Raw Milk and Live Cookies

Raw Milk 
Dungeness Valley Creamery, $1.50/pint

Live Chocolate-Walnut Cookie
The Cookie Jar, $3

Whatever the dairy equivalent of "bread basket" might be, the Sequim-Dungeness Valley would have earned the title for much of the 20th century.  The arrival of the first cows in 1860 inaugurated a thriving industry; eventually the area boasted hundreds of dairy farms and thousands of cows, most of them Guernseys and Jerseys producing buttery high-fat milk.  

Over the last fifty years, though, Sequim-area dairying has declined.  The new norm emphasizes larger farms, industrialized techniques, lower-fat milk, and higher-yielding cows (typically Holsteins). 

One of two dairies remaining in the Valley today, the Dungeness Valley Creamery is extremely choosy about which trends it follows and which it bucks.  Located on the bluff above the Dungeness Spit, the creamery facility was built in 1992 by a family who have been in the dairy business since the 1970s.  The farm's 38 acres are home to 60 vintage Jersey cows, each with her own name and personality.  Their milk is sold unpasteurized and unhomogenized, so that the cream rises to the top, and since 2006 Dungeness Valley Creamery milk has also been certified raw.  

The milk is cold and frothy with the sweet-clean aftertaste of mown grass.  It begs to be put to work washing something down, and the Creamery has the perfect partner on hand:  Live Cookies.  Available in a number of flavors, these substantial treats feature flours ground at the last minute and stored cold in order to maintain their nutrients.  

The Creamery's stock of Live Cookies is limited to what was left over after Live Bread Shoppe owner/baker Sherry Fry closed her Sequim-based business in 2012.  Fry's new nutritional counseling business in Puyallup will eventually offer Live Cookies, along with a cookbook, Nutrition From the Cookie Jar. 

(If you're navigating using Sequim's free tourist map, note that the Creamery's location is marked incorrectly.)

Dungeness Valley Creamery
1915 Towne Rd
Sequim W360/683-0716

Cherry Shrub and Shrubet

Shrub

Acetic acid is powerful stuff, capable of clearing your sinuses, cleaning your bathroom, or transforming bland and perishable cucumbers into zingy pickles with a near-infinite shelf life.   

Along with water, acetic acid is the essential ingredient in vinegar--but it need not be the dominant flavor.  Brewing vinegar directly from tasty ingredients such as fruits and grains ("pure vinegars") or adding these ingredients to vinegar prior to a second, shorter fermentation process ("compound vinegars") can result in something more like a liqueur:  smooth, intense, aromatic, and even drinkable, usually as an apertif, digestif, or diluted into a kind of spritzer.  In many places, that mixture of fruit vinegar and water or soda water is known as "shrub". 

Home-brewed compound vinegars have a long history and after a quiet spell have seen a recent bump in prominence.   Making your own is easy (shrub is the jam of lazy DIYers) and relatively cheap if you use the fecund-est local fruit of the moment (in my case, cherries).  


Cherry Shrub

4 lbs cherries, washed, sorted, stemmed, and pitted
4 c vinegar (I used Bragg's apple cider; depending on your fruit you could use white, balsamic...)
1/2 c sugar (to taste)

-Put the fruit in a large non-reactive pot or several glass jars and add enough vinegar to cover.  
-Let the fruit sit, covered, at room temperature temperature for a week, stirring well each day. 
-On Day 7 or 8, stir in the sugar and heat the fruit to a low boil for about an hour.  
-Remove from the heat and when the mix is cool enough to handle, strain the liquid into clean jars.  Reserve the fruit solids (see below). 
-Mix chilled shrub with water or soda water to taste, or sip straight.  

 
















Bonus:  Shrub-et!

Why waste all that yummy fruit mush?  If shrub makes for a refreshing drink, it's off-the-charts invigorating as a frozen treat.  

leftover shrub fruit (of course this is best done with fruits such as pitted cherries that are entirely edible)
sugar to taste
water
spices and flavorings to taste
approx. 2 T vodka (depending on the volume of fruit)

-If your fruit is chunkier that you like in a frozen dessert, whizz it in a food processor.  
-Add just enough water to dissolve about 1/2 c of sugar; stir, shake in a jar, or heat gently until the sugar grains completely melt.  
-Mix the fruit and syrup.  
-Add any desired spices or flavorings (to my cherry mush I added a little cinnamon, ground cardamom, and black pepper, plus about 1 T of almond extract).  
-Stir in a little neutrally-flavored alcohol to keep the mush from freezing rock-solid. 
-Pour into a plastic tub or bowl and place in the freezer.  To create a softer texture, break up the ice crystals by raking the shrubet with a fork every hour or so as it freezes, then give it a final fluff about 15 minutes before serving. 

