I’m back! And I’ve got two events coming up in the NYC area: The history and future of COCKTAILS and an exploration of the evolution of Chili Powder!
Masters of Social Gatronomy do COCKTAILS
Monday, July 29th, 6:30 PM
@ the Brooklyn Kitchen
$5 gets you admission, two free beers and 10% off purchases at the Kitchen. Buy tickets here!
Each month, Sarah and Soma take on a curious food topic and break down the history, science, and stories behind it. Up this month: **cocktails!**
The cocktail is credited as one of America’s greatest inventions. But where did it come from, and how did it evolve into the endless combinations we find today? Sarah will examine the dawn of the cocktail and trace the origins of some of our country’s most beloved imbibements. You’ll walk away with a new appreciation for the drinks that got your ancestors drunk.
Soma will tackle our modern-day obsession with the cocktail. Rules will be broken and assumptions shattered: water vs whiskey, shaken vs stirred, and the One True Way to craft a martini! Find out how egg whites got from your breakfast plate to your highball glass, and whether baseball sized ice cubes make your drinks a sure home run.
BIG IMPORTANT NOTE!: MSG mooooving on over to Brooklyn Kitchen this month, where your $5 admission will get you 2 drink tickets and 10% off anything your heart desires. Doors at 6:30, talks shortly thereafter! Awesome? Yes. You can buy tickets at the door but there is a limited capacity; buy in advance here.
Image courtesy Marx Foods.
Chili Powder: A History
Thursday, July 25th, 6:30 PM
@ the Brooklyn Brainery
$18 Buy Tickets Here
What was chili’s path from a local dish of the Southwest to an easy weeknight meal for millions of Americans? There was an era when black pepper was considered spicy; but today, we make ourselves sweat with the hottest chili pepper blends. Why? Can science offer an explanation for our obsession with heat?
From traditional spices to national chili cook-offs, we’ll discover how the distribution of commercialized chili powder affected our eating habits and how it fits into our national pantry.
We’ll look at the roots of chili in Mexican cuisine, as well as the “Chili Queens” of San Antonio. We’ll learn how chili made its national debut at the 1893 world’s fair, and how this Tex Mex dish became a part of Americana from Washington DC to Cincinnati to Texas.
This class will include a tasting of chili cooked from a recipe in the first Mexican-American cookbook published in 1908. Buy tickets here!
I greatly regret not being able to attend MSG events, as I live on the other coast (the idea of making a special trip one day is very appealing…). However, I had to comment on Cocktail History, which I would certainly go to if I were anywhere nearby!
We used to have a book in the house by Robert Benchley called “Benchley Beside Himself,” in which he mentioned (as I recall) a famous man’s recipe for the perfect martini: walk past the gin once a month with a bottle of vermouth. I remembered this and another “recipe” I’d read (unfortunately, I don’t remember where) when I was a bartender many years ago. Being asked for a dry martini, I followed the second set of directions and sluiced the glass out with vermouth before adding the gin. The drink was returned to me as “too dry,” and I was indignant. Had I not followed the instructions of literature? Which just goes to show that the only literature one should use in making cocktails is a bar book.
HA! I enjoyed that. In the recent book Boozehoud, the author has a great essay on exactly that–the dry martini, how it got so dry, and maybe why it shouldn’t be quite so dry. I think you’d enjoy it.
This MSG will be podcast! We want to do more podcasting so that people outside of the city can enjoy the talks; because we really enjoy doing them.