Camper English's Blog, page 3
May 1, 2025
Talking About Ice on the America's Test Kitchen’s Proof Podcast
I did an interview with America’s Test Kitchen a long time ago, and it just went up. The first half of the episode is on the history of ice. I come in at around 27 minutes in.
The episode is called Why Are Americans So Obsessed with Ice?
Start your own ice obsession by buying books mentioned in the episode:
The Ice Book, by me! [amazon] [bookshop] More info here.
Ice by Amy Brady [amazon] [bookshop]
March 31, 2025
How to Stretch a Lime - My Story in the SF Chronicle
I wrote about oleo citrate and super juice for the San Francisco Chronicle.
These are techniques for increasing the yield from citrus fruits by eight times or so, using a touch of citric and malic acid powder in a specific way to bump up the flavor and texture of citrus to extend it over a large volume.
Bartenders in the Bay Area have begun experimenting with the technique, not because our locals love high-tech processing of natural ingredients (our locals very much do not) but because threatened tariffs on imports from Mexico would make limes more expensive- as well as tequila and agave nectar.
The story may be paywalled, but check it out here:
Tariffs could make Bay Area cocktails more expensive. This ‘super juice’ may be a solution
By Camper English
Unless bartenders figure out something soon, margaritas could soon cause sticker shock on cocktail menus across the Bay Area. The tequila, limes and agave syrup used in them may all come from Mexico, and imports on them will face tariffs if President Trump follows through with his threats.
Eric Ochoa, partner at the bar Dalva in San Francisco’s Mission District, has been weighing his options and not finding any great ones. He could increase the price of the drink, or take the “shrinkflation” route, reducing the quantity of tequila or mezcal from 2 ounces per drink to 1½. Or he could swap out fresh-squeezed lime juice for “super juice” to cut costs on one ingredient at least. A citrus juice preparation resulting in six to eight times the liquid of regular juice from the same amount of fruit, it’s a technique that bartenders around the region and the country are testing out to squeeze their fruit for all it’s worth.
March 13, 2025
San Francisco Then And Now
I am reading The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld by Herbert Asbury for the first time as I research San Francisco cocktail history.
(You can buy it on [amazon] [bookshop] to support this blog.)
My impression of this book is that the “informal” part of the history is important to note - you’d need to fact check it if you’d want to use the information academically. But anyway:
I like the below section of the book as it speaks equally to today in 2025 as it did to 1850! I am starting to get interested in how cities maintain their personalities over decades and centuries, not just due to demographics but… residual vibe.
Despite the amazingly high cost of living and the extraordinary opportunities for frittering away money, everyone in early San Francisco was supremely confident that he would soon be able to return home with an incalculable amount of gold. Everything was conceived on a vast scale, and there was always plenty of cash available for any scheme that might be proposed, no matter how impossible or bizarre it seemed. No one hesitated to borrow money, although for several years the prevailing rates of interest ranged from eight to fifteen per cent a month, payable in advance, and even higher unless gilt-edged security was provided. Everyone was in such a hurry to get rich that few men were willing to bind themselves to any sort of contract for a longer period than a month, the time basis upon which nearly all business was transacted. Real estate that a few years before had brought enormous prices from speculators, fifty-vara lots which had been granted by the Alcalde upon payment of twelve to sixteen dollars, sold for tens of thousands. Fortunes were made with incredible rapidity in real estate, in building, in merchandising, at the gaming-table, and in every conceivable sort of business and speculation; yet little was thought of or talked about except gold mining. Any occupation, however great the stream of profit, was regarded merely as a stopgap pending a lucky strike in the gold-fields; probably the only men who devoted themselves wholeheartedly to the business at hand were the gamblers. The town was filled with tales, seldom verified, of the few fortunate miners who were gathering fortunes in the diggings at the rate of five hundred, a thousand, and, in a few cases, ten thousand dollars a day; everyone heard of the man who had picked up a chunk of pure gold weighing thirteen pounds and worth thirty-five thousand dollars, and of the two men who had discovered an even larger nugget and had immediately left for the East to exhibit it at fifty cents a look. But practically nothing was heard of the thousands of hard-working men who were on the verge of starvation in the hills, nor of the thousands of others who, discouraged and disappointed, had returned to San Francisco and were living in squalor and destitution.
March 8, 2025
Don’t Drink and Send Telegrams - and Other Advice from 100 Years of Cocktail Etiquette Books
My first story for Food & Wine just went live.
I took advice from 95 years of cocktail etiquette books, beginning in 1930 and ending with the publication of How to Be a Better Drinker last week [amazon] [bookshop].
I had fun going through my cocktail book collection to find other etiquette books, including The Official Preppy Handbook, to cite.
Anyway, check out the story here!
March 6, 2025
April through May 2025 Drink Book Releases
I am keeping all the year’s new drink books on this post:
New Drink Book Releases in 2025
But I wanted to make sure that you saw just the new updates so I’ll repeat then here.
