Extravagance, Decadence, and Indulgence
Happy Holidays! This week we speak about all the maximalist trends in food, fashion, and cocktails that are coming, dandelions in cocktails, celebrity tipples, Martha Stewart's Instagram and more!
Hello!
Happy Holidays! Hope you’re all having a restful and enjoyable holiday season, I know they can be tough for so many people (myself included).
On our front, the renovation continues, but I’d like to turn some attention to one of the best decisions we’ve made, our backyard chickens.
This was my first experience cracking a fresh egg open right after it was laid. It tastes extraordinary. 10/10 would recommend. Our girls have a medium-sized coop and run, but we closed off a larger area of our backyard here for them to explore all day. I can’t imagine them inside that run all day - they are the most curious creatures. Every few days, they also have access to the rest of the yard to find new worms, snacks, and such. They are so friendly, and after a few months of training, love to be pet, and held, and always are ready to say hello (because we always have treats.)
This week:
Dandelions + dandelion liqueur
Tablescaping
Maximalist restaurants
The Cup Overfloweth
Extravagant Cocktail Theatre
Eat You Heart Out
She’s Just Like Us
Celebrity spin the bottle
What’s in a Christmas Dinner?
Foodie gift guide
Dandelions:
I’m currently reading Dandelions by Thea Lenarduzzi, a family history through four generations’ worth of migration between Italy and England, and the stories scattered along the way.
One of the first stories is about her Nonna picking dandelions. I didn’t realize they were a) super edible and b) a popular Italian garnish/ingredient.
Dandelions get a pretty bad wrap as weeds and hold countless common names, in English “Irish daisy, blowball, milk-witch, cankerwort, yellow-gowan, monks-dead, priests-crown, swine’s snout” or in French “dent de lion” (lion’s tooth).
While we think of dandelions as common weeds today, dandelions have been used in traditional Chinese, Egyptian, Roman, and Greek medicine. In Victorian England, they were considered a delicacy and served in salads and sandwiches. The Italians also have a long history of using them in cooking. Dandelions are rich in vitamins A, C, and D as well as iron, potassium, and zinc.
You can eat them raw in a salad or sauté them in a little olive oil and garlic. Alternatively, you could use them in a pie or on top of a pizza.
It got me thinking about how else we could incorporate dandelions into our diet. I was able to find a dandelion liqueur recipe that might be fun and easy for summer!
Dandelion liqueur:
1 cup dandelion petals (from 1 quart blossoms)
750 ml vodka (or neutral spirit)
1/4 cup light honey (or sugar)
Remove the dandelion petals, do not leave any green parts, as they're bitter (but technically edible). Place the dandelion petals in a quart jar and cover with 750 ml of vodka (or neutral spirit). Cap with a tight-fitting lid and shake to mix. Allow the mixture to infuse for about 2 to 3 weeks, shaking every few days. Once infused, strain through a fine mesh strainer. Sweeten to taste with a light honey or sugar. I'd suggest about 1/4 cup for this recipe, but use more or less as it suits you. Try it in your cocktails, as a spritz, or with some tonic, and enjoy!
Tablescaping:
As we round up the year we are inundated with ‘Wrap ups' and ‘Ins and Outs’ lists. Something I find interesting is Pinterest’s trend predictions. Calculated from the trends of what users have been pinning, it predicts what aesthetics, looks, and themes we can expect the following year. Apparently, maximalism is in, and part of this is eclectic tablescaping.
You might have seen the photos on your instagram, tables filled with flowers, mismatched chairs, linen, vintage crockery, and colors. It looks like we’ll be seeing a whole lot more in 2024 so dig out your Granny’s crockery and get thrift shopping!
Maximalist restaurants:
Similarly, Eatermag has a feature and an article on maximalist restaurants. It looks like we can expect a lot more in 2024. I’ve heard it referred to as “dopamine dressing” which is quite funny.
“Not only are restaurants fun again, they’re, like, really fun — like over-the-top Decline and Fall of Roman Civilization maximalist fun. Why? Myriad the reasons, many the factors. Could it be because the world’s ending anyway? (Climate change! Economic inequality! Why not go out with cheese pulls and flaming bananas?)”
Here’s a list they put together on some of the funniest/most out there maximalist restaurants in America.
The Cup Overfloweth:
We also have maximalist cocktails, Punch Drink wrote about the new era of maximalist cocktails.
“If there is a word that captures the vibe of drinks and drinking right now, it is maximalist: more components, more complexity, more spectacle, but also more choices, more labor (to make and sometimes to drink) and definitely more money. U.S. bars, both genuinely high level and the merely spendy, are pushing the form of the cocktail—and the envelope of taste—in a way and at a scale that has never been seen before”
"The feverish intensity propelling this omnitrend is also a product of this particular moment in culture—one that celebrates excess and indulgence in response to these unfeeling times."
Some of the ‘maximalist’ cocktails they’ve seen around include: Caprese Martinis, cacio e pepe Gimlets, Cosmos made with fermented Kool-Aid, emu neck distillates and deer antler tinctures. I can’t say I’m jumping at the bit to try any of them, but I am intrigued.
Extravagant cocktail theatre:
Cara Devine wrote about her recent experiences with extravagant cocktails in The Australian Bartender, too.
