In addition to being the location of the raising of the first American flag, my neighborhood of Union Square also holds the honor of being the birthplace of Marshmallow Fluff, invented in 1917 by Somerville resident Archibald Query. Three years later Query sold the recipe to H. Allen Durkee and Fred L. Mower, and the Durkee-Mower company has been making Fluff in Lynn, Massachusetts ever since.
The gooey white stuff hasn’t changed much since then, as you can see from this video of the manufacturing process (apologies for the Boston Globe‘s overly intrusive “web media is killing us” frameset):
Last Friday, a state legislative committee held a hearing to consider designating the Fluffernutter the official sandwich of the State of Massachusetts. Representatives have weighed in on this issue before, either heartily supporting it, or blathering about “more important issues to deal with.” (As if anything in this state happens faster than a geological timeframe. It’s a miracle we were able to appoint an interim senator in only two weeks.)
The day after the hearing marked the Fourth Annual What the Fluff? Festival, celebrating the invention of Fluff by holding a big party in the area usually occupied by the Union Square Farmer’s Market. We managed to squeeze our way through the crowd and check out the activities.
This was the list of choices for the Fluff Fear Factor booth. You picked a number at random and had to eat a cracker topped with Fluff and whatever corresponded to your choice. Fluff with clams, anyone?
One of the entries in the cook-off, Fluff meringue.
Another sophisticated cook-off entry, Fluff-banana torte with peanut butter sauce.
One of the festival sponsors was Teddie Peanut Butter, made in Revere. Bread from Iggy's in Cambridge, peanut butter from Revere, and Fluff from Lynn: a perfect locavore creation.
Would-be poets submitted their odes (and haikus) to Fluff for a community vote. The winner would become the Pharaoh of Fluff.
Unfortunately, most of the fun had to be found at the edges of the festival. The majority of the crowd consisted of hipster doofuses (doofi?) milling about, waiting to buy a t-shirt emblazoned with this year’s festival logo (seen at the top of this post). Nothing, not even small children, would get in the way of their latest ironic acquisition. It brought to mind the popular townie slogan: “Welcome to Boston. Now go home.”
We wandered over to Hub Comics, where we scored the best find of the festival:
Find a copy if you can. The chapter on marshmallow harvesting techniques is worth the five bucks.
Everyone seem to understand that the tomatoes will be gone soon, so they’re overcompensating by buying huge quantities of the remaining heirloom crop. Fortunately, not many of the folks at the market realized that peaches are on the wane, so what I lost in vegetables this weekend I made up with fruit.
This week’s haul was apple cider, banana-walnut bread, granola (now I’m hooked), pluots, honeycrisp apples, mixed baby potatoes, tomatoes, peaches, red and yellow bell peppers, and cucumbers.
Today was also delivery day for my meat CSA, so off to Cambridge for the pickup:
This month’s share was a whole chicken, pork chops, beef short ribs, and a smoked kielbasa. I also found orange cauliflower, thumbelina carrots, and a lemon curd cake.
I’m not sure what I’ll do with he kielbasa, maybe I’ll incorporate it into a cassoulet. I’ll cook the cauliflower with some bacon and mushrooms, and the lemon cake will go along with some fruit.
(Did you know the spell check on “cassoulet” suggests “cassowary”? I’ve eaten ostrich and emu before, but never cassowary, rhea, kiwi, tinamou, or any of the other ratites.)
He worked with James Watson and Francis Crick. He discovered transfer RNA and amino acid activation. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. His name was Mahlon Hoagland, he passed away last week, and you have never heard of him. I had never heard of him until a series of unlikely circumstances brought us together thirteen years ago.
In 1995 I could see the writing on the wall foretelling the end of my biology research career. Companies were losing venture funding, R&D was being cut back, and I was about to hit the glass ceiling that still exists for scientists without PhDs. My last research gig at a biotech startup had ended (a story for a future post about how not to fire people), and I was working as an editor for MacTemps while I shopped my resume around. Again.
