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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. 

[Vesper 28,796]

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 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 16,838]

Mehmet Ozil -his eyes are offside 🤣

[Vesper 28,796]

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 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,796]

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 28,796]

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 4,477]

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.

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Crémant, the next best thing to champagne

Sales of the sparkling wine are soaring, thanks to its affordability and variety. Here are the best bottles to buy now

https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/food-drink/article/cremant-sparkling-wine-best-offers-bottles-dkhmq7vh9

 

Sales of crémant, the wallet-friendly bubbly from France, are soaring. Aldi has added a couple of new lines to its list, with shoppers clearing shelves of its very popular light, smooth, orchard-fruited 2022 Crémant du Jura (£10.99) the minute it lands. Over at Waitrose sales leapt 51 per cent this spring and the Wine Society has just sold out of its bestseller. Made by the same method and often from the same grapes — chardonnay and pinot noir — crémant is the next best thing to champagne, but for half the price.

What can confuse drinkers is the variety of crémants on offer. There are eight different regions where it is made — Burgundy, Loire, Bordeaux, Alsace, Limoux, Die, Jura and Savoie — each using a clutch of different grapes, hence the different flavours. Unlike champagne, crémant is aged for less time on its yeasty lees, or sediment, with less pressure behind the cork, making for a lighter, creamier fizz (which is what crémant means in French). Consequently it has less of those rich, nutty, brioche flavours that champagne drinkers love.

If it’s got to be a champagne taste-alike, then a tasty chardonnay and pinot noir-influenced crémant de bourgogne is the closest you’ll get. For my money the Cave de Lugny co-op in the Maconnais region in southern Burgundy is the producer to raid. Take your pick from a couple of star buys: Waitrose’s 100 per cent chardonnay Blanc de Blancs or Tesco’s pinot noir-led fizz, topped up with 40 per cent chardonnay and 10 per cent gamay. Booths’ Cave de Lugny Crémant de Bourgogne, a slightly different blend of chardonnay, pinot noir and gamay, delivers ripe, grapey, citrus fruit for £12.75.

Crémant de Loire is the next best bet and the 2020 Generation Series Crémant de Loire, (thewinesociety.com, £14.50, from the end of October), delivers rich, floral, yellow apple chenin blanc and cabernet franc charm, topped up with chardonnay and grolleau.

In my experience Bordeaux and Alsace are less impressive sparklers but Waitrose’s Crémant d’Alsace from the Turckheim co-op, £9.99 down from £13.99, delivers a good tenner’s worth of tart, tutti-frutti style.

The best crémant to buy now

 

Specially Selected Crémant de Loire, France
12 per cent, Aldi, £8.99
Class-act crémant doesn’t come much cheaper than this racy green-apple, chenin-blanc-led steal.

Crémant de Bourgogne Blanc de Blancs, France
11.5 per cent, Waitrose, £12.99 down from £16.99
Still my favourite blanc de blancs crémant, a zippy lemon-zest and saline-edged chardonnay gem.

Crémant de Limoux, Domaine Collin, France
12.5 per cent, yapp.co.uk, £17.50
Another brilliant chardonnay-led bubbly, topped up with pinot noir, all leafy tree-fruit, mineral-finished charm.

Crémant de Bourgogne, France
11.5 per cent, Tesco, £15
From Cave de Lugny like Waitrose’s, but pinot noir-dominant, hence its lively yet rounded, nutty red fruit.

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Middle Eastern recipes from Honey & Co’s home kitchen: tinned tuna cakes

https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/food-drink/article/middle-eastern-recipes-from-honey-cos-home-kitchen-tinned-tuna-cakes-h2lm5r505

This recipe is inspired by one of our favourite Israeli food writers, Sherry Ansky. We have adapted her original recipe to our kitchen and taste through the years. Her excellent writing and recipes are treasures that aren’t widely available in English, so we see it as our duty and privilege to bring this dish to you. Serve hot, or at room temperature, or in a pitta with a picnic, along with some yoghurt, maybe some sliced vegetables and a squeeze of lemon.

Makes 8 patties

For the fish cakes

 

1 large potato or 2 small ones, about 180g

 

1 small onion, about 100g

 

1 carrot, about 140g, grated

 

160g tin of tuna in oil, drained

 

1 tbsp small baby capers or chopped larger ones, or even diced pickled cucumbers

 

1 tbsp harissa paste, to taste

For frying

 

1 egg

 

70g plain flour

 

1 tsp smoked paprika

 

Vegetable oil

01 Place the potato and onion (both whole and unpeeled) in a small pan with 1 tsp salt and cover with plenty of water. Boil until just soft, about 20-25 minutes. Don’t be tempted to dice the potato before boiling, as it will retain too much water.

02 Drain the pan and, once you can handle them easily, peel the potato and onion, then cut into small dice.

03 Mix the diced vegetables in a bowl with all the other fish cake ingredients and a generous pinch of freshly ground black pepper. Make sure they are well combined.

04 Use your hands to shape small rounded cakes, each about 50g. If they are very soft, place them in the fridge for 20 minutes; if they are firm, you can cook them straightaway.

05 Lightly beat the egg in a small bowl. Mix the flour, paprika and ½ tsp salt together in a separate bowl. Pour a good amount of oil (about 2cm deep) in a frying pan and heat to about 170C. Prepare a plate with some sheets of kitchen paper on it.

