DOWN-N-OUT:

The Tale Of The Early-Round KO Of Muhammad Ali’s Champburger (Dan McQuade, February 28, 2025, Defector)

“In 1916,” Adam Chandler wrote in the book Drive-Thru Dreams, “Walt Anderson first performed the magical, calculated act of crafting tiny ground beef patties and then smashing them flat onto a steaming, onion-laced griddle.” To reassure customers scared of the meat industry after reading works like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Anderson had his employees cook the burgers on a griddle right in front of patrons. The sliders made Anderson $3.75 in profit on his first day. The motto of his restaurant, White Castle, was “Buy ’em by the sack.”

“White Castle made this big effort to provide this place that looked really clean,” Chandler told Defector. “They would grind the meat in front of the customers and they’d made a big show of everything being choreographed down to the second. Every bit of the experience was just really, really managed. And all the stores look the same, too, and that was meant to convey comfort and familiarity in a sense that you’ll be safe in any of these places wherever you go. Now we think of that as kind of being soulless and corporate, but back then that was a big deal.”

White Castle was an instant and smashing success. Knockoffs with names like Blue Castle and White Tower failed to capture the same magic, but by the 1960s, the country was dotted with chains like A&W, Tastee-Freez, and Dairy Queen. By the time places like Champburger were opening, McDonald’s was well on its way to becoming the largest chain in the country. Franchisee Ray Kroc bought out its founders, the McDonald brothers, and pushed through an ambitious program of expansion that continues more or less to this day. That globe-bestriding empire, and many only slightly smaller ones, was built through franchising.

The franchise system was a boon to company owners. In exchange for a percentage of profits and a franchise fee, franchisees received the rights to operate their restaurants under a set of guidelines laid out by the companies whose recognizable brands gave those franchises value. Those guidelines were generally quite strict; chains still strived for comfort and familiarity even after The Jungle was well out of customers’ minds. From a business perspective, the franchisee took on most of the material risk. Eventually companies would turn to making money from the land under their own restaurants, which they leased to franchisees.

Many of those franchises were start-ups from people in the industry. Kroc was a milkshake machine salesman; McDonald’s was one of his customers before he made his start as a franchisee. The company spread under Kroc; competing fast food franchises like Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken also found success. It was not long until celebrities started getting in on the action—not as franchisees, but as the faces of brands that wanted to expand in the same ways, if not on the same scale, as White Castle or McDonald’s.

The week before Ali reported to prison, Joe Namath was in Miami to open a Broadway Joe’s restaurant. Miami News sports editor John Crittenden described the scene: “When Joe Namath opened his restaurant here last weekend, it was done at great expense—extensive advertising, houseboat cocktail parties, the employment of buxom damsels wearing football jerseys to serve hero sandwiches.”

The celebrity fast-food craze can primarily be traced to the success of Gino’s Hamburgers, a restaurant founded by Joe Campanella, Louis Fischer, Alan Ameche, and Gino Marchetti in the late 1950s. All four had played for the Baltimore Colts, and the first location was in the city’s suburbs. In a city that loved its Colts, a restaurant owned by four of them predictably became a hit.

After that, it was just a matter of waiting for the Blue Castle/White Tower types to arrive. Those knockoffs came in varying forms, but they all had a celebrity attached. Namath had Broadway Joe’s. Johnny Carson had Here’s Johnny’s! Ron Santo had his own pizzas at Wrigley Field. Bart Starr owned drive-ins. Plans were in the works for something called Mickey Mantle’s Country Kitchen. While still with the Steelers, Brady Keys opened All-Pro Chicken. At one point his restaurants were so successful that they partnered with KFC to open Brady Keys’ Kentucky Fried Chicken locations in black neighborhoods. The colonel was pushed aside by a Pro Bowl cornerback.

Other companies attempted similar ideas. Minnie Pearl’s Chicken operated in white neighborhoods. It served the same food as gospel singer Mahalia Jackson’s Glori-Fried Chicken, a name that feels almost but not quite sacrilegious. Glori-Fried Chicken locations were either attached to Gulf gas stations or standalone properties designed by black architectural firm McKissack and McKissack and made to look like a church. (This part feels notably more sacrilegious.)

“It’s getting ridiculous,” an anonymous stockbroker told the Detroit Free Press in January of 1969. “A celebrity sticks his name on a chicken shack and suddenly it’s $50 a share.”

Champburger was the brainchild of three white Miamians: Edward Gale, Leonard Lurie, and Philip Brooks. They worked with the Ali associate and Southern Christian Leadership Conference lawyer Chauncey Eskridge to put together a prospectus for the business and looked for investors.

