~

however much i may pride myself on the total lack of practical information presented on this blog, the wild successes of our Scotch Club beg to be shared with the wider public. so, while i don’t presume that you all are incapable of coming up with a similar or likely superior system on your own, we have found that this works very much for our purposes, and sometimes it is but a matter of offering a loose template in order to get the ball rolling.

the impetus behind the formation of Scotch Club was several of us loving and being very curious about scotch, but of course being too poor to indulge this interest to the extent desired. for the purpose of trying new scotches, most bars carry a predictable and quite delimited selection, and although whisky-centric bars exist (Montreal’s L’Île Noire and Whisky Café, for example), the mark-up is staggering and inevitable, and usually you end up surrounded by businessmen and the types of guys who feel sufficiently invested in masculinity to wear a button-up and blazer, but insufficiently devoted to good taste to feel compelled to tuck their goddamn shirt in. and since none of us were dating people with rich dads (the traditional source of decent scotch), alternative solutions needed to be found. so, Scotch Club? (if you ever feel like you’re pining for a hobby, i suggest taking a kind of alcohol and attaching to it the word “club,” and seeing what kind of social infrastructure springs up around it)

none of us really knew what we were talking about, but our hearts were in the right place, and we thirsted for the company of like-minded ignoramuses with whom to share such loose and impassioned jabber. what eventually came together was a group of five who semi-regularly assembled to collectively buy, taste, and compare new bottles. i think that having a small core group is of the essence. four or five is ideal because it allows everyone to gather around a table and converse easily as a group. six is permissible, but even at this number i find there is a tendency to splinter off into smaller conversations, which is fine if that’s what you’re into, but the coherence of the club depends in part on everyone sharing their insights with the group as a whole, to say nothing of the scheduling issues that can arise when trying to coordinate more people. a core group of four or five also allows you to have occasional guests, about whom i will explain more below.

each meeting the core group selects two bottles of whatever price we feel comfortable paying and purchases them collectively. at the meeting we try a round of each bottle neat, followed by a round of each with water, for comparison. while water definitely opens up some scotches in a wonderful way, my default is to always take them neat, and i have yet to be so struck by the addition of water that i have managed to remember that a given scotch is better that way.¹ i don’t know whether to chalk this up to my own difficulties systematizing information, or simply the problems inherent in acquiring new info while drinking hard liquor. either way. next we do a round of each of the two bottles that were tried at the previous meeting, in order to provide a rolling comparison, and to give us a chance to taste the same bottles twice within a relatively short time span. this is followed by a “drinker’s choice” round, where everyone gets to have another drink of whichever of the four they most preferred.

in this way, in one night one has the opportunity to taste four scotches, paying in something around 30-36$ total,² with the added advantage that afterwards we still own what remains of the bottles. after being tasted at two consecutive meetings, a bottle goes into the “Scotch Bank;” less a physical space than a morally protected zone of temporary undrinkability. obviously collective ownership of booze presents its own Fighting Hellfish-like challenges (it is a great testament to the esteem in which i hold the Club, its rules and membership that the 16 bottles of single-malt that rest beneath my bedside table remain unmolested). one option is to treat the Scotch Bank as a resource to which the club may return at any point, like, say, when times are tough and the wolf is at the door but you still want to get the club together for some meeting and drinking. another might be to host the Sweetest Party Ever, where you run a bar to sell off all the remains of your bottles at something close to cost, extending to others the chance to taste whiskies they might otherwise never have had the opportunity, thus fulfilling the educational and public service mandates that you may or may not have built into your scotch club from the get-go. the possibilities are endless, really.³

because this is one thing that you will likely discover – as soon as people hear you have a scotch club, they’ll be clamoring all over you to get in on it, because of course no one wants to organize a scotch club, but everyone wants to reap its benefits. how we’ve dealt with this is by each meeting inviting one guest (occasionally two, although we’ve found that even seven people is really pushing it), usually someone who has expressed prolonged and avid interest in the club, but is not a founding member. the guest does not buy in on the bottles as does a core member, but instead pays by the drink. on the face of it, this might sounds a touch cold, but when people come into it knowing they’re going to pay something in the vicinity of 20 bucks for seven drinks (that in a bar would likely cost them 80-100$),  i haven’t found the atmosphere of collective good cheer to be compromised, and the settling of accounts may be accomplished with alacrity.

so that’s basically the gist of it. Scotch Club is the fuckin’ best.

