Three American “Sugar Daddies” and What They Gave to American Pop Culture

The American slang term, “Sugar Daddy” is widely used today, and its origins do actually come from the American sugar industry.   Over the weekend I had the opportunity to walk what is now known as Domino Park, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the site of the sugar refinery of Friedrich Havermeyer, son of the OG Sugar Daddy .    Two of the earliest partners of Friedrich’s father’s Havermeyer Sugar Bakery (Refinery) in the 1830s in a part of Greenwich Village that is now SOHO, were Johann Heinrich Doescher from Grossenheim, Hanover, and Adolph Claus Johann Spreckels from Lamstadt, Hanover.  

Friedrich Havermeyer’s father and Uncle had come to New York in the early 1800s and started the sugar refining business, giving Friedrich a foothold in the market.     Johann Doescher got sick and had to return home a few years later to Grossenheim, Germany, near Dresden, where he married Margaretha Steffens and had four sons – Melchior, Claus, Albert and Johann.     Son Claus came to Cincinnati in the 1860s to work for his uncles Albert and Johann, who had tried their hand at the California Gold Rush, oddly enough, at a mine in El Dorado County called the Cincinnati Mine, and then settled in Cincinnati, starting a candy business in Over-the-Rhine on Jackson Street.

Claus dropped the ‘e’ from his last name and became Dosher, starting the Doscher brothers Candy and Sugar Company in 1871 with his brother Johann or John.   The Doscher company is the oldest continually operating candy company in Cincinnati, making their legacy candy canes and French Chew – a chewy nougat similar to taffy.

Claus died in 1883, and his brother John took over, married his brother’s widow and kept the candy company going and supporting his two nephews, now stepsons.    It was John who in 1896 saw the Turkish Taffy craze that was sweeping Southern France and invented the French Chew.    And, it was also John who gave America the very first candy concessions at a baseball park in the late 1880s.     Riding the coattails of Hauck’s beer, which had struck a deal for the first beers sold at an American ball park at Redlegs Stadium, Doscher sold a caramel corn like product called Grandpa’s Corn Fritters about a decade before Cracker Jack was released in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair.   Thanks to John Doscher, Cincinnati’s OG Sugar Daddy, we should actually be singing “Buy me some peanuts and Grandpa’s Corn Fritters…” at the 7^th inning stretch.

After Doscher and Spreckels left as Havermeyer’s partner, Friedrich Havermeyer moved his sugar refinery in 1854 to the Williamsburg waterfront and started an American Sugar empire that became the well-known Domino Sugar Company in 1900.    Too bad Johann Doescher didn’t stick it out and keep his hand in the Havermeyer sugar pot.

Friedrich had four sons, Fred Jr,  George, Theodore and Henry, O.      Only two of his sons were smart enough to be involved in the family biz, and it was Henry “Harry” O. that took over from his father and maneuvered the combo of several sugar plants on the east coast into the Sugar Trust, which amassed him an incredible fortune.

Harry Havermeyer son of Friedrich, used his money to amass a humongous collection of Japanese sculpture and swords, and old master paintings.   Harry decorated his study in a half dozen prominent Rembrandts.  Along with his second wife Louisine, and the guidance of American impressionist and friend Mary Casssatt, they became the first Americans to collect the radical impressionists – buying Monets, Manets, the largest American collection of Degas sculptures and paintings, and Cezanne.     In her will, Louisine donated nearly 150 of the best paintings in their collection, and her three children donated to make the Havermeyer collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art include 1000 total works.      Unlike the Fricks and the Isabella Stewart Gardner, other prominent American art collectors and philanthropists, the Havermeyers preferred to be anonymous and just wanted the find the best home for their family art collection.   They were just passionate about art, not the prestige associated with collecting.  As a result, their huge legacy to our country’s most prominent art museum is largely unknown.    But it is Big Sugar and the Havermeyer Sugar Daddy that we can thank for our large knowledge and collection of impressionist art.

