We Jun 24 09

Today’s Globe has two mentions of Toscanini’s: Inman Square’s new restaurant, Tupelo gets three stars and we’re mentioned for making the ice cream. We love Tupelo’s and we love making their ice cream.

“The dessert menu hits the right notes with the likes of pecan pie and banana pudding. Rachael Cummings makes the sweets (though Layman says a Petsi pie may turn up occasionally). Tupelo’s brown butter pecan pie is all Southern sweetness balanced by woody nuts, a worthy slice. It comes topped with Tupelo honey ice cream made by Toscanini’s. Coconut cream pie gets a welcome twist from bits of peanut butter crunch candy. A double chocolate bread pudding is dry on the two occasions we try it.”

And this year there have been three good books written about ice cream. One is by Sally Sampson, Recipe of the Week Ice Cream, and the second is by the Globe’s Adam Ried, Thoroughly Modern Milkshakes. Local food writer Jeri Quinzio has written the third book. She was photographed at Toscanini’s and interviewed for today’s Food Section, now ensconced in G.

“G FORCE | JERI QUINZIO
She knows the scoop

By DEVRA FIRST, Globe Staff | June 24, 2009

We all scream for it, but Jeri Quinzio writes books about it. A local food historian and the author of the cookbook “Ice Cream: The Ultimate Cold Comfort’’ has a new volume out, “Of Sugar and Snow: The History of Ice Cream Making.’’ We spoke with her recently about the evolution of everyone’s favorite frozen treat.

DEVRA FIRST

Q. You debunk several myths about the origins of ice cream: that Nero invented it by pouring honey over snow, that Catherine de Medici brought it from Italy to France. What’s the truth?

A. There was no one eureka moment. Scientists in Europe were experimenting in the 16th century and learned if you added salt to ice you could freeze something. One of the first things they did was freeze wine. It was one of the very popular drinks, a wine slushy. Shortly thereafter, confectioners started playing with the technique, trying to freeze other things. In a sense they were already halfway there, because they made drinks they could turn into sorbets and made creams and custards which frozen became ice cream.

Q. How has ice cream’s place in society changed?

A. For a very long time it was food for the rich. You didn’t have ice cream, or if you did it was a very rare treat. Now ice cream is seen as a very affordable, casual thing. It’s changed from something nobles ate to something kids strolling in the street eat.

Q. Did Prohibition and the Depression affect the ice cream business?

A. Prohibition was great for ice cream. Dad stopped on the way home and picked up ice cream for the family instead of stopping at a local tavern and drinking with pals. Even Anheuser-Busch started producing ice cream instead of beer. Then the Depression hit and Prohibition was repealed. Ice cream got a double whammy. People could now spend what little money they had on beer or whiskey.

Q. Your book includes several historical recipes. Have you tried many of them?

A. I’ve made quite a few. I love Emy’s recipes, but they’re a little hard to follow. [M. Emy wrote a book of recipes for flavored ices and ice cream in 1768.] Fanny Farmer’s frozen pudding is very nice, Mrs. Marshall’s cinnamon ice is very nice. I would skip the clam frappe. I did not try that.

Q. Some of the old flavors sound so current and cutting edge: truffle ice cream, for example, or cinnamon tobacco. They’re something you might find a pastry chef experimenting with nowadays.

A. When I read about a chef coming up with a wonderful new ice cream, I think, “Emy did that in the 18th century.’’ People do invent things for themselves, but others were generally there first.

Q. What’s your favorite local place for ice cream? Do you have a favorite flavor?

A. Like everybody else, I like Toscanini’s. I also like Christina’s. Toscanini’s has a very nice burnt caramel. I like lemon ice cream, which was once huge. You hardly ever see lemon ice cream anymore, and it’s really delicious and wonderful. I always have a hard time coming up with flavors. My next one is my favorite.”