¹ ice both numbs the tongue, rendering it insensitive to the subtler flavours, and produces a steadily more watered down drink, interfering with one’s ability to get any clear picture of how the thing actually tastes and whether or not it naturally opens up over time. i don’t recommend it.

² this depends of course on how expensive are the bottles we have chosen on a given night. a good way to economize in this area is to look into the prices for bottles in neighbouring provinces/states. the rules governing pricing and import of alcohol in Québec appear to be totally arbitrary and not a little malicious, and we have found that whenever one of us, or a helpful associate, is traveling either into Ontario or especially into the United States, getting them to pick up a bottle or two for us can be an excellent way to both save money and get our hands on scotches that are otherwise unavailable in Québec. if you happen to know someone passing through the Heathrow airport, all the better. the duty-free World of Whiskies is straight up bananas.

³ note: the possibilities are not actually endless, and pretty much all of them end up with you being drunk.

~

sorting through some old notes, i ran across the following, headed “Recent Developments”:

i have now buttered something that is already in my mouth. as in, stopped chewing, took a knife, and spread butter on the mass that was currently in my open mouth, and continued chewing.i also undertook to call several SAQs to try to track down a bottle of scotch from a particular bottling that i was afraid was no longer available, which required the employees to search through their bottles individually to find the number i required.¹i imagine these both signify some sort of passage into some new part of my life, but i’m not sure it’s the same thing.

god, if only they weren’t indicative of the same thing . . . anyway, this reminds me that i haven’t really ever written about scotch before, despite it being, you know, one of the best things the world has going for it. seeing how as we are nigh on the one-year anniversary of the Scotch Club of which i am a part, it seems only appropriate to give the stuff a little love. all the more because the topic dovetails nicely with the “Food and the Imaginary” post that i wrote just recently (more on this later).

i would say there are three key moments in the history of my relationship to scotch. the first took place probably somewhere around the turn of the millennium, when i still lived in Prince Edward Island. a friend of mine who lived in a beautiful and expansive house in the country and also benefited from her mother’s habit of leaving town for summers at a time, decided to throw a Scotch Party, which for all intents and purposes was something of an “old timey” party. everybody dressed up and there were card games and a pool table, and of course scotch. ironically, this was the one party that was ultimately broken up by some nosey noser of a neighbour, and i can imagine their perplexity upon finding the house populated by dapper teens in ties and evening dress, listening to jazz and playing snooker or baccarat while sipping scotch, rather than the pantslessness and pool-ruining and weed and irresponsible meat-cleaver brandishing that might have greeted them at any number of the other parties throughout the summer. after most of the revelers were cleared out by the well-meaning imbecile who thought it would be a good idea to make a bunch of teenagers drive home from their booze-themed party, my best friend and i found ourselves alone in the basement, finishing up our game of pool. neither of us drank at the time (i was straightedge, i believe that he was “taking a break”), so we were mainly in it for the tie-wearing, but out of curiosity, my friend took a swig from an abandoned glass, and him gagging violently before then removing himself to the sink behind the bar to thoroughly wash out his mouth (this, from the man who brought us Mountain Moon Juice) provided my first association with scotch as a thing.

the second, more direct experience came years later while on a canoe trip in northern Ontario, when a jolly old English stereotype (i apparently consider anyone with a British accent to be a stereotype. i assume this will cause problems for me eventually, but so far, so good.) passed a bottle of Té Bheag around the campfire, and tasting it i remember thinking to myself “Hm, maybe I don’t dislike scotch after all.” i mean, i was on a goddamn island, already mellowed by barley stew and box wine, so it is no wonder i found the whisky very sympathetic, but what with the challenge that scotch presents to many palates, to say nothing of my pre-existing prejudices, my enjoyment was by no means a foregone conclusion.

Té Bheag is, i think, a great introductory scotch for how it hints at many of the notes that can be found expressed more fully in more expensive bottles, without being overwhelming, or tasting of bootwater like many of the other similarly priced blends (Johnny Walker Red Label, Chivas Regal, etc.). it is also mild enough that it makes for a good campfire-drinkin’ whisky; unlike some of the other Island and Highland malts (Té Bheag comes from the Isle of Skye, which is officially considered part of Highland territory, but many argue for the distinctness of the Islands – Skye, Jura, Mull, Orkney, Arran – as places of production), it isn’t overly smokey, so it’s not going to gang up on you with the fire, and the creamy, sort of butterscotch notes it carries before the touch of peat and rise of almost rye-ish heat are well suited to the back-country camp setting. (and possibly the best $34.95 you can spend on whisky at the SAQ. [Bulleit being the best $33.50 you can spend on whiskey, by comparison])

probably the most significant experience for my current relationship to scotch, that which should be considered the beginning of my love for it rather than a forerunner thereof, as i view the above,² was the first time that i tasted a well-made, well-aged single malt. for the moment, it is not important what it was,³ because at the time its identity meant nothing to me. i knew it was “good,” and that it was expensive, but i approached it as an unknown entity.