Now we come to Claus Spreckels.   He leaves the Havermeyer Sugar Company and moves out west to San Francisco and after starting a brewery, in 1867 opens his own sugar refinery at Eight and Brannon Streets, calling it the California Sugar Refinery and later the Spreckels Sugar Company.  He comes to dominate the West Coast and Hawaii sugar markets, but wants a piece of his former East Coast partner’s market and opens a sugar refinery in Pennsylvania, which Havermeyer ends up acquiring into his Sugar Trust of Companies.

Claus Spreckels’ son Adolph Spreckels inherits the fortune and company and becomes the most eligible bachelor in San Francisco.    He was the deciding vote on the committee to choose which version of the the Dewey Monument in San Francisco was to be erected.  He chose the one that had an allegorical female at the top modelled by Alma de Bretteville, who was 25 years his junior, and had been a nude model for artists in the Bay Area.   He courted  and married her, building a fabulous Beaux Arts mansion that has since been the home of author Danielle Steel.     Because of their difference in age and the nature of his fortune, Alma began calling Adolph her Sugar Daddy.   The term stuck and became firmly embedded into American Pop Culture.

After the completion of their Sugar Mansion in Sausalito, Alma convinced her husband to support a museum project which was realized in 1924 with its opening.  In 1921, ground was broken for the Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum in Lincoln Park, San Francisco. As Spreckels envisioned it, the building is an almost exact, full-scale replica of the French Pavilion from the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, which in turn was a three-quarter-scale version of the Palais de la Legion d’Honneur in Paris.    Alma travelled Europe and solicited donors and bought art to fill the museum.

So we can thank the original American Sugar Daddies for our country’s fine public collection of art and the beginning of sweet baseball stadium concessions.

A Tale of Three New York City Cheesecakes

When we think of New York Style Cheesecake, most of us think of the tall, thick, dense, slightly browned on top version – most represented by Juniors out of Brooklyn.     But that’s short selling the variety by a lot.  I’m telling you, there are two other New York Style Cheesecakes to consider when choosing your favorite.    And you might be surprised how much you like them.

I had the opportunity to taste Junior’s for the first time at their 45^th street bakery just north of Times Square.     You can buy anything from a whole cake to a mini version, to just a big slice.    I chose the big slice for a taste.   And it is pretty fantastic for a New York style cheesecake – you get the dense creamy, yet sort of bland flavor you want.    Junior’s is a perfect canvas for a berry coolie or sauce – strawberry, cherry, or blueberry.   And maybe that’s its brilliance-  it’s the purest form of the New York Cheesecake.     The cake is available in nearly a dozen flavors – raspberry swirl, strawberry, tiramisu, brownie explosion, pineapple, Oreo, blueberry, red velvet, carrot cake, and lemon coconut.   

There are many other places to sample traditional NYC cheesecake.    Good examples are Magnolia Bakery, Carnegie Deli, and Carlos Bake Shop (home of the Cake Boss, Bartolo “Buddy” Valastro, Jr.), which by the way makes an insanely good cannoli.

Junior’s originally started in the 1950s on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn and is still there, while they’ve opened other locations – two in the theatre district, one in Connecticut, Las Vegas, and an outlet store in Burlington, NJ.     They’re also available through Costco in Cincinnati, along with their mini bundt cakes.

The second form of the New York Cheesecake is the Italian version made of ricotta cheese, such as you will find at Patsy’s Italian restaurant.    This version is less dense and lighter, although the ricotta gives a grainier, and less creamy texture.     This is Patsy’s founder’s recipe, Pasquale Scognamillo, grandfather of current owner Sal Scognamillo.    The basic recipe is 6 pounds of ricotta, a dozen eggs, 6 cups of sugar, vanilla powder, cinnamon and grated orange peel.   The citrus and vanilla flavors really throw this cheesecake over the top, and the crust is a bit more flavorful, although, like Junior’s is thin and not a feature of the cake.      This one goes well with spicy Italian marinara dishes, in my case, the spicy stuffed calamari which was over the top amazing.

