Archive for August, 2016
31 Aug 2016

Clive Caldwell

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CliveCaldwell
Group Captain Clive “Killer” Caldwell”

WWII Today (August 29):

On 29 August 1941 Clive Caldwell was attacked by two Bf 109s North-West of Sidi Barrani. One of his attackers was the Bf 109 E-7 “black 8” of 2./JG 27 piloted by one of Germany’s top aces, Leutnant Werner Schroer who was credited with 114 Allied planes in only 197 combat missions.

Caldwell’s P-40 “Tomahawk” of 250 Squadron was riddled with more than 100 rounds of 7.9 mm slugs, plus five 20 mm cannon strikes which punctured a tyre and rendered the flaps inoperative. In the first attack Caldwell suffered bullet wounds to the back, left shoulder, and leg. In the next pass one shot slammed through the canopy, causing splinters which wounded him with perspex in the face and shrapnel in the neck. Two cannon shells also punched their way through the rear fuselage just behind him and the starboard wing was badly damaged. Despite damage to both himself and the aircraft, Caldwell, feeling, as he remembers, “quite hostile” turned on his attackers and sent down one of the Bf 109s in flames.

The pilot of the second Messerschmitt, the renowned Leutnant Schroer, shocked by this turn of events, evidently made off in some haste. Caldwell’s engine had caught fire, however he managed to extinguish the flames with a violent slip. He then nursed his flying wreck back to base at Sidi Haneish.

Hat tip to Woodpile Report.

31 Aug 2016

Fifty Shades of Žižek

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50ShadesZizek375

31 Aug 2016

Democrats Find Harp and Piano

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party_realignment2.0.0

Lee Drutman views the world partisanly, through red-tinted Progressive lenses, and his screed features all the usual sanctimonious liberal stereotypes (We Republicans are just a bunch of nasty racists), but I thought there was an interesting grain of truth, underneath all the cant, in all this, specifically in the technical analysis of the party sociology that led to Donald Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries.

Our story effectively begins in 1932, when Democrats formed a majority coalition that included Northern liberals and Southern conservatives. The Great Depression had made economics the fundamental dividing line of conflict. And with Republican President Herbert Hoover getting the blame for the collapse, Democrats were on the winning side of the issue.

Now, if the median voter theorem explained the world, Republicans would have simply become the party of the New Deal as well — as some would say Eisenhower attempted to do. But Eisenhower’s New Deal–light Republicanism angered the activists and economic elites in the Republican Party, who still wanted to undo the New Deal and who were sure that if they really truly opposed the New Deal, public opinion would miraculously move to their side.

When the far-right economic conservative Goldwater lost in 1964, however, it became clear Republicans couldn’t win purely on limited government as a defense of liberty. They would have to attach limited government to a winning position on some other issue that would split the Democratic Party…

Like all majorities, the Democratic majority from 1932 to 1964 contained within it the seeds of its own destruction — in particular, an internal conflict between Northern liberals and Southern conservatives over the issue of civil rights. Eventually, Northern liberals became the majority faction within the Democratic Party and exerted pressure, and Democrats passed a series of civil rights bills into law.

And with that, the Democrats effectively lost their winning political hand for the sake of moral principle. The civil rights laws created a backlash among Southern white Democratic conservatives and Northern working-class whites who were most directly affected by urban riots, and housing and school desegregation.

This gave Republicans the cross-cutting issue with a clear majority they needed: race and identity. With Nixon’s strategic guidance, Republicans went full steam ahead in making it the central dividing line in American politics.

They were certainly aided in this effort by Democrats, who struggled to speak to the urban unrest that drove many former Democrats to the Republican Party, or to acknowledge some of their own hubris in the power of a government run by Ivy League intellectuals to solve deep social problems. Democrats also nominated George McGovern to be their standard-bearer in 1972, whose label as the effete candidate of “acid, amnesty, and abortion” stuck, and also stuck with Democrats.