I received a placement request asking for someone with a scientific background who could also edit electronic illustrations created in Freehand. I said I could do the job, even though I had never used Freehand, and taught myself the program over the weekend before reporting for work. I learned I was working in the college science division of Mosby, a textbook publishing company, where I would be correcting illustrations for a new chemistry textbook. By the time I had completed that task – which took four months – I had impressed the editors enough that they offered me a permanent position, which I gladly accepted.
An offhand comment from my editor, Judy Hauck, permanently changed my career path. She was complaining about how much she had to spend on custom book illustrations with so little return on the investment. “There has to be a better way to circulate these illustrations to instructors; sending them out as 35mm slides is killing us.” I thought about it for a bit, then told her I’d come up with something. Within a week I had cobbled together a primitive image browser in HyperCard. A week after that, she showed the program to some instructors to gauge their level of interest. Within a month of her remark I had changed my title to New Media Editor, and had begun production of a professionally-coded version of the image browser.
What does any of this have to do with Mahlon Hoagland? Judy was his daughter. As we got to know each other by working together, she told me about her family. Her grandfather, Hudson Hoagand, co-founded the Worcester Institute for Experimental Biology (where the first oral contraceptive was developed by co-founder Gregory Pincus), and had been prominent in the nascent skeptics community in Massachusetts. This article, published in The Atlantic Monthly in November 1925, is a report on his investigation of Margery, a famous alleged medium who was exposed by Harry Houdini.
In addition to his tRNA discovery, her father, Mahlon, had been very active in science education. By the time I was working with Judy, he had retired but had just published a book, The Way Life Works, which was a life sciences answer to David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work. In collaboration with his friend, illustrator Bert Dodson, Hoagland managed to explain the basics of biology, biochemistry, and genetics in seven chapters organized by concept (Patterns, Energy, Information, Machinery, Feedback, Community, and Evolution).
Judy asked me to construct a web site to promote the book. With David Siegel’s Creating Killer Web Sites, a scanner, and a Mac Quadra 650, I managed to put together my first commercial site. It still looks exactly the same – no re-coding has been done – because it is appallingly primitive: just some tables, text, and a lot of graphics.
Judy’s next idea was to create a CD-ROM with interactive experiments based on the concepts and illustrations from the book. After talking it over with some game designer and programmer friends, we came up with the idea of building a proof of concept activity based on a section in the book about how bacteria search for food. By adjusting two sliders – run and tumble – you could adjust the efficiency of a bacterium’s food-seeking ability.
After two weeks of frenzied programming and testing, we had a prototype of the experiment module. Judy set up a meeting at which I would present the prototype to her father. I was terrified: How would this Nobel-nominated scientist react to our crude representation of his work? I made my presentation (on an original color Mac PowerBook), let him manipulate the controls, and then asked if he had any questions.
“How did you replicate the bacterium’s behavior?” he asked.
“Long answer, or short answer?” I replied.
“Short.”
“After the programmers read the chapter in your book, we used mathematical modeling to create a chemotaxis algorithm.”
That seemed to satisfy him, so we chatted for a bit before ending the meeting. It wasn’t until I looked at his book again that I realized I had seen him before, in one of Bert’s illustrations:
That was the last time I saw Mahlon Hoagland. We polished the design on the bacterium module, then Judy and I met with his editor at Random House in New York to pitch the interactive CD. The proposal was rejected (“Why would anyone want a CD like that?”), so I returned to my other textbook work at Mosby. The company was soon acquired by McGraw-Hill, where I languished as a developmental editor for three years before leaving to join a multimedia development company – the same company I had hired to create my image browser.
Judy left McGraw-Hill as well, signing on with Jones and Bartlett Publishing, where she developed Exploring the Way Life Works. Exploring was a study guide to Mahlon’s book, which was now being used in classrooms.