For more on shrub's history and resurgence in popularity, check out this NYT article. 

Triple XXX Rootbeer

Rootbeer
Triple XXX, from $2.75

Although "root beer" is catchier, "root-bark-herb-and-berry beer" would be more accurate; the first commercial recipe, launched by pharmacist Chester Hires at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, called for more than 25 different flavorings. 

Just after the turn of the century, the Galveston Brewing Company introduced a range of "XXX" soft-drink syrups, including ginger ale and root beer.  During Prohibition, Galveston supplied its syrups to more than 100 licensed franchises around the country.  Among them was Renton's Triple XXX Rootbeer, the first drive-in restaurant in the Pacific Northwest when it opened in 1930.  

The Issaquah branch--in its current location since 1969--and one in Indiana are the only surviving outposts of the XXX empire, but only the Indiana restaurant still uses the original XXX syrup; the Issaquah XXX sources its syrup from Coca-Cola, which uses a 1930s recipe.  

Although Triple XXX is no longer a drive-in, the parking lot is often lined with classic cars, whose owners gather at the restaurant for monthly shows and swapmeets.  Customers head indoors to order--and to ogle the accumulation of vintage memorabilia that clings to every wall and surface.  The root beer comes in "regular" or "supersize" glass mugs covered in velvety frost; it can also be ordered without ice, for an additional charge.  And of course there are root beer floats, made using Darigold ice cream.  

Triple XXX
425 NE Gilman Blvd,
Issaquah WA
425/392-1266

Don's Pharmacy

Don's Pharmacy Soda Fountain 
Cherry Lime Phosphate (above)

Chocolate Milkshake (below)

Head past the world-class soap selection, gardening tools, and racks of novelty greeting cards to the back of Don's Pharmacy and you'll find a soda fountain installed in 1962 and untouched by the intervening years.  Seating is at your choice of booth or counter stool; service is quick and sassy--but completely genuine, like a sharp-tongued big sister rather than a gum-smacking, beehived retro cliche.  
The waitress is happy to explain some of the menu's more archaic items ("Brown Cow" is a Coke float, "Green River" is a lime soda) and to make recommendations.  She makes milkshakes (below) as thick as spackle from milk and hard-packed ice cream, with an entire second shake in reserve in the mixing cup.  

You can also get a made-to-order phosphate, a tart relic from soda's early days.  Although pharmacists initially introduced soda fountains as a way of making medicine more palatable (see my earlier post on the 1850s soda fountain at New Orleans' Pharmacy Museum) the public soon developed a taste for sweet syrup and fizzy water, minus the medicine.  The addition of phosphoric acid to drinks created a puckery sourness that found many fans; phosphates were a popular and prominent soda fountain offering from the late 19th century through the 1930s.  

Today many so-called phosphates, including those served at Don's, are made with citric acid rather than the harder-to-get phosphoric.  Although the citric acid gave my cherry-lime faux phosphate a deliciously sharp edge (waitress:  "Like drinking a sour patch kid!"), phosphoric acid aficionados claim that nothing matches the experience of genuine article.  

Don's Pharmacy Soda Fountain
1151 Water Street
Port Townsend, WA
360/385-2622

1151 Water StWA 98368

(360) 385-0969

Penland Gingerade

Gingerade

I've been attending residential art classes at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina off and on since 1996. What with juggling 24-hour studio access and whatever work-study job I've been assigned, I tend to push myself hard while I'm there, often teetering on the edge of what could be a disastrous illness.

Gingerade to the rescue! Over the years, the Penland Coffee Shop has migrated and mutated, but this spicy, invigorating brew has been a blessedly constant presence on the menu. I can't begin to calculate how many gallons I must have bought.

Now I make this versatile tonic at home, bringing a little bit of Penland magic to whatever creative or physical challenge I happen to be facing. Wretched winter cold? Hot with extra honey, and maybe a touch of whiskey. Demoralizing summer cold? Full-strength over ice. Looming exhibition deadline? Fancied up with seltzer and a lime wedge.

Gingerade

(As written the recipe recipe makes 2 quarts, but it's easy math to scale up for bigger batches.)

1 c peeled and thinly sliced ginger

1 t whole cloves
4 cinnamon sticks
2 whole lemons, washed and quartered with peels left on

2 quarts water

Combine the above ingredients and simmer for 2 hours. Strain out the chunks and while the liquid is still hot add 2 cups of orange juice and 1 cup (or to taste) of your favorite sweetener (honey, agave, sugar, brown sugar, or succanat work fine). Stir until the sweetener is dissolved. Serve hot or cold, straight or diluted with still or fizzy water.