06 Toss each cake in the seasoned flour, then dip it into the egg. Carefully place in the hot oil. Fry until beautifully golden on the bottom, then flip and fry the other side (it should take about 2 minutes each side). If the oil gets too hot, remove the pan from the hob for a few seconds and reduce the heat.

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Tuna fritters with tzatziki

 

Serves 2 people as a starter

For the fritters

 

1 medium potato, peeled

 

½ courgette

 

160g tin of tuna in water, drained

 

150g canned sweetcorn, drained

 

½ bunch of parsley, leaves only, finely chopped

 

50g plain flour

 

1 egg

 

2 tsp crushed chilli flakes

 

Tabasco sauce

 

1 lemon, cut into wedges

 

Sunflower oil

For the tzatziki

 

½ cucumber, peeled

 

125g full-fat Greek yoghurt

 

Zest and juice of 1 lemon

 

1 small clove of garlic, minced

01 To make the fritters, coarsely grate the potato and courgette and combine in a bowl. Add the tuna, corn and parsley, then mix thoroughly before adding the flour and the egg. Season with the chilli flakes, Tabasco and salt and pepper. Set aside.

02 To make the tzatziki, cut the cucumber in half lengthways and deseed. Coarsely grate the flesh and put in a sieve. Using the rounded side of a spoon, press out as much liquid as possible and then combine the flesh in a bowl with the yoghurt, lemon zest and juice and garlic. Season with salt and pepper. Set aside.

03 Heat a generous splash of sunflower oil in a thick-bottomed frying pan over medium-high heat. Once the oil is hot enough, spoon two portions of the fritter mixture into the pan. Cook for 3-4 minutes until golden brown. Flip the fritters and cook for another 3-4 minutes until crispy and done. Lift them out and drain on kitchen paper. Repeat until the mixture has been used up.

04 Serve the fritters alongside the lemon wedges, with the tzatziki in a separate bowl.

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Mackerel and potato frittata

Serves 2 people as a main

ingredients

 

200g Yukon gold (or baking) potatoes, peeled and halved

 

6 eggs

 

50ml milk

 

Olive oil

 

2 x 125g tins of mackerel in sunflower oil, drained

 

1 handful fresh spinach, coarsely chopped

 

75g grated fontina cheese

 

¼ bunch of rocket, leaves only

01 Heat the oven to 160C (180C non-fan). Boil the potatoes in a pan with plenty of salted water until fork tender. Let them cool a little before cutting into 2mm-3mm slices. Set aside.

02 Whisk the eggs with the milk in a bowl and season with salt and pepper. Mix in the potato slices until they’re all thoroughly coated.

03 Heat some olive oil in an ovenproof pan over medium-high heat, pour in the potato and egg mixture, add the mackerel and press it down a little, cooking on a low heat with the lid on until the egg starts to set.

04 Top the frittata with spinach, scatter the fontina on top and season with salt and pepper. Put the pan in the oven for 5-7 minutes until the spinach has wilted and the cheese melted. Serve the frittata with rocket.

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Sardine hummus

Serves 2 people as a starter

INGREDIENTS

 

200g tinned chickpeas, drained

 

½ clove of garlic

 

2 tbsp tahini

 

½ bunch of flat-leaf parsley, tough stalks removed, plus extra leaves

 

Juice of ½ lemon

 

1 tbsp chilli flakes

 

1 tsp Tabasco

 

1 tsp ground cumin

 

1 tsp salt

 

3 tbsp water, plus extra (optional)

 

3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra (optional)

 

120g tinned sardines in olive oil, drained

 

1 tsp hot smoked paprika

01 Coarsely grind the chickpeas, garlic, tahini, parsley, lemon juice, chilli flakes, Tabasco, cumin and salt in a food processor. Slowly pour in the water and olive oil and process until smooth. Add more water and/or olive oil for a creamier texture. Season with salt and pepper.

02 Put the hummus in a bowl and top with the sardines. Scatter the extra parsley and the paprika on top and drizzle with olive oil.

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Fava with anchovies

Serves 2 people as a starter

INGREDIENTS

 

Extra-virgin olive oil

 

1 small yellow onion, diced

 

250g yellow split peas, rinsed

 

1 bay leaf

 

Juice of ½ lemon, plus extra (optional)

 

22g tinned anchovies in olive oil, drained

 

1 tsp za’atar

01 Heat some olive oil in a thick-bottomed frying pan over low heat and soften the onion for 3-4 minutes until translucent. Add the split peas and briefly sauté with the onion. Add the bay leaf and enough water to cover the peas by 1.5cm.

02 Bring to the boil, turn down the heat and cook the peas with the lid on loosely for 30-40 minutes until soft. Add water if it looks as if the peas might boil dry.

03 Take the pan off the heat when the peas are soft and creamy. Remove the bay leaf. Put the lid back on and rest for 30 minutes.

04 Grind the peas in a food processor with the lemon juice, 2-3 splashes of extra-virgin olive oil and salt and pepper until smooth. Add extra oil and/or lemon juice to your personal taste.

05 Serve the pea purée with the anchovies, za’atar and olive oil.