The Pub - Discuss Anything

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Fairies dance as autumn arrives in Sweden

Rosersberg, north of Stockholm.

Low-lying mist like in the picture, of the kind that usually appears on late summer or grey autumn days, is called älvdans in Swedish: fairy dance.

Today we know that this kind of mist is caused by moist air condensing and forming droplets that float, typically over meadows or still water.

But in times gone by, people in Scandinavia believed the cause was fairies gathering to dance and casting their spells.

Edited September 27, 2024 by Vesper

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UK’s worst night out? Costly, crime-ridden London

Club owners, tourists and students complain of an ‘early city’ where bars close long before the night is over

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/arts/article/london-worst-night-out-uk-cost-of-living-crime-alcohol-0gdkw2c0b

A rainy night in Soho. London has fewer venues open past 2am than any other major city surveyed

GUILHEM BAKER FOR THE TIMES

It is 1am on Thursday night in Soho, central London, and the cacophony of music and drunken chatter from the clubs has already died down. Bar managers are shuttering doors as men sitting in pink, fluffy rickshaws wait for the final revellers to start making their way home.

“In New York right now, I could find an open bar in a second,” says George Johnson, 30, who works in the live music business. “London’s an early city now. Everything is shut by 1am.”

London was once a world-class nightlife destination but it now has fewer venues open past 2am than any other major British city.

The Times analysed the closing times of hundreds of pubs, nightclubs and bars in the 12 biggest British cities. London ranked the lowest, with less than 6 per cent of venues open after 2am on Friday and Saturday.

 

Even on Friday and Saturday nights, less than a quarter of London’s venues open past midnight. In Edinburgh, on the other hand, 44 per cent of venues close after midnight at the weekends, with more than 8 per cent open post-2am.

London is one of eight cities in which less than 10 per cent of late-night venues are open past 2am, joining smaller cities such as Sheffield, Bristol and Brighton.

The capital has long lost its reputation for being a 24-hour city. Data collated by the Night-Time Industries Association (NTIA) found that between March 2020 and December 2023 more than 3,000 night economy businesses closed in Greater London — the steepest fall for any English region.

While London’s “night tsar”, Amy Lamé, did facilitate the reopening of techno club Fabric, she has repeatedly come under fire for the lack of perceived action in preventing other venue closures, despite her hefty annual salary and regular overseas trips.

Michael Kill, chief executive of the NTIA, said people are simply not staying out as late as they used to, primarily because they have “less disposable income, and concerns about infrastructure and the ability to get home after midnight”.

In Manchester, the birthplace of Oasis and The Stone Roses, nightlife is thriving compared with London, with 14.5 per cent and 15.8 per cent of bars and clubs open after 2am on Friday and Saturday, respectively.

Sacha Lord, the city’s night-time economy adviser, said new transport and infrastructure developments mean the city “feels very buoyant at the moment”.

In 2018, he asked the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham: “How can we call Manchester a 24-hour party city when we do not have 24-hour transport?” Two of the city’s busiest bus routes now run all night, which, along with the May opening of the Co-op Live music arena — with 23,500 seats, the biggest in Europe — has led to renewed confidence in Manchester’s nightlife.

But Lord acknowledged that bars were struggling with “midweek footfall dying away” because of the soaring cost of living.

“Students, rather than paying £3 to get in on a Tuesday night and then stay there until 2 or 3am at the bar, are going to Sainsbury’s and buying a bottle of vodka and having a house party instead,” he said.

Lord is expected to take up an independent national night-time adviser position, in addition to his current role, to feed into policy for the sector across the UK.

Jeremy Joseph, 57, owned three venues in London and one in Manchester before pressures on the industry forced him to close down his London nightclub G-A-Y Late and franchise his Manchester club.

“Spend per head has dropped dramatically,” he explained. “Venues are now competing against supermarkets, because they’re cheaper.”

Joseph’s remaining establishments — G-A-Y Bar and Heaven — are serving the same number of customers as ever, he says, but he now opens on Wednesdays to try to make up for the decreased spending.

Rob Huysinga, 29, the founder of Bubba Oasis, which operates bars in Islington and Clapham, has said sales “start to drop off” from 2am.

He plans to open two more bars next year, but said he’s adapting to become less “reliant on the late-night economy”. About 75 per cent of his venues’ revenue comes from alcohol sales but he is focusing more on bolstering other revenue streams, such as selling coffee and fresh juice, and offering yoga events, hot-desk working space and alcohol-free DJ nights.

“We are going towards a world that is more health-conscious and this will ultimately impact the late-night economy,” Huysinga said.

Gino Knarren, 28, and Ailish Mathee, 21, who were on holiday in Edinburgh from the Netherlands, outside Cabaret Voltaire on Blair Street

EUAN CHERRY FOR THE TIMES

Combined with higher rent and energy costs, low customer spending spells trouble for London’s once-vibrant nightlife scene. Kill said: “The reality is, it is 30 per cent to 40 per cent more expensive to operate compared to pre-Covid.”

A producer at Powerhauss Cabaret who uses the stage name Shard O’Nay was partying at Louche Soho on Thursday. She said she had seen first-hand how many venues were “closing” and “cancelling gigs”.

“People cannot afford to go on nights out because they have to plan their meals and other financial needs,” the 26-year-old said. “Whereas a night out was a staple of the weekend before, now it’s such a luxury.”

Shard O’Nay, 26, centre, is a producer at Powerhauss Cabaret

GUILHEM BAKER FOR THE TIMES

In Edinburgh, a cheap night out is easier to come by. Just before midnight on a Friday, a queue of punters snaked out the entrance of the Why Not club. Inside, the venue offered shots of tequila for £1.75 as part of its Filthy Fridays promotion — a magnet for local students.

Edinburgh University students Erica Knox and Agnetha Kempe, both 18, said they would be there until closing at 3am.

“I love going out in Edinburgh,” Knox said. “It’s quite civilised. You see the police driving around everywhere so you feel quite safe, and everything being open late gives the city a good vibe.”

In London, crime has become a major problem for business-owners and customers alike. Kill said the risk of “sexual harassment and petty theft”, particularly in crowded areas such as Soho, deterred people as there was “no CCTV” and “not enough police on the street to ensure these things are not happening”.

Two visitors to Soho on Thursday night, 18-year-old students Lauren Gold and Frankie Smith, said they preferred house parties, as the streets felt dangerous and Ubers were increasingly “expensive and hard to come by”.

Edinburgh University students Erica Knox and Agnetha Kempe, both 18, planned to stay out drinking until 3am

EUAN CHERRY FOR THE TIMES

The crime levels also frightened them, they said, as a group of men with hoods and masks covering their faces rode past on e-bikes. Down the road, a toothless man was spitting at passers-by and threatening them with a wine glass full of urine.

“This strange vibe puts off girls as unless you’re going out in a group, you don’t feel as comfortable or safe,” Gold said.

Milad, 27, works in a 24-hour off-licence in the heart of Soho. He estimated that between five and ten people came into the shop every day asking employees to call 999 or pull CCTV footage because their phone had been stolen.

The level of crime in London is frightening, said 18-year-old friends Lauren Gold, left, and Frankie Smith, right

GUILHEM BAKER FOR THE TIMES

Westminster’s entire CCTV system was scrapped by the council in 2016. Since taking control of the borough in 2022, Labour has installed 100 public-realm CCTV cameras to tackle crime and anti-social behaviour.

Joseph employs 35 security personnel across his venues on a Saturday. Despite paying the late-night levy, which requires premises serving alcohol after midnight to contribute money for policing, he said it can take 40 minutes to get through on 999 on a Saturday night.

Rowdy behaviour also upsets local residents. Venues are already required to prevent public nuisance, including excessive noise, outside venues under the 2003 Licensing Act. But a small number of resident complaints can lead to costly licence reviews.

The Compton Arms, famed as a favourite of George Orwell, almost closed after resident complaints prompted Islington council to review its licence and enforce a noise abatement notice. Some venues report spending thousands on legal fees to fight these licensing reviews.

Milad, 27, works at a 24-hour convenience store. He said as many as ten customers a day complain of having had their phone stolen

GUILHEM BAKER FOR THE TIMES

 

Ben Rosen, 19, and Lilli, 21, at Jazz After Dark, which employed Amy Winehouse before she shot to fame

GUILHEM BAKER FOR THE TIMES

Joseph’s solution was to purchase the two flats adjacent to Heaven. “The law favours residents,” he said. “Heaven has been there for 45 years, yet somebody could move into the area and affect our business.”

Huysinga said: “On the face of it, it seems really fun operating party spots, but there is a lot the outside world doesn’t see.”

Lilli, a 21-year-old Leeds University graduate, prays that Soho’s nightlife will weather the storm, and partying until the sun rises will not become a thing of the past. “If pubs and nice bars stayed open later, I’d be there,” she said.