Moreover, as the economy stagnated in the 1970s, and businesses choked on a slew of new regulations and inflation increased, Democrats’ traditional advantages on economic issues also waned.

With Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, Republicans solidified a winning coalition that successfully strengthened the appeal of “limited government” beyond economic conservatism, where it had traditionally lived. “Limited government” now also meant not meddling in the private lives of citizens to enforce some elitist Ivy League intellectual’s idea of racial justice, and not asking middle-class taxpayers to pay welfare support for poor black people. …

But like all winning political coalitions, this, too was full of internal contradictions. In particular, many of the economic conservatives (who tended to be more libertarian and thus more culturally cosmopolitan) and many of the cultural conservatives (who tended to be former New Deal Democrats and thus very supportive of universal entitlements like Social Security) didn’t have a ton in common, other than feeling like they didn’t have a home in the Democratic Party (though for different reasons). …

[Subsequently] Republicans and Democrats essentially underwent a four-decade exchange program. Democrats sent Republicans their non-college-educated, culturally conservative white voters, mostly in declining rural and exurban areas, who had once been the core of the New Deal. In return, Democrats got culturally liberal wealthy professionals, largely in prosperous urban and suburban areas, many of whom were once “Rockefeller Republicans” and had once opposed many elements of the New Deal.

This happened slowly, because partisan loyalties are really sticky and most voters don’t play close attention to issues. (To really understand how sticky partisan identities are, consider that up until 2010, Democrats were a majority in the Alabama state legislature).

It also happened slowly because in the 1990s, Democrats managed to stem some of the flow by taking more conservative stands on race and culture under the leadership of Bill Clinton, who won a bunch of Southern states. But it could only be a temporary hold, especially once Republicans started winning back southern congressional seats and retook the House in 1995. …

For Republicans, this initially looked like a really good deal, more like a two-for-one swap. And it largely was, from the early 1970s until about the mid-2000s.

But the deal had a long-term liability. America was steadily becoming more diverse, and more highly educated. And the younger generation was much more culturally and socially liberal than the previous generation. Republicans might have been converting more Democrats to Republicans than vice versa. But Democrats were making greater gains among new voters, and also doing better and better among increasingly cosmopolitan wealthy Americans. What looked like a losing coalition for Democrats in 1972 would be a winning coalition for Democrats nationally in 2008.

There was also second problem for the Republican elites whose vision of “limited government” was always far more motivated by economic conservatism than by cultural conservatism. By the mid-2000s, they were becoming more and more of a minority within their party as the party had become more dependent on conservative working-class whites to win elections.

And while these voters could be convinced to support “limited government” and “free enterprise” as abstract moral principles, they also had no great love for Wall Street, or for corporate CEOs or globalization. More often than not, they were from rural and exurban places that had increasingly become hotbeds of political resentment, places that had been on a steady multi-decade economic decline as more and more talent and capital investment flowed to the largest cities, mostly on the coasts. Their communities were slowly dying, both literally and figuratively.

These voters had no interest in Republican elites’ priorities of voucherizing Medicare or privatizing Social Security. They wanted their entitlements. They wanted government to do more for old people and the middle class. And they were really concerned about immigration. And as Republican elites failed to respond to their concerns, these voters grew more and more frustrated.

Given this dilemma, Republican leadership had essentially two choices. One was to recognize that the Republican Party was becoming the middle-class party, and to offer a set of economic policies targeted to help these increasingly struggling middle-class voters. …

The other choice was to instead continue to push the very economically conservative policies most preferred by the now minority-within-the-party wealthy establishment Republicans by turning “limited government” into a nearly religious crusade, and feeding the overarching argument that the federal budget was nothing but a giant transfer program from strained “maker” middle-class taxpayers (mostly white) to poor “taker” criminal welfare recipients and illegal immigrants (almost entirely black and Hispanic). And, even more apocalyptically, that any expansion of government was akin to socialism and communism and fascism all rolled into one horrible totalitarian nightmare overrun with illegal immigrants, which just happened to be Barack Obama’s secret black Muslim takeover plan for America.

