I thought today, for a change of pace, I’d make everyone hungry.
Chicken Chasseur, or “Hunter’s Chicken”.
Bonus #1: Bigos, or “Polish Hunter’s Stew”.
Bonus #2: This is longer, but it pushes another of my hot buttons (other than food), arctic exploration. “The Food Of Prince Philip’s Arctic Expedition” from the Real Royalty channel. (The arctic expedition part is early on, if you don’t want to watch the whole thing.)
In a just society, this would be considered “justifiable homicide”.
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According to FOX13, a neighbor heard Crocket say, “B—-, you know I don’t like mayonnaise on my hamburger,” when he received his meal order. According to the local news outlet, Crockett struck Aldrige once and Thomas three. Crockett turned himself in to police custody days after the shooting, according to the report.
FOX13 reported that a jury found Crockett guilty of first-degree murder and first-degree battery. Circuit Judge Ralph Wilson sentenced Crocket to up to 130 years in prison, due to his multiple counts including 75 years for first-degree murder, 40 years for first-degree battery, and an additional 15 years for possession of a firearm as a felon, the report said.
(Hattip: my mother.)
A quick round-up of obits I’ve been meaning to make note of over the past few days.
Michael Lonsdale, actor. He was “Hugo Drax” in “Moonraker”, but he did a whole bunch of other work. Some of it was in “avant-garde” films, but he also played “Lebel” in the original “Day of the Jackel”, “Jean-Pierre” in “Ronin”, and a long list of other work “with a Who’s Who of directors, including Mr. Spielberg, François Truffaut, Orson Welles, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Jacques Annaud, and James Ivory”.
Pierre Troisgros, famous French chef.
The Troisgros brothers eventually took charge of their parent’s restaurant and transformed it into a gastronomic destination, at the cutting edge of the culinary revolution known as la nouvelle cuisine. That style was influenced by the austere finesse of Japanese cooking and known, at its extreme, for tiny portions on huge white plates, a caricature in which the Troisgros brothers never indulged.
Their contribution was to showcase the innate flavors of seasonal ingredients, and to pare down some of the overblown creations buried in thick sauces that had come to represent French haute-cuisine.
It earned them Michelin stars and top ratings from other guides. And it put the restaurant high on the list for tourists starting in the 1970s, many of whom, like safari-goers ticking off the “big five,” went to France mainly to experience its top restaurants, collecting souvenir menus along the way.
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The restaurant’s most famous dish was salmon with sorrel sauce (saumon à l’oseille). In the Troisgros kitchen the sauce was not thickened with starch but depended on well-reduced sauce ingredients and a touch of cream. Mr. Boulud pointed out that the dish was cooked in a nonstick pan, noting that Mr. Troisgros was among the first chefs to use one.
Alain Ducasse, the chef and restaurateur who is part of a generation that followed in the footsteps of Mr. Troisgros, Mr. Bocuse and others, said in a statement that the Troisgros brothers had developed the basis for nouvelle cuisine, but that their food was never austere or posed.
Robert Gore, inventor of Gore-Tex.
Mr. Gore’s billion-dollar invention was born out of failure and frustration. In 1969, as head of research and development for W.L. Gore & Associates, the manufacturing company founded by his parents, he was tasked with creating an inexpensive form of plumber’s tape for a client. The tape was made from polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, known commonly by the brand name Teflon.
Mr. Gore sought to make more efficient use of the material by stretching it, not unlike Silly Putty. But each time he heated and stretched a rod of PTFE in his lab, it broke in two.
“Everything I seemed to do worked worse than what we were already doing,” he told the Science History Institute in a short film. “So I decided to give one of these rods a huge stretch, fast — a jerk. I gave it a huge jerk and it stretched 1,000 percent. I was stunned.”
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Mr. Gore became president and chief executive of W.L. Gore & Associates in 1976 and pursued new applications for his invention. He would stand in a rainstorm to check garments and footwear for waterproofness, and he filled his home with prototypes. He called the company’s 800 numbers to make sure the customer service was up to par.