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Delicious soup recipes for autumn — butternut squash, chicken noodle and more

 

Try these easy and tasty ways to zhuzh up the ultimate comfort food

https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/food-drink/article/soup-recipes-butternut-squash-lentil-chicken-noodle-parsnip-px8pqcqh7

Whipping up soup is one of the things to look forward to as the season changes. It’s a bowl of nourishment, a quick and easy supper or a comfort when you’re feeling poorly. Nigella Lawson agrees, saying: “Soup is universal and also preciously intimate: to offer a bowl or mug of soup to someone is an act of cosiness and connection.” That’s why she is supporting a new book called Soup for Good, a collection of delicious recipes from a food-focused social enterprise called Cook for Good, established by Karen Mattison and Robinne Collie, and based on the Priory Green housing estate in King’s Cross, London. The organisation started by offering free cooking classes, training and community meals, and before long established a weekly soup café.

The Soup for Good community recipes are easy to make but definitely represent an upgrade if you usually make tomato or leek and potato. They are zhuzhed up with ingredients such as aromatic lentils, curried parsnip and Thai chicken. Their tip for a really good soup is to always start with the backbone: a good stock. Homemade versions are even better (recipe below) — they’re free of sugar and yeast, and will allow you to control the levels of salt. Lawson says: “For me, soup sums up all that I love about cooking: it’s adaptable, resourceful in its ability to turn bits and pieces into a meal that’s sustaining, comforting and uplifting, and the possibilities and variety are boundless.”

Try to use a wide pot or casserole dish and to caramelise your vegetables before adding the stock, which will maximise the flavour. Cream in soup might not be to your taste but a bit of healthy fat helps to achieve the smooth texture. Cooking your vegetables initially with butter or adding a dollop of yoghurt at the end will help. The best thing about soup is that you can make a tasty meal without blowing the budget: a £15 stick blender will be your best friend.

 

Cauliflower and coconut soup

Serves 4–6

Ingredients

• 1 onion
• 1 garlic clove
• 750g cauliflower
• 100g butter or coconut oil
• 500 ml vegetable stock
• 1 × 400g tin coconut milk
• 150g double cream or coconut cream
• Salt and pepper

For the garnish

• 50g butter or coconut oil
• 125g cauliflower (florets only)
• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 tsp nigella seeds
• 50g flaked or desiccated coconut

Method

1. Peel and finely chop the onion and garlic. Remove all the outer leaves from the cauliflower (you don’t need the leaves for the soup but they are delicious steamed or roasted with garlic and oil). Cut the florets and stalk into 3-4 cm pieces.
2. Set a large saucepan or shallow casserole pan on a medium heat. Add 75g of butter, followed by the onion and garlic, and sauté for about 8 min until soft but not coloured. Next, add the cauliflower pieces, vegetable stock and coconut milk. Stir and bring to the boil and then simmer until the cauliflower is tender, about 20 min.
3. Take the soup off the heat and add the remaining butter or coconut oil and the cream. Stir well and then blend until really smooth. Taste and season with salt and pepper as needed.
4. To make the garnish, chop the remaining cauliflower into small 1-2cm pieces. Place 50g of butter into a frying pan on a high heat. When frothy, add the cauliflower pieces, cumin seeds, nigella seeds and coconut. Cook until golden brown and aromatic.
5. To serve, heat the soup until piping hot. Decant into bowls and sprinkle with the cauliflower, coconut and seeds, and drizzle over any remaining butter from the pan.

Aromatic lentil soup

Serves 6

Ingredients

• 1 onion
• 2 mild red chillies
• 1 tomato
• 200g red lentils
• 2 garlic cloves
• A small thumb of ginger
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tsp black mustard seeds
• 1 tsp Baharat or Lebanese 7-spice
• ½ tsp ground turmeric
• 1 litre vegetable stock
• 1 × 400ml tin coconut milk
• 1 lemon
• Salt and pepper

Method

1. Finely chop the onion. Deseed and finely chop the chillies. Dice the tomato into small cubes. Wash and drain the lentils. Peel and finely grate the garlic and the ginger to make a paste.
2. Set a large saucepan or shallow casserole pan on a medium heat. Coat with a thin layer of the oil. Add the mustard seeds and fry for 2 min until they start to pop. Stir in the onion, garlic, ginger, chillies, Baharat/7-spice and turmeric. Sauté until the onion begins to turn light brown. Add in the diced tomato and sauté until they soften. Add the lentils, coconut milk, vegetable stock and a good pinch of salt, and simmer over a medium heat for 20-25 min until thickened and the lentils are cooked. Add the juice from the lemon, starting with the juice of half and then adding more to taste. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
3. To serve, either blend the soup or leave it as it is for more texture. Garnish with your choice of tasty toppings.

Curried parsnip soup

Serves 4–6

Ingredients

• 2 onions
• 4 garlic cloves
• 2 apples (Gala is our favourite variety)
• 750g parsnips
• A small thumb of ginger (approx. 5 cm)
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp curry powder
• 2 tsp ground coriander
• ½ tsp turmeric
• 1 litre vegetable stock
• 1 × 400ml tin coconut milk
• ½ lime
• 20g fresh coriander
• Salt and pepper

Method

1. Peel and finely chop the onions and garlic. Peel, core and roughly chop the apples. Peel and roughly chop the parsnips. Peel and finely grate the ginger.
2. Put a large saucepan or shallow casserole pan over a medium heat. Add the oil along with the onion. Sauté for 3-4 min, stirring constantly, until the onion starts to soften. Add the garlic, ginger, curry powder, ground coriander, turmeric and apple. Lower the heat and sauté for a further 5-6 min until golden and fragrant.
3. Add the parsnips, vegetable stock and a good pinch of salt. Stir well. Bring to the boil, cover and simmer on a low heat until the parsnips are very tender, about 15 min.
4. Blend the mixture until very smooth. Juice the lime and add the lime juice along with the coconut milk. Taste and season with salt and pepper as needed. Finely chop the coriander and use it to garnish the soup.

 

Thai chicken noodle soup

Serves 4 – 6

Ingredients

• 1 onion
• 3 garlic cloves
• 3 carrots
• 1 red pepper
• 3 large skinless, boneless chicken breasts
• 150g rice noodles
• ½ lime
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 4 tbsp red curry paste
• 1 litre chicken stock
• 500ml coconut milk
• ½ tsp ground black pepper
• 20g fresh coriander
• ¾ tsp chilli flakes
• Salt and pepper

Method

1. Peel and finely chop the onion and garlic. Peel and cut the carrots into 1cm cubes. Halve the red pepper, remove the stem and seeds, and cut into 1 cm cubes. Cut the chicken breasts into 1 cm cubes. Break up the rice noodles. Juice the lime.
2. Set a large saucepan or shallow casserole pan on a medium heat. Add the oil, followed by the onion, carrot and red pepper, and sauté for 3-4 min, stirring constantly. Add the chicken and mix well. Add the garlic and curry paste. Cook until the chicken is just cooked, about 3-4 min. Mix in the stock and coconut milk. Season with a little salt and pepper. Bring the soup to the boil and let it cook for a further 5 min.
3. Finely chop the coriander and set aside for garnish. Add the broken noodles to the soup and bring back to the boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer for about 3 min. Test for the balance of flavours and add chilli flakes and lime juice to taste. Season with salt and pepper as needed. Serve the soup warm. Finish with the chopped coriander.

 

Roasted butternut squash

Serves 6

Ingredients

• 1 large butternut squash
• 1 large carrot
• 2 tbsp olive oil, for roasting
• 1 onion
• 2 tbsp olive oil, for sautéing
• 1 leek
• 1.25 litres vegetable stock
• Salt and pepper

Method

1. Preheat oven to 190C/gas 5. Wash, halve and deseed the butternut squash. There’s no need to peel it! Cut into 3cm chunks. Wash and roughly chop the carrot. Put the butternut squash and carrot cubes in a large bowl and mix well with the 3 tablespoons of olive oil for roasting. Season with plenty of salt and pepper. Line a baking tray with non-stick baking paper. Arrange the butternut squash and carrot on the baking tray in an even single layer. Cook in the oven until tender, about 20 min.
2. Peel and dice the onion. Set a large saucepan or shallow casserole pan over a medium heat. Add the remaining olive oil along with the diced onion. Gently cook — you’re not wanting colour but just a slow cook so keep the heat low — and stir regularly.
3. Wash the leek and thinly slice. Add to the pan to sauté along with the onion. Once tender, add the roasted butternut squash and carrot. Pour in the stock and mix well. Bring the pan to the boil, then turn down to a simmer and cook until the vegetables are soft, about 25 min.
4. When the vegetables are soft, blend the soup until smooth. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve piping hot.

Emergency chicken noodle soup

Serves 4-6

Ingredients

• 1 onion
• 1 garlic clove
• 2 carrots
• 1 celery stick
• 350g cooked chicken (we recommend thigh meat)
• 1 tbsp butter
• 1 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 bay leaf
• 1.75 litres chicken stock
• 250g medium egg noodles
• Salt and pepper

Method

1. Peel and finely chop the onion and garlic. Peel and cut the carrots into 1 cm cubes. Cut the celery into 1 cm cubes. Slice the cooked chicken into 2 cm pieces.
2. Place a large saucepan or shallow casserole pan on a medium heat and add the butter and oil. Add the onion, carrot and celery, and sauté for 5 min or until starting to soften. Stir in the garlic and bay leaf. Season with salt and pepper. Cook for a further minute.
3. Add the stock to the pan. Bring to the boil and then stir in the chicken. Bring back to the boil and simmer for a further 2 min. Add the noodles to the pan and cook until they are al dente, about 3 min. Remove the bay leaf and season to taste.