She describes ordering a drink called The Godfather in Edinburgh which was “presented with a perfectly balanced drink and a little hand-crank music box which, when wound, tinkled the eerie notes of the Godfather theme tune, prompting a hum-a-long for the whole group.”
Similarly in Lisbon, she had a drink called the Finger Ring “The unlikely mix of Fernet, bourbon, Guinness, and tepache intrigued me but what was even better was when a brown-paper wrapped beer bottle was presented alongside a ring box.
The ring inside was also a bottle opener, placed ceremoniously on my ring finger for me to pop the bottle myself, once I’d stopped laughing. “The name and presentation both have a great double meaning that can be played with a lot for clients. The name is a cheeky smile when ordering, and when served with the ring box… the look on the other person’s face and then the realization that it’s a bottle opener is always a playful moment,” says Dave Palethorpe, owner of the bar. Devilish banter.”
These experiences and cocktails which could easily be seen as over-the-top, gimmicky, or plain odd “are so well-executed and presented by talented professionals that it creates a memory.”
I’m undecided if I think all this maximalist extravagance is tone-deaf and excessive given the state of the world or if it’s the fun antidote we sometimes need. But one thing is for sure, we rarely recall every good negroni we’ve ever drunk, and cocktail theatre certainly leaves an impression.
Eat your heart out:
The history of going big in the food world isn’t new. Decadent eating has been portrayed in history for hundreds of years. Eater mag put together a history of food art history, you can read the full piece here (complete with maximalist graphics too!)
What we collectively think of as decadent looks that way because it’s been signaled to us over and over via art history, which is crammed with excessive banquet scenes and mass quantities of food: The Etruscans (mid-first millennium BCE) put them on funerary monuments. An acrobat and a juggler entertain the guests in a Han Dynasty (25 to 200 BCE) relief.
In Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s 1888 Roses of Heliogabalus, where the Roman emperor lounges with guests around an overflowing table, a torrent of rose petals suffocates the crowd. If a seder is a banquet, then maybe any Last Supper scene counts; the list would get out of hand if we included picnics, naked or otherwise. References to excess are as varied as the days-long feast in the first-century CE Roman farce The Satyricon (and Fellini’s 1969 adaptation); descriptions of luscious, sopping fruit juices in Christina Rosetti’s 1862 poem “Goblin Market”; and even the pastry-laden set design of Sofia Coppola’s 2006 version of Marie Antoinette.
Food and fashion are also friends in the maximalist world. Taylor Mac’s performance cycle A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, which elapsed over a full day — use hats shaped like birthday cake, Champagne-cork wigs, and skirts of shredded potato chip bags to retell U.S. history through a queer maximalist lens.
It looks like we can expect a lot more of pop, colour, size, and chaos in 2024!
She’s just like us!
Balancing the expectation we put on celebrities to seem relatable, and in touch with the rest of the world, while acknowledging the enormous wealth/lifestyle disparity is tricky in the social media age. One person who perhaps has got the most honest balance is none other than Martha Stewart. Her 1.9 million followers adore her instagram for it’s blurry, unedited photos, captions filled with typos, shameless selfies, celebrity crushing, and personal touch which is missing in most celebrity’s accounts. Even the account handle ‘@Marthastewart48’ seems reminiscent of a mother or great aunt. Refreshingly, she’s not trying to be ‘just like us’, and how could she? We don’t all have a $400 million net worth. Instead, she’s authentic to herself, pet peacocks post one day, a blurry slightly unappetizing photo of a restaurant dinner the next.
The general consensus about @MarthaStewart48 is that it is mesmerizing because it is “authentic,” meaning, as Quartz explained, in 2018, that “she posts what she wants, regardless of its marketability”
Whatever she posts, my favorite remains her thirst traps.
Celebrity spin the bottle:
Speaking of celebrities, this year has seen scores of celebrity drink launches. How To Spend It from the Financial Times has created a celebrity spin the bottle to find your festive tipple. Although let’s be honest, how many more celebrity tequila brands do we actually need?
See them all here.
What’s in a Christmas dinner?
Family Christmas dinners can be wonderful, heart-warming, delicious, and intense. If you need some reminding that everyone’s family and Christmas dinner is different, here are some classic, chaotic, family Christmas dinner scenes from movies.
Foodie gift guide:
And finally, for the last-minute Christmas shoppers, I thought I’d share the link to the much beloved food-themed gift guide by Helen Rosner.
She writes:
“The secret to giving a wonderful gift is the element of delight: if you can see how marvellous something is—its beauty, its function, its rarity, its cleverness, its absurdity—then so will whoever you give it to. The world is full of cruelty; life is hard enough. Why give a gift unless it makes you happy, too? These are some of the most delightful things I’ve come across this year—consider them starting points, ideas rather than dictates. And don’t forget local abundance: treats, trinkets, snacks, and gift cards from shops and restaurants in your own neighborhood.’
Kitchen accessories, tools, novelty pieces, food related fashion, homewares, giftboxes, books, and food itself. This guide has it all.
You can read the rest here:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-food-scene/a-food-themed-holiday-gift-guide
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That’s all for this week!
Merry Christmas Ya Filthy Animals!
And a Happy New Year.
Carlie xxx
That dandelion drink was nicely table-scapped, too!