At today’s Harvard graduation Professor Robert Langer of MIT was given an honorary doctorate. He was recognized for his work at “a small college near Toscanini’s ice cream.”

Langer is famous but Paul Slovenski is the only faculty member from etiher college to have a flavor named after him. Paul’s nickname was Sluggo. He was a running coach at MIT. He and his intensity were the inspiration for Chocolate Sluggo. Slovenski did his work with no recognition from Harvard.

There is a WSJ article today about Grape Nuts. Grape Nut and Grape Nut Raisin are two of our bigget flavors. Grape nuts are popular with very different groups: older customers from northern New England and the Maritime Provinces of Canada, and West Indians. We sell a lot of Grape Nut ice cream. Why the company that makes the stuff doesn’t do their own ice cream is beyond me.

Link to the article.

Z Square was not a gigantic failure in the small world of Boston restaurants but neither was it routine. One source thought that the total amount of money lost approached $7,000,000.

The first “unit” or “store” occupied a bullseye location in the heart of Harvard Square. Rent was said to be $29,000 plus a percentage of sales. The company grew out of a successful Marin County cafe and the owners exuded great confidence. They eventually took over a former flatbread pizzeria near Boston University for a second store and a kosher deli in Boston’s financial district became their third unit.

Everyone connected with Z Square was a star. One person was a member of a famous Boston rock band. They had a cookie consultant.

And they had expensive offices on the other side of the block that suggested a possible negative outcome, despite all the confidence and the past accomplishments of everyone who was involved. Most restaurants have offices that are appropriate to submarines or tenement museums. Z Square had a lot of expensive space in Harvard Square.

One sage thought Z Square was doomed. She was right. They opened slowly and quickly began firing people. Very gradually the level of sales rose but like Howard Hughes Spruce Goose the enterprise never took off.

We sold them ice cream and checks became infrequent and ordering grew disorganized. Suddenly the restaurant was closed and newwspapers were accumulating in their doorway. We were owed a little more than a $1,000.

Finally the news of the restauant’s closing became public and eventually we received a notice from the bankruptcy court. With more curiousity than hope my sister and I trudged down to the bleak Tip O’Neil building to attend the bankruptcy hearing. Maybe we would benefit in an implausible way from showing up.

The hearing was in a room as banal as any high school classroom. We recognized a few familiar faces. Before the court got to the Z Square bankruptcy it swiftly processed two poignant personal bankruptcies.

The bankruptcy judge was authoritative. Z Square was represented by the least prepared member of the downtown bar I have ever seen. His manner was impeccable but when the judge asked about hundreds of thousands of dollars he said, “We didn’t have funds to do any forensice accounting, but we think most of the money went into the corporations.” There were, as is common, multiple corporations, but a lot of money slopped around and it became clear that we weren’t going to get any of it. The valuable liquor license now belonged to the landlord’s agent, who had also purchased all the equipment and leasehold improvements for a bargain price. A slightly bigger vendor had lost thousands of dollars and there were rumors that a produce vendor had lost much more than that.

At one point the judge asked where the principal was, that confident casually dressed Californian from Marin County. “I don’t know” said the attorney. That was probably literally true, that at that one moment the lawyer did not know where the captain of the Titantic was but almost everyone else involved thought he was in England and some people claimed to have his address.

A number of well known professionals worked with the company and did not succed in saving it. One person said they “rode it down” which involved getting paid for work while the corporation crash lands.

The miserable case was continued and on our way out we commiserated with the dairy supplier. Most of the time the restaurant business can seem like an upright if tough section of the economy, but not that morning in Boston.

Restaurant Depot is a nationwide chain of warehouse stores that cater to restaurants. In order to shop there you have to be in the restaurant business.

In order to enjoy shopping at Restaurant Depot I think it helps to have an affection for American Democracy Aborning.

I always go to the store in blue collar Chelsea, Mass. Chelsea contains the very large New England Produce Market, a wonderful bagel company that struggles on in a town with few Jews, several almost abandoned Polish fraternal organizations and a leftover Russian steam bath. It is also a vibrant town full of new Americans of many origins.