Soup for Good is published by Cook for Good. £25 (amazon.co.uk)

 

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What does the Swedish food agency think we should be eating more or less of?

https://www.thelocal.se/20240930/what-does-the-swedish-food-agency-think-we-should-be-eating-more-or-less-of/

Sweden’s food agency is due to present new dietary guidelines at the beginning of next year, but it has already published a sneak peek. What does it want us to change about our diets?

What should we be eating more of?

Similarly to its current recommendations, the agency wants Swedes to eat at least 500 grams of vegetables, fruits and berries a day – more if possible – with a large proportion of this consisting of fibrous vegetables, like root vegetables, cabbage and alliums. 

It describes this as “five fist-sized portions”, which could, for example, include adding grated carrot or lentils into a bolognese sauce, or adding berries to your morning yoghurt. Frozen fruit and vegetables can also be included in this total.

Adults currently eat around 270 grams of vegetables, fruits and berries a day, dropping to 200 grams for children, so the recommendations are almost double current consumption.

This doesn’t include potatoes, although the agency describes potatoes as “good food”. Legumes, like lentils and beans aren’t included in this 500 gram total either: the advice there is to eat them “often, preferably every day”.

Swedes in general do not consume many legumes at all – the median consumption for adults is estimated to be 0 grams, rising to 5 grams for children, and only 25 percent of Swedes eat more than 15 grams of legumes a day.

The agency hopes that these recommendations will lead to Swedes eating 50 percent more legumes, vegetables, root vegetables, fruits, nuts and berries in 2035.

As far as grains, like wheat, oats and rye, are concerned, Swedes are most likely to consume these as bread, with adults eating around 80 grams of bread a day while children eat around 100 grams.

Bread is also the leading source of wholegrains for most Swedes, representing 50 percent of adults’ wholegrain intake, dropping to 30 percent for children.

Other common sources of wholegrains are porridge, cereal, rice and other grains.

Currently, adults only eat around 40 grams of wholegrain foods per day, while children eat around 27 grams. The agency wants to see consumption double between 2021 and 2035.

The food agency wants Swedes to eat fish and other seafood two to three times a week. This doesn’t just include fresh fish, but also food like prawns, crayfish and mussels, as well as preserved fish products such as herring or tinned fish. 

Currently, only 40 percent of adults and 10 percent of children eat enough fish and seafood to meet the Nordic Nutritional Guidelines’ 300 gram-per-week target.

The average consumption for adults is around 220 grams a week, while children eat around 130 grams.

The agency hopes to see this figure increase by 20 percent by 2035.

What does it want us to cut down on?

The agency wants Swedes to eat less high-energy, unhealthy foods, like sweets, chocolate, cakes and, most of all, sugary drinks. It wants to see current consumption halved by 2035.

“If you eat well otherwise, then it’s not dangerous to eat food like this occasionally,” it says, while recommending that you think more carefully about when and where you eat this type of food.

This includes, for example, choosing healthier alternatives if you order take out, which contain more vegetables, wholegrains, fish, beans or lentils, and drinking water instead of sugary drinks.

Adults currently eat around 100 grams of sweets, like ice cream, cakes, desserts and drinks, a day, while children eat roughly double this, 220 grams a day.

“This number is however likely to be higher in reality, as respondents are likely to underreport their consumption of foods considered to be unhealthy,” the agency says.

Swedes’ meat consumption is also under fire, with the agency recommending just 350 grams of red meat and processed meats a week, down from its previous 500 gram recommendation.

The agency estimates that adults currently eat around 511 grams of red meat a week, and it wants to see this cut by 30 percent by 2035.

Women are currently the group most likely to eat less than the new guidelines per week, with 37 percent estimated to eat 350 grams of red meat or less.

The agency estimates that only 15 percent of men, 17 percent of girls and 4 percent of boys eat enough to meet the new guidelines.

“Boys in upper secondary school eat the most meat and processed meats, while women eat the least,” the agency says.

Finally, the agency also wants Swedes to cut down on salt – 20 percent less by 2035. Currently, adults eat anywhere between 8 and 11 grams of salt a day, while children eat around 8.

Most of that comes from meat and sausages (both fresh sausages as well as products like salami, which are preserved), as well as bread. For children and young people, pasta and pizza are common sources of salt.

Under new recommendations, salt should be limited to 6 grams a day at most, preferably iodised. The agency estimates that over three quarters of the population currently eats more than this.

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When did Swedes get so crazy about cinnamon?

https://www.thelocal.se/20240930/when-did-swedes-get-so-crazy-about-cinnamon

It's not just kanelbullar, Swedes put great spoonfuls of cinnamon in their porridge, in apple crumbles, in glögg wine, and even use it to jazz up their matjessill herring. What's the history of Swedes' love affair with the spice?

It certainly doesn't go back as far as the Vikings.

While they ate a lot of porridge and would have had a soupy stew constantly on the go on the fire, all the evidence suggests these lacked salt, sugar and certainly cinnamon or other spices.

"We have no evidence of spices being imported to anywhere in Scandinavia at that time. There's no written evidence and there's no physical evidence [from archeological digs]," Daniel Serra, a culinary historian, told The Local.

"They find herbs. They find juniper berries, mustard seeds, definitely. But there's no evidence of exotic spices." 

Serra is sceptical of suggestions that the Swedes who travelled to Constantinople to serve as mercenaries in the Varangian Guard would have brought spices back with them on their return. 

"You would need an audience that knows what it is," he says. "You would be spending all your savings on bringing home these spices that nobody would understand, whereas if you bring home silk fabric, gold or silver, people will know what it's about." 

Spices like cinnamon and cumin were, however, certainly available during the Viking period in the bigger cities of Germany and northern France, but they appear to have stopped there. 

"One of the earliest evidence for spices is the description of a market in Mainz by an Arab cumin merchant, who finds spices, but then he goes on to Hedeby, which is in the south of Denmark, and says only that the food is terrible. So I think there was a clear demarcation line." 

Cinnamon comes to Sweden  

The earliest written evidence of cinnamon being used in Sweden appears in a recipe for the mulled beer Saint Bridget of Sweden, known as heliga Birgitta, served to guests at the funeral of her father in 1328, when half a kilogram of the expensive spice was used. 

"There are two main reasons for serving cinnamon here," Serra says of the use of cinnamon in the funeral beer. "It's to show your status, because it was an expensive import, to show that you're part of the continental European food culture, and it also has medical properties."

Bridget of Sweden's father, Birger Persson, was governor of Uppland and one of the richest men in Sweden. "Next to the king, he was the most potent, powerful man in Sweden at the time. So when he dies, she has to do something extraordinary." 

But cinnamon had probably begun to become available to the elites in Sweden fifty or a hundred years before this. It is included as an ingredient in several recipes in Libellus de arte coquinaria, The Little Book of Culinary Arts, a cookbook attributed to the Danish cleric Henrik Harpestræng, the Canon of Roskilde Cathedral, who died in 1244. 

"What he includes in the cookbook is a cameline sauce, which is based on vinegar and cinnamon with some herbs to it. I think there's mint and parsley," Serra says. "You would have had small morsels of meat and dipped your food into the sauce. There's also one where you make a bread pudding with saffron and some cinnamon sprinkled on top of that, but as a sort of savory side dish." 

The Salsor Dominorum sauce in the book, used for wild game pickling, features a mix of cloves, black pepper, cinnammon, nutmeg, ginger and cardamom: a similar mix to that used nowadays in the pepparkakor biscuits Swedes serve at Christmas. 

A portrait of Bridget of Sweden by Hermann Rode, taken from Svenska folket genom tiderna. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

From rich merchants to ordinary people

It was not until well into the 13th century, when the Hanseatic League began to increase trade with Sweden, that the spice began to be used more widely, although it remained a luxury. 

"In the Renaissance, you have a rising middle class who want to show off that they are part of the elite, so you start getting these cookbooks and you also have luxury laws around Europe, which say 'if you are a peasant or you are a merchant, you can't have these spices'," Serra says. 

The use of spices like cinnamon then slowly spread from the very wealthy to become something ordinary people would use to mark big celebrations. "It trickles down to become festive food, for Christmas or for festive occasions." 

Spices only began to come to Sweden in large quantites with the advent of the East India trade in the 18th century. The Swedish East India Company, founded in Gothenburg in 1731, brought spices and also sugar to Sweden in large quantities for the first time. 

Cakes and kanelbullar 

Cinnamon was initially used in savoury dishes. It was only when sugar began to be produced at plantations in the US and Caribbean and imported to Europe in large quantities that cinnamon began to be used in cakes and desserts, and it wasn't until sugarbeet began to be planted in Sweden the late 19th century that sugar became a commodity available to almost everyone. 

"The first recipe we have for a sweet cinnamon dish in Sweden is from mid-16th century, and it is written by one of the last Catholic bishops of Sweden," Serra told us. "It's for a tart or cake including eggs, sugar, cream, cinnamon and ginger, which he said was made in Sweden for noble women when they were feeling unwell." 

The bishop was in exile, and the recipe, Serra says, was part of a book aimed at showing the Catholic world why Sweden was special and so encouraging them to intervene and return it to Catholic rule.