Whether or not Republican leaders actually believed any of this rhetoric is hard to say. But these are the kinds of things Republican voters began to say in the 2010s. And Republican leaders did nothing to stop it. After all, all this rhetoric allowed the party to keep its donor-class activists happy by obscuring these donors’ deeply unpopular policy goals under the guise of something else. …

[O]nce Democrats were freed of their remaining “blue dog” Southern conservatives in Congress after the 2010 midterm landslide, and they felt increasingly confident they could win national elections with the “Obama coalition” of racial minorities and white liberals …, they had fewer reasons to moderate on racial and social issues, as Bill Clinton had needed to in order to win nationally in 1992 and 1996.

It’s no surprise, then, that Democrats have recently taken strong stands on same-sex marriage, have felt more comfortable speaking to the concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement, and have even been willing to take more aggressive stands on gun control. And given all this, it’s no wonder that socially conservative whites have become so convinced their country is being taken from them.

Immigration has also contributed. It’s important to understand that between 1990 and 2014, the share of foreign-born citizens in the United States went from 7.9 percent to 13.9 percent — a near doubling. The last time the share of foreign-born citizens got this high (about 100 years ago), it provoked enough nativist backlash in the 1920s to largely close the borders for four decades, until 1965.

It appears that the rising tide of immigration has indeed provoked some backlash, and that backlash has been channeled into the Republican Party. …

Now, in retrospect, it becomes increasingly clear how the Republican Party got to a place where it was primed for Trump’s white grievance message. Republicans spent the past half-century winning over socially conservative, non-college-educated whites on issues of race and identity, to the point that these voters became the dominant faction within the party.

Read the whole screed.

Putting it slightly differently from Drutman, I’d say that Barack Obama’s intensification of national racial divisions, his Culture War aggressions, and his artificially-prolonged economic bad times which fell most heavily on middle and working class Americans really did provoke an uprising of major elements of the Republican base and of a great many loosely-affiliated cross-over democrat voters.

This populist insurgency is strongly anti-immigration, (from the Progressive viewpoint) transgressively opposed to governmentally-imposed minority privilege, and –it’s true– frequently lacking in conservative or libertarian principles. The populist wave proved strong enough to gain victory in the primaries, but the sad truth is the democrats misgoverned and awakened the fury of the peasants who came out with pitchforks and torches, discrediting themselves and their movement in the process by selecting a clown for a leader on the basis of a bunch of pernicious slogans and reprehensible political postures.

The poignant irony is that it was precisely the damage to the economy and the national morale inflicted by a Progressive democrat administration that caused the portion of the Republican base that the democrat party alienated and drove over to us to run amok and to effectively democratize the Republican Party, adopting traditional democrat demagogy talking points complaining about free trade, opposing labor competition and the export of jobs, promising to punish corporations, offering special governmental patronage and protection, and urging American retreat from International Leadership. The peasant revolt in the GOP is almost certainly going to result in an absurd and completely undeserved democrat party victory in what on-every-rational-basis ought to have been a landslide Republican year.

Where I grew up, a rational observer might remark that “the democrat party is exactly like the guy who fell into the septic tank and came up with a harp and a piano.” “Piano” being pronounced “PIE-ano.”

31 Aug 2016

Another Coincidental Death

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HillaryDeadDeer

30 Aug 2016

Lots of Trigger Warnings

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trigger-warning1

Toni Airaksinen lists some of the trigger warnings she’s encountered these days at Barnard.

As a student at Barnard, a private women’s college in Manhattan, I come across trigger warnings daily. Most often, I see them in campus Facebook groups, but occasionally too in campus magazines or during in-class conversations.