or, that is not precisely so. because i knew of course that it was a whisky, so not a total unknown, but in the initial tasting it opened up a space of the unknown.

which is to say that it did not immediately taste like anything i knew, anything that i had ever drank; for a moment the idea of what a whisky was or could be was banished, and replaced by this space of possibility – possibility in the sense of an uncertainty, of suddenly not knowing what it was that i was tasting, and having to devote considerably more attention to its ascertainment than i was accustomed. this is in part what i mean by food that asserts a “monopoly on the imagination” (see “Food and the Imaginary“). faced by a wealth of intense and unfamiliar (or strangely familiar) tastes, time slows down, the moment distends, as suddenly we must focus all of our attention on what is happening in our mouth. in that first drink there is a swell, a disorienting pulling of focus, and the world recedes into the background.

it is all the more challenging because of the borderline familiarity and peculiarity of the tastes one is encountering. indeed, as i have come to know scotch better, what is fascinating is how many of the tasting notes evoke flavours of things that we have never actually eaten, and in many cases cannot be eaten (or should not). tar, peat, straw, burning sticks, trawling ropes, scorched wool, brine and plastic buckets. to be sure, many of these could be more familiar to those who have spent time in Scotland or other maritime locales, but this too rests upon a collapse or disregard of the scent-taste distinction. scent is not taste, however inextricably the latter depends on the former. it is in the (mobilization) of the imaginary that these tastes become intelligible as such. the imaginary of the sea, the peat, the tar, the whatever, comes to stand in and do the important associative work of tasting. it can be quite remarkable, and i appreciate scotch for how it calls upon this faculty. which is in part scotch culture, which even in in its most casual of forms, permits and encourages these flights of associative fancy that are nonetheless still ostensibly rooted in what is happening in one’s mouth.

up next: start your own Scotch Club!

¹ Aberlour A’bunadh, batch 33.  well worth the effort, although i haven’t been able to find a review yet that i totally agree with. sherry for sure, cocoa, dark chocolate, spice. sweeter than i had previously been able to imagine enjoying in a scotch, but there is so much going on that it doesn’t end up being cloying at all. also, i strongly advise against the adding of water, despite that being conventional for a cask strength scotch of this high alcohol (60.9%). i found that water actually stripped it of a lot of its more interesting notes and, surprisingly, left a lot of the alcohol burn, highlighting it, even.

² what is a forerunner of love? acceptance? affection? trust? did Té Bheag represent the beginning of my willingness to trust scotch? to eye it with warmth rather than wariness? let’s go with that.

³ it was a Lagavulin, although 12- or  16-year old i do not recall.

i have just been informed of the existence of macon, or macon’s bacon, and am now dying to try it. mutton bacon? i mean, shit. i admit i’ll be woefully disappointed if The Old Foodie is correct in their claim that its name derives from the collapsing of the words mutton and bacon, but it seems believable (maybe a little too believable?). i don’t know why this portmanteau annoys me more than any other, but it just seems so inelegant. not that, i suppose, mutton bacon itself sounds particularly elegant (“light black and yellow in colour, with the outer edges being darker pink”? amazing), but i’d like to think they could come up with something better than that. therefore i shall persist in groundlessly believing that some more satisfying and mostly unpronounceable Scottish word exists for the stuff.

unfortunately i haven’t been able to turn up any evidence for its availability in Mtl, and am not about to order it from goddamned Scotland, so if anyone hears anything, or knows anyone who makes it, word me up.

this also reminds me that i don’t think i’ve ever had bresaola, nor gotten around to finally going back to Dominion to try their duck ham. i gotta get on that, stat.

cure ‘em all, i say

as a variation on the “Black Mischief” (stout + gin + espresso), i give you the “White Mischief”: blanche + gin + cocaine.

is that racist? rather, does it by default make Black Mischief racist?

(somebody try this and tell me if it makes them feel racist. or makes them feel like i’m racist.)