The restaurant industry has few of what economists call “barriers to entry.” If you or your mother can make a great fresh mozzarella or tasty arrepa you are almost ready to open. The staff and customer base of Restaurant Depot reflect those possibilities.

Occasionally I will encounter a more established chef or restaurant owner. Some act embarassed as though I’d caught them in the act of buying frozen vegetables but sometimes they will confess how much fun they think it is to save money buying supplies in such a hurlyburly, Star Wars bar atmosphere.

The interior of Restaurant Depot consists of towering four story shelves that are filled and emptied by young men driving noisy frontloaders. The aisles resonate with that regular honk vehicles make when backing up, except the honking is inside the building and not in the surrounding parking lot. On busy days all the motion can verge on chaos.

Customers reveal the future of the American food business and maybe even the country’s future. Religious Moslem women lead their sons, who are already dressed in hip hop sports clothing. A percentage of the customers bring their children. A good day will include a turbaned Sikh or a Haitian family with a high school age translator.

Once I was in line behind a Brazilian purchasing hundreds of pounds of marscapone cheese. After guessing about the appropriateness of a question I asked what he was doing with all that Italian cream cheese. “I make cannoli with them and we sell the cannoli throughout eastern Massachusetts.”

On another occasion I needed soy milk. I approached a worker and asked if he spoke English. “Un poquito” he said, making a small measure with thumb and forefinger. “Tiene leche de soy?” I asked. He then turned into Senor Koharski, my high school Spanish teacher, “la leche de soya?” he asked with emphasis on the missing “a.” “Si,” I said, “la leche de soya.” Switching to English he said, “No. We don’t have any.”

I went down an aisle and asked another worked in Spanish if he spoke English. He was apologetic, “I’m sorry. I only speak English.” Which is okay because I only speak English.

Lucky J’s
Jason T. Umlas
www.luckyjs.com
5703 Burnet Rd.
Austin TX 78756

Chicken for strength
Waffles for speed

April in Austin Texas is as good a place as any, and that includes Paris. There are bluebonnets. The weather is wonderful. The grackles are noisy. I went to Austin to visit Amy’s Ice Creams, and spend time with the nice people who started Amy’s.

Austin Texas has many charms but the city seems determined to obliterate as many of them as possible in the name of progress. Right now there is a dispute between the mainstream restaurants and the interesting collection of trucks and sidewalk vendors.

The established restaurants are burdened with regulations. Most of the street vendors are immigrants and they cheerfully ignore regulations that would get a normal restaurant closed by the determined agents of the city and county health departments. This dispute calls for the wisdom of Calvin Trillin.

While meeting with Amy and discussing new flavors and happy cows we noticed an irregular amount of activity across the street. My friend Rob now runs a flock of sophisticated white tablecloth restaurants but he is a chowhound who can’t resist the smell of mesquite. People at Amy’s said that the place across the street was another “street vendor.”

Rob and I were curious so we hopped into a rental car and drove across Burnet Road, which is what Texans do when they want to cross the street. Lucky J’s sells barbqued chicken and waffles. “Chicken for strength and waffles for speed” said a sign.

Barbequed chicken and waffles is what restaurant people call “a concept” and its making largely unacknowledged progress in black neighborhoods and hipster enclaves.

Inside a small lunchwagon was a man who said hello. “You don’t sound like your from Texas?” I said.
“I’m from New York” said Jason T. Umlas.
Rob and I looked at each other like detectives watching a case fall into place. “Did you go to Stuyvesant or Science or something like that?” I asked, naming New York’s two most selective high schools.
“Yeah, I went to Stuyvesant and then I did East Asian Studies at Brown. I lived in Tokyo for six months and moved to LA. I worked for five years as a chef and executive chef but my girlfriend and I couldn’t imagine staying in LA so we moved here.”