Online, where I encounter them most frequently, these warnings take the form of captions at the top of posts. They say “trigger warning” or “content warning,” or simply, “tw” or “cw.”

Here are some of the topics I’ve recently seen trigger warnings on. (And no, trigger warnings aren’t given ironically. To do so would be insensitive, you jerk.)

Pokemon GO

PokemonHuh? Pokemon GO is problematic? Yes, of course it is. Everything is problematic. But why? Well, some people believe Pokemon GO is a racist and classist game. Not only that, but people have alleged that it’s ableist, too. So much for “it’s just a game.” (Pictured, screenshot of actual trigger warning)

U.S. Constitution

I did a double take when I saw “tw: constitution” placed on a post rejoicing the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. The logic is simple: the U.S. is, according to some students and professors, a tyrannical and colonialistic empire founded via the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. For students, particularly those of color, the Constitution needs a trigger warning because it could prompt thoughts of oppression, persecution, genocide, and other social ills.

‘White men’

Contemporary feminism deems men as oppressors and threats. And in the hierarchy of oppressors, white men sit atop the food chain. So not only do I come across trigger warnings on posts about men — what they’ve said or done — but I also saw this one: “TW: white men” — used on an article on fraternity brothers behaving badly.

Donald Trump

At my school, contempt for conservatives is de rigueur. Anyone to the political right is considered not just bad, but dangerous. Thus, mentions of politicians such as Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina and Paul Ryan, or conservative values (such as gun rights), often come with a trigger warning attached. For example, it’s not uncommon to see a news article with something Donald Trump said tagged with “trigger warning: Trump, racism.”

The Police

Need I say more? I live in New York City; whenever the police are spotted on campus, my timeline erupts in trigger warnings. Statuses such as “Trigger warning: Just seen on Broadway Ave and 116th Street, NYPD vans. Stay inside!” are common. Police are associated with police brutality, racism, and the historical legacy of black oppression in America.

Traditional Gender Roles

The traditional male/female binary is oppressive, according to far-left logic. It limits women, we’re told. So, any references to gender roles can be hurtful. For example, it may be triggering to ask a female student if she wants children when she’s older, because to ask would be to play into the stereotype that women have an inherent maternal instinct, we have been warned.

There are other topics, of course. Thanksgiving. The Second Amendment. And so on. But to cite them all would be like trying to list all the “isms” — it’s an endless parade of affronts that seemingly has no end in sight.

30 Aug 2016

Smallsword Gifted by Benjamin Franklin

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BenFranklinSmallsword

Christie’s Sale 12186
Important American Furniture, Silver, Outsider and Folk Art

20 September 2016, New York, Rockefeller Plaza

Lot 854
THE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN SILVER-HILTED SMALL SWORD
PROBABLY SPANISH, CIRCA 1760

Estimate USD 200,000 – USD 300,000

with tapering Colichemarde blade of hollow triangular section, etched at the forte with scrollwork, and engraved inscription (a 19th century addition) in French Epée que portait Benjamin Franklin dans les combats livrés en Amérique pour la cause de la Liberté. / Il la donna depuis à son ami P.J.G. Cabania (sic) [Sword worn by Benjamin Franklin in the battles fought in America in the cause of Liberty. / He then gave it to his friend P.J.G. Cabanis], silver hilt comprising symmetrical shell-guard, quillion-block, knuckle-guard and pommel (rear-quillion missing) pierced with scrollwork and stylised trophies, and grip bound with silver wire and ribbon; with brown leather scabbard with silver locket decorated en suite with the hilt and struck on the reverse with a silversmith’s mark, and later silver chape with iron finial; and later close-fitted velvet-lined leather-covered case with brass mounts
The sword: 33 ½ in. (85 cm.) blade; 40 3/8 in. (102.5 cm.) overall
The case: 42 5/8 in. (108.3 cm.) long

The locket (upper scabbard mount) bearing a silversmith’s mark of SS in a rectangle, determined to be that of Samuel Soumaine (1718-circa 1769) of Annapolis, Maryland and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

More here.


larger version here

30 Aug 2016

Death, the Final AFK

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Death&theInternet

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are already littered with the accounts of members who have passed away. Inevitably, some decades in the future, the number of accounts of the dead will exceed those of living users. What should social media sites do about that?

