Recipes from the Afterlife
Celebrity auctions, Hauntings and recipes, New wine bottles, New menus, Celebrities working 'real jobs' for the day, The ultimate depression cookbook, Cocktail recipes and more!
Hello readers!
Welcome back to another drink seco newsletter! Hope you’re all well, who can believe how fast this year has flown by?
We have some exciting news…
We’re starting to renovate a home!
This may be a little less exciting since it’s not a home that we plan to live in, but a renovation is exciting no matter what! I’ve always wanted to have an Airbnb, but with the current restrictions cities are planning (and I can’t blame them - having too many Airbnb’s in the world DOES eliminate housing for locals) I knew it would have to be in a more remote, rural area.
We also wanted to make sure the home would have multiple purposes, such as serving as a place for us to live when we’re not bouncing around the world, and perhaps most importantly - a place to put our things!! We have been paying an exorbitant amount in storage fees, which has felt nothing short of throwing money down the drain.
Hopefully, by the next newsletter drop, I’ll have decided on how to share these home renovation updates!
This week:
Let the bidding begin
Why are celebrities cosplaying hospo workers?
Recipes from the afterlife
Depression cooking
A new era for the menu
Hollywood’s Gruesome Obsession
Redesigning the wine bottle
A cocktail recipe for the weekend
Let the bidding begin:
To support the SAG Hollywood strikes celebrities are offering experiences you can bid on. And let’s just say some of them are … unusual. To give you an idea, some of the experiences up for offer are: Natasha Lyonne will help you solve the NYT crossword, the New Girl cast will party with you on zoom, Adam Scott will walk your dog, the Bob’s Burgers” Cast Will Sing a Custom Song, Lena Dunham will paint your mural. And that’s only the beginning!
Anyway, this has prompted a bunch of great tweets and memes of ‘fake’ experiences. I thought I’d join in the fun and create some fake food/cocktail listings that I’d bid on haha.
Why are celebrities cosplaying hospo workers?
While we’re on celebrities, we’re witnessing a weird phenomenon at the moment where celebrities are ‘working’ at fast food chains for a day. Remember those photos of Lana Del Rey at Wafflehouse, Ben Affleck at Dunkin Donuts, Ed Sheeran at Weiner Circle, or David Letterman at Hy-Vee supermarket? No one’s quite sure why celebrities are cosplaying hospo/service workers. I’m assuming it’s some sort of PR stunt, but it’s a curious choice. Especially in this cost of living crisis, are they trying to seem relatable and down-to-earth? Who knows… But if you think you see a celebrity lookalike at your local Taco Bell, you might not be far off. I’m hanging out for Julia Roberts to pop up, but I think we all know she’s too classy for that.
Recipes from the afterlife:
Julia Georgallis wrote about grief, death, memory, food, and the ways we miss people in this article in Mold Magazine.
“When the people we love die, we miss their physical company, but we also miss the way that they did things. How they walked, the way they talked, or how they would always sing the words of a particular song wrong. The food that they made us, however, takes on new dimensions of remembrance because it is attached to a multi-sensory experience.”
Cooking is a multi-sensory experience that taps into a whole different power to evoke memories. We all know how the smell of one meal can almost magically take us back to when we were five in a grandparent’s kitchen.
Not long ago I wrote about cooking your way through heartbreak. I think there’s an element of cooking that is so intertwined with grief. Whether it’s the food we cook for grieving loved ones, the comfort food we reach for, the smells of dishes that haunt us, or the food that reminds us of those no longer with us.
“Cooking a recipe that’s been passed down is a way to relive that special connection, “You’re smelling the smells and tasting what they tasted””.
Ghostly Archive is a Tiktok page that documents gravestone recipes. Something I didn’t even realize was a tradition until I read this article. It’s predominantly in the US, and usually women, who are engraving recipes onto their gravestones.
When Grant (the creator of Ghostly Archive) asked a woman who was planning on having a recipe on her gravestone she found “It came down to the way she wanted to be remembered. It wasn’t that she liked cooking or baking it was like, ‘This is a recipe that I have an identity with.” It’s a really interesting and beautiful exploration into memorialization, identity, and memory.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about hauntology. Hauntology is defined as “a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past”. Hauntology argues the past never leaves us, and is inextricably intertwined with the present, further is manifested through memorialization. Hauntological theory has been applied to all sorts of disciplines, particularly as another lens to look through history and the ‘haunting’ of our violent colonial past.