This entire story hit me as a nostalgic rush this morning as I read the obituary in the Boston Globe. I hadn’t thought about some of the people mentioned here in years; others have been constant collaborators since I met them in 1994. I still recommend the book to people; it has no equal. And that, perhaps, is the greatest tribute.
I don’t know about you, but I wish more of my science teachers had been as enthusiastic about their subject as Julia is. When I first read about this experiment, I got all fired up and was determined to reproduce it in my high school chemistry lab. Unfortunately, my lack of access to custom-blown glassware, spark electrodes, and flammable gases killed that idea.
It’s a good thing Julia got more people excited about cooking other soups. Imagine how many home explosions we would have read about if everyone who saw this video got as excited as I did.
Today’s recipe comes from John O’Neil, a frequent guinea pig for my cooking experiments. It’s a variation on the Hainan chicken rice recipe I wrote about in January. John realized that a few substitutions could change the dish from Asian to Mexican. It was so simple and obvious that I had to try it.
I gathreed my ingredients: cilantro, a four pound chicken, two cups of long-gran rice, two onions, a head of garlic, a large tomato, half a teaspoon of cumin, a teaspoon and a half of tumeric, half a teaspoon of oregano, and a jar of adobo paste.
I rubbed the inside and outside of the chicken with kosher salt, then I chopped two tablespoons of garlic and one of the onions and stuffed them into the cavity along with a good-sized bunch of the cilantro.
I set a pot with about three quarts of water to boil, then submerged the chicken. I covered the pot, reduced the heat to medium, and simmered the chicken. After ten minutes I turned off the heat and left the chicken to poach in the covered pot for two hours. I removed the chicken to a platter and let it cool.
While the chicken poached, I made a sofrito by combining the cored tomato, the remaining onion, four cloves of garlic, and the oregano in a food processor until the mixture was thick and pulpy.
I simmered a cup of the sofrito (the rest is in the fridge) in a quarter cup of chicken fat over medium heat for about five minutes.
I added the cumin and tumeric – my variation on John’s variation – and cooked for an additional minute before adding the rice. I toasted the rice/sofrito mixture for about three minutes, until the rice grains turned milky white.
I added a quart of the poaching liquid and a handful of cilantro sprigs, brought everything to a boil, then covered and simmered the rice over low heat for twenty minutes.
While the rice cooked, I prepared the adobo sauce. According to the jar, the paste gets added to water or stock in a 1:4 ratio. I tried this, adding two tablespoons of paste to half a cup of stock, and wound up with something resembling hot fudge. I added a second quantity of the poaching liquid, resulting in an 8:1 ratio.
I removed the chicken skin, and then separated the meat from the bones, shredding it into small pieces.
Once the rice was done, I removed the spent cilantro and gave it a good stir.
I tossed the chicken with some olive oil and salt, placed it over bowls of rice, spread the adobo over the top, and garnished the plate with some chopped cilantro. I also cut some lime wedges to serve with the dish.
How did it taste? The rice was amazing; I’ll make yellow rice this way from now on. The chicken was moist and flavorful, and the adobo was very earthy. The lime wedges added some necessary brightness that the dish would have been missing.
I don’t think it would be worth making the sauce from scratch, there’s a huge amount of work involved. The same company also makes a three different mole sauces: brown, green, and pumpkin, which gives me addition variations to attempt.
In the end, I was surprised at how different the dish tasted from the Hainan version, just on the basis of some simple substitutions. It wasn’t a classic arroz con pollo since it lacked saffron in the rice and the chicken wasn’t browned before cooking. But, given how little effort was required to make it, I’ll add it to the monthly recipe rotation.
Today’s post is about music and science. In this video, a lecture from the World Science Festival, singer Bobby McFerrin demonstrates how humans seem to be hardwired to generate a pentatonic scale.