“Bob was the guy who made things happen,” Bret Snyder, the chairman of W.L. Gore & Associates and Mr. Gore’s nephew, said in a phone interview. “He had a passion not just for the theoretical, but how the products worked in customers’ hands.”
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“hardly any encryption, authorization or authentication”. I bet you can guess what happens next. Yes! Hilarity ensues!
The write-up is much, much longer and more detailed: I’m just trying to hit the high points here.
Bonus:
(Hattip: Hacker News on the Twitter.)
I’m kind of hungry right now.
What was WWI trench cooking like?
Would you like some tea with that? (Okay, technically, this is WWII, not WWI, but I don’t think the process of making a cuppa was that different.)
Bonus: WWII field kitchen cooking.
Bonus #2: Another WWII field kitchen – a German field kitchen, “known as a Gulaschkanone (Goulash Cannon)”.
Bonus #3, and a bit longer: “The Royal Family’s Favourite Meals From The Empire”.
Today: the majestic moose!
From the Simple Living Alaska channel, “Butchering a Moose”.
278 pounds of moose meat!
Okay, that was a little long, so here’s a coffee break sized one for you. I’ve written before about the legendary Broadway flop “Moose Murders”. (Which, of course, I never saw, because I was just under 18 at the time, didn’t live in New York City, and it opened and closed on the same night.)
So this wonderful eccentric decided, as the final for a class he was taking, to direct the opening scene of “Moose Murders”. And now it is up on the ‘Tube.
Bonus bonus, also short: “B-roll” from the Beautiful Soup Theater Collective revival.
Julia Reed, writer about food and the South. She wasn’t someone I was really familiar with, but reading her obit makes her sound like a barrel of fun.
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Ms. Reed earned her first byline at 19, when she was a sophomore at Georgetown University in Washington and a part-time library assistant and phone answerer, as she put it, at Newsweek, a job she had held since she was a student at Madeira, an all-girls boarding school in Virginia.
When the school’s headmistress, Jean Harris, murdered her lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower, the celebrity doctor and creator of the Scarsdale Diet, Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief sent Ms. Reed to get the Madeira angle. As Ms. Reed wrote, he woke her up with an order to head back to her old school. When she wondered why, he barked, “You idiot, your headmistress just shot the diet doctor!”
Ms. Reed liked to say she was sorry the doctor had to give his life in service to her career as a journalist.
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Cathy Smith is burning in Hell.
Ms. Smith is the woman who gave John Belushi the fatal speedball.
Another dose of random for today.
“The Poisonous History of Tomatoes”.
Bonus, slightly longer, video, which you would not see on television today. Or any time after about 1965, I’d guess.
A 1950s episode of “Bold Journey” featuring the editor of True magazine, Douglas Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy goes to Africa…to hunt rhino.
This is within a few years of Ruark’s Horn of the Hunter: that was published in 1953, so I think (but can’t confirm) that Ruark’s safari was 1951 or 1952. According to the YouTube notes, this aired in the third season of “Bold Journey” which ran from 1956-1959.
Bonus #2: as a hattip to ASM826, I thought I’d post this one: “YOJIMBO & A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS – How The Western Was Changed Forever”.
A couple of food videos on the shorter side today.
First off: an explanation of grog, and the importance of rum.
Bonus: how to make garum. First off, you leave a barrel of fish with some salt added out in the sun for two months…okay, not in this case, but that was basically the traditional Roman method.
Bonus #2: James May on the subject of Spam versus ham.
One thing that I love is a good caper.
Well, I do like capers. But what I really meant was “capers”. You know, heists. Daring robberies. That sort of thing.
Something called “Wonder” has been popping up in my recommendations. I’m a little hesitant about posting much from them, but these are fairly short and part of what appears to be the same series: “Daring Capers”.
The first one is the one that I really wanted to post, for reasons: the December 11, 1978 Lufthansa heist.
You remember the Lufthansa heist, don’t you? Jimmy Burke Jimmy Conway, Paul Vario Paulie Cicero, those guys, those Goodfellas?
