Drink Seco Newsletter's 1 year anniversary! 🥳
1 year of Drink Seco newsletters! Today we explore food and religion (and what's red Fanta got to do with it?), The double life of NY's Oyster King, Granny cooking content, Food and literature & more!
Hello!
I’m very excited today because I realized it’s the 1st anniversary of this newsletter! Crazy how time flies! Thank you all for continuing to read and support my work!
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Renovation Update!
We have officially finished a room, and photographing the process was harder than I imagined. I was able to gather some minimal before and afters though! This room was structurally one of the worst in the house as far as the physical rooms. You can see in the photos below just how much drywall repair was needed!
The worst part is and will always be the ceilings. Kate took charge of drywalling so I did all the ceiling painting. A fair but miserable deal for all. After drywalling, which included removing everything around the open brick that leads down to the fireplace, we started priming the whole room. Sadly, the previous owner(s) had already painted over the gorgeous wooden trims, making it too large of a project to strip and reveal what was underneath.
We painted out the walls and the ceiling before adding some decorative trim and still need to add the vertical strips to give the room a bit more definition and decided on a two-tone room to add both warmth and brighten the small middle room.
Most excitingly, I went deep into my DIY soul after realizing that any on-brand hanging lamps were all over $300, so I decided to make my own! I’ve never attempted this before and while there are changes I would make for the next one, I’m thrilled with the outcome. I had a ton of wood-working glue around and this whole shade was created from one roll of paper towels via paper-mache. The lightbulb was the most expensive purchase coming in at $22.99 and the lamp kit with the braided rope came in at $15.25 making this whole light a $40 purchase!
Final touches were added by utilizing all of our not-so-favorite paint samples and creating two custom pieces of art (that I 100% looked at a photo online and then free-hand painted.) Up close, they’re definitely not perfect, but what I’m learning is that when everything comes together, you really don’t see the tiny imperfections!
So here is our first room, in its almost complete form. We learned a lot, and there is still a bit to do here. We plan, as I mentioned above, to add vertical trim coming down from the horizontal trim, and I plan to build a very simple pine bed to replace the dark wood bed frame that has no place in this room. My goal next time is to make the bed before photographing (lol) but no promises there in this hectic life we lead.
You may notice the random door behind the bed. This house was built in 1890 and has some of the regular irregularities of today’s modern world such as jack-and-jill bedroom doors. We definitely considered removing the door, but ultimately decided it would just become a sweet part of trying our best to historically restore the home and not spend a ton of money!
We are currently working on both the under-the-stairs bathroom and the upstairs sunroom, so hopefully, I’ll have some updates on those by the next newsletter!
In a bit more of some non-food/cocktail-related news, this month I watched the Beckham documentary which I highly recommend! A pretty amazing story, and some great old footage. I also didn’t realize that Beckham was the first real celebrity footballer. Victoria Beckham was very enjoyable to watch and very funny. Even if you don’t like football I’d recommend watching this!
This clip was the reason I decided to watch it haha. David Beckham, Investigative Journalist?
This week:
A conversation with Reem Assil
Making the mundane sacred
Please send me your Grandma cooking content
A fun fact
The double life of The Oyster King
Sweet tooth, a timeline of American dessert trends
Clippings: Food in literature
Best American Food Writing 2023
Cocktail recipes for everyone!
A Conversation with Reem Assil:
It can feel overwhelming and trivial to be writing or going on with normal life when there’s so much horrific violence and systemic oppression in the world right now. However, I also know that many people want a break from the news.
To bridge the gap a little, and connect to what’s happening in Israel and Palestine, whilst staying true to this newsletter, I thought I’d share an interview between Alicia Kennedy and Reem Assil. Reem Assil is a Palestinian-Syrian chef, former labor and community organizer, and restaurant owner.
This interview talks about “colonization and occupation, to what role the restaurant plays in our society, to how to create equitable systems while living under capitalism.”