It wasn't until the middle of the 19th century that cafés serving Viennese-style patisserie started to become established in Sweden. The kanelbulle, or cinnamon roll, appears to have arrived or originated in Sweden on the west coast, in and around Gothenburg. 

According to the website Högtider och traditioner, the earliest recorded written mention of kanelbullar comes in 1857, when there's an advertisement for "saffron and cinnamon rolls" in the local newspaper in Åmål, on the west coast of Lake Vänern. In 1868, there's a similar announcement in the Göteborgs-Posten newspaper. 

The now ubiquitous bun does not appear to have arrived in Stockholm until decades later, with the first mentions in Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet not coming until 1925. 

The real explosion, however, came when rationing was lifted at the end of the Second World War. The first edition of Vår Kokbok, Sweden's classic collection of home recipes, contained a recipe for kanelbullar, helping to turn them into the Swedish staple they are today. 

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8 minutes ago, Vesper said:

the earliest recorded written mention of kanelbullar comes in 1857, when there's an advertisement for "saffron and cinnamon rolls" in the local newspaper in Åmål

The 1998 movie Fucking Åmål (known in the English-speaking world as Show Me Love), directed by Lukas Moodysson, is set in Åmål. The movie depicts the town as extremely boring and it was largely filmed in the nearby town of Trollhättan. The film created controversy in the town of Åmål. Local politicians campaigned to get the title of the film changed.^[4] The local complaints had no effect on the content or release of the film and since the release of the film the town of Åmål has even tried to embrace the publicity generated. In the early 2000s the town founded the pop music festival "Fucking Åmål Festival".

Edited October 1, 2024 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 17,299]

Mehmet Ozil -his eyes are offside 🤣

[Vesper 30,088]

The great baked bean taste test. Who sells the best — and the worst?

The store cupboard essential is trending with foodies. Anne Shooter gives her verdict on the highstreet offerings

https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/food-drink/article/what-are-the-best-baked-beans-the-supermarket-brands-rated-cn3bqzmp7

Bakedbeans are the ultimate British store cupboard staple, equally at home alongside sausages, on a slice of buttered toast or as an integral part of a full English. Not so long ago there was, essentially, only one brand to buy — we all sang along in the television ad breaks that “beanz meanz Heinz”, as indeed it did back then. These days, however, there are countless varieties, from the supermarket own-brand versions to organic ones, and now the trendy Bold Bean Co has brought out fancy baked beans in a jar.

The consumer experts Which? recently conducted a taste test of budget baked beans and found Aldi’s to be the best, beating Heinz and potentially saving you £100 a year if you eat two cans a week (slightly excessive, surely?).

The truth is that even at the Heinz price of £1.40 a can — compared with about 40p for a cheaper brand — half a tin of baked beans on toast or a baked potato is an incredibly reasonable lunch, whether topped with a handful of grated cheddar or not (yes please).

Also, asconvenience foods go, they’re actually not too bad. Half a can of standard baked beans generally has about 185 calories, 8g of fibre — which we should all be eating more of — and less than 10g of sugar, which counts as low. The salt is about 1g, which is considered medium, so be aware of what you eat them with (hmm, maybe hold that cheddar), and there are some thickeners to the sauce, such as modified maize starch, which is considered a UPF and is not ideal. Cornflour, which you do find in some brands, is better.

We conducted our own taste test, including some of the smarter and organic brands — this is The Times, after all — and here’s what we thought.

The nutritional details are for half a can — about 200g — which is considered a serving size, or 200g from a jar.

• Baked bean recipes for an easy midweek meal

Baked beans ranked: from best to worst

Waitrose Duchy Organic Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce, £1

182 calories per half can, 9.7g protein, 9.2g sugar, 1.1g salt, 7.8g fibre
Cute little beans in a rather runny sauce that thickened on cooking. They have a lovely mouthfeel and taste very precise, as if someone has been terribly careful with the recipe and made sure every element works, which it does. These are excellent.
★★★★★

The Greek Kitchen Gigantes Baked Giant Beans in a Rich Tomato Sauce, £3.50, Ocado

266 calories per 200g, 10.8g protein, 3.2g sugar, 2.16g salt, 11.2g fibre
These are not something to have on toast so much as to have with grilled lamb chops or as part of a mezze. They really do taste like a holiday in Greece thanks to the herbs and gorgeous mouthfeel from the extra virgin olive oil. A really lovely product, although the level of dried dill is not for the faint-hearted.
★★★★☆

Asda Baked Beans in a Rich Tomato Sauce, 42p

187 calories per half can, 10g protein, 8.6g sugar, 0.96g salt, 9.4g fibre
These are a glow-in-the-dark shade of orange but surprisingly tasty and quite delicious. The beans are fairly large and the sauce is of a good consistency — and there’s lots of it. The short list of ingredients includes paprika and paprika extra, which accounts for the colour. Would buy again.
★★★★☆

Branston Baked Beans in a Rich, Thick, Tomatoey Sauce, £1

175 calories per half can, 9.4g protein, 9.6g sugar, 1.24g salt, 9,4g fibre
You can really taste the little, firm beans here and they are evenly coated in a vibrant sauce that tastes really tomatoey and not fake or gloopy. The vinegar, salt, pepper and sugar are very well balanced — they are actually really good.
★★★★☆

 

Bold Bean Company Baked Beans Rich Tomato, £3.50, Ocado

322 calories per 200g, 9.4g protein, 9.8g sugar, 1.4g salt, 12.4g fibre
These look great — really fat, white beans in a thick sauce with visible pieces of finely chopped onion and a sheen of olive oil. They have a really good, natural, homemade flavour but they are not something any child is going to want with their fish fingers and they could do with a touch more sugar, as the tomatoes are on the acidic side. I’d have mine with some crumbled feta on top and a hunk of crusty bread.
★★★★☆

Biona Organic Baked Beans Classic in Rich Tomato Sauce, £1.40, Ocado and health food shops

186 calories per half can, 9.2g protein, 11.8g sugar, 1.4g salt, 9.6g fibre
To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from these. They look like there are too many beans for the sauce, which is thick and rather brown. But they are absolutely delicious. So tasty, they’re almost like a cassoulet and would be great with sausages but would also work on toast. Yes, they are pretty high in sugar, but the flavour is really well balanced.
★★★★☆

• Are you making baked beans wrong? Follow Heinz’s rules or you’re toast

Aldi Bramwells Baked Beans in a Rich Tomato Sauce, 41p

187 calories per half can, 9.7g protein, 9.8g sugar, 1.09g salt, 9.6g fibre
I concur with the Which? panel that these are very good. The sauce is thick without being gloopy and the beans are a perfect texture. There is a good tomato flavour but they are slightly on the sweet side for me — they are quite high in sugar compared with some other brands.
★★★★☆

Heinz Beanz in a Rich Tomato Sauce, £1.40

168 calories per half can, 10g protein, 8.9g sugar, 1.3g salt, 8g fibre
These are the standard for me as they are the brand I was brought up with and they remind me of fish finger suppers and Bonfire Night. On a more objective note, they look good with evenly sized small beans and a well-coloured sauce. The sauce is quite thin, although it thickens well after a few minutes bubbling on the hob and is tasty, if a little on the sweet side.
★★★☆☆

Sainsbury’s Baked Beans in Tasty Tomato Sauce, 40p

168 calories per half can, 9.2g protein, 8.5g sugar, 1g salt, 9.9g fibre
These have neat small beans in a very bright sauce, which I thought looked slightly frightening. However, they taste great. They use tomatoes rather than puree, which some other cheaper brands use, and they are not too sweet. They have a good hint of paprika too, which I like. The beans are a little on the firm side, though, and the sauce is rather thin.
★★★☆☆

M&S Organic Baked Beans in a Rich Tomato Sauce, £1

166 calories per half can, 9.2g protein, 8.2g sugar, 1g salt, 8.6g fibre
The sauce is on the browner, rather worthy, side but they have a warming, slightly spiced flavour and a glance at the ingredients shows they contain chilli powder, nutmeg, coriander, turmeric and dried garlic. I rather like them but suspect these will not be to everyone’s taste.
★★★☆☆

Co-op Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce, 49p

176 calories per half can, 9.5g protein, 8.3g sugar, 0.95g salt, 8.1g fibre
These look great and the sauce is a good consistency but for me, they taste fake — a bit like someone has added ketchup to their baked beans or like there’s some artificial sweetener involved (this is not on the ingredients, although there are undisclosed “flavourings”). I bet kids would like them, though.
★★★☆☆

Tesco Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce, 43p

174 calories per half can, 9.3g protein, 9.7g sugar, 1g salt, 8.2g fibre
These have lots of deep red, thick sauce coating unevenly sized beans. They have a weak, slightly false, sweet flavour and an aftertaste I am not keen on. The ingredients show they have clove extract, which might be the issue — or it could be too much dried onion powder that’s the problem.
★★☆☆☆

Mr Organic Organic Baked Beans, £1.65, Ocado

198 calories, 12.4g protein, 7.2g sugar, salt 1.38g, 7.2g fibre
I had high hopes for these. They are 60 per cent beans, which is the highest of any of the cans (most are around 50 per cent), with a short list of organic ingredients and the sauce is a good consistency and colour. But they taste nothing short of horrendous with the most overwhelming flavour of something like cloves or allspice, which lingers long after you’ve eaten them. Someone needs to look at the recipe immediately.
☆☆☆☆☆