Rob sheepishly admitted his own background “Actually I went to high school in Manhattan and college at Yale.”

We ordered what the ex-New Yorker suggested. I’m not a big fried chicken person so I had to ignorantly hack my way through the crust. The chicken was okay. Rob disappeared and returned with two sauces that transformed the chicken into something extraordinary.

“This is great.”
Rob and I decided to keep driving and eating, which are always good things to do in Texas. I said, “I’m leaving the chicken scraps on the hood of the car.” We drove down Burnet Road and Rob said “The entire neighborhood smells like fried chicken.”

We couldn’t cross the oncoming traffic to visit a Czech calleche bakery. In Texas, Czechs rival Germans as culinary antecedents and every Texan has a favorite bakery for these stuffed pastries. All those bakeries are located in distant small towns. Rob said we would come back tomorrow.

Then we pulled into Taco Deli. Rob ordered a taco and at his suggestion I ordered a soft taco. Both were good. We were in a chowhound groove. Then we got back in the General Lee and drove to South Congress. Rob was staying at the superhip San Jose Motel. I enjoyed the street scene from the Motel’s open air bar/coffee bar.

We got a phone call from Amy asking where we were and we zoomed off to Uchi, the city’s fabulous fusion sushi restaurant. That meal took hours. It was mystifying that so many people who looked like they had not much money could eat at such a primo retaurant. Rob picked out wines and I drank slowly, but I drank slowly for hours. By the end of the evening I was slowly glowing.

The next day it was off to tiny Smithville to deliver tables and chairs to be put in storage. We had lunch at Sherry’s, a restaurant located in a double wide trailer. I had the Fiesta Steak a la Queso. A fiesta steak is something in between a minute steak and a hamburger. The Queso was a watery cheese sauce dotted with peppers. The dish came with buttered potatoes, fried okra, buttered toast and a complimentary cupcake.

EVAN CRANKSHAW

Evan Crankshaw is a drawer and painter from North Carolina. His work deals with drawing issues, biological, evolutionary, and erotic abstraction, and the interplay between outer and inner space. He received a Diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2007 and completed the Fifth Year program there in 2008. He just finished a year as Visiting Faculty in the Drawing department at SMFA, and his studio is a tire warehouse in East Boston.

On view for several weeks at Toscanini’s.
Opening reception Th May 14 6–8pm.

For more information on Evan Crankshaw try www.evancrankshaw.com

Toscanini’s hosts several exhibitions per year of new and established artists. For more info try adam@tosci.com

Rockers we have known.

Toscanini’s has had all sorts of workers from all sorts of places. A persistent group of scoopers have been musicians, and usually rockers. Early in our history there was a glorious moment when we had lots of oversized women rowers from Boston University but every year we have a scrawny popstar in the waiting.

Matt Henderson was in two famous hardcore bands: Agnostic Front and Madball. He played for half a million people in Holland and did a tour of South American soccer stadiums. At age twenty-five he told me that he thought he was getting too old for the hardcore scene. I was walking through Berlin when I peeled a poster off the Berlin Wall for his band. They were appearing at a German club called The Bronx. Madball couldn’t tour when their lead singer was in jail.

Brian Fair was also in two bands: Shadows Fall and Overcast. I think Brian was president of his high school class but he had shoulder length hair and a voice from the worst part of hell. He used to do telephone interviews with Japanese magazines while he was making ice cream. He was a good ice cream maker. He had the phone cradled between his cheek and shoulder while he reeled off cliches, “We miss Japan and can’t wait to get back and see our fans. We’re keepin’ it real.”

One worker was in a sort of hardcore punk band. He may have previously been a paratrooper. Sadly he died when the police pulled him over. He had just bought a lot of drugs and swallowed them. He died in jail.

One employee looked a lot like Billie Joe of Green Day, but actually seemed like the pudgy guy from The Clash. Of course The Clash did not have a pudgy guy but this musician was waiting for the band’s reunion tour.

