Food & drink takeaways - 7 August
A curated taster menu of every day's food & drink associations
Food birthdays
1856
American saloon keeper and New Orleans bartender, invented the arm-achingly shaken Ramos Gin Fizz (see header pic)– gin, lemon juice, lime juice, heavy cream, egg white, orange flower water, simple syrup, seltzer and, optionally, vanilla.
"The Ramos Gin Fizz became famous for its
purportedly 12-minute shake time. It’s said Ramos would employ 20-35 bartenders at a time just to keep up with the drinks demands, rotating a line of staff to pass cocktail shakers and allow others’ arms to rest."
Food in art
Few artists could bring sumptuous - if deserted - place settings to the table than French Symbolist and Neo-Impressionist painter Henri Le Sidaner, born on this day in 1862.
"His seductive views of the gardens he created in the ruins of the medieval fortress at Gerberoy, with their recently vacated tables dappled in sunlight and overhung by roses, have cemented his reputation as a unique artist who does not fit easily into an art movement."
Those tables invariably feature half-emptied wine pitchers and glasses, abandoned coffee cups and saucers and bowls laden with fruit. The painting below is titled Small Table in Evening Dusk but you can find a pull-together of his table works at the Catherine la Rose - The Poet of Painting website, from which the above quote was taken.
Leftovers. . .
A newspaper article on 7 August 1940 announced a Government Order under which wasting food would be made an offence, according to food historian Janet Clarkson, who added that cases brought under a similar order during the First World War included:
- A woman who fed 14 dogs on bread and milk, fined ₤5.
- A woman who gave meat to a St. Bernard dog, fined ₤10.
- A furnaceman who, dissatisfied with his dinner, threw the potatoes in the fire, fined ₤10.
- A farmer who fed seven stone of rock cakes to his pigs, fined ₤10.
- Another farmer who fed his stock on bread, imprisoned for three months.