This shifts away from the Western conception of the horror ‘ghost’ as something negative and to be feared. Hauntology offers us a new way to examine the ways the past (and the erased histories) that coexist with us today. On a smaller scale, haunting and ‘ghosts’ are used as metaphors for memory and our personal ‘ghosts’, or the present absences that draw the past into the present.
There's no literature (that I can find) that connects hauntology to cooking or recipe making, but given what we’ve been talking about, and the sensory power of cooking, I think there’s a lot of potential for this area. Cooking, eating, and drinking, especially by following recipes tap into long traditions and histories.
Cooking is a way to bring the past, and people no longer with us into the present. Recipes have a similar power to ‘haunt’ us with memories from the past, even if it is not a past we remember. Similarly, cooking is intertwined with healing, and learning to live with grief. It also extends to the ghosts and haunting of forgotten, stolen and erased recipes. The politics which Alicia Kennedy does a great job at writing about in her newsletter From the Desk. If anyone knows of any good books or essays about hauntology and recipes, send them my way!
Side note: totally unrelated but I also love the theory of ‘Queer (specifically lesbian) haunting’ which Ilana Eloit and Clare Hemmings touch on in their essay here.
Depression Cooking:
We are bombarded with recipes these days and it can be overwhelming trying to decide what to cook and what recipe to use. In part, with the rise of Girl Dinner, we are seeing the embrace of simplistic, random, assortments of food as a meal. Cheese? crackers? Some slices of apple? A solo leftover lamb-chop? Girl Dinner! Girl Dinner can be whatever you want it to be. Something that hits your cravings, constitutes a meal, and is extremely low effort. I’m sure you’ve been bombarded with Girl Dinner hot takes in the past few months, so I won’t add to them.
However, while in Girl Dinner, laziness or lack of desire to cook a ‘proper’ meal is all a bit of relatable fun, sometimes it really can feel impossible to cook a meal. I thought I’d share this zine I stumbled across called ‘Depression Cooking: Easy Recipes for when you’re depressed as fuck’ by Sonali Menezes.
Simple, accessible, funny, practical. Despite a lot of my work, life, and newsletter celebrating the joy of eating and drinking, sometimes it really is just about surviving. Depression Dinner de-glamorizes (or adds another dimension) to the Girl Dinner weird assortments of food that end up on our plates when we can’t be bothered to cook. Have a read of the manifesto:
I’d also like to add that all the recipes in the Depression Cookbook are genuinely accessible and realistic. This zine also incorporates notes like *less spoons* and *more spoons* options for the recipes. Because the only thing worse than cooking when you don’t feel like it is cleaning up. You can buy the zine for $4.50 here.
A new era for the menu:
In one of the first Drink Deco newsletters I ever wrote, I did an extensive deep dive into the New York Public Library’s collection of over 40,000 old menus dating all the way back to 1843! If I learned anything from that research, it was that menus don’t only tell us what’s on offer, but are markers in time, and pieces of art, that hold important cultural and social value.
Unfortunately, we’re a long way away from the days of embroidered, hand-painted, or musically accompanied menus. QR codes and the pandemic ruined what was left of an already dying art.
However, I have some news. It seems menus are entering a new ‘era’… This was written up in Punch Drink last week:
“With faux pharmaceuticals, Rubik’s cubes, invisible ink and other interactive elements, modern bar menus are becoming as high-concept as the cocktails they list.”
It seems some bars are now experimenting with new ways to present a menu. Some are 3D, or interactive, others are more like contemporary art. There’s one that involves you making your own cocktail recipe from a Rubix cube. As I’ve found in my research, eye-catching, experimental menus are not new. Rather, they’re part of a long lineage of American menu art. Ultimately, they’re all part of the experience, and if it starts up a conversation, or gets people excited then I’m all for it!
Redesigning the wine bottle:
Since we’re talking about new things,this week in a Mold article I learned, “producing conventional glass wine bottles accounts for approximately 29% of a winery’s carbon emissions.” This doesn’t include transport or packaging. Glass bottles ensure a lot of things, they don’t change the chemical composition of wine over time, and they reduce the risk of pressurized bottles exploding, not to mention they look elegant.
