A heads-up that I’ll be taking part in the first Food 2.0 - Nom Nom Nom event this Sunday, the 18th of May. One of the things I’ll be making is Nettle Soup, a foraged delicacy I’ve recently discovered, and some more besides, in the fine company of my mate Ed, who’ll be making some of these delicious Scotched Eggs…
Check the site for full details, and check back soon for a report.
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing - there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders - a lot of things we like - didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
If anyone knows the historian Clay Shirky is referring to here, I’d be fascinated to know more. CWB doesn’t have any gin recipes, sadly, although this will certainly be remedied in the next edition.
UPDATE: I did some research. This talk was one of the results.
Not actually connected with CWB in anything but spirit (geddit?), but I recently came across The Soho Project, a collaborative challenge game thing taking part across Soho - one of whose strands is ‘Soho Picnic’. This is Team Gintastic’s entry, and gets a mention for doing ‘Potato Vodka Surprise’ in the middle of the street.
More about the Soho Project, and a couple of similar vids from my friends Mikey and Tom: Steak Tartare and Soho Square Cerviche.
This is a little blog about Cooking with Booze, a completely awesome cookbook. The blog has its own RSS Feed.
You can read the whole book online, and let us know what you think of the recipes.
Here's the Introduction to the book, and the Table of Contents.
There's also some information about the web edition and some geeky stuff.
But hey, screw that—Why not just go and buy the book now?