Michael Bates: September 2019 Archives
The Mysterious, Stubborn Appeal of Mass-Produced Fried Chicken - VICE
This article explains the complexity of frying chicken, why mass-production works so well, and why nicer restaurants either specialize in it or don't offer it at all. Makes you appreciate places like AQ Chicken House and Eischen's.
"When you drop cold chicken into a hot fryer, the temperature of the oil drops. A typical fryer will raise the temperature back to the set point as quickly as it can, usually somewhere between 325 and 350 degrees. That's bad for fried chicken. 'If you just had your oil at 350 degrees and started cooking bone-in chicken, the outside would get done before the inside,' Hays says. Popeyes fryers, however, hold at that lower temperature for eight to ten minutes, which allows the meat to cook through evenly. The temperature then rises back to the set point toward the end of the cooking process, which gets the skin nice and crispy after the meat has cooked through.
"The fryers, which are operated by touch screen, can be programmed to remember up to 20 different settings, though they typically only use a few (ones for breasts, thighs, wings, etc.). Just frying those segments separately makes a difference, too, as they all have different ratios of bone to meat to skin. The fryers also have features that make it easier to filter and change the oil, as well as instruments to measure the polarity of the oil so staff know exactly when it needs to be replaced....
"But it's not just the fryers. Unless you're dedicating a large part of your focus and your physical space to fried chicken, it's just not going to work. Fried chicken is a small part of Lee's menu at Succotash, for example--the dinner menu on the restaurant's website shows two entrees that include it and ten that do not, plus two dozen other appetizers, sides, and other dishes that do not--but he estimates that about 20 percent of his kitchen is devoted to it, which includes a brining station, a breading station, and two pressure fryers. 'It's similar to barbecue,' Lee says. 'You either do it or you don't. There's no way to half-ass it.'
"This kind of mental and resource drain for fried chicken is why Adkins serves fried chicken (pan-fried in Crisco) only on Wednesday nights at Sally's Middle Name. 'It's too much time to make properly every night,' Adkins says. 'It would slow things down.' So rather than being one-seventh of his menu all the time, it's basically the whole menu once every seven days."
Shell Oil Company road maps - David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
Gas station road maps of states and cities from the 1940s and 1950s, mostly before the turnpikes, freeways, and interstates were built.
Dave Chappelle Punches Up - Arc Digital
"For the non-woke majority, which includes average Americans who don't work for the media or Hollywood, punching down is now punching up, because they feel culturally voiceless: they have no say in how culture is communicated to the masses or what is voted up or down as acceptable or problematic. These are parents who feel powerless as Hollywood educates their children. These are angst-ridden teenagers who don't feel accepted by the mean girls or woke activists in cardigan sweater and slim-fitted blue jeans. For non-woke folks who have working-class jobs, who are tired of all the speech-policing and the internet shaming, punching the woke minority provides a feeling of crisp and sensational relief -- like downing a can of ice-cold Pepsi at a sweltering filling station."
Baker's Coconut ~ Animal Cut-Up Cakes Booklet [1959] | Retro Musings
This is the entire booklet -- second in a series from Baker's Angel Flake Coconut -- with patterns for cutting round or rectangular cakes and arranging the pieces to make animals. I can remember Mom making the rocking horse (with the Life Savers polka dots), the butterfly, and the terrier. The booklet's font and the cake designs are decidedly Mid-Century Modern. The original 1956 Baker's Cut-Up Cakes booklet and Baker's ads from 1961-62 featuring Cut-Up Cakes are also online. More about Baker's Cut-Up Cakes on the Food Company Cookbooks blog and Krystina Evans's Bit-O-Me blog.
Why Hasn't Brexit Happened? - Christopher Caldwell, Claremont Institute
This is an excellent "explainer" -- not only in answer to the title question, but also about the constitutional impact of EU membership on the UK's constitutional arrangements, which included both subjection to foreign courts and creation of a judiciary independent of Parliament. This observation has transatlantic applicability:
"The transfer of competences from legislatures to courts is a superb thing for the rich, because of the way the constitution interacts with occupational sociology. Where the judiciary is drawn from the legal profession, and where the legal profession is credentialed by expensive and elite professional schools, judicialization always means a transfer of power from the country at large to the richest sliver of it. This is true no matter what glorious-sounding pretext is found to justify the shift--racial harmony, European peace, a fair shake for women. In a global age, judicial review is a tool that powerful people expect to find in a constitution, in the same way one might expect to find a hair dryer in a hotel room."
Because Britain's elites opposed Brexit, they didn't make use of the UK's significant leverage:
"Rogers and other British experts were strangely unimpressed by the powerful practical levers their own side disposed of. Britain was the largest importer of cars from Germany. It had a trade deficit with most countries on the continent, which meant that any breakdown in talks would idle more European factories than British ones. It was, with France, one of only two serious military powers in Western Europe. It had an intelligence-gathering relationship with the United States that continental Europe was desperate to preserve the benefits of. It contained 40% of Europe's data servers. It was due to recover its own rich fishing banks--schools of mackerel north of Scotland, beds of prawns southwest of Cornwall--where E.U. vessels took 59% of the haul. And it was the financial capital of the world. The E.U. would have no choice but to do business with an independent Britain."
About the Irish backstop, the guarantee of no "hard border" between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic:
"It was an unusual demand for a number of reasons. There had never been a hard border between the two countries, outside of military emergencies. Nor was there a need for one now. Britain and Ireland were part of the same island region, cut off by ocean and law from the E.U.'s 'Schengen' area of free movement. Britain had as much reason to demand border guarantees from the E.U. as the E.U. did from Britain. And while such borders might present new challenges after Brexit, there were proven solutions: non-E.U. Switzerland, for example, keeps its borders, travel, and trade open with four major E.U. countries. These problems only became 'insoluble' when E.U. diplomats discovered they might be used to tangle up the Brexit negotiations."
In conclusion:
"Brexit was not an "outburst" or a cry of despair or a message to the European Commission. It was an eviction notice. It was an explicit withdrawal of the legal sanction under which Brussels had governed Europe's most important country. If it is really Britain's wish to see its old constitutional arrangements restored, then this notice is open to emendation and reconsideration. But as things stand now, the Leave vote made E.U. rule over the U.K. illegitimate. Not illegitimate only when Brussels has been given one last chance to talk Britain out of it, but illegitimate now. What Britons voted for in 2016 was to leave the European Union--not to ask permission to leave the European Union. It is hard to see how Britain's remaining in the E.U. would benefit either side.
"And yet, given that Britain is the first country to issue such an ultimatum, given that pro-E.U. elites in other European countries have reason to fear its replication, given the moral ambitions of the E.U. project, given that the British who support Remain have transferred their sentiments and their allegiances across the channel, given the social disparity between those who rule the E.U. and most of those who want to leave it, how could the reaction of Britain's establishment be anything but all-out administrative, judicial, economic, media, political, and parliamentary war? The battle against Brexit is being fought, Europe-wide, with all the weaponry a cornered elite has at its disposal.
"It has proved sufficient so far."
How Colleges Pair Freshman Roommates - The Atlantic
"Many new students join groups online to connect with one another before freshman year, and they submit roommate requests based on the information they glean there. But in recent years, many colleges have started to restrict--if not altogether remove--incoming freshmen's say in the roommate-matching process. Schools want to maintain careful control over that process so that they can fulfill higher education's democratic mission at the micro-level of the dorm room." I thought higher education had a different mission, somehow. Still, it's valid to think that students aren't always good at spotting the characteristics that will make someone a good match for sharing close quarters.