I thought this was an interesting supplement, if you will.
Bonus: the January 2, 1972 Pierre Hotel robbery.
I chose this one because I’ve read Ira Berkow’s book about the Pierre, which tells the story mostly from Bobby Comfort‘s point of view. I note that the paper of record says $3 million, while the series claims $10 million. The $3 million figure is supported (to the extent anything can be supported) by Wikipedia. But as I recall, there are some questions about whether the robbery victims reported everything they lost: for example, stashes of untaxed cash.
One more: the July 16, 1976 robbery of the Société Générale bank in Nice.
Tunnel heists are awesome. Also, Lawrence gave me a much appreciated copy of The Gentlemen of 16 July for Christmas one year.
Travel Thursday!
Where to this week? We’re going to Greece!
Why Greece? I’ve been enjoying a relatively new podcast, “The Delicious Legacy”, about the history of food in the ancient world. (If you want to give it a try, I recommend the episode “The Orthodox Easter Food Traditions“.) So why not?
From TWA: “Superjet to Greece”. Speaking of food:
Now I’m hungry.
Bonus video: since I don’t really have any place else to put this, “Across the World in 3 Seconds”, a short film about Pan Am’s communications and computer systems.
Over the past few days, the paper of record has run two obits that fall into the “obscure outside of a specific niche, but interesting” category.
Jay Riffe. He took up spearfishing when he was 10 years old (“to get food for the table”). He became the Pacific Coast spearfishing champion at 22.
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Louis Colavecchio. He used to make jewelry, but turned his skills to a more lucrative occupation: counterfeiting.
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All of Mr. Colavecchio’s work was meticulous. He could toil alone under microscopes for days, filled by a desire to trick the federal government and the casinos. He would not brook the possibility of an error; each die had to be perfect.
“Making counterfeit items must have appealed to me in some way that I didn’t understand,” Mr. Colavecchio wrote in his book.
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His tokens were masterly because he crushed the originals and got the exact breakdown of their composition, Mr. Longo said. Mr. Colavecchio purchased the material, bought a press and, using a laser-cutting die, made molds and copies.
“It’s like having access to the U.S. Mint on the weekend, printing your money and leaving,” Mr. Longo said.
In case you were wondering, his book is You Thought It Was More: Adventures of the World’s Greatest Counterfeiter, Louis the Coin (affiliate link). I may have to order a copy of that for myself.
Great and good FotB Borepatch sent over a nice obit from ArsTechnica for Grant Imahara, which I very much appreciated. There’s also a very good Hacker News thread.
This is partially a continuation of the survival theme, but I also see it as a slice of life from a culture that I’m honestly not all that familiar with. (Except for the jokes about everything outdoors being lethal, and “Fosters: Australian for Budweiser”.)
“Bush Tucker Man”, the original documentary, by way of Australian Bushcraft Magazine.
This is basically an Aussie version of Euell Gibbons.
Bonus: the documentary resulted in a spin-off series, also known as “Bush Tucker Man”. And many of those episodes have been uploaded to the ‘Tube as well.
Akubra hats in the USA. One of these days I’m going to hie myself over to Brookshire or Pattison and pick up an Akubra.
I knew you could purchase military rations online. What I didn’t know, until recently (but should not have surprised me), is that there are people on YouTube who purchase and review them.
Steve1989MREInfo has over 1.5 million subscribers.
Here he reviews a French MRE from 2017.
Bonus video #1: an Italian MRE from 2014, which is interesting: as I understand it, Italian MREs are the only ones that contain alcohol.
Bonus video #2: a British “emergency” field ration from some time between 1899 and 1902.
Do you like jam?
Do you like Jam Handy?
Do you like soup?
From 1962, “The Ballad of Soup Du Jour”.
Warning: folk music.
And here’s a bonus for those of you who haven’t had enough already, or who are big fans of “The Gallery of Regrettable Food“: “The Magic Shelf”, a 1950s promo film for Campbell’s Soup. In glorious (?) color.
Tomorrow: pack your suitcase for an exotic destination!