Lidl Newgate Baked Beans in a Rich Tomato Sauce, 41p

184 calories per half can, 10.5g protein, 9.7g sugar, 1.16g salt, 7.2g fibre
Seemed promising with evenly sized beans in a good coating of rich-looking sauce but the flavour is strange, acidic and somehow fakely floral. I spot “basil extract” on the ingredients. Whatever that is, it makes these baked beans taste nothing short of nasty.
☆☆☆☆☆

Edited October 5, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,088]

Amatriciana

Serves 4
Prep: 10 minutes. Cook: 40 minutes

Ingredients

• 150g guanciale, trimmed and chopped into 1cm lardons, or use bacon
• 50ml white wine
• 500g tomato passata
• 1 small red chilli, chopped
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 400g bucatini pasta
• 100g pecorino, grated

Method

1. In a frying pan over a medium heat, sizzle the guanciale or bacon for 8-10 minutes or until crispy. Add the white wine and let it evaporate for 3-4 minutes, then remove the guanciale or bacon from the pan (keeping the pan on the heat) and set aside on a plate.
2. Add the tomato passata and chilli to the empty pan. Season with salt and pepper, reduce the heat to low-medium and cook for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. After 20 minutes, add the crispy guanciale or bacon back into the pan.
3. Bring a large saucepan of salted water to the boil over a medium heat. Add the bucatini and cook for 2-3 minutes less than indicated on the packaging until al dente. Drain, reserving a couple of ladlefuls of the pasta water.
4. Add the drained bucatini to your sauce. Toss well for a couple of minutes to combine all the flavours, adding a drop of pasta water if necessary.
5. Turn off the heat, add the cheese and give it a nice stir and serve.

[Vesper 30,088]

Witches around the world

The belief in witches is an almost universal feature of human societies. What does it reveal about our deepest fears?

https://aeon.co/essays/the-universal-belief-in-witches-reveals-our-deepest-fears

If asked, most people in the West would say that wicked witches who fly unaided or turn into animals don’t really exist. And, according to all available evidence, they would be right. It’s more difficult to prove that no one practises ‘witchcraft’, that is, conducts rites or utters curses in an attempt to harm others. Yet regardless of what people say about witches, or even what they believe, the idea of the witch is a universal constant looming over cultures from the islands of Indonesia to the pizza parlours of the modern United States.

Fifty years ago, as graduate students at Oxford, my wife and I were preparing to do anthropological fieldwork on the island of Sumba, in eastern Indonesia. Not long after beginning our research, an elderly ritual expert happened to mention that yet another ritualist – one of his rivals, as it later turned out – had ‘eaten’ a woman, the wife of a third man. This took me aback, in part because the woman in question was still alive. But I soon learned that the old man was accusing his rival of being a mamarung, a witch, who on Sumba is said to cause illness and death by invisibly eating people’s souls. Meeting secretly at night, Sumbanese witches also capture human souls, transform them into sacrificial animals, and then slaughter these to kill their victims and consume their bodies.

Thinking about this after returning to the United Kingdom, I realised that the same accusations of ritual killing and cannibalism were levelled during the ‘witch crazes’ of the early modern period, from the 14th to 17th centuries, in Europe, resulting in the persecution and killing of many of those accused. European witches were also said to feast on human flesh, transform themselves and others into animals, join nocturnal assemblies, and fly through the air. Far more recently, I was reminded of the universal idea of the ‘witch’ by Pizzagate – the QAnon conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and other members of a supposed global elite were killing and eating children in secret satanic rites, conducted while operating a paedophile ring in a pizza parlour in Washington, DC. As I read further, I realised that the Pizzagate accusations were recycled versions of allegations levelled during the 1980s and ’90s against owners and employees of US daycare centres who were identically accused of sacrificing children and eating them.

But what is a ‘witch’? To prove that a belief in witches really is a human universal, we obviously need a definition. We also need to be clear about what ‘universal’ means. Actually, a definition commonly used by anthropologists, historians and other academics suits well enough. A witch is a human being who, motivated by malice, wilfully harms other people not openly by any physical methods, but by unseen, mystical means. Secret acts of ritual killing and cannibalism – essentially treating people like animals – are typical expressions of the witch’s hatred of humans. For example, witches among the Navaho of the America Southwest were accused of cannibalism, just like witches in New Guinea. Charged with the same horrendous acts, those US daycare workers would simply be seen as a variety of witches. In working through Satan, these rumoured devil-worshippers resemble not only the witches of medieval and early modern Europe, but equally witches described in Africa, Asia, the southwest Pacific, and native North and South America. For not only do non-Western witches kill people and eat them; they are similarly believed to obtain their powers through local demons. To cite one of many examples, Sumbanese witches possess evil spirits called wàndi that they keep inside their bodies and send out at night to attack their victims.

It hardly needs mentioning that I’m talking about ‘wicked witches’, and not the ‘good witches’ familiar to Westerners from The Wizard of Oz, nature-loving Wiccans, or the progressive young women who populate the pages of ‘witch-lit’. Such good witches find an explanation in the history of English, specifically the derivation of ‘witch’ from an Anglo-Saxon word further applied to healers and benevolent magicians. But the important point is that, throughout history and in a great variety of cultures today, people have imagined and continue to imagine thoroughly nefarious figures corresponding to the wicked witch.

Witchcraft reveals our persistent and enduring tendency to imagine the existence of evil people

To say that witches are universal doesn’t mean belief in them has been recorded in all cultures, or that, where recorded, widespread public accusations, witch-hunts or moral panics ensue. Whereas recent accusations of satanism in the West, including Pizzagate, evidently do reveal these features, witchcraft in non-Western societies often does not. For instance, the Hopi people of Arizona never openly accused people of being witches, for fear of retribution. Instead, they believed the evildoers would be punished in the afterlife.

Anthropologists have also described a few societies as being unfamiliar with witches altogether – at least at the time they were being investigated. Or they were familiar with witches but didn’t feel particularly threatened by them, perhaps because they thought they were sufficiently protected by counter-witchcraft magic or the security of benevolent gods. An example are the Tallensi of Ghana, in whose world view the anthropologist Meyer Fortes judged witchcraft to be ‘remotely peripheral’. That is, the Tallensi do not, for the most part, believe that misfortune derives from the wickedness of other people but from the actions of just and all-powerful ancestors, so that illness and death are interpreted as rightful punishment for human wrongdoing.

What the universality of witchcraft does reveal, however, is our persistent and enduring tendency to imagine the existence of evil people, either next door or somewhere in the next valley, who constantly strive to harm us by supernatural means. Thus, the same ideas crop up time and again in places that are otherwise culturally different and geographically distant.

John Pettie Arrest for Witchcraft 1866. Courtesy the NGV, Melbourne.

Seventeenth-century Massachusetts (including Salem) provides the most popularised example of witchcraft. English immigrants, many of them Puritans, faced the challenge of a harsh existence in a new land, surrounded by sometimes hostile native peoples, and riven with religious and political divisions. They found themselves needing to account for both misfortune and the fact that some succeeded while others failed. To do so, they invoked witchcraft beliefs imported from their native England and identified particular neighbours who were reputedly in league with the devil as the cause of their ills. As a result, accusations were made, people were tried as witches, and dozens were executed.

An early illustration of witches on broomsticks from Martin Le Franc’s ‘Le Champion des Dames’ (1451). Courtesy the BNF Paris.

Historians often focus on earlier witch-hunting crazes erupting in 15th-century Europe, after a period of relative indifference. Why did the phenomenon appear so suddenly and then decline with similar rapidity in the 18th century? Both the Enlightenment and the emergence of modern science during that century and the subsequent Industrial Revolution have been invoked to explain this change. Yet historians have recently documented beliefs in witches and malicious witchcraft, especially among rural Westerners, persisting into the 20th and 21st centuries.

 

José Guadalupe Posada A witch carrying a child on her broom. C1880-1910. Courtesy the Met Museum New York

Anthropologists, who have studied witchcraft from the early days of their discipline, strive to explain the phenomenon by focusing on social systems. Do accusations of witchcraft reveal social relationships that are ill-defined and likely to give rise to tension? Do they play a role in political or economic rivalry (including among co-wives in polygamous marriages)? Have they been invoked to explain why some people suffer misfortune while others do not?

The inspiration for this approach goes back to the work of E E Evans-Pritchard on the Azande of Central Africa. In his book Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande (1937), E-P (as he was known to students and colleagues) treated accusations and confessions of witchcraft as essential elements of Zande cosmology and a way of maintaining an orderly social life.

Belief in witches was a way of explaining why bad things sometimes happened to good people

Zande witches were said to embody an evil substance with the supernatural power to harm a person whom the witch, consciously or unconsciously, disliked. Unlike witches in many other cultures, the Zande variants attacked by purely mental means. They simply had to harbour ill will against another, and did not, for example, need to recite spells or deliberately send invisible projectiles to injure a person as is common among witches elsewhere.