The third and final version of the New York cheesecake is a German/Austrian version called Topfentorte.    It is made not with cream cheese, not with ricotta, but with a European cheese called quark.    The top version of this is the version served at the Viennese Café Sabarsky inside the Neue Gallerie in the Upper East Side, where the gorgeous Klimt painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the Woman in Gold hangs.     The Café is one of my favorite places to go when visiting NYC, and like Jackie Kennedy Onassis, I have a usual table there on the wall side at the entrance, where I can see everyone else in the café.

Quark is somewhere in between thick Greek yoghurt, cottage cream, and sour cream.   It’s not as grainy as ricotta, but less dense than cream cheese, and has that buttermilky sour tang to it.    Café Sabarsky serves theirs in a European thin slice, topped by fresh berries.     It is creamier than the Italian ricotta cheesecake, but less dense and still as decadent as the standard New York Style.

In my opinion the lineup of best New York cheesecakes goes #1 position to Patsy’s Italian Ricotta, #2 to Sabarsky’s Topfentorte, and # 3 to Juniors.    

For the Brooklyn Blackout Cake, The Proof Is In the Pudding

On a recent art and theatre trip to New York City, I became familiar with a beloved confection of Brooklyn.    It’s called the Brooklyn Blackout cake and has been around for over 100 years, but its most recent name only took off during World War II.   

I was touring historic Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg with a tour guide, Norman, when we passed a place called the Doughnut Plant in Williamsburg.    He pointed to the place and said these are really gourmet doughnuts.   I asked, “Well what makes them gourmet?”   He replied, well let’s go in and I’ll show you!”

Inside they have a display case showing off all the flavors of doughnuts with descriptions.    Some of the flavors are PB&J, Coconut Cream, Organic Orange, and Marcona Almond.   But one flavor stood out for its interesting name – the Brooklyn Blackout.   It was described as a rick chocolate cake, filling, glaze and crumbs.   I said, “Wow that’s a great name!”    And Norman asked if I had ever heard of it.   I had not and asked if it was a thing, and he said, “Oh yes!”

And there’s a story and legacy of this cake that is as rich as its sponge, filling and icing.    It was made by a German immigrant bakery called Ebinger’s, which opened in 1898 on Flatbush Avenue, and started making this rich chocolate cake in about 1906, after founder George Ebinger and his wife Catherine retired and gave the business to their sons Walter and Arthur.   The brothers originally named this cake the ‘chocolate fudge cake’.     It was made with a devi’s food sponge, a Dutch cocoa filling, a pudding around the sides to which cake crumbs were sprinkled, and finally a rich chocolate ganache icing on top.   To Brooklynites, it’s this pudding on the outside with the crumbs that sets this chocolate cake over above any other.    And, to me, It’s reminiscent of the super-rich and popular Opera Cream Cake by BonBonnerie in Cincinnati. 

The cake inherited its Blackout name to honor the frequent blackout drills during World War II to protect the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s 42,000 workers in 1942.    The Civilian Defense Corps would direct all city lights to be shut and windows to be covered when the Navy sent its ships to sea so that enemy planes could not spot them.   Blackout drills around New York City began in 1942 and continued throughout the war, dimming the normally bright lights like in Coney Island and Time Square’s billboards and theatres.  

The Ebinger Bakery was a neighbor to the Brooklyn Navy Yards and it developed a cult following in Brooklyn and New York City over the next thirty years until the bakery closed in 1972.   It became a common hostess gift and birthday cake.   Kid’s got chocolate moustaches diving into it at parties, and adults started salivating when they saw the telltale pale green and brown  box tied with string.   Although a recipe never was published by Ebingers, many bakeries made clones, and recipes showed up for it in regional cookbooks.   The Doughnut Factory is keeping this legacy alive with their Brooklyn Blackout Doughnut, but I think that having the large cake is really the only way to scratch the itch if you’ve ever had it before.   But it at least is introducing it to another generation of Brooklynites.