April through May 2025 Drink Book Releases
The Official Barbie Cocktail Book: 50 Dreamy Recipes for Inspired Entertaining
Amazon
Bookshop
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Mood Drinks: Alcohol-Free Cocktails to Create the Perfect Mood
Amazon
Bookshop
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Hard Seltzer, Iced Tea, Kombucha, and Cider: How to Make Your Own Boozy Fermented Drinks
Amazon
Bookshop
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Tequila Wars: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico
Amazon
Bookshop
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The Curious Bartender's Agave Safari: Discovering and appreciating Mexico's tequilas, mezcals & more
Amazon
Bookshop
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Casablanca Cocktails: We'll Always Have Aperitifs
Amazon
Bookshop
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The Unauthorized Court of Cocktails: Recipes for your Romantasies
Amazon
Bookshop
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The Brandy Milk Punch
Amazon
Bookshop
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The Unofficial A Court of Thorns and Roses Cocktail Book
Amazon
Bookshop
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February 18, 2025
Alcoholism, Absinthism, and Prescription Absinthe in Algeria
I just finished reading The Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France's Most Notorious Drink [amazon] [bookshop] by Nina Studer. The book is an academic look at parts of absinthe’s history.
(I wrote another blog post about one aspect of it - that wine was considered a better base spirit than grain or sugar beets.)
Two additional facts stuck out to me about the medicinal history of absinthe I learned in the book. These are important to me, as I wrote a book about the history of alcohol and medicine.
Absinthe was not Prescribed against Disease in Africa
Absinthe as we know it was most likely “invented” in Switzerland and commercialized in Pontarlier, France. It became popular in Algeria, North Africa, among French soldiers in the colonization effort there. Later, due to those returning soldiers and national pride, it became popular at the cafes in Paris and Marseilles and elsewhere in mainland France.
However it is frequently written that the French soldiers in Algeria were prescribed daily rations of absinthe to fight against dysentery and malaria. But Studer writes, “I have already discussed in my 2015 article, “The Green Fairy in the Maghreb,” I have not come across a single source from the period of 1830-1847… or the in the years immediately following the French victory that recommended or even discussed daily absinthe rations for French soldiers."
The army sometimes even prohibited the sale of absinthe to soldiers. However, the soldiers did drink a ton of absinthe and did believe that it was preventative against disease. And they did popularize it back in France. It’s the word “prescribed” that should probably be changed in the history of absinthe.
Alcoholism vs Absinthism
Wine, beer, and cider were called “hygienic” beverages in France, and absinthe “artificial.” Other distilled spirits and liqueurs were also considered more dangerous than wholesome fermented drinks. Further, the term “alcoholism” was used in its early days only referring to the condition we know today when distilled spirits were consumed, not really when people only drank fermented ones. [Studer doesn’t go into this distinction between fermented and distilled specifically, but it would be interesting to study further, as this seems to be the case in other countries as well.]
Absinthe was considered “artificial” due to the wormwood/anise flavor and probably also the distilled base spirit behind it. And the physical effects from drinking absinthe were distinct - absinthe consumption was associated with epileptic-type seizures specifically, and later a propensity for violence. (For a time of course it was also considered a source of artistic inspiration.)
The term “absinthism” was used to basically describe alcoholism when the alcohol in question was absinthe (though absinthe drinkers usually consumed other alcohol as well). Studer writes, “The 1860s saw the emergence of the diagnosis of absinthism, based on the diagnoses or alcoholism, which had only been developed in the 1850s.”
“The first medical publication that defined the addiction to absinthe as a separate diagnosis from alcoholism seems to have been August Motet’s 1859 medical dissertation.”
These diagnoses being defined so close together indicates to me that absinthism was a sub-category of alcoholism, where alcoholism really only applied to drinking absinthe anyway. But the supposed special effects of absinthe drinking were not correct in the first place.
A 2006 article "Absinthism: a fictitious 19th century syndrome with present impact” summarized it thus:
The only consistent conclusion that can be drawn from those 19th century studies about absinthism is that wormwood oil but not absinthe is a potent agent to cause seizures. Neither can it be concluded that the beverage itself was epileptogenic nor that the so-called absinthism can exactly be distinguished as a distinct syndrome from chronic alcoholism.
The book The Absinthe Forger cited a lot of animal studies in which animals were injected with wormwood oil and died in convulsions, alluded to in the above quote. Wormwood oil does cause these issues in high doses (a case in humans is cited in my book) but nowhere near the same doses as found in the beverage absinthe; only concentrated wormwood oil.
I believe I implied or outright stated in Doctors and Distillers that absinthism was used as another word for alcoholism. I think that’s true in practice because there were not many diagnoses of alcoholism from other beverages.
Studer writes, “Absinthism and alcoholism were confused, and alcohol dependent people were simply deemed ‘absinthe drinkers.'"
Purchase links (may earn me a commission)
The Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France's Most Notorious Drink [amazon] [bookshop]
Doctors and Distillers: The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails [Amazon][Bookshop]
February 14, 2025
February 12, 2025
Why Did The Lake Ice Industry End?
Another section cut from my Vinepair article on lake ice from Norway (yesterday I shared the section on different types of ice blocks) is this one below. In it I explain why lake ice went out of fashion. It wasn’t only that ice making machines got better….
Rise of the Machines
In her book Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks--a Cool History of a Hot Commodity, author Amy Brady describes the downfall of the natural ice industry. Now that ice had become a daily necessity in America toward the end of the 1800s, ice companies harvested blocks from local rivers adjacent to cites; not just from far-afield crystalline lakes. The water was often polluted with agricultural and industrial waste, and in some years the bacteria-laden ice caused outbreaks of disease. (Even more problematically, these same source rivers were used for the drinking water.)
Bartenders noticed. The Standard Manual of Soda and Other Beverages, published in 1897, noted, “Some dealers put shaved ice into the soda water when served. It is a tedious process to grind the ice on a shaver, and makes the process of serving drinks much slower; ice is usually impure, and the beverage is really not fit to drink; and lastly, the beverage quickly loses its gas and tastes flat.”
Dirty soda wasn’t the only issue impacting the old-school ice business. The period of natural global cooling known as the Little Ice Age was ending- 1850 is usually cited as the end of the era. Many lakes previously harvested for ice didn’t freeze as deep as they used to; in some years not at all.
Machine-made ice also became less expensive into the early 1900s, especially after manufacturers switched to using ammonia as a coolant. Brady writes, “Withing a few years of [World War I in 1918] ending, the electric refrigerator went from being a novelty of the rich to one of the country’s most common household appliances.”
Machine ice had become the new standard, so some extant companies clinging to solvency tried to rebrand their old-fashioned lake ice handmade by Mother Nature as a craft luxury good. It didn’t catch on at the time, but maybe one of these days…
Read the original article on Vinepair here.
February 11, 2025
Ice Blocks Are Made in Many Different Ways
In the story I wrote for Vinepair about harvesting lake ice in Norway, a couple sections got cut out. They weren’t essential to the story, but I liked them a lot!
This first section is about ice blocks - I was researching the blocks people use at different ice hotels and ice carving festivals to see if they were machine or nature-made. The results are fascinating:
Other Lakes, Other Places
Not all ice blocks are equal. The Minnesota Ice Festival this year features the world’s largest ice maze, with all the 3,452, 425-pound blocks for it produced by a fast (and semi-clear) brine-cooled block-making machine owned by Minnesota Ice.
Orderud of DesignIce in Norway says that the blocks for a lot of other ice mazes and ice hotels (the non-see-through parts anyway) are typically made from compressed snow, rather than ice. Clear Clinebell blocks are sometimes used for the windows.
The Songhua River is the source for “most” of the thousands upon thousands of ice blocks used for the huge annual Ice and Snow Festival in Harbin, China, not too far from the northern border with Russia. Reportedly there are more than 2000 sculptures and constructions in the theme park built from ice or snow, and some of the ice structures reach over 150 feet in height.
And at the World Ice Art Championships, held annually in Fairbanks, Alaska, blocks are taken from gravel ponds and standardized to 6 by 4 by about 2.5 feet (depending on how thick the ice is that year). Leigh Anne Hutchison, member of the Ice Alaska Board of Directors, says of the pond blocks, “Some even are cool enough to have methane bubbles in them.”
That sounds a bit more “scary” than “cool,” until you realize that nobody is trying to eat that ice. (The blocks with methane bubbles do look pretty groovy though; she sent me pictures.) As far as Orderud is aware, none of the naturally frozen ice for these or any other festivals is served in drinks.
Read the story on Vinepair here, and imagine this section in it.
February 10, 2025
The Return of Ice from Lakes
I visited Norway late last year to see an “ice farm.” I wrote it up for Vinepair.
The story I turned in was about twice as long (my bad) so I’ll also share some of the stuff that was cut out here over the next couple of days. For now, here is the story.
Frosty, cooling drinks like juleps and cobblers were trending in early 1800s America, their popularity driven by the recent year-round availability of ice. Blocks of it were cut from ponds and lakes in Massachusetts and Maine in the winters, then sold locally or exported abroad on ships specially insulated to keep as much of it solid as possible.
When the cold cocktail trend caught on in the United Kingdom, thanks in part to books like Charlie Paul’s “Recipes of American and other Iced Drinks,” London ice delivery men wore uniforms with eagle buttons to reinforce the product’s U.S. provenance. Initially, ice was a luxury product over there, and the Wenham Lake Ice Company (located just north of Salem, Mass.) was the leading provider in London, at least until counterfeit cubes flooded the market.
In 1873, The Food Journal reported that “the use of ice has gradually increased among our population in the last twenty years, at an ever-accelerating rate, although it is as yet by no means as necessary an article in our domestic economy as among our American cousins,” and also that most of the U.K.’s ice now came from Norway. The country had a long-established relationship selling ice (usually along with fish) to the U.K. and wanted in on the cool new action. In fact, one Norwegian company renamed one of its local lakes from Lake Oppegård to Wenham Lake so that it could sell its ice under the same name as the famous American company.