~

on the topic of “food and the imaginary,” i recently picked up a bottle of Salers Gentiane. knowing nothing about it, but always eager to support the SAQ’s (minimal, but improving) efforts to bring weird bitters and apératifs into Québec, i did now allow myself to be put off by the startling all-purpose-cleaner-yellow colour of the drink. indeed, when messing about with bitters – so often little collapsing galaxies of apothecarial innovation/immoderation – one must not shy away from the occasional unexpected hue (green Chartreuse, anyone?).

gentian root is is one of the elements i had been trying to track down for my own bitters experiment. it has a long and laureled history in herbal medicine, for everything from chronic debility to dog bites to “weakness of the digestive organs” and was used as a bittering agent in early beers prior to the introduction of hops. along with quinine, gentian also supplies the core flavours of the bottle of Bonal that i picked up in the summer (it turned out to be something of a disappointment, fetching label aside. i thought it tasted basically like fancy  aromatic prune juice, but i happen to like prune juice, so don’t screw up your mouth at me like that. [a more charitable description may be found here. alternately, in the words of my friend Kinneret, "I could drink a whole glass of this shit."]).

for all this, i was initially a little nonplussed by the Salers, although the taste is less disappointing than perplexing. i couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but i find it strangely reminiscent of that old chalky banana-flavoured medicine that one was administered as a child. what makes this strange is that it manages to taste like that stuff without actually tasting anything like bananas, prompting me to make, to a room full of people, the moronic pronouncement “this tastes like an absent banana.”

how’s that for “imaginary food”? no one else seems to share my conviction of their similarity, so what makes such an association possible? by what circuitous route is my brain arriving at this mental picture that describes the outline of where a banana should be? of course, the advantage of claiming something tastes like a thing that has no actual referent is that no one can really contradict you. “wise men don’t argue with fools,” and all that..

listen, i know the Post is a Neo-Con (or like, Nu-Con?) rag, but if you can think of a better way to get invited to luncheon on Mulrooney’s dirigible, i’d like to hear it.

~

a few weeks back, my roommate Nicole and i got together with a couple of friends a ol’ pig’s head soup. the friends had acquired a half a hog back in the summer and butchered it all themselves, but hadn’t gotten around to doing anything with the head, and we figured that it had been lurking about in their deep freeze for long enough. we decided to make something along the lines of a Mexican pozole, which involved stewing the head for the better part of a day, then removing it and stripping as much off the skull as possible. to this we added achiote and tomatoes and hominy, then finished it with avocado, fresh cilantro, lime, tortillas and cabbage.

up until fairly recently i had spent much of my adult life as a vegan. i have only scant, but growing, hability with meat preparation, and i had never seen, handled, or eaten a pig’s head. i really had no idea how i would handle the process. a pig’s head has eyes, and teeth, a nose, eyelashes, a whole face. and how does one face such a face, on a terrain not so much of recognition but of consumption? one is reminded of the old vegetarian slogan “I don’t eat anything with a face,” and gets to thinking about the inversion that could well apply to many a meat eater – “I don’t eat the face of anything.” i won’t go so far as to say that this is cowardly, but i am happy that i had the opportunity to face up to what was left of this particular face (despite the uh, lack of skin and ears, which made for a slightly more gruesome than sympathetic visage), and surprised that it didn’t give me greater pause.

as it turns out, i was able to approach the whole affair with alacrity, a sense of curiosity and of irreverent humour. somewhere along the line, though, whether it was when we were wrenching out teeth to make jewelry with, jabbing around the inside of the skull with a chopstick to free the what was left of the brain from its cranial safety, or putting sunglasses on the head and taking pictures with it, we of course had moments of “is this right? are we going to hell? we’re definitely going to hell.” one friend’s response to the “cool pig” photos (see below) was along the lines of “Oh, that is just wrong,” but i wonder wherein does the wrongness reside? is “irreverent” truly the best way to characterize it, and is this irreverence the same as a lack of reverence for life, or for that matter, for death?

on the one hand, i think irreverence is important. humour is important, it can help us handle the world, to put things into different perspective, to cope, and even to heal (of course humour can be hateful and hurtful as well, but i don’t believe this nullifies its other potentials). on the other, i think that some measure of reverence for life is important, but what do we mean when we talk about reverence for life? what do we assume about how reverence is experienced, and how it is expressed?

is it all hushed tones and deference and platitudes? this hardly seems the appropriate response where food is concerned. and on the face of it (pun intended, duh) is this any different from playing with one’s food? or perhaps i should say beneath the skin of it, is this any different from playing with one’s food? because it is the face that arouses our moral sentiment, that challenges us beyond food with disgust, empathy, horror. but then, we can say “beyond” food only if we have already accepted and normalized the separation of food from life, from lives. where in this chain of fragmentation, of transformation from an entity to edibility, does it become, or cease to be, in poor taste to play with one’s food? to joke around with a head, rhyme and revel with the dead?