Presidential Fritters

So this year the Cult of Cherry Thing-a-lings became larger.   Or at least the playing field did.    Two other competitors finally saw what Schmidt’s Bakery in Batesville, Indiana have been doing for 50 years and decided to step up to the plate to complete.    And look I’m all about extending the season for confectioners and the opening of a competitive market.  People drive as much as two hours and wait outside in line on what is usually a very cold February weekend to get the delicious mini cherry fritters of joy made at Schmidt’s.    

Cherry Thing-a-lings are small fritters with cherries baked into the dough, deep fried and then bathed in  a cherry frosting.    The fritters are perfect – crispy and crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside, and an authentic cherry taste is experienced from the outside to the inside.   They are worth waiting for.  And they’re only offered President’s Day Weekend to celebrate the mythology of Washington admitting to chopping down a cherry tree. In the past five years Schmidt’s have offered preorder and shipping within an hour of Oldenburg, which includes most of Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky.   

Two prominent donut slingers in Cincinnati decided this year to go in with their own version of the cherry fritter – Busken and Holtman Donuts.  But I’m here to say neither is a real contender for the real Cherry Thing-a-ling – not enough real cherry are involved in either.

Take Busken’s for example.   They call it the Cherry Blossom Donut.   It’s basically a cinnamon roll with splurts of very fake tasting red cherry syrup inside the swirls.   There are no chunks of cherries inside and no cherry glazing like Schmidt’s amazing product, only standard vanilla glaze.    The cherry flavor they use is from the same lackluster supplier they used to make the cherry cream filling for their Valentine’s day Cherry paczki or what they called the Luvski.   The imitation cherry flavor tastes like stale maraschino cherries or bad kirsch liquor.   Come on Busken, you have been in the donut game long enough to do better.

The popular Holtman’s Donuts decided they were in the game too.   Basically they just took their standard fritter and plopped a three cherry dose of cherry pie filling on top.     Again they use a standard white glaze, no cherry glaze, and no bits of real cherry inside the dough.   But they also have cherry cake donuts, and what they call their cherry cordial donuts, so they went a bit further in the game than Busken did.

So, although I’m a fan of the fritter, I won’t hold up a foam hand to celebrate fake-imitation flavors of any kind so Busken ruined it for me.   I am however, into exploring other fruits to include in a fritter other than the standard apple.   And I am all in for celebrating president’s birthdays with unique fritters.

Maybe we should start celebrating local boy, President William Howard Taft’s birthday with an ube  fritter in honor of his time served as the first Governor of the Philippines in 1901.   Or we could celebrate another Ohio president, William McKinley’s birthday with a pineapple fritter as he annexed Hawaii as a U.S. Territory in 1898 after the Spanish American War.    We could even celebrate William Henry Harrison’s birthday with a fritter fashioned after his fave dessert – spiced fruitcake.

Gulow Street Vibes

It’s pretty cool that the best salmon salad (and cold sesame noodles) are at a restaurant in Northside named after an ancestor of mine.    I just bought my Gulow Street ball cap over the weekend and have been wearing it almost everywhere since.   Gulow Street might be one of the smallest streets in Cincinnati – barely running the length of two blocks from Hoffner Street to Vandalia Avenue – but it’s laden with so much Germanic history.   It’s named after August Ernst Gulow (1835-1901) a cousin of my Great Great Gramps, Theodore Ernst Woellert (1829-1909)    They both grew up together in the northern German town of Penzlin about an hour’s drive north from Berlin.    

Theo came to Cincy with his cousin Carl Dankert and their sweethearts – sisters Freda and Therese Burchard – who they married in a double Cincy courthouse wedding in 1855 when they first came to Cincy and lived in a tenement house on Liberty Street in Over-the-Rhine.