The great thing about the presentation is that it’s not passive. I’m sure you found yourself anticipating the next interval just as the audience did. You know that scale, you’ve heard it hundreds of times even if you’re not aware of it. But just to drive the lesson home, here’s the best example I know. Listen to the guitar part:
Before mix tapes became fraught with emotional baggage (as chronicled in High Fidelity), they were the best way for friends to share musical discoveries and favorites. At one point I was juggling six active tape exchanges, each with its own playlist parameters. But the one thing all the mixes had in common was the use of found sounds and non-musical sources to pad the spaces between songs and at the ends of each side.
Bob in Philadelphia was the master of the found audio source. He spent his weekends combing through record bins at Goodwill and Salvation Army stores, which yielded a rich treasure of motivational speeches, sermons, self-help regimens, hypnosis cures, and other behavioral modification programs. His last tape to me – which I still have – broke with tradition in that it used only one source for all of the filler: a female voice repeating the phrase “hello, baby” over and over. Sometimes the speed and pitch changed (no doubt from Bob manipulating his turntable), but “hello, baby” soon burned itself into my brain.
Despite repeated requests from me, Bob steadfastly refused to identify the source of the two-word mantra. Eventually I forgot about it altogether after I stopped listening to the tape. A few years later, while watching a “Dave’s Record Collection” sketch on Late Night with David Letterman (the original 1 AM slot after Carson), I heard it again: “Hello, baby.” Dave was talking along with the voice, which was from his Hartz Mountain Parakeet Training Record. At last, the source was revealed to be a cheap disc I could find in any pet shop.
Any pet shop but those I visited, which were always out of the record, which was always due “real soon.” I gave up looking for it, and only recently realized that I could probably locate it on eBay (duh). Which I did, and it only cost me 10 bucks, a mere ten times more than the original price. The sleeve was in good shape, the record less so, but I digitized the tracks with a USB turntable for posterity.
The back of the sleeve describes the rationale for this revolutionary disc:
In an amazingly short time, your parakeet will actually teach himself to talk, simply through listening and imitating the words and phrases on this record…
These words are professionally presented in the most ideal manner – spoken slowly and distinctly by a voice with perfect diction.
They are repeated over and over, in the same tone of voice , at the proper pitch, at the exact rate that parakeets will most readily imitate.
The disc opens with a spoken introduction, and then we get to the big hit, “Hello, Baby”:
While listening to it, I realized that the phrases were not being repeated at a regular interval. I was snapping my fingers to keep time, and noticed that the voice was sliding all over the beat. I thought, If she could keep time, I could do something with the track. That’s when I got the idea for this:
It took all of 20 minutes in Garage Band, but it was fun to slap together. It owes a conceptual debt to Erasure’s “Sweet Sweet Baby,” but I don’t think my track will be spun in Ibiza any time soon.
Does the record work? Will it teach a parakeet to talk? The last rack would have you believe so:
It’s so obviously not a parakeet, but who is it? I think it’s is the “hello, baby” lady, her voice ravaged from hours of takes interspersed with cigarette breaks.
I skipped the market last week: It was raining, and I wanted to force myself to use what was left in the fridge. So today, with plenty of fridge space and a keen knowledge of the imminent end of the tomato and corn season, I restocked the basics: corn , tomatoes (heirlooms and cherry), napa cabbage, french breakfast radishes, cucumbers, and yellow beans.
I also found an entire brioche loaf (already cut into thirds and stored on the freezer), mozzarella cheese, ham steak (mmmm, ham…), golden raspberries, giant blackberries, honeycrisp apples, cherry pie and granola. (I know, granola? But this stuff is made with maple syrup and dried cranberries.)
I’ll pretend it’s summer for another week, cooking mostly on the grill while it’s still warm enough to do so. Deep-fried turkey season is just around the corner.
Today is National Cheeseburger Day. I likes me a good burger, and fortunately there are plenty of good burger places near Chez Belm, many of them in Harvard Square: Flat Patties, b. good, and the traditional favorite, Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage. I have occasionally strayed out of that culinary comfort zone, sampling the offerings at Four Burgers in Central Square and R.F. O’Sulivan in Somerville (whose burger is described by the owner as “a gigantic thing for your mouth”).