The Champburger prospectus was not promising.

TRAGIC:

Salt of the earth: The secret history of the pub peanut (Rob Crossan, October 28, 2024, Country Life)

If you wanted a salty snack in a British pub before 1872, then there really was no need to order anything other than a pint from the barman. Before the Licensing Act that became law that year, breweries would put salt in the beer itself, keeping — as was no doubt intended — their customers thirsty and masking the often appalling quality of the ale sold to drinkers.

A century and a half on and the issue of salt with your beer is once again coming out of its shell. This time, it’s due to the decline in sales of that most venerated of pint accompaniments: the humble bag of dry roasted or, more commonly, salted peanuts.

Market-research firm Kantar reports a 4.5% decline in the sale of peanuts between 2020–23, worth £29.4 million across the country’s supermarkets. As Dominic Durham, general manager of The Sheaf View in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, five-time winner of the CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) Champion Pub of the city, elaborates, the change in habits has been noticed behind his bar counter, too.

‘There has been a definite decline in sales [of peanuts],’ reflects Mr Durham. ‘The main change in snacks is that the variety has increased — things such as poppadoms and pretzel pieces are available now, which obviously takes sales away from nuts. A lot of venues now offer more substantial snacks, including pork pies and Scotch eggs — we even sell onion bhajis that a local curry house provides us with at weekends.’

WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

If oysters be the food of love, shuck on: Tom Parker Bowles searches for the ultimate ‘jiggy jiggy juice’ (Tom Parker-Bowles, November 7, 2024, Country Life)

I remember a trip to Hong Kong, a couple of decades back, where I found myself in Kowloon’s ‘Snake Alley’, a tiny backstreet known for its reptilian delights. The walls of this particular restaurant were fitted with dozens of small glass cases, each containing a cobra, all of which eyed me with beady disdain. Once I’d selected my dinner, the furious serpent was removed from its home and languidly proffered before me. After I’d nodded my (terrified) approval, its head was lopped off, the body chopped up and simmered in a soup, as the bile duct and blood were drained into a shot of baijiu, which I had to down in one. The spirit was so potent that I could taste nothing but fire. Once I’d opened my eyes and just about recovered, the owner punched me on the shoulder. ‘Your lady very lucky tonight,’ he whispered with a lascivious grin. Then he pumped his fist, just to hammer the message home. There was, I hasten to add, no effect whatsoever. Just like every other so-called ‘aphrodisiac’.

Some ingredients do, admittedly, possess nutrients that may help the wannabe lothario. At a push. We all know that the Venetian Casanova gobbled oysters by the dozen and, not only do they look fairly suggestive, all soft, seductive folds of flesh, but they also contain zinc, which can speed up testosterone production. Dark chocolate is rich in a compound called phenylalanine, which boosts mood and, they say, the libido, too. Bananas are bursting with potassium, bromelain and B vitamins, all essential for reproductive hormones, whereas pomegranates have lots of lusty antioxidants. Yet you’d have to consume all of the above in such vast quantities that you’d eat yourself into a stupor — which hardly makes for a night of unbridled passion.

Every country and culture has its own form of ‘jiggy jiggy juice’.

BRINE BUSHES:

‘One of the most amazing things in terms of food in this country’ — How a tower of thorns makes salt (Ben Lerwill, February 27, 2024, Country Life)

On the west coast of Scotland, facing out across the Firth of Clyde towards the Isle of Arran, there stands a wall of thorns. It is manmade, but otherworldly, like a vision from a Gothic fairy tale. Its dark tangle of barbs reaches up to a height of 30ft and stretches more than 100ft across. Is it an art installation? A giant instrument of torture on the outskirts of Ayr? The correct answer is far simpler: it makes salt.

The history of salt production in Scotland dates back almost a millennium. Before the arrival of refrigeration, the mineral gave a vital means of preserving meat and other foodstuffs. Sea salt was, therefore, harvested along both coasts of the country — using salt pans, shallow containers in which seawater could be heated by fire and evaporated — and, by the end of the 18th century, the commodity had become Scotland’s third most valuable export, behind only wool and fish. Then came a steep decline, as demand waned and the market was overtaken by cheaper rock salt. The last Scottish salt-pan works was closed in 1959.

Back to the present-day Ayrshire coast, where Gregorie and Whirly Marshall are quietly changing the narrative.

