The Ketchup Conundrum “Mustard now comes in dozens of varieties. Why has ketchup stayed the same?” Fascinating study of condiments. “Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived. There the three-year-old was, confronted with something strange on his plate–tuna fish, perhaps, or Brussels sprouts–and he wanted to alter his food in some way that made the unfamiliar familiar. He wanted to subdue the contents of his plate. And so he turned to ketchup, because, alone among the condiments on the table, ketchup could deliver sweet and sour and salty and bitter and umami, all at once.”
First Catch Your Puffin “So, how was the puffin for me? Fine. It had none of the fishy taste that is supposed to render seagull flesh unpalatable. It was strong, dark, gamy. There was an extra pleasure because when I was a child, my parents had made me a member of the Puffin Club, in which middle-class children were meant to assemble and talk about how much they liked reading. You got Puffin badges and Puffin bookmarks. I took a dark pleasure in eating a puffin that had been shot and plucked and roasted for me”
The Perfect Martini “Technically a “Perfect” of any cocktail that uses Vermouth is one that uses equal parts of dry Vermouth and sweet Vermouth. But of course when somebody tells you that they make The Perfect Martini you know that they aren’t talking about a “perfect” Martini, but instead are talking about “a Martini that is perfect”. Ok, so we’ve now gotten that out of the way lets examine a little closer what it might mean to make this mythical Martini that is so “perfect”.”