I recently stumbled across a Five Guys Burgers and Fries in Orange, CT – a chain that started in the Washington D.C. area, but has now extended its empire into New England (the closest Boston location is in beautiful downtown Deadam). I had read some online raves about the chain, so I decided to take a break from buying light bulbs for mother-in-law (don’t ask) and try a burger.
The menu is sparse, a good sign at a place like this – it means they concentrate on making a few things well. The decor is minimal: tables, chairs, a box of free peanuts in the shell, and walls covered with reviews and magazine articles. By the front door is a pallet loaded with sacks of potatoes, which are identified at the counter (“Today’s potatoes are from Pasaco, WA”). Fries come in two styles: regular and cajun spiced. All the “regular” burgers have double patties; if you want a single patty you have to order a “little” burger. A sign advises you that all of the burgers are cooked well done.
Despite that red flag, the bacon cheeseburger I ordered (pictured above, topped with just lettuce and tomato) was juicy and flavorful. It was an OK burger, a bit underseasoned, but better than many other flat-top cooked burgers I’ve had. But the fries: They could change the company to Five Guys Fries and not lose a single customer. Those thick, hand-cut fries, cooked in corn oil, might as well have been laced with crack – that might go part of the way to explaining how amazing they tasted. It’s hard to tell from the photo, but they fill up a large styrofam cup with perfectly cooked fries, drop the cup into a paper bag, and then they fill the rest of the bag with a second helping. Oh, Jeebus, I had to exercise every ounce of self-control not to eat all of both orders of fries (one regular, one cajun). I fought with He Who Will Not Be Ignored over the last few stragglers at the bottom of the bag.
It may not be worth a trip to Deadham, but if you find yourself near a Five Guys, make the detour to try those fries (and a decent burger). I mentioned the name to my brother-in-law, who spends a lot of his work time on the road, and his eyes got glassy as he mumbled “Those fries…”
Why did I title this post “A Feisty Burger” and then go on to rate it as merely “decent”? Because how often will I get to make a J.S. Bach/Martin Luther joke?
Before my career path diverged toward web design, multimedia, and other computer-related geekery, I was a biologist. It was something I knew I wanted to be from an early age. When I read about the discovery of the genetic code at MIT, I knew where I wanted to go to college to learn biology.
And that’s what I did. I took pride in not being an engineer, in being someone who dealt with “messy” systems, living things. I preferred hands-on work over lab bench manipulations, and despised the molecular biological trend the field was following (much to the detriment of my future career).
But what I liked the most about biologists was talking to them, sharing their enthusiasm, even if I barely understood their specializations. About 20 year sago I was given a tour of a biomechanics lab at UMass Amherst, where I was shown slow-motion video of geckos climbing sheer glass walls. I barely understood the underlying mechanics – it’s all van der Waals interactions between foot fibers and the surfaces – but the fellow giving the tour was very good at explaining his work. (I also remember that he had a tuatara skull, which he acquired while in Australia.)
That fellow was Adam Summers, who has recently been featured on the Make magazine web site:
More people need to see that scientists are like Adam, and not pompous authority figures in lab coats. We do a tremendous disservice to society every time we invoke the ivory tower metaphor. Science doesn’t happen there, it happens in the heads and hands of people like Adam, people who are enthusiastic and curious about the universe.
Why did I begin this post with a still from Finding Nemo? Because Adam was the science consultant for the movie, advising the Pixar animators on the finer points of fish locomotion. Pixar repaid the favor by basing the Mr. Ray character on Adam, although I’ve never heard him sing the song about the zones of the ocean.
Oooh, let’s name the zones, the zones, the zones
Let’s name the zones of the open sea
…mesopolagic, bathyal, abyssalpelagic.
All the rest are too deep for you and me to see.
Oh, knowledge exploring is oh so lyrical,
when you think thoughts that are empirical.
Maybe that’s what it takes to show that scientists are cool: publicity from other geeks.