What’s cool is that the historic corner entry building has been lovingly restored and was standing when its namesake and his fellow Penzliners were living and thriving in a new country.

August Gulow was born in 1835 in Penzlin and baptized at the Marienkirche in Penzlin.  His parents were Christian Daniel Carl Gulow and Sophie Elizabeth Friederica Schier.    Christian Gulow was a master black smith but his two sons went a different route, becoming tailors  They had three sisters Henriette, Dora, and Marie, who immigrated with their mother to Cincy in 1865 after their father’s death.

Above image: August Ernst Gulow’s birth entry in the Penzlin Marienkirche church book in 1835.

August immigrated to Cincy in 1857, two years after the Theo Woellert family group, with his brother Wilhelm.  Both were tailors and men’s hat makers.   Wilhelm settled in the densely populated Germanic West End and became a West End Turner.   August settled with the Woellerts, Dankerts and several other families from the town of Penzlin in Cumminsville in the several blocks around Knowlton’s Corner – the cross section of Ludlow, Hamilton, and Hoffner Avenues.      

Vandalia Avenue is an old name for the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, which is where the town of Penzlin is situated.      The area where these families lived in Cumminsville could be called Little Mecklenburg, because of the numerous families who came in chain migration.

On October 20, 1870 Oak Street in Cumminsville was renamed Gulow Street in honor of August.   He had been a councilman from the 25th ward for numerous terms, had a notions and tailor shop on Hamilton Avenue, been part of the Cumminsville School Board, and was a President of the Cumminsville Turners – a Germanic sport and social club that threw over-the-top Christmas parties at their Turner Hall.  We have one known photo of that Turnhall from a group photo taken in the 1870s which includes images of members of this Chain Immigrant group of families from Penzlin.    They were posing after participation in the 1873 Turnfest hosted by the group of Cincinnati Turner societies and held at what is now Coney Island, then known as Parker’s Grove.

They say it takes a village to raise a kid. And it was certainly true for the Penzliners. They served as godparents or gevattern for each others kids. August Gulow for example was godfather to one of Theodore and Freda Woellert’s daughters, Therese August Christine Woellert in 1864.  Carl Dankert was godfather of August Ernst Gulow’s only son, August Robert in 1861.  Theo Woellert took in his niece Anna Dankert when she was orphaned as a young teenager.

An excerpt from the 1885 Cincinnati Evening Post describes Gulow’s business:

August E. Gulow is one of the earliest residents of Cumminsville. HIs little story and a half tailor shop on Hamilton Pike near the post office, was one of the landmards of Cumminsville, when it was yet a village, before it became Ward 25 of a great city. Mr Gulow is now a councilman from that ward, and having prosperous business, is building a new store and residence adjoining the old one.

In 1870 the Cumminsville telegraph office was moved to Gulow’s old tailor shop, making it a popular gather and discussion spot.

For me the amazing salmon salad on rye Sammie at Gulow Street is a homage to the pickled herring or matjes that these families ate in Penzlin and a tradition that carried on four generations in my family in Cincinnati.   As kids we were mildly disgusted at the three types of pickled herring that were presented at the Woellert Christmas parties at Aunt Dee and Uncle Howard’s house.     There was the standard pickled herring in cream sauce, a brown sauce version and a red version that was immersed in a lingonberry cream sauce.    We dared each other to sample a dip of these deeply fish Christmas dips.   As my dad would later explain to us, eating pickled herring around the new year was considered good luck.     The delish salmon salad is also homage to souljanka, a fish stew also made by people in Penzlin and northern Germany, similar to say a San Francisco cioppino or a New Orleans Bouillabaisse.