Because of the environmental impact, some companies are experimenting with different shapes, styles, and materials for wine bottles. Take these flat ones for example, which are great for more effective packaging, however, glass making- even recycled glass making isn’t great for the environment and requires a lot of energy.
Others are trialing aluminum cans which “can be infinitely recycled with next-to-no reduction in quality and it’s estimated that up to 75% of the aluminum ever produced is still in circulation today.” Obviously, it’s not perfect for all wines but the air-tight, light-blocking qualities have their own benefits. Not to mention the size, in a culture where people are drinking less and less, and sometimes opening a wine bottle seems wasteful. And for those worried about the taste, “a 2019 study found that a slight majority (51% compared to 48%) either preferred the taste of canned versus bottled wine or found no difference between the two.”
Australia has embraced its ‘Goon Bag’ culture (cheap box wine in Australia is sold in 0.75- litre disposable silver bags- in a box, that are called Goon Bags). An Australian company; A Glass Of has been packing wine into small pouches - as seen in the first photo. Even more traditional winemakers are shifting to lighter glass bottles with smaller carbon footprints.
I’ve written a lot about the future of cocktails and wine, particularly in the face of the climate crisis and a cultural shift surrounding drinking. This makes these new alternatives really exciting and I’m sure a soon-to-be thriving industry.
Hollywood’s Gruesome Obsession:
Before you ask me, “Carlie what on earth does this have to do with cocktails or food?”, let me tell you, if Bon Appetit can cover it then so can I.
Back in July I wrote about horror and food and shared some of the unsettling photos from A24’s horror cookbook. In the book was an essay by the talented Carmen Maria Machado called Horror Caviar.
This week I thought I’d follow up on this and share an article she’s written called ‘Hollywood’s Gruesome, Lurid Obsession with People Eating People’. You can read it here, it’s part of Bon Appetit’s Anxious Carnivores series which I’ve been following.
“Despite growing pressures to quit meat, many Americans can’t quite do so—but they’re getting weirder and weirder about how they eat it.”
It seems cannibalism is dominating our screens at the moment, The Last of Us, Yellowjackets, Bones and All, Fresh, Dahmner, Armie Hammer, or going back further Raw, The Neon Demon, Hannibal, the list goes on, and let’s not forget the rise of the phrase “eat the rich”. Our fascination with something so horrid, so unsettling, in such opposition to humanity, something philosopher Julia Kristeva would call ‘The Real.’ But “what does it say about this specific moment in time that cannibalism is (forgive me) back on the cultural menu?”. Carmen Maria Machado interrogates the gendered, class, and racial elements that underwrite these stories of cannibalism that at their core deal with “the ethics of consumption.”
In her essay on cannibalism as metaphor for capitalism and feminism, Chelsea G. Summers—author of her own brilliant cannibal novel, A Certain Hunger—writes on the way the idea has infected our very language: “We don’t just win; we devour. We don’t just vanquish; we roast our rivals, and we eat them for breakfast. We go to bars described as meat markets in search of a piece of ass, and if we find a lover, we nibble, we ravish, we swallow them whole.” Cannibalism is a way of framing the capitalistic impulse to conquer; how the upper hand, so to speak, always goes straight to the mouth.
I’ll read anything Machado writes, I love the intersection of culture, food, wine, literature, and theory. We’re nearing October, Spooky Season is almost upon us but I’ll leave you with her closing sentence to ponder “Horror that asks a question that might be haunting you, in this current apocalyptic moment: What—or who—are you willing to consume in order to survive?”
Cocktail Recipes:
If you can stomach something after Machado’s article (or maybe you need a drink) I couldn’t send you into the weekend without a cocktail recipe.
Given we were talking about recipes on gravestones, here’s what I would put on mine and you know it’s going to be a bit cheeky! - (with the disclaimer that I would rather have a cocktail book! lol)
My Last Word
.75 oz fresh lemon
.5 oz green chartreuse
.5 oz maraschino liqueur (cut 1/2 with simple syrup)
1.25 oz fino sherryMix everything with a lot of ice in a shaker. Strain away from ice one nice and chilly and pour into a very chilled coupe.
That’s all for this week folks! Hope you’ve learned a thing or two and have some food for thought. It’s still pretty warm in San Seb (high 70°Fs and low 80°Fs) so we’ll be enjoying our time in the San Sebastian streets.
Take care!
Carlie xx