Why ‘chaos wheat’ may be the future of bread (Michael J. Coren, September 17, 2024, Washinton Post)

Of the 47 million acres of wheat planted across the United States, experts I interviewed said very few have been planted with varieties like those produced by the Breadlab. “I tried to change the commodity system,” admits Jones, who served as director of the Breadlab until earlier this year. “You just can’t.”

So he turned to smaller farmers looking for ways of growing grain, and premium brands that could turn the flour into higher-priced products, as an alternative that’s “replicable, rather than scalable.” While more labor intensive — sometimes it requires years to fine-tune wheat blends for specific environments — a growing number are embracing the approach as part of the regenerative agriculture movement seeking to improve soil health and cut carbon emissions.

King Arthur Baking Company, the employee-owned company that released its Climate Blend Flour last year, is probably the most well known. The blend of wheat varieties, including a perennial capable of growing for years rather than being replanted every season, is part of King Arthur’s push to source 100 percent of its flour from “regeneratively grown wheat” by 2030. The result, says King Arthur, is a rich, nutty flour that can work in any whole-wheat recipe (something I confirmed in my own muffins).

The scale so far is tiny (just 120 acres), and prices are higher: A one-pound bag of Climate Blend Flour sells for $2.98, compared with $1.12 for standard whole wheat. But the company says it hopes to drive down costs as it assesses the climate benefits. “We believe in this work and understand it needs to be a long-term commitment,” Janis Abbingsole, the chief operating officer at King Arthur Baking Company, wrote in an email. “We need to allow time to listen to our growers and support them as they test and learn.”

We’re required to take a few baking classes and in the Education Center they refer to all my bakes as a function of chaos. (Proudly displayed the heaviest cup of flour ever measured, until they explained that’s not the point…)

GOOD EATS:

Cooking Peppermint Chiffon Pie with Flannery O’Connor (Valerie Stivers, July 9, 2024, Paris Review)

The owner of the Sanford House restaurant, Mary Jo Thompson, wrote a cookbook in 2008 including some of the restaurant’s most beloved recipes. The book is out of print, but a curator from the Andalusia Farm museum sent me the restaurant’s recipe for the peppermint chiffon pie. To my modern eye, the recipe looked unappetizingly dour. It called for evaporated milk, gelatin, and a premade Keebler’s Chocolate Ready Crust crust. The peppermint flavor and pink color came from melted peppermint hard candy, which I thought would be wishy-washy to the eye and the palate.

I decided to make one version of the pie following Thompson’s recipe, and then also to generate my own blown-out recipe using from-scratch techniques and amped-up retro flavorings. Chiffon pie research online, however, turned up wildly different formulas. The “chiffon” designation is supposed to mean a pie with an airy texture that has been created by mixing a custard base with whipped egg whites. But the most common contemporary recipe I ran across asked for packaged vanilla Jello pudding mixed with Cool Whip. The flavor and color came from food coloring and peppermint extract. It technically wasn’t “chiffon,” and it relied even more on ingredients from packages and cans than the Sanford House version. Eventually I made up my own recipe, making a crust from crushed Oreos, a filling from homemade custard mixed with whipped egg whites and flavored with peppermint extract, and a whipped cream topping mixed with crushed peppermint bark and peppermint candy. I would achieve a pink color with a particularly powerful neon-pink gel food coloring.

The comparison project was slightly hampered by the lack of Keebler Ready Crusts in any of the grocery stores I have access to, so I ended up making Oreo crusts for both the Sanford House pie and my own. Fortunately, having a strict comparison didn’t matter in the end. I didn’t need two recipes because you can’t make a bad peppermint chiffon pie. The Sanford House version was mild, minty, and just sweet enough. Topped with whipped cream and drizzled with chocolate syrup, it was heavenly.

THE LAST AMERICAN HEROES:

It’s Time to Give Moonshine Some Respect: It’s an American tradition and as worthy a liquid as any unaged spirit (CAROLINE EUBANKS, June 26, 2024, Inside Hook)

“We just don’t have a better word, so moonshine has come to fill that void, and it’s problematic because moonshine can also mean an illegally-made spirit,” Spoelman says. “Then that suggests a dangerous or poorly made spirit, perhaps to some ears.”

The legacy of moonshine also counteracts many of the stereotypes. “A good moonshiner would try to give his customer a good value,” Schumaker says. “If you sell somebody 180-proof moonshine, it’s really not moonshine, it’s almost vodka at that point. There’s a misconception that that’s the only thing that a moonshiner would sell.” Unfortunately, the majority of the recognizable brands on the market don’t create anything that could truly be identified as moonshine, instead offering neon-hued flavored drinks made from neutral grain spirits in mason jars.