The northern Germans were not huge beer drinkers.     The Brewers came from southern Bavaria, Thuringia and minimally, Swabia.    The northern Germans drank harder liquor – like regional brandies and fruit schnapps, one of which was one that hasn’t made it to America yet, brandy made from sea buckthorn berries the sort of cranberry of low lying northern Germany.  It was commonly used to spike Eierliquor or the north German version of eggnog.   My grandfather made his own eggnog for the family Christmas parties long before I was born.   He spiked it typically with bourbon.   As he got older and not able to make his home eggnog, he found that UDF’s eggnog was a good substitute.    Oddly, none of Grandpa’s four sons thought it would be smart to ask him for the recipe, so it’s now lost to history.

The Penzliners did drink beer in Cincy because Johann Caspar Bruckmann, the founder of the Bruckmann Brewery was a friend of theirs.   He was also a president of the Cumminsville Turners, a member of their German Lutheran Church on Apple Street, and later on Hoffner Street.   The original 1857 Apple Street Church is still standing, but the larger one built was destroyed by a tornado event that collapsed the tower into the main knave of the church.  The congregation then moved mid century to a newly built church in College Hill, where they remain today.

The group photo of the 1873 Cumminsville Turners is such a gold mine of photo archeology.   It shows the members drinking mugs of dark Bruckmann Beer, perhaps their bock beer.   It shows all the members of the Penzlin group, except for Carl Dankert who had died in 1863.    It also shows Heinrich Himburg (another Penzliner) and his son, who made cigars locally for the turners and other members of the Germanic Northside/Cumminsville community.    His domicile and cigar factory were in the property that is now Bridges Nepali Cuisine, and formerly the original Melt.  Theodore Woellert is shown with presumably a Himburg cigar in his hand in the group portrait.

While the Gulow story is one of survival and perseverance, it wasn’t all a bowl of cherries.   There was a high rate of child deaths in all the families.   And there was a history of dementia too, possibly caused by the use of mercury in the hatmaking the Gulows employed to make make the Blue Grass Derby Hat, for example.     Near the end of his life, August Gulow was put on watch by his family in lieu of sending him to the Longview Asylum, which many families did when their elderly members succumbed to dementia and what we now call Alzheimers.

August’s son August Robert Gulow also became a prominent member of the Northside/Cumminsville community.  He had been a young teenager and founding member of the Cumminsville Turners and later became the first physical instructor for the Cincinnati Police Force, and an excellent boxer.

The Brilliance of the Cincinnati Chili Spice Blend.

The three most common spices in American chili are cumin, chili pepper, and paprika.   Those three are followed by garlic, onion powder, Mexican oregano, and bay leaves.   All these spices can all be found in the list of Cincinnati style chili spice blends.    There’s a brilliance to Cincinnati chili because it combines elements of Greek and Turkish or Arabic spice blends and then adds spices like peppers and paprika that the American palate was receptive to in the 1920s.   The brothers Kiradjieff – Assen (Tom) and Ivan (Johnny) – knew their American audience and their homeland cooking very well, it seems.   They knew all the spices they used in Cincinnati chili must balance each other in the five taste sensations – sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami.

Nationally Cincinnati chili is trash-talked as not being an authentic American chili.    But really the chili category today can refer to any spicy stew that has some sort of chili.   And they don’t even have to include meet or beef, the most common protein used in American chili.    In fact, the Greek meat sauce that is the grandfather to Cincinnati chili, saltsa mi kima, used lamb or goat, which is what the Kiradjieffs and many other immigrants raised on their hilly subsistence farms in Macedonia, now Greece.  There are awesome white chicken chilis and even great vegan chilis.   Both Skyline and Gold Star have veggie chili options.   I prefer Skyline’s black bean version best of the two.   But even an Indian aloo choley (spicy chickpea stew) or an African lentil based Masir Wat could be considered chilis too.

I challenge any chili purist to come up with a type of chili that has as many balanced spices as Cincinnati chili – a whopping 18 total spices.    

Cincinnati chili starts with the Holy Trinity of Greek cooking : the spices cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, which are found in Greek dishes like pasticchio and moussaka.     Many point to these dishes as the origin of cinicnnati style chili.   But they’re really only partially right.