Coco Rico

Coco Rico

As a genre, "tropical" drinks tend to feature a half-dozen garish flavors skewered together by a tiny umbrella (real or implied). Not so Coco Rico, a single-note coconut soda so stripped down it's almost shy.

First produced in Puerto Rico in the 1930s, Coco Rico is clear but creamy, fizzy but soft, aromatic but without suntan lotion overtones. Singles are $0.89 at Rising Sun Produce in Seattle.

Soda Fountain

Soda Fountain
New Orleans Pharmacy Museum, admission $5

Housed in what was once the premises of the country's first licensed pharmacist, the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum offers a rollicking look at the health care endured by our ancestors, featuring: leeches, bone saws, chocolate-covered poison pills, drug-laced tampons, and reusable syringes the size of a small jackhammer.

In a cheerier corner near the front there's a soda fountain dating from 1855. Made from black, white and pink marble, it's an appropriately grand monument to the pharmacist's skill at making the medicine go down. Back in the days when most medication was administered as shots of off-puttingly bitter liquid, pharmacists discovered that flavored syrups could be beneficial, whether added directly to the medicine or mixed with fizzy water and served as a palate cleanser.

Customers grew so fond of the sweet drinks that soda fountains flourished and became a standard feature of pharmacies for more than a century. Many early soft drinks contained narcotic ingredients, and many of today's most popular drinks are based on those original recipes. It's a new take on Hippocrates: "Let soft drinks be thy medicine and medicine thy soft drink.

Sadly, you won't get a soda at the Pharmacy Museum--or if you did, it would be far from a health tonic. Their ornate soda fountain still functions, but all of the pipes and spigots are made from lead.

Hurricane

Hurricane
Pat O'Brien's, $8

After you've spent the afternoon screaming encouragement at a stream of dressed-up dogs roaming the streets during the Mystic Krewe of Barkus--Mardi Gras' only canine-friendly parade (see below)--it makes a certain kind of sense to recuperate in a smoky bar screaming Elton John songs over foot-tall glasses of rum dressed up as fruit juice.

Pat O'Brien's is a legendary and labyrinthine bar complex with lounges, a courtyard, a cavernous dueling piano bar, and a house drink, the Hurricane, whose original purpose was to maximize rum consumption. The bar's founder came up with the recipe during World War II when cheap booze ran freely but top shelf liquors were scarce; crafty salesmen required bars to buy dozens of cases of rum per every one case of whiskey. At O'Brien's the surplus rum was sweetened and served over ice in a glass the size and shape of a hurricane lamp.

Today you can take your Hurricane glass home as a souvenir--which seems like kind of a cruel thing to suggest to a drunk person.

Switchel

Switchel

Nutrition-wise, one of the few things I have going for me is the fact that I don't much care for soft drinks. The most popular pops, in particular, leave me cold. Pepsi? Eh. Coke? I probably average one serving every two or three years.

When I do indulge in sweet, fizzy drinks, they tend to have a more old-fashioned bent. I enjoy root beer--with or without ice cream--and birch beer, when I stumble across it. I like ginger ale and love ginger beer, the hotter the better.

And it turns out that I'm a big fan of a drink even less likely that these to appear on grocery shelves or in a gas station cooler: switchel. Flavored with molasses, ginger, and vinegar, it's spicy, stomach-settling, and weirdly refreshing. And luckily, it's really easy to make.

Like so many soft drinks, switchel has historic and utilitarian roots. It first appeared in the 17th century in the Caribbean, where molasses was a plentiful by-product of the sugar refining industry. A couple of centuries later in America, switchel was a kind of proto-energy drink, providing electrolytes and hydration to sweaty laborers doing the hot, heavy work of making hay.

I based my own attempt on a recipe in Ellis Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation, which was in turn adapted from Stephen Cresswell's Homemade Root Beer, Soda, and Pop. I reduced the amount of sugar and chose not to dilute the syrup to drinking strength right away; the mix stores well in the fridge, so I just make it up as needed, adding a few tablespoons to a glass of cold soda water or a mug of hot water.

Switchel

1/2 c apple cider vinegar
1/2 c sugar
1/2 c molasses
2 inches grated fresh ginger
1/2 c water

Heat all of the ingredients until just boiling, then simmer for 10-15 minutes. Let cool and strain to remove the ginger. Store, refrigerated, in a jar. Dilute to taste with hot water, cold water, or seltzer.

Shikhye

Shikye
Yakult

Shikye is a sweet Korean beverage made from cooked rice that is quickly fermented with malt water, then sweetened and flavored with ginger. This commercial version made by Yakult (tagline: "Nostalgia drink since 1993") is as sweet as syrup but oddly watery and clouded by bloated rice particles. It tastes almost like it would be a hit with hummingbirds.