A group of abinza (witchdoctors) dancing at a seance (do avure), wearing elaborate dance costumes including rattles, headdresses and magical attachments. c1926-7. Photo by E. E. Evans-Pritchard and courtesy the Pitt Rivers Musuem, Oxford

Suffering an illness or other misfortune, especially one that afflicted only themselves and not others (eg, snakebite or another ‘accident’), a Zande man or woman (or their relatives, if the misfortune was fatal) would then suspect the work of a witch who had it in for them; with the help of a diviner, the suspect’s identity could be confirmed. Claiming they were not conscious of causing harm, the accused often confessed. The two parties were then reconciled, and the victim no longer regarded the accused as a witch. In this way, Evans-Pritchard saw belief in witches as a way of explaining why bad things sometimes happened to people, including good people. Since accusations and confessions could reveal strains in relations between people, this was a way to promote and maintain social harmony as well.

A portrait of Bagbeyo, an elder of the Zande people. Bagbeyo was apparently commonly reputed to be a nakuangua or nangbisi (a witch). Photo by E. E. Evans-Pritchard and courtesy the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford

Later anthropologists followed Evans-Pritchard in interpreting witchcraft as something that served to maintain social systems in a reasonably steady state. This ‘war is peace’ approach found favour despite the social disruption, harm, unhappiness and, sometimes, injury or death of innocents that can follow from openly accusing people of being witches or simply treating them as though they were suspects. What’s more, and in line with a relativist perspective that views human cultures as essentially different from one another, cross-cultural studies came to largely consist of identifying social functions that witchcraft beliefs might perform in particular societies. Identifying someone as a witch might be useful in dissolving or reforming social relationships that are no longer supportable, for example between spouses or co-wives. Or, more generally, belief in witches might be seen as promoting good behaviour, so that people would avoid acting badly towards others for fear of either being accused of witchcraft or having witchcraft used against them.

Because the focus among historians and anthropologists was on single societies, there was little scope for generalisation. And, in any case, it soon became clear that the sorts of people who were accused or suspected of witchcraft varied considerably from group to group. Thus, while globally it is women who are mostly identified as witches, in some societies – including the North American Navaho, and several African societies – most witches are men. In many other places (including Zandeland, according to Evans-Pritchard), men and women are suspected about equally.

Similar variation is found in regard to age, social standing and wealth. Though elderly and impoverished women are suspects in a great variety of places, in some cultures, including the Tlingit and Kaska of Alaska and northwestern Canada and the Bangwa of Cameroon, many of those accused as witches were children. In a witch craze that affected the Kaska during the first two to three decades of the 20th century, dozens of children were put to death in the most horrendous ways, often by members of their own families, thereby depleting the population of this society, which apparently never numbered more than 300 or 400.

The way people make a living also does not determine the occurrence of witchcraft beliefs. Some writers have claimed that witchcraft is absent or rare among small-scale, nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer communities with small population densities. But before their integration into modern nation-states, the aforementioned Kaska maintained a belief in witches and anti-witchcraft practices, as did many other native North and South American hunter-gatherers – including the Paiute of eastern Oregon.

Recognising the deficiencies of earlier sociological approaches to witchcraft, my former supervisor at Oxford, Rodney Needham, proposed a better perspective. In his essay Primordial Characters (1978), Needham argued that, to properly understand the witch, we must investigate particular beliefs about witches that find expression in otherwise quite different cultures and different historical settings. Together, these add up to what Needham called ‘the image of the witch’, a complex of ideas, none of which is necessarily connected with particular forms of social organisation.

Needham calls part of the widespread image of the witch the ‘moral component’: representing witches as the absolute opposite of the moral human being. Not surprisingly, under this heading Needham first mentioned cannibalism, but he didn’t say anything else about the remarkably uniform way witches are claimed to prosecute their nefarious deeds. With few exceptions, witches the world over act invisibly; they transform victims or their souls into sacrificial animals, and attack people by piercing or stabbing them with unseen instruments and inserting harmful substances into their bodies. (Piercing is a major technique among the Kalapalo of Brazil, who call witches ‘masters of the darts’, but it also recalls QAnon’s recent claim that Bill Gates, identified as a member of the ‘global elite’, was promoting COVID-19 vaccination with the aim of injecting microchips into unsuspecting recipients.)

European witches plant crosses upside down, perform rituals backwards, dance counterclockwise

Though Needham did not specify it, an equally prominent expression of the moral component of the image is the way witches in most places act to impede normal processes of human life. Most notably, they counteract human procreation by killing both unborn babies in the womb and infants after birth, all while reputedly engaging in disapproved sexual practices that cannot lead to conception. Female witches in Ghana are supposedly able to turn a woman’s uterus upside down so she cannot conceive, while male witches can steal a pregnant woman’s fetus. In some places, including early modern Europe and among the West African Yoruba and the Mapuche Indians of Chile, witches are credited with stealing men’s penises or destroying their semen.

Other traits Needham lists are similarly widespread across cultures. People around the world describe witches as secretly meeting in groups to kill victims, as in the covens of early modern Europe. They are regularly depicted as operating at night, being able to fly (or levitate), associating or identifying with animals, participating in a wide variety of physical and other inversions, and manifesting as nocturnal lights. Though seemingly trivial, this last trait is ubiquitous. Instances are found in all parts of the world, including North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific islands. Thus, the Sumbanese of eastern Indonesia often call witches ‘those who glow, shine, or flicker (in the night)’. Similarly, in Ghana, the Twi word for practising witchcraft means ‘to glow’.

‘Inversion’, where witches do things in a way opposite to what is proper or normal, is another idea found just about everywhere. European witches were supposed to plant crosses upside down, perform rituals backwards, dance counterclockwise (the inauspicious direction), and do things with the left hand that should be done with the right – just as latter-day satanists have been described as doing. Outside the West, witches are conceived as equally inverted beings. The Nagé people of the Indonesian island of Flores, among whom I conducted fieldwork between 1984 and 2018, describe witches as dancing in the ‘wrong’ direction during their nocturnal cannibalistic feasts. Nagé witches also sleep with their heads pointing the wrong way (towards the sea rather than inland). Similarly, Navaho and Western Apache witches cast harmful spells by reciting ‘good prayers’ backwards; some witches in India are credited with inverted feet; in East Africa witches walk about upside down; Burmese witches sleep on their bellies rather than their backs; ancient Roman writers described witches as capable of reversing the course of rivers – and the list goes on.

Needham argued that the components need not all occur together, and I agree. For example, if Americans recently accused of engaging in satanism are modern examples of witches, so far as I know they have yet to be credited with flying unaided, turning into animals, or walking on their heads. The absence of such attributed abilities, all of which are, of course, physically impossible according to modern physics, is readily explained by the advent of modern scientific education, which has affected the public discourse and presumably the imaginations of even the most uneducated members of Western societies. Yet, what remains in accusations of satanism are ritual homicide, cannibalism, and hindering human reproduction (by reputedly sacrificing children and promoting abortion).

Surviving accusations may thus reflect only what is empirically possible. Even so, they appear central to the image of the witch. For a start, cannibalism, eating fellow humans, is itself a kind of inversion, as well as being in most places an extreme moral outrage. Even in cultures that practise ritual cannibalism (like some in New Guinea), the cannibalism of witches is morally distinguished by its secret, excessive, uncontrolled and indiscriminate aspects. At the same time, modern Western witchcraft, or satanism, has apparently expanded on the witch’s common preference for victimising children by adding paedophilia to their roster of evil deeds. Not entirely original – since sex with children is a charge laid against witches in some traditional African cultures – this addition surely reflects features of modern child-rearing that are quite specific if not unique to the mass societies of the West.

From the arresting series of inversions to manifesting as nocturnal lights to flying unaided, many attributions of witches are encountered so often, in different places and different historical periods, that they cannot credibly be explained as mere coincidences, or something that originated in one culture and simply spread to near and distant others. Some beliefs may have developed independently in different places. But this only begs the question: why should this have occurred? Given the uniformity of the image of the witch worldwide, we can only conclude that it is a product of pan-human psychology.

Needham reached much the same conclusion, but he never took it any further. Drawing on Carl Jung’s concept, he simply characterised the witch as an ‘archetype’, though one that is ‘synthetic’, meaning that it consists of components that need not occur together, and that some people attribute to entities besides witches. As he noted, purely spiritual beings like gods and ghosts can also be inverted, take the form of animals, or be active mainly at night. Yet these commonalities find a ready explanation in a consistent conception of witches as beings with the same supernatural powers as spirits and, simultaneously, flawed humans.

In other words, witches habitually confuse what philosophers recognise as major ontological categories. These comprise essentially different sorts of beings and most notably human beings, nonhuman animals and spirits, which moral humans everywhere keep separate from one another, conceptually and, in some ways, physically as well. People everywhere forbid having sex with animals, while witches are often charged with just that. The Nagé of eastern Indonesia say that such transgressions would turn any individual into a witch.

Curiously, people usually identify social insiders as witches

Admittedly, these observations go only part way to explaining universal witchcraft. If the witch is an inherent tendency of pan-human thought, then its roots must lie deep in human psychology. That said, witchcraft is a complex phenomenon, so certain aspects or components require explanations different from others. Take the series of physical inversions for example. These are products of the universal proclivity to construct metaphors. Being back to front or upside down are particularly concrete, vivid, categorical and psychologically effective ways of representing moral inversion – thinking, feeling and behaving in ways completely opposite to those of ordinary humans, as exemplified by more abstract moral inversions such as sacrificing humans in place of animals, cannibalism, sexual perversion and so on. But calling physical inversions metaphorical is not to suggest they are merely figurative. Another feature of metaphors is that, over time, they can come to be, if not firmly believed, then taken for granted, rarely questioned, and simply accepted as something like fact by the majority of people who habitually use them.