There’s more.    Cincinnati chili also employs another blend of spices that’s a Turkish Arabic spice blend called the Baharaat.   It typically consists of allspice, chili peppers, cardamom, cumin, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, nutmeg and peppercorns.    This is a blend common in a lot of Turkish and Balkan Arabic dishes.

Groovy, but there’s even more spices.   Again, Cincinnati chili parlors use up to 18 total spices.   The Kiradjieffs and other immigrant chili pioneers added more to appeal to the American palate.    And, in a largely Germanic immigrant population like Cincinnati where pepper and butter were the two most commonly used ‘spices’, they stumbled on or lets say ingeniously crafted a blend that created a crave in the most dormant of palates.

So, there are three categories of these spices, and this is really the brilliance of Cincinnati Chili.      There are the sweet apostoulos or apostles– warm sweet spices you might find in gingerbread, mulled cider, or pumpkin pie – add ginger, turmeric and anise to the list.   Then there are the spicy apostoulos and finally the herby apoustoulos – oregano, thyme , celery salt and bay leaf.   The balance of sweet to hot unlocks the taste buds and gives a layered taste sensation that the early Cincinnati Chili parlor pioneers knew how to balance.   That is a trick or hack known in Mediterranean cuisine, familiar to the Greek and Slavic-Macedonian immigrants who first formulated Cincinnati Style chili.  It was a lot spicier back in the early days than either Skyline or Gold Star are today.

But they also knew that a stew or chili needed sour or some tang and some acid, so they added tomato paste, some sort of vinegar.   That vinegar is most commonly apple cider, but its been surmised that some like Skyline use red wine or even sherry vinegar, giving an even more sweet taste to the chili.    And, that sweetness imparts the widely perpetuated myth that Cincinnati chili contains chocolate.   That is absolutely not true.   I interviewed every chili parlor in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky and EVERY ONE of them said there is NO chocolate in their Cincinnati chili.

And, although umami hadn’t been articulated in cooking and foodie circles in the 1920s, the early chili pioneers knew it needed something else to put it over the top – Worchestershire sauce.  I prefer to use bourbon barrel aged Worchestershire and have experimented using soy sauce and fish sauce.   But something to offer that fifth taste sensation of umami is like the cherry on top of the icing on the cake.

I just entered my Cincinnati style chili in my company’s recent Chili Cookoff and won best chili.   I used the secret spice packet of Mr. Haggis, a grandson of Petro Manoff who started Strand Chili Parlor in Newport, Kentucky, in 1931 after leaving Dixie Chili.   His son Tom Manoff started Hamburger Heaven, which he sold to his brother-in-law who then sold to four Daoud brothers from Jordan who modified the Manoff recipe to form Gold Star Chili, named after the tobacco company their family sold tobacoo to in Jordan.     This packet is said to be the optimization of two recipes – that of Petro Manoff, which descends from Empress, and Peter Haggis, who owned the Haggis Chili Parlor.

To that brilliant spice blend,  I added unfiltered apple cider vinegar, bourbon barrell aged Worchestershire, and just about an eighth of a teaspoon of Korean gochujang paste.   Our COO said it was a flavor bomb.  

The cross cultural brilliance of Cincy chili’s spices were evidenced by another comment from a coworker – a recently arrived Indian woman. She said I really like the spiciness of your chili – ” It reminds me of a ‘gravy’ I make for my family that uses lamb.”  Yesterday was the first time she had tasted beef.

The recipe calls for a 2 lb portion of ground beef, about twice the ratio used in most chili parlor’s recipes.     Thus it combats the common complaint about Cincinnati Chili being too watery.   My parents, having grown up on Empress and its meatiness usually ordered dry threeways from our go-to Skyline on Colerain Avenue.   What that meant is that the chili waiter drained off some of the liquid for a meatier sauce on their threeways.

So now you know at least the list of spices and the ingredients in good, authentic Cincinnati chili.   Now you can have fun testing the ratios and making your own Cincinnati style chili.