NDKane discusses the possibilities.

30 Aug 2016

Italian Volunteer During Spanish Civil War?

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OneLessRed

UPDATE: Someone suggested that he might be a 1956 Hungarian Freedom Fighter. Horizontally, his sleeve band represents the Italian colors. Vertically: Hungary. I like the Hungary theory even better.

29 Aug 2016

Another Survivor of Custer’s Last Stand

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CusterStaghounds
George Armstrong Custer with his original staghounds, Blucher and Maida. The Indian Scout Bloody Knife is at Custer’s righthand side.

Between 1867 and 1875, George Armstrong Custer contributed fifteen letters, published under pseudonym “Nomad”, to the New York-based sportsman’s journal Turf, Field and Farm. His letter indicate that Custer spent most of time, when not fighting Indians, hunting big game on the Western plains accompanied by a couple of Scottish staghounds.

Dutch Salmon reports finding a letter in an old issue of Forest & Stream that contends that Captain Miles Keogh‘s horse Comanche may not have really been the sole four-footed survivor of five companies of the 7th Cavalry’s Last Stand, 25 June 1876.

Most accounts have it that when Custer and the Seventh Cavalry rode to their doom at the Little Bighorn, his hounds were left behind in camp. However, in a 1907 letter to the old Forest and Stream magazine, a reader wrote that he had seen one of Custer’s hounds—”one of the pair that came from Queen Victoria”—at Ft. Washakie in September, 1882. The correspondent added:

    “Three days after the fight, when a scouting party reached the battle ground where Custer and the few survivors had made their last stand, the greyhound was found lying down near his dead master. A rifle bullet had struck him near the eye which made him blind on that side, but otherwise he was uninjured. He was taken good care of by the party and finally found a master in Lieut. R.E. Thompson, of the Sixth Infantry, who was stationed at Washakie when I was there. It was the lieutenant himself who gave me the above details concerning the dog.”

Was the dog truly a greyhound? Or was it one of the staghounds, a greyhound in rough coat?

29 Aug 2016

Restaurant Damon Baehrel

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BaehrelMeal
A Baehrel tasting menu.

One of the World’s Top 50 Restaurants, perhaps the most difficult venue to obtain a reservation for in America, is apparently operated by one man out of a basement in a village (Earlton, New York) half an hour south of Albany. Servings are reputedly fully booked up through 2020, or possibly 2025.

Nick Paumgarten, in the New Yorker, reports:

[T]he place was now simply called Damon Baehrel, after its presiding wizard and host, who served as forager, farmer, butcher, chef, sous-chef, sommelier, waiter, busboy, dishwasher, and mopper. Baehrel derived his ingredients, except meat, fish, and dairy, from his twelve acres of yard, garden, forest, and swamp. He made his oils and flours from acorns, dandelions, and pine; incorporated barks, saps, stems, and lichen, while eschewing sugar, butter, and cream; cured his meats in pine needles; made dozens of cheeses (without rennet); and cooked on wooden planks, soil, and stone. He had christened his approach Native Harvest. The diners who got into the restaurant raved about it online. But at the time it was booked through 2020. …

The dining room was snug, seating no more than sixteen guests, with a table set up in the middle as though for a single party of six. It was tidy, not really rustic, more varnished than one might expect. The walls were painted a brushed ochre. A stained-glass panel in the wall read “Good Food” backward. Baehrel had installed it that way so you could read it in a nearby mirror. Along the back wall, a broad table was arrayed with bowls of seeds, nuts, leaves, roots, berries, and mushrooms; Mason jars of sap and flour; and vials of oil, all marked with painter’s tape describing the contents and the vintage—“Acorn oil 8/15,” “Golden Rod flour ’14.” The Native Harvest tag had been his wife’s suggestion. “I was inspired by Native Americans,” he said. “I wanted it to be based on the people who were here in this country before we were.” Supposition was his guide: he said that he had never actually read anything about Native American cuisine.