Requiring a different explanatory framework is the foundational belief in the existence of inherently evil human others. Curiously, people usually identify social insiders as witches, at the very least members of the same ethnic group or speaking the same language. Often the accused are also members of the same village or family, and even spouses, parents and siblings. But, in doing so, they represent the suspects as morally alien and inhuman, individuals outside the bounds of humanity and so the exact opposite of ‘people like us’. Therefore, typically high on the list of suspected witches the world over are co-resident slaves (usually descended from war captives), other persons of low rank and, especially when they come from another village (as they often do), wives and their kin.

Linked with the witch’s essential outsiderhood, witchcraft builds on a recognition, unique among humans, of other minds just like our own combined with a countervailing conviction that other people are not exactly like us, and are indeed ‘others’.

One approach traces the hatred and fear to the universal emotional experiences of early childhood. Deriving ultimately from Sigmund Freud, this theory locates witchcraft in an infant’s growing awareness that caregivers exist separately from themselves, and can therefore frustrate as well as satisfy their needs and desires – the first step in a person’s realisation that, to quote Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘hell is other people.’ Because infants find their consequent rage too difficult to bear, the argument goes, they project it onto other people, first the primary caregiver (most likely the mother) and later onto others. The suggestion that the very idea of the witch is rooted in childhood would, in fact, help to explain, via the role that theory assigns to infant caregivers, the global prominence of women among accused witches.

Complementing this approach, cognitive scientists view witchcraft as a product of evolutionary psychology originating among the same Stone Age hunter-gatherers creating emerging religions. A belief in unseen beings is as old as our species, after all, and there’s an enduring psychological attractiveness and memorability to the minimally counterintuitive idea – one that is fantastic yet simple, and not so contrary to common sense that it’s hard to process. If witches are to possess supernatural powers comparable to spirits and engage in practices characteristic of religion, including ritual killing and communal feasting, that only makes sense.

It is no coincidence, either, that contemporary Westerners who accuse others of satanism tend to be evangelical or fundamentalist Protestants, for adherents of these Christian denominations believe in Satan as a being present and active in the world, and in evil as a real power embraced by others who, unlike themselves, are not among God’s elect. According to the evolutionary psychologists, witchcraft belief evolved as a psychological mechanism that aided survival in small-scale Palaeolithic communities by alerting people to the possible existence of internal or external human enemies behaving maliciously in unseen ways.

Like some modern evangelicals, some recent or remaining hunter-gatherers continue to believe there are witches in their midst. These beliefs may no longer serve us, but our species as a whole has survived them – just like we survived the evolution of large brains and heads, the side-effects of which are the life-threatening difficulties women can experience in childbirth. Obviously, isolating the ultimate causes of witchcraft will not immediately solve the social disruption and injustice that accusations (which, in the case of witchcraft, we may assume, are invariably false) can cause. But the more we understand the belief as a tendency inherent in the human condition, the better chance we have of controlling and counteracting its worst effects. At least we’ll have a better idea of what we’re up against.

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Jewel Sazerac (Batched Cocktail)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/jewel-sazerac-batched-cocktail/

While not traditional, this great Sazerac from Chris Hannah of Jewel of the South in New Orleans skips the absinthe rinse and pre-batches the drink to store in the freezer. The cocktail has the classic anise notes, but is also rich and raisiny, thanks to the unexpected additions of rainwater madeira, a drier style of the Portuguese wine, and rancio sec, an oxidative wine similar to sherry.

Make ahead: The rich demerara syrup needs to be prepared and cooled before use, 1 to 2 hours in advance. The drink needs to be prepared and chilled in the freezer, at least 1 hour, before serving.

Storage: Refrigerate the demerara syrup for up to 1 month. The batched drink will keep indefinitely in the freezer.

Where to buy: Rancio sec can be found at well-stocked wine stores.

Adapted from Chris Hannah of Jewel of the South in New Orleans.

Ingredients

measuring cup

Servings: 8-10 (makes generous 3 cups/26 ounces)

For the rich demerara syrup

• 1 cup demerara sugar
• 1/2 cup water

For the drink

• 15 ounces 100-proof rye whiskey, such as Rittenhouse
• 3 ounces rainwater madeira, preferably H&H
• 3 ounces rancio sec, preferably Matifoc
• 2 1/2 ounces Herbsaint
• 2 ounces rich demerara syrup
• 1 ounce Peychaud's bitters
• Lemon twists, for garnish

Directions

Time IconTotal: 5 mins, plus up to 3 hours for chilling

1. Step 1

   Make the rich demerara syrup: In a small saucepan over medium-high heat, combine the sugar and water, and bring to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Once the sugar is fully dissolved, remove from the heat and refrigerate until completely cooled before using.

2. Step 2

   Make the drink: In a 1-quart (1-liter) bottle, shake together the rye, madeira, rancio sec, Herbsaint, demerara syrup and bitters until combined. Transfer to the freezer and chill completely before serving, at least 1 hour. About 10 minutes before serving, chill however many rocks glasses you need, then pour about 3 ounces into each glass and garnish each with a lemon twist.

Substitutions

If you can’t find rancio sec >> oloroso sherry is a good substitute.
Rich demerara syrup >> simple syrup or a sugar cube.

[ZAPHOD2319 4,801]

Northern lights from my front door. 

 

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 October mist in Helsingborg

Helsingborg is a coastal city in southern Sweden, across the Øresund Strait from Denmark

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Embrace Italian culture with the pre-dinner aperitivo hour

An expert explains how to enjoy this relaxed Italian tradition at home

https://www.themanual.com/food-and-drink/aperitivo-culture-comes-to-us/

Plenty of people around the world have dreams about living the Italian life. From the outside, Italy seems like a haven of delicious food, great drinks, and a relaxed, fun culture. But while the rest of us may feel jealous of the sociable Mediterranean way of life, there’s nothing stopping us from importing a little taste of Italy into our everyday experience.

One iconic feature of Italian food and drinks culture is the aperitivo hour, a dreamy, sophisticated time for a tasty cocktail and a small snack just before dinner. Best enjoyed with friends in a casual, informal atmosphere, the idea is to transition you smoothly from the business of the day and into the evening.

We can’t all be sitting on a dreamy Italian balcony overlooking the Mediterranean, but we can make a bit of space for indulging in aperitivo culture. We spoke to Giuseppe Gallo, an Italian mixologist who has launched his own brands of aperitivo drinks, Italicus and Savoia, about bringing this Italian tradition to the US and how anyone can recreate this experience at home.

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What aperitivo culture is

Aperitivo is a long-standing tradition that you’ll find across all of Italy and, like many cultural habits there, has been in place for hundreds of years. “The aperitivo tradition dates back to ancient Italy, where it began as a pre-meal beverage designed to stimulate the appetite,” Gallo explained. “The term ‘aperitivo’ comes from the Latin word ‘aperire,’ meaning ‘to open.’ Historically, these drinks were crafted using herbs, roots and citrus to create flavors that would prepare the palate for the meal to come.”

The idea is to enjoy time before dinner, and to build anticipation for delicious food to come. That includes both a bitter drink and a small snack, but it isn’t a fussy affair. It’s about simple and tasty ingredients shared in a social environment.

“Herbal notes with a slightly bitter finish, what in Italian is called Amaro-Dolce (Bitter-Sweet), help to open up the stomach, but most importantly, it is a moment to share a good time and a drink with your friends or loved ones. Vermouth, Amaros, and Bitter Aperitif are perfect for these low ABV cocktails. Add sparkling wine or prosecco, and the cocktail is ready. Food, bites, and light snacks are essential to complete the aperitivo experience,” Gallo said.

As well as being bitter, another key feature of aperitivo drinks are that they are lower in alcohol than other cocktails might be, making them more suited for drinking earlier in the evening.

“Aperitivo products, which typically have a lower alcohol by volume (ABV) with a slightly bitter or herbaceous aftertaste compared to spirits like gin, vodka, and whiskey, are ideal for creating these light, refreshing beverages,” Gallo said. “The category has become highly diverse, with many new local (regional) players and almost every Italian spirits producer offering their own vermouth or bitter.”

Gallo’s own Italicus and Savoia brands are easily mixed into classic Italian drinks like a spritz which give complex bitter flavors while still being relatively low abv and easy to drink.

The heart of aperitivo

Aperitivo culture isn’t only about the drinks though. It’s also about the experience, and about making time for social interactions over food, Gallo said.

“The aperitivo is not just about drinks; it’s a social moment of conviviality shared between friends. While it may have originated in Italy, this concept is easily adaptable to other cultures, including the US, where Americans are already accustomed to enjoying a cocktail or two before dinner.”

It may also involve exposing people to more bitter flavors than they are used to, but with the rise in popularity of drinks like the Spritz or the Negroni, plenty of people are embracing these darker and moodier flavors.