Moonshine is actually a uniquely American product with roots back to the earliest days of the nation. The Scots-Irish settling in the mountainous east coast are primarily responsible for bringing their centuries-old distilling traditions stateside, using corn and water straight from the source to carefully craft flavor. Kings County sources corn from upstate New York, and Highlands gets its materials locally in southwest Virginia and Pennsylvania, allowing for the spirit to pick up the terroir.

“It’s very challenging to make a white spirit palatable, and that’s the job of the moonshine maker, whereas the whisky maker can fudge that piece of the process and sort of age out the imperfections over time,” Spoelman says.

So why doesn’t the industry appropriately recognize it? Moonshine typically falls under the category of “other American whiskies” in the awards, and very few have broken through to claim the medals like Troy and Sons in Asheville, North Carolina, which has twice been honored for its platinum whiskey.

Moonshines of this variety also rarely appear on cocktail menus outside of the territory where the spirit is traditionally distilled in Appalachia. But it has as much versatility as anything else you might have behind the bar.

“The cocktail opportunity of an unaged whiskey remains pretty unexplored, especially when you have tequila, silver tequila, white rum and various kinds of apple spirit ending up in cocktails,” Spoelman says. “I still think moonshine is maybe at the trough of its backlash, and it’s poised for a re-emergence as a more cultural mainstay once it’s better understood.”

One of my buddies is a moonshiner and I bring him any grains, sugars, fruit products we are getting rid of. Constantly amazed at the quality of the liquor he can turn them into. There’s even a reality show about them nowadays.

“THE MOST HEAVENLY TASTE”:

Make the Ancient Road Snack of Central Asian Nomads: Qurt is salty, long-lasting, and packed with protein. (SUSIE ARMITAGE, MARCH 8, 2021, Atlas Obscura)

ONE WINTER MORNING, PRISONERS AT the Akmola Labor Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland, part of the Soviet gulag system from the 1930s to 1950s, trudged to a nearby lake. As they began gathering reeds to heat their frigid barracks, children and elders from the neighboring community approached the shore. The kids hurled small, hard white balls toward the women, and the camp guards cackled: Their charges weren’t hated only in Moscow, but here in remote Kazakhstan as well, recalled Gertrude Platais, who had been arrested in 1938 and sent to serve her sentence there.

While it initially seemed like an insult, the villagers had the opposite intent. One of the prisoners tripped on the projectiles, got a whiff of milk, and suspected they were edible. Back in the barracks, Kazakh prisoners explained that it was qurt, a traditional dried dairy product that had sustained nomads across Central Asia for centuries. Long-lasting, easy to carry, and packed with protein and calcium, the balls—described as “precious stones” in a poem about the incident by Raisa Golubeva—provided a much-needed supplement to the sparse prison rations.

LUBE JOB:

For Enslaved Cooks, Persimmon Beer Combined Ingenuity and Joy: A conversation with Michael Twitty about the powerful history behind a centuries-old beverage. (DIANA HUBBELL, NOVEMBER 12, 2021, Atlas Obscura)

MICHAEL TWITTY, THE JAMES BEARD Award–winning culinary historian, estimates he has brewed his grandmother’s persimmon beer about a dozen times. Made by fermenting Diospyros virginiana, the diminutive North American persimmon, with sugar, honey, and yeast, persimmon beer is more akin to fruit wine or liqueur than anything brewed with barley, malt, and hops. Twitty continues to make his family recipe for its sweet-tart flavor and striking amber hue imbued by red pine straw. More than anything, though, he continues the tradition of fermenting this gently boozy elixir because of its deep ties to Black American history and its power to start conversations.

In his book The Cooking Gene, Twitty describes the experience of sharing a batch with contemporary Civil War reenactors. “Persimmon beer became my social lubricant of choice, even with a whole troop of Confederate soldiers,” he writes. Twitty notes that it was likely the very same drink with which his ancestors would have toasted their freedom in 1865.

For generations of Black families across the American South in the 18th and 19th centuries, persimmon beer played an integral role in daily life. In his quest to uncover more about the foodways of his ancestors, Twitty learned that American persimmon trees are a genetic echo of fruit trees in West Africa, and that both the plant and the beverage provide a thread across the history and geography of the African diaspora.

With ’simmon season currently in full swing, Gastro Obscura spoke to Twitty about his family history, the importance and evolution of foraging, and how much a single recipe can reveal.