He worked through the items on display. Lily tuber, cattail stems, milkweed, bull thistle. By watching deer in the woods, he had discovered that the inner barks of certain trees have a salty taste. While chopping wood, he found that a particular lichen takes on an oniony flavor for three weeks a year. He made a cooked powder from it. “You’re gonna love it!” Baehrel relies heavily on starch and stock made from rutabagas. He uses wild-violet stems as a thickener. He inoculates fallen logs with mushroom spores. He’ll spend seven hours gathering three-quarters of a pound of clover—enough to fill a steamer trunk. “I do it at night, with a headlamp,” he said.

He had me sit at a table in the corner, a two-top, from which I couldn’t see the door to the kitchen. He wanted me to have the dining experience. He said, “Don’t worry, I’m a professional. I’m not going to kill you.” He filled my glass from a pitcher. “It’s sap. Sycamore sap.” It tasted like water, with a hint of something. A few minutes later, he came out with another pitcher. “This is sparkling maple sap, with dried lemon verbena. I have lemon trees in containers, but I don’t get many lemons. Just the leaves.” He said he harvests about a dozen saps: maple, birch, sycamore, hickory, walnut, butternut, beech, hardwood cherry. “Sycamore sap, when concentrated, is a little salty. You can brine things in it. Hickory sap is very briny and salty. Good for long cooking. I’ll brine a pork shoulder in hickory sap and pine needles for nineteen days. Cherry sap is salty and sweet, bitter, with herb hints like marjoram and lavender.

“My biggest challenge is creating enough flour,” he went on. “I make it from cattails, pine—the inner bark—dandelions, clover, goldenrod, beechnut, hickory nuts, acorns. A huge part of my life is making flour. It takes one to one and a half years to make acorn flour. Acorns from the red oak have bitter tannins. White oak is more like a nut. In fall, I gather the acorns up in burlap sacks. Around New Year’s, I put the sacks in the stream, tied up. I leave them there all winter, under the ice. By spring, the tannic bitterness is gone.”

I asked him how he’d figured this out.

“Soaking didn’t work. I tried a circulation tank, and that didn’t work, either. I press them by hand, in a vise, or with stones. No machines.”

The first course was served on a slab of sawed wood. It was a small rectangle of what looked like salami atop a curled cracker. He said, “It takes me sixteen to eighteen months to make cedar flour. I use a pull knife, a two-handled grater, to shave off some cedar under the bark. The shavings are bitter, tannic—inedible. I soak them in water. Every four to six weeks, I soak them. After a year or a year and a half, I can grind it into cedar flour. So the crisp is made from cedar flour, with a little hickory-nut oil, duck-egg-white powder, water, sea salt, which I sometimes render.” He produced a jar of sea salt from the sample table. “I made the batter and baked the crisp today.” The rectangle of meat, he said, was blue-foot chicken cured in pine-needle juice, pulp, and powder for eighteen months.

The morsel was delicious, though it was difficult—and would continue to be, during the next four hours—for an amateur and glutton like me (in fact, for anyone who is being honest with himself) to tell whether my appreciation, fervent as it often became, had been enhanced by the description of the work and the ingredients that had gone into it. The tongue is suggestible. New words register as new flavors. As numerous blind wine tastings over the years have demonstrated, you taste what you want to taste.

He cleared the slab and arrived with a plate with a spoon on it, and in the spoon a piece of fish with a chip on top.