That’s making aperitivo culture more popular across the US, Gallo said: “Just ten years ago, drinks like the Spritz, Negroni, or Sgroppino were virtually unheard of in the American cocktail scene. Today, these cocktails are widely embraced by bartenders and highly sought after by consumers. The rise of these drinks reflects an increasing appetite for both unique experiences and international flavors.

“Bartenders across the US are excited to experiment, and consumers are more open than ever to trying drinks that transport them to European traditions.”

Recreate aperitivo hour at home

With the rise in popularity of these flavors and ingredients among bartenders, one way to experience aperitivo culture is to head to a bar. Indeed, plenty of Italians will be found sat outside their favorite local bar in the early evening, sipping on a Spritz and enjoying a small bruschetta or a selection of meats and cheeses.

But if there isn’t a little local Italian bar near you, you can easily recreate the aperitivo experience at home. That’s becoming a more popular option driven by lifestyle changes and an interest in trying out new flavors, Gallo said:

“The aperitivo category has evolved significantly due to changes in consumer lifestyles and palates. Working from home has altered social habits, creating more opportunities for daytime gatherings with friends. This shift has led to a preference for socializing in a way that balances enjoyment with moderation, favoring refreshing long drinks.

“At the same time, modern palates are getting more accustomed to bitterness, making Italian aperitivo products, characterized by bitterness, more accessible and appealing to contemporary consumers. This growing appreciation for bitterness and everything made in Italy allows drinks like Italicus and Savoia to resonate with today’s audiences while staying true to their traditional roots, presenting modern and refreshing drinks.”

Drinks and snacks for aperitivo hour

When it comes to hosting your own aperitivo hour, it needn’t be a stressful or demanding experience. In fact, the point is to relax and have fun, so don’t sweat the details or worry about preparing elaborate snacks as well as having to prepare dinner. Instead, think of buying a few high quality ingredients that are delicious to enjoy on their own.

That might involve fresh bread sliced and served with oil olive for dipping, or a bowl of olives or nuts. You could put together a plate of local cheese or some meat cuts from the deli. Even a bowl of simple salted chips can work. But embrace the fun of the experience and serve your snacks in elegant ceramic bowls or on a wooden board. The idea is to embrace the luxury of small things.

Gallo’s tips on hosting an aperitivo hour focus on simplicity and fun: “Recreating an Italian Aperitivo experience with Italicus and Savoia is easier than you might imagine. First, gather some friends and play your favorite playlist. You will need ice, citrus fruits like oranges or grapefruits, glasses, sodas and bottles of Italicus and Savoia.

Add some Italicus to a glass and top it up with Prosecco for a refreshing spritz, or mix Savoia with any soda for an easy-to-drink aperitivo. Serve with bowls of green olives, preferably Nocellara olives, small bruschettam and Parmesan chunks. Now enjoy!”

These simple drinks are a classic part of aperitivo culture, but if you’re looking to get more adventurous then you can also try your hand at making some bitter cocktails which are ideal as pre-dinner sips. There aren’t any hard and fast rules for the mixing of bitter Italian amaros or vermouth-like aromatized wines, so feel free to play and experiment with mixing with different spirits, wines, herbs, or juices to make your own creatons.

“Italicus also works perfectly with agave spirits,” Gallo said. “I love the Bergamot Margarita, made with equal parts Italicus and blanco tequila. Then there’s the Mezcalicus, mixing 50/50 mezcal and Italicus to elevate a Bergamot Cosmo or Daiquiri. Bergamot can enhance any classic cocktail.

“Savoia Rosso makes simplicity a priority in the world of cocktails, using just a few ingredients so everyone can craft a cocktail at home. Combine Savoia Rosso with bourbon whiskey for a Boulevardier, or with gin for a perfect Negroni. Use rye whiskey for a Manhattan, or simple orange juice for a Garibaldi at home.”

Aperitivo cocktail recipes

If all this has you inspired to try your hand at mixing your own aperitivo drinks, Gallo provided some favorite cocktail recipes to enjoy the classic Italian experience.

Italicus Spritz

Italicus

Ingredients:

• 1 part ITALICUS ROSOLIO DI BERGAMOTTO
• 2 parts Prosecco
• 3 green olives to garnish

Method:

Build in a wine glass over ice. Simply combine one part Italicus with two parts Prosecco or Champagne over ice. Add garnish with three green olives to balance the floral aromas with a touch of saltiness.

Italicus Sgroppino

• 1 Scoop of Lemon Sorbet
• 1 oz Italicus Rosolio di Bergamotto
• 1 oz Sparkling Wine
• Garnish with Lemon Zest

Italoamericano

• 1 oz Italicus Rosolio di Bergamotto
• 1 oz Savoia Americano Rosso
• Top with Grapefruit soda
• Garnish with Grapefruit zest

Calabria Spritz

Italicus

Courtesy of the Hoxton Hotel in Paris, France

• Italicus Rosolio di Bergamotto
• Prosecco
• Garnish with olives and rosemary

Caffe Italia

Italicus

Presented at Tales of the Cocktail, recipe by Lorenzo Antinori

• 35ml Italicus Rosolio di Bergamotto
• 25ml Fresh Cold Brew Coffee
• 0.2ml Cardamom Bitters
• Garnish with fresh mint

Negroni at SAVOIA

Italicus

• 50ml Savoia Americano
• 25ml Mezcal
• 3 flakes of bitter cocoa

Mix the ingredients and serve in a glass with ice. Decorate with a red chili.

Romeo & Julietta

Italicus

40ml Savoia Americano
15ml Italicus Rosolio with bergamot
50ml Prosecco

Mix the ingredients and serve in a glass with ice. To give an extra touch of class, decorate with a red rose petal and edible gold dust.

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• San Diego bartenders share their favorite Mexican cocktails

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Château Ducru Beaucaillou 2016🤩

 

https://www.vinsetmillesimes.com/en/ducru-beaucaillou/101596-ducru-beaucaillou-2016.html

 

20/20
La Revue du Vin de France

99/100
The Wine Independent

98/100
Andreas Larsson - Tasted
Fresh, intense and floral nose with fine layers with ripe dark fruit, cassis, black cherry with discreet oak, gentle notes of mocha and coffee bean with tobacco and sage. Very dense and persistent palate with well-preserved freshness, notes of crushed black currant with tobacco, sage and mint spiciness. Very digest and savoury finish with serious length, polished tannin like cocoa powder adding freshness and length.

98/100
VertdeVin
The nose is elegant, fruity and offers a beautiful definition, a beautiful race as well as a very fine intensity. It reveals notes of fleshy blackberry and wild strawberry associated with small touches of cassis as well as discreet hints of tonka bean, violet, Sichuan pepper, spices, graphite and an imperceptible hint of cardamom. The palate is fruity and offers a beautiful definition, delicacy, a beautiful finesse of the grain, a beautiful suavty , a very beautiful elegance, a beautiful finesse of the structure, an acidulous frame, a beautiful purity of the fruit as well as minerality. On the palate this wine expresses notes of blackberry, cassis and more slightly strawberry associated with touches of small fruits, liquorice , vanilla, an imperceptible hint of blueberry (in the background) as well as very fine touches of chocolate, toasted oak and a very discreet hint of caramelization. Beautiful chews on the finish. Tannisn are fine, elegant, well-built and struturing . Gourmandize and appetence on the aftertaste. A very beautiful wine, fine, elegant, delicate and perfectly well-balanced between power, concentration, gourmandize and elegance. Beautiful success ! Beautiful persistence !

99/100
Jeff Leve, The Wine Cellar Insider
Powerful, intense, rich, long, full-bodied, and concentrated, the wine is almost off the charts. From start to finish, this is a wow wine! As good as the nose is, on the palate, the wine explodes. The fruit is expansive, building and moving as it coats your palate. The seamless finish hits every nook and cranny in your mouth with layer after layer of lush, opulent, complex fruits. Drink from 2030-2065.

98/100
Robert Parker Wine Advocate
Very deep purple-black in color, the 2016 Ducru-Beaucaillou delivers a pronounced, enticing nose of baked plums, blueberry preserves, fruitcake and boysenberry with suggestions of lilacs, mocha, hoisin and exotic spices plus a waft of cedar chest. Full-bodied, rich and opulent in the mouth, the palate has layer upon layer of black fruit preserves and spicy nuances, matched by a very firm, grainy frame, finishing with epic length and depth.

100/100
Jeb Dunnuck
An absolute legendary wine that's as good as anything out there, the 2016 Château Ducru-Beaucaillou is reminiscent of the 2010, yet perhaps with a touch more opulence. A total blockbuster of a wine, it offers huge minerality as well as pure crème de cassis, liquid violets, graphite, and hints of tobacco that all emerge on the nose, and this fabulous Ducru-Beaucaillou is full-bodied, massively concentrated, and structured, yet somehow never loses its overarching sense of purity, balance, and elegance. This ultra-classic beauty deserves another decade of bottle age and will evolve gracefully for another 3-4 decades. Hats off to proprietor Bruno Borie for another incredible achievement.

99/100
James Suckling
Super perfumed, attractive violets with a thread of fresh blueberries, cassis, blackberries and dark plums, delivering a very enticing impression. Beautiful ripeness here. The tannins are perfectly ripe and layers meld into each other, carrying deep, graceful and plush, velvety dark fruit long into the vibrant and seductive, chocolate-laced finish. Great potential. Try from 2024.