Here’s a snippet I loved:
You can read or listen to it here:
Making the mundane sacred:
This week I learned that strawberry Fanta is a popular offering in Thailand. Ligaya Mishan (one of my favorite food writers) wrote a beautiful piece on how we transform food from the profane to the sacred.
Four thousand years ago, the Sumerians baked date syrup cakes for the goddess Inanna; the early settlers of Ireland buried pots of butter in bogs, possibly to placate supernatural forces, in the fifth century B.C. In Brazil, acarajés, black-eyed pea fritters split and stuffed with shrimp, are traditionally sold by followers of Iansã, the orisha (deity) of war, winds and lightning, and many vendors to this day set aside nine fritters for her on their platters. More commonly Catholics still eat a wafer of bread symbolising the body of Christ weekly at Mass. So urgent is the Eucharist to Catholics that in 2018, when Venezuela was in economic free fall and suffering severe food shortages, neighboring Colombia donated to the predominantly Catholic country a quarter-million communion wafers so that people could properly celebrate Easter.
One explanation for why the Thai offer Strawberry (red) Fanta at their shrines is that “blood sacrifice was common in animistic beliefs, which got replaced by red-colored water and consequently by Strawberry Fanta. Red is also considered to be an auspicious color.”
A universal part of our collective history, we have always found ways to connect spiritually through food.
Mishan writes:
It is a banality of the modern day to say, “Nothing is sacred.” In fact, the opposite is true: Secularism has not banished the sacred but made it infinite. Unmoored from religion, we flail for meaning and seek new forms of exaltation. We turn ordinary objects into holy grails, making pilgrimages to restaurants ranked among the world’s best (and helmed by chefs not so jokingly compared to gods) or stand in line for hours for breakfast burritos, barbecue or matcha crème brûlée doughnuts, then post pictures on Instagram as proof of our devotions.
In many ways how or if we worship Gods has changed, however our rituals, search for connection, and offerings have remained tied to food and turning the banal into the sacred.
Please send me your Grandma cooking content:
Recently, my whole feed has been full of Grandmas cooking. My favorites are Italian oldies making burrata and tomato sauce, and Greeks making baklava.
It’s peaceful, charming, and vaguely nostalgic.
There’s a collaborative project running at the moment called Grandma’s Project that invites filmmakers to make short films centered around their grandma cooking a favorite family recipe.
You can watch some of the videos from this project here:
https://www.youtube.com/@GrandmasProject/videos
“Grandma content tends to flatten women out into an archetype: an industrious, uncomplaining source of hard-won knowledge, or a cute, benign, twinkly-eyed craftswoman.
Many of the women in “Grandmas Project” are also sad, tired, angry and sometimes a little incoherent. They’re potty-mouthed and funny and inconsistent. They are lonely, or nostalgic, or eager to fix a date with their crushes who live downstairs. They are even, sometimes, sick of being filmed.”
If you want more Grandma content, try Pasta Grannies on youtube. Which is pretty much what the name suggests, Nonnas making pasta with some beautiful Italian scenery.
Also as a Fun Fact of the week:
I saw this fact in the Stained Page News newsletter by cookbook critic Paula Forbes and thought it was quite fitting since I’ve just been raving about Grannies cooking and sharing family recipes...
Ever thought your family recipes should be published? It turns out you’re not special “two-thirds of Americans believe their family recipes are “worthy” of bestselling cookbooks, according to a survey done by Bob Evans Farms.”
Other stats from the survey:
71% have a family recipe from either their parents (54%), grandparents (40%), or great-grandparents (24%).
Millennials (80%) are most likely to “continue their family's heritage through cooking” as compared to Boomers (76%), Gen X (75%), and Gen Z (67%) (Possibly an unfair stat to judge them on- realistically you’re surviving off 3 kinds of pasta in college).
Meanwhile, Gen X (77%) actually has possession of the family recipes, versus Boomers (76%), Millennials (68%), and Gen Z (53%).
