Beverage Notes: Moxie   

By John Thorne 

If you’re not doing anything else today, you might consider driving to Waldoboro, Maine, to help celebrate Moxie Day. The Moxiemobile will be there and other Moxie-intensive excitements, plus free samples of that beverage for everyone. Despite the fact that, before the Great Depression (I mean the earlier one), Moxie was America’s bestselling soft drink (okay, I don’t believe it either, but it does seem to be a fact), most people south of the Maine border have never heard of the drink, and the few who have, more than not, have refused to sample it again. Among them I count my doctor, who favors diet Dr Pepper, a drink which in any form should never have been allowed to cross the Mason-Dixon Line. (We already have it in New England; we call it cough syrup). When I suggested he might try diet Moxie, he reacted as though I had suggested he sip iced sewage.  

Moxie’s popularity in Maine is genuine. Checking online to confirm the Waldoboro event, I discovered that there are other Moxie Day celebrations in Maine this summer — in Lisbon Falls, Kennebunkport, and Union. I mention this only in passing, since my interest is in the beverage, not the “famous” Moxiemobile, Moxie memorabilia, or even Moxie ice cream. Even so, that these things actually exist gives me that comforting feeling you have when you discover you’re not alone.  

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Buttered Peas on Toast   

by John Thorne 

When I first read about this dish in Nigel Slater's rather hypnotic Kitchen Diaries, I thought, "Where have you been all my life?" I love fresh peas as fresh from the garden as I can get them and often eat a whole bowlful at night just before going to bed. Who thought I could have them for breakfast, too? You might point out that Nigel hadn’t meant this as a breakfast dish, which is true but irrelevant. I love fresh asparagus on toast for breakfast — heat minced garlic in butter in a small skillet until softened, add half a cup of water and bring it to a boil, put in asparagus cut into short lengths, cover, and cook for 7 or 8 minutes. Make toast, butter it if you’re in a luxuriant mood, and pour over the contents of the skillet. What are you waiting for? Eat.

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Who the Hell Uses Onion Juice?   

By John Thorne (http://www.outlawcook.com/)

The other day I was leafing through a vintage edition of The Fannie Farmer Boston Cooking School Cookbook looking for American chop suey (a story for another time), when my eye fell on a recipe with an ingredient list that included a “few drops onion juice” — and suddenly I was a child again, poking around in my grandmother’s kitchen.

It was an odd little room. The family lived on the bottom floor of a large duplex, built by my grandfather in the 1920s in Wollaston, on Boston’s South Shore. Long before I came along, my grandmother purchased a piano and turned the dining room into the piano room. Thus, the kitchen became the dining room and the adjoining pantry became the kitchen. It was just wide enough to hold the kitchen sink at one end and the gas stove at the other. (The refrigerator sat in the dining room.) Between them ran a narrow counter and, above and below it, storage shelves for cookware and food. This was the kitchen in which Nana prepared meals for a family of five children (my mother the only girl).

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Eating with My Mother   

 

By John Thorne

[John Thorne and his wife, Matt, live in Northampton MA, where they cook in an apartment kitchen. They are perhaps best known for their irregularly published food newsetter,  Simple Cooking , which has been chugging along now for thirty years(!). Their books include Outlaw Cook, Serious Pig, Pot On The Fire, and most recently Mouth Wide Open.  It is perhaps worth noting that I idolize Mr. Thorne, have for as long as he and Matt have produced Simple Cooking, and am ecstatic to see his posts on markbittman.com. When you read this piece you’ll see why. – mb]

After my father died, I used to go to Maine twice a year for a week-long visit with my mother, first at the family home in Searsmont and then at a retirement community in Belfast. There, she was required to eat supper at the community dining hall a certain number of days a month. But she didn’t really enjoy that, and not because of the quality of the food (although she complained about that, too). She liked to move through the day at her own rhythm, which meant lunch was often eaten around three in the afternoon, and she wasn’t in the mood to walk down to the dining hall two hours later. She’d much rather eat supper at her own place … around eight in the evening.

This was the case even though by then various frailties had reduced her cooking to preparing some vegetables to accompany the night’s frozen dinner. Of course, I tried to get her to let me cook for her. She did allow this but showed no enthusiasm for my doing so, despite the fact that she often seemed to enjoy what I made. Finally, I got the hint. I gave up, and she and I would settle down in front of the television, each with our own frozen dinner (or, in my case, two frozen dinners — and I usually hedged my bet by having two different kinds).

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