in the end, it was in a way more about the head anyway. more so than it was about investing a whole day into creating some outstandingly delicious meal. i mean, don’t get me wrong, the soup was pretty good. hearty, rich, by times mysterious (is this a gland? cartilage? muscle or myelin or brain matter, maybe?), but for me it was really more about the process – about working with a challenging cut of meat, or rather a part of an animal that often is excluded from consideration as meat, and coming to understand just how much there really is to it, but also how much work you have to put into it to get it, to turn it into meat. to see how it comes apart, is broken down. this was a challenge, and in its own way, a celebration. an homage to the pig that says not for squeamishness alone will any part be deemed unfit to eat.

and what says “celebration” like sunglasses, right?

~

]]> http://stillcrapulent.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/just-a-lazy-skull-boiling-monday-afternoon-2/feed/ 0 goulu, but not forgotten day two. post soup boiling for to put on our waaaaaalllllll. just a couple of cool dudes http://stillcrapulent.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/anyone-for-a-game-of-triangle-toss/ http://stillcrapulent.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/anyone-for-a-game-of-triangle-toss/#comments Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:27:50 +0000 stillcrapulent http://stillcrapulent.wordpress.com/?p=2200 ]]>  

at a fake New Year’s NYE party last night it was decided over 2011s (the cocktail: consisting of Zubrowka, Booker’s, ginger beer, lemon and pomegranate) that 2012 was to be the year of points. without bothering to explain, i will say merely that this seems fitting to me as i had already come to the conclusion that 2011 was the year of arbitrariness.

i apologize for the sluggish updates of late, but if you’re interested, i’ve been invited next week (i think it’s next week) to serve as Guest Editor for the National Post’s Afterword section, so i’ll be doing a series of posts about this and that (bouillabaisse! bitters! horror novels!), there. i’m huge?

~

i may as well say right out that i am not a huge fan of poutine. i respect and appreciate it, as a culinary phenomenon, especially in its living of the principle of Go Big Or Go Home, but perhaps as my once-ardent love for french fries has receded over the years, it has happened that i never found a place for it in my life, or on my plate. nonetheless, a permutation of the poutine that i can really get behind is the poutine Galvaude, which is effectively the hot turkey sandwich of poutines, adding peas and shredded turkey or chicken to the already daunting mix. i was in an argument recently over whether or not this was merely disgusting (it has always struck me as the least offensive of variations. so much less so than the “Italian” poutine, for example, which somehow manages to be so grossly unlike chili fries as to boggle the mind/belly), when it occurred to us that neither of us had any idea to what “Galvaude” actually referred. i presumed it to be someone’s name, or perhaps an obscure sub-region of France or Québec, but lo and behold, it turns out to be so much more interesting (if slightly detrimental to my argument):

galvauder (v) ”Compromettre par un mauvais usage, en prodigeant mal à propos”

the rough English translation is something like to sully, tarnish, waste, or squander, but what it’s really about is ruining something by doing wrong by it, and i (as always) appreciate the deftness of the dictionary definition, to compromise by a wrong or inappropriate usage. there may be some further context for this that could be provided for me by a local, but as it stands it seems like galvaude is just a funny reference to abusing a poutine by subjecting it to turkey (or chicken) and peas; somewhat ironic as poutine already supposedly derives its name from being itself a fucked-up mess.

then just a few days ago we randomly stumbled upon this entry for poutine in the Larousse Gastronomique:

A dish from the south of France, consisting of a mixture of tiny young fish, particularly sardines and anchovies which are fried like whitebait. The name comes from the dialect of Nice, from the word poutina (porridge). Poutine can also be made with poached fish sprinkled with lemon and oil, and can be used to garnish a soup or fill an omelette.

which, btw, sounds delicious, and i wish was as easy to find in dirty neighbourhood diners as is its QC counterpart (although if prepared with only as much care as the average poutine, perhaps it’s better off this way). this is yet another instance when i wish i had an older edition of the Larousse, for i am as interested in it as a historical document and source of anachronistic culinary miscellany as a contemporary resource. so if anyone happens to have an early edition of the LG, i would happily take it off your hands for you know, like, 20 dollars.

yeah, such is my devotion to my craft. TWENTY DOLLARS. commence champing at your bits, you poor starving gourmands, you.