The Poor Mouth

Shiny Happy People

VER THE SUMMER I was passing through an anonymous hamlet in the Hudson Valley, and I met this fellow, whose name I no longer recall. Matt or Mac or something. He had this little red barn in his backyard, and it contained, he later revealed, a handsome copper apparatus for the manufacture of whiskey. I asked if I might see it in action. He said sure, but then we got distracted by drinking stuff other than whiskey, and night fell, and by the time we thought of it again it seemed unlikely that we’d be able to track down a propane tank.

[Mysterious stranger: Mark something or other?]

See, it was like 2 o’clock in the morning by then. But we were still more or less steady on our feet, so we decided to take a stroll to the corner gas station and see if they would sell a tank of highly flammable liquid to two guys with crossed eyes. They would. I can’t remember exactly what happened next, but before long I was drinking clear, hot happiness from the mysterious stranger’s still.

[It looked like this, but it was fresh and hot.]

I was reminded of that night when I came across this great little article in The Atlantic about a “hipster moonshiner” named “Max Watman”:

One of the priciest spirits I’ve ever tasted was a clear whiskey poured from a green 12-ounce Sierra Mist bottle. Max Watman, who held the bottle like a Parisian sommelier, told me it cost about $120—roughly what he’d paid in drinks and meals to people who introduced him to other people up the Virginia moonshine supply chain as he went about procuring it. He poured us each an ounce or so into elegant tasting glasses. We sipped. Watman made a face that was not the face of someone having an especially good time. He described it as “bile with some simple syrup.” In my tasting notes, I wrote: “musty,” “rancid,” “Alpo.”

Read the whole thing here. It’s uncanny how much “Max Watman” looks like the moonshiner I chanced to meet—if I didn’t know better, I’d think it was the same guy. Oh well. My memory’s not what it used to be.

Cooking with Epstein

ATING is a new memoir by Jason Epstein. I’ve written about it for Barnes & Noble Review: “First catch your hare,” begins one of the most famous and DIY-minded recipes of all time. Except—no such recipe exists. It is typically attributed to Isabella Beeton, she of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), though some claim it is found in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747). The disappointing truth is that the phrase is merely an old saw, akin to “Don’t count your chickens,” and has nothing whatsoever to do with the culinary arts.

Likewise, the line “First catch your big break” does not appear in Jason Epstein’s Eating: A Memoir, but one could be forgiven for thinking it did. Mr. Epstein is not a cook by trade; he is in fact one of the most important figures in American book publishing, having not only more or less invented the trade paperback format (at Doubleday, aged 22) but also having helped create the New York Review of Books and the Library of America. He spent 40 years as the editorial director of Random House, working with luminaries like Nabokov, Mailer, and Doctorow.” Click here to read the whole thing.

Duncan Runs on America

ELLO AND WELCOME, new readers of The Poor Mouth! In honor of the official launch of this site—meaning I clicked a box in TypePad that says “Yes, publicize this blog”—I’m going to beg you for money like the 501(c)(3) I wish I was. But instead of offering you a garishly decorated tote bag or a pamphlet with your name listed under “Benefactor,” “Associate,” or “Amigo,” I’ll tempt you with something that’s actually cool: a damaged and pencil-marked but AUTOGRAPHED first edition of Duncan Hines’s Duncan Hines’ [sic] Food Odyssey (1955).

Needless to say, I have only one of these, and I’m saving it for whomever sends me the biggest PayPal donation by December 20th—which is to say I’m giving it to my mom for Christmas unless one of you is man enough to stop me. Did you know that Duncan Hines® was a real person before he was So Moist. So Delicious. And so much more?™ According to the Food Odyssey, which in the history of literature is second in importance only to the regular Odyssey, greasy-fingered Duncan is

an erect and well set-up individual, just short of six feet tall, with thinning gray hair, a ruddy complexion, a genial twinkle in his eyes, and only slightly on the rotund side. While undoubtedly one of America’s best-known gourmets, he is definitely not a gourmand. During the past thirty years he has traveled over two million miles by automobile, train, and plane throughout every state in the Union, parts of Canada, Mexico, and the Hawaiian Islands in the quest for good food and good living. He has probably eaten in more different places that any other living man.

Duncan Hines® may be So Moist™ and so forth, but Duncan Hines the man was probably something like Don Draper’s senile father-in-law. The Food Odyssey is full of tidbits like: “You may even ride about the grounds in a genuine Chinese pedicab, half bicycle and half ricksha [sic], pedaled by an authentically costumed ‘coolie.’” And how about this Runyonesque dialogue?

[W]e were ready to drive away when around the corner of the square came a colored man carrying a basket covered with a snowy napkin and calling out, “Fried chicken, twenty cents a hunk!”

“Twenty cents isn’t much,” I said to my friend. “Let’s try a ‘hunk’ of his chicken.”

To our amazement it was excellent—warm, crisp, and golden-brown. I asked the vendor what he did to get his chickens so tender.

“Well, suh,” he answered, “I gets up early in the morning and chases them roosters around the yard until they gets up a good hot sweat, and then I wrings their heads off right now!”

It is, in spite of these embarrassing morsels, a remarkable book, “with lots of authentic recipes,” as the jacket promises. Think of it as a hokey, unreconstructed cousin of Mark Kurlansky’s The Food of a Younger Land. And then pay me for it. But why? Well, I could tell you that Stefan Beck® (So Charred. So Congealed. And so much less satisfying than you’d imagined.™) suffered a variety of unexpected setbacks in fiscal year 2009 and can really use the help. Or that he’s seriously considering culinary school and needs tuition money. Or that he’s fighting the obesity epidemic by teaching schoolchildren to render their own animal fats in a safe, environmentally conscious way. None of these is strictly untrue. But—why donate money to The Poor Mouth by clicking here or on the button to your right? Just ask Mr. Duncan Hines himself, on page 186:

Many thanks, from my cutting board to yours!