“I wanted to show you the power of the sycamore sap,” he said. It was Scottish salmon, which had been brined for thirty-nine days. The chip was a slice of black burdock root. “I peel off the fibrous outside of the root, slice the inside, and bake it.” A drizzle of sauce bisected the plate and spoon. It consisted, he said, of pickerel-weed seeds and unripened green strawberries stored in homemade vinegar of a low acidity, then blanched in water in a stone bowl. “With another stone, I mashed them into a paste. Added homemade green-strawberry vinegar and wild-sorrel vinegar and grapeseed oil. That’s the paste. The copper-colored powder is the ground leaves of wild marsh marigold.” Of course. Every milligram seemed hard won. …

Over the next several hours, as he brought in course after course, he appeared and disappeared (“I’ll get you some more sap!”) like a character in a resort-hotel farce. But the dishes were a dizzying array of tastes and textures. Oyster mushrooms, palate-cleansing ices (one was made of wild carrot juice, stevia tea syrup, pickled baby maple-leaf powder, violet leaves, and lichen powder), cured turkey leg, mahogany clams, lobster, prawns, swordfish ham, brined pork with goat sausage—all of it subjected to a jumble of verbs and nouns, many of them new to me. Bull-thistle stem, chopped barberry root, ostrich fern. I deployed an index finger to dab up every woodland fleck. The platings were whimsical and inspired. The sprigs and needles that adorned the mid-meal platter of cheese and cured meat brought to mind Saul Steinberg or Paul Klee.

The fifteenth, and final, course was something he called Earlton Chocolate. It consisted of the fermented leftovers of his “coffee,” which he makes in the autumn from hickory nuts and acorns. (He does not serve actual coffee.) The nut dregs become a kind of paste. “It gets gloppy after three months, then it relaxes.”

Read the whole thing.

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Black Book was pretty enthusiastic.

Chef Baehrel’s autumnal “Native Harvest” menu was heavenly. His lifelong obsession with food and nature pours out of every dish. The plates he served were developed, well-composed, and thought-provoking. The meal consisted of about 14 courses plus several extras, some of which Baehrel had been perfecting for decades and some of which were invented that day. In fact, many of the ingredients were seasonal and picked from his gardens that very morning, while a variety of ingredients had been preserved for years, waiting to be utilized at just the perfect time in their aging process.

One of Baehrel’s new concoctions on the day we visited was a bowl of clams, warm pressed with wild hickory nut oil infused with spruce needles and “cooked” in a sauce made from ostrich ferns and topped with burdock root chips. Later, we sampled a dish that Baehrel has been continually refining: chicken thigh brined in staghorn sumac powder, then cooked in a blend of concentrated sycamore sap and Baehrel’s fresh grapeseed oil, surrounded by a sauce of rutabaga cooked in the soil it was grown in.

Baehrel does not use butter in his dishes, nor does he use flour in his sauces. Instead, his sauces are often thickened with rutabaga. The buttery quality of a mouthwatering lobster dish served was deceivingly cooked instead in white oak acorn oil that was roasted with fresh white oak acorn, giving it a rich flavor.

Inevitably, the process of creating each dish is the daily manifestation of a lifetime dedicated to food, nature, and self-sustainability. Damon Baehrel remains open even through the cold New York winter months, and Chef Baehrel manages to source most ingredients from his own property. To accomplish this, five to seven foot deep cold frames are dug around his property and filled with compost that ferments during the winter, helping to prevent the cold frames from freezing. In the extreme cold, Baehrel utilizes a form of radiant heat from a 10-watt solar panel connected to heating rods in water containers about 4-5 feet underground. Baehrel actually claims that with the sunshine, fermentation, and radiant heat that warms up the cold frames, “winter in Earlton, New York is the best time of year for root vegetables.”

Each and every dish we ate that evening told a story.

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Restaurant homepage

29 Aug 2016

Definitions of Musicians

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Violinist

13 more here

28 Aug 2016

Pants on Fire

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Ramirez50

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