Both halves of The Dresden Dolls worked at the store. Vocalist Amanda Palmer has always been a star in her own head and Brian Viglione, the band’s drummer was not well-suited for everyday life. He listened to more varied music than anyone who ever worked in the store.
Mike from The Dead Trees, who describe their music as Folk/Rock/Grime/Americana, had the most mature take on the music business. He was also the best pint packer who ever worked in the store. His band moved to Portland, OR to facilitate their rise to stardom.

Nick Brannigan is a quiet redhead, who made ice cream and also drummed for the band Bain. I was watching a high school film noir about drug dealing in California when one of the characters came onscreen wearing a Bain t shirt.

Right now we have our own American Idol grouping. Martin Gonzalez knows something about all music. Michigan’s Andy Burri makes ice cream and won the recent Rock and Roll Ruckus. You can read about him on rollingstone.com. Jarrod Annis and Nick Maestri lead Electric Music.

This year Nick Maestri surprised everyone by selling two songs to television, largely based on Facebook exposure. One was sold to the cable show “Weeds” and was about driving around the suburbs, stoned. The other song was about child molesting.

Nick has been a source of youthful wisdom. When he was negotiating for the sale of his song he said, “Don’t fuck with me. I’m a music business major.”

He also told 17 year old Rauol Robert that “there is no future in metal music.” Rauol hung his head and said, “But I love metal.” Nick simply shook his head and repeated that “There is no future for metal.”

Toscanini’s greatest rock star was Amy Carpenter, who was an occasional member of Toxic Narcotic. TN, as the group’s fans called it, had a big hit with “If Silence Equals Death, Shut up and Die.” But they stopped playing the song when they realized their fans thought it was a homophobic anthem. It was not. Amy looked like the comic book character, Tank Girl, or Tank Girl looked like Amy Carpenter.

We don’t throw away much ice cream. The other day I found a bad batch of Strawberry Sorbet and a bad batch of Raspberry-Blueberry. A batch equals four 3-gallon tubs. The Strawberry Sorbet was coarse in texture and I thought easy to fix. It is easy to melt and refreeze sorbets. Ice creams are usually impossible to refreeze although some expensive restaurants claim to melt and refreeze ice cream every day.

After melting the four tubs of Strawberry Sorbet I put them all together in a big tub and used a scary kitchen tool to further puree the berries. A burr blender looks like something from a slasher movie or a very adolescent sex movie. It enables cooks to puree large quantities of food in a big container instead of subdividing into batches. I pureed the now melted strawberries a lot and added more sugar in order to improve the texture of the sorbet. Using leftover orange juice and sugar I made an Orange Syrup that also changed the flavor from Strawberry Sorbet to Strawberry-Orange Sorbet. Everything worked and after freezing in the ice cream machine the sorbet was excellent.

The ice cream had been made by simply adding frozen blueberries to a pretty good Raspberry ice cream. Simply adding frozen blueberries to an ice cream results in an unfortunate texture that makes one think of Macadam roads and glacial till. This flavor was beyond repair. Saved one and failed with another. Probably gained a new sorbet flavor and lost $100 on the bad ice cream.

A big fat attachment arrived today, listing all the nominees for James Beard Awards. These awards are important to foodservice professionals. The nominees for Best Northeast Regional Chef included Tony Maws from Craigie on Main, Michael Leviton of Lumiere in Newton, Marc Orfaly of Pigalle in Bay Village and the chefs at Hugo’s in Portlant, Maine and Arrows in Ogunquit, Maine. Corby Kummer was nominated for his food columns in The Atlantic. Three former Bostonians were nominated: Suzanne Goins now cooks in LA, writer Alan Richman once worked at The Globe but now types for GQ, and artist/designer Steve Solomon, formerly of Pizzeria Regina, Michela’s and Rialto. Solomon was nominated for his graphic work at Terroir wine bar.