Party Like a Viking with Goetta’s Icelandic Cousin Bloodmor

Who could resist a party that features lambs head, pickled testicles, and rotten shark?   I’m all in, are you?   These are some of the featured nibblets in Icleland’s midwinter festival Thorrablot, which honor’s their pagan Viking history.

More weird food on that Icelandic Thorrablot smorgasboard are two goetta cousins.   This first is called bloodmor or Icleandic blood pudding made of lamb’s blood, suet, rye and oats.   The second is called lifrapylsa, an Icelandic liver sausage.  When served together, they’re called slatur, meaning slaughter.   So, like goetta they are slaughter sausages or grain sausages made at the time of slaughter and extended with local grains, sometimes with blood.   Bloodmor used to be stuffed into lamb stomachs but today it is made with synthetic casings.   As with goetta cousins like Dutch balkenbrij there is a sweet version made with raisins and warm gingerbread cookie like spices.

I just received my results from my Ancestry DNA test which shows I have Danish and Swedish ancestry.   And, I am just starting to match this with the written record of my father’s northern German family finding Nordic names interspersed with the German names.   It seems the Danish and Swedish kings were involved in the 30 years war in the mid 1600s and for a time reigned over Mecklenburg Germany, where my father’s family hails.    So that’s probably when the Nordics merged with the German Saxons in my family tree. So, I must embrace my Viking ancestry and these weird foods of my ancestors.

Before the 10th century, Icelanders worshiped the Æsir, or Norse gods. During their calendar month of Thorri (January 20 to February 18), locals celebrated Thorrablot, a midwinter festival named for either the historic Norwegian king Thorri Snærsson or the King of the Nordic Pantheon, Thor, the God of Thunder.

After Norwegian king Olaf Tryggvason Christianized Iceland in 1000 AD, pagan beliefs and practices faded away. But in the late 19th century, a group of Icelandic students resurrected Thorrablot.  Icelanders and restaurant menus really put the holiday back on the map after World War II, when a rise in nationalism gave way to a cultural revival.

The month of Þorri is bookmarked by two special days similar to Valentine’s Day: Bóndadagur, or Men’s Day, occurring on the first day of the month, and Konudagur, or Women’s Day, which marks the beginning of the following month of the old winter calendar: Góa. On both Men’s and Women’s Day, flowers are the main token of affection, but general pampering and spoiling is also encouraged.

Locals mark the occasion with traditional Thorrablot foods. And the feast that ensues is more Viking than Aristocrat . Smoked, salted, dried, pickled, and rotten meats are the star of the show, including traditional faves of pickled ram’s testicles, rotten Greenland  shark meat (hákarl), boiled sheep’s head (svið), dung-smoked lamb (hangikjöt), hvalsrengi (whale blubber) and wind-dried white fish (harðfiskur).

Because this traditional food was meant to be eaten through late winter, much of it is tough or otherwise undesirable pieces of the animal that have been preserved in mysa (fermented whey). The mysa both preserves the food and breaks down the proteins, which tenderizes the meat and makes it more palatable. That said, don’t expect the refined flavors of roasted chicken.

You can find Thorrablót menus (or a taste of thorramatur-style food) at some traditional restaurants around the country, including Café Loki, Íslenski barinn, Fjárhúsið, Múlakaffi, and Þrír Frakkar in central Reykjavík. You can also find some of the treats in supermarket refrigerators.   Too bad Aldi doesn’t have a Thorrablod month like they do with their Oktoberfest month.

 For the faint of stomach like me, smoked salmon, non blood sausages, rye bread, and flat bread are also on the menu. Participants wash it all down with brennivín, a potent local liquor that’s fondly referred to as “Black Death.”    I’d imagine many shots of brennivin are required to eat the gruesome foods of this feast.

After dinner, Icelandic families sing traditional songs, play games, tell stories, and party until the early hours of morning.    I wonder if a Thorrablod banquet would fly in Cincinnati.