The double life of The Oyster King:
You all know how much I love oysters. When I saw this title ‘The Double Life of New York’s Black Oyster King: Thomas Downing was a fine-dining pioneer with a secret’ I had to read it.
During the 1800s the elite flocked to Downing’s Broad Street oyster house for the best oysters in the city. Thomas Downing was born to formerly enslaved parents and grew up on Virginia’s Chincoteague Island where his family worked fishing, clamming, and raking oysters. In the 1820s, opportunity in the industry was abundant. Oysters, however, was everyone’s go-to street food and there wasn’t yet a fine dining scene in New York.
Downing opened his Oyster House in 1825 on Broad Street, styling it with luxurious interiors, curtains, carpet, and crystal-crusted chandeliers. Soon the Oyster House became the best known oyster spot in the city, with a clientele of upper-class white men. With business booming Downing started to offer international order shipping! He sent raw, pickled, fried, and fresh oysters across Europe and the Caribbean. Most notably, Queen Victoria was a big fan and regular customer.
However, Downing was not only running a world-class Oyster House and fine dining restaurant. Underneath the feet of his elite clientele, in the basement, he hid enslaved people fleeing the South to Canada as part of the Underground Railroad.
When he passed away in 1866 at the age of 75 (as one of the wealthiest men in NYC might I add) the New York Chamber of Commerce even closed for the day as so many top merchants wanted to attend his funeral. He was only a legal citizen for one day of his life, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 became law the day before he died.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., has displayed Downing’s story and the museum’s cafe offers a full menu of oyster dishes to pay homage to Downing and his rich history.
Oyster King. Successful businessman. Abolitionist. What an incredible story!
Sweet tooth, a timeline of American dessert trends:
I enjoyed this article in Eater Mag covering a brief timeline of restaurant dessert trends and how they speak to broader socio-political climates.
You can tell a lot about a restaurant — and a culture — by its desserts. A bizarre but reliable economic indicator, America’s desserts have always reflected what was going on in the world around them. Whether it’s war cakes made with water and spices to distract you from the lack of eggs or Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s molten chocolate cake that screamed ’90s decadence, desserts, maybe more than any other course, reflect our values and tastes. It’s what we’re willing to treat ourselves to in good times or bad. And it reveals what we consider to be a treat at all.
Here’s a snapshot:
2008: Cereal Milk launches an empire- and the froyo effect.
2010: Fancy desserts- the era of the “dust”, deconstructed dessert and the swoop of sauce across a plate.
2015: Viral milkshakes take instagram- Cronuts, milkshakes, and other instagram sensations
2016: Trome l’oeil desserts- Norma and Heston plate up deceptive food, caramels resembling sandy starfish, toffee made to look like duck feet, a flower pot that is actually cake.
2018: Shave ice- Fun, refreshing, and adaptable.
2023: A return of savory dessert- Finally breaking into the mainstream, savory desserts are front and center.
Clippings: Food in literature
As I’m sure you remember, I love talking about food and literature. They’re both essentially about storytelling and exploring who we are as people. Famous for my dinner parties put together a collection of food features in literature, presented in photographs of clippings with a short explanation.
“In Good Citizens, Joan Didion mocks the empty phrases and good-willed clichés she hears at dinner. The fancy French strawberries further emphasize the pretense and self-congratulatory atmosphere in the societal circles she writes about.”
Best American Food Writing 2023:
On a different food and literature note, I’m keen to check out this collection of the best food writing of 2023 put together by Mark Bittman!
The stories in this year's Best American Food Writing are brilliant, eye-opening windows into the heart of our country's culture. From the link between salt and sex, to Syrian refugees transforming ancient Turkish food traditions, to the FDA's crusade on alternative non-dairy milk options, to Black farmers in Arkansas seeking justice, the scope of these essays spans nearly every aspect of our society. This anthology offers an entertaining and poignant look at how food shapes our lives and how food writing shapes our culture.