Hello Friends,

I want to thank all of you for your support during the recent Mission Critical pledge drive. We asked and you answered. A special thanks those of you who became first time subscribers. We need you and it was gratifying to see how many of you showed up. Now onto the show.

As a child, I was fascinated by old movies, especially The Thin Man series and their ilk. Much of my enjoyment involves watching the stagecraft around alcohol. The moments of actors making and sipping drinks. There's something about the whole process, how people hold their glasses, hold the shaker, how they add the ingredients, and how they wave the drink around while talking. It adds this whole other layer to the reality that's being created. And for me, it was the equivalent of being an adult; this type of drinking conveyed social status and revealed personality. Odd, then, that I evolved into not much of a drinker. Even so, I loved hearing historian Hadley Meares talk about the history of drinking in the movies. I think you will too.

If the bottles in your bar are dusty from lack of use, the pause of a holiday is a good excuse to explore and take the time to make a cocktail. Get out that shaker, throw in some ice, pour yourself a drink, and settle in to watch an old movie. 

Here's another idea for this weekend. The Huntington Library Rose Garden is popping off. Go gaze at color and form and relax. 

This summer, I'm planning on taking more frequent short trips. I'm good at going away internationally, but somehow I get stuck when it comes to a jaunt up north. So tell me, when you're headed to Northern California, do you just jump in the car or do you fly? I keep doing that calculation of the amount of time spent just getting to LAX or Burbank and then airport waiting time, then the car rental situation on the other end. Yep. I just convinced myself to drive. It's only seven hours to get where I need to go, and I'll already have a car (truck in my case) when I get there.

The Week's Dining Highlights from the GF Team

Evan is the host of Good Food.
I didn't dine out this week, but I did cook. This is the second time I made the Dubu Jorim aka Spicy Braised Tofu, from the Umma cookbook. Once you have the ingredients, it's easy to throw together. I admit to cheating a bit and using a kimchi spice paste I had in the pantry since it was made from many similar ingredients. The dish will now be in my bi-weekly repertoire. 

Gillian is the voice of the market report and the Supervising Producer. 
Nicole Rucker's Extra Spicy Ginger Molasses Cookie from her new Fat + Flour cookbook. My friend Betsy brought them to our Cookbook Club last Sunday, and they were so good that I stole a few extra to take home.

Laryl is the Senior Director of Good Food Content.  
On a trip to Big Sur, I enjoyed Taco Tuesday at Esalen and the classic breakfast at Deetjen's.

Elina is a Digital Producer. 
The classic chashu bowl of udon at Marugame Udon is a fave. They also make excellent shrimp tempura.

Keep on trucking, as we used to say,
Evan

Whether it's Humphrey Bogart's French 75 in Casablanca, Audrey Hepburn's Mississippi Punch in Breakfast at Tiffany's, or James Bond's martini (shaken, not stirred, of course), vintage movies had a way of making cocktails look like the apex of leisure and sophistication. Historian Hadley Meares looks at how Hollywood sips cocktails on the big screen. 

Author Aaron Goldfarb pinpoints 2010 as the moment the mania for vintage spirits took off. Bottles of Pappy Van Winkle began selling for outrageous prices as collectors sought older vintages. "Unlike wine or beer, we don't exactly say that spirits age. We call them liquid time capsules because of their proof and the way they're made. Once they're bottled and someone opens them, you're literally tasting what a person would have tasted when it was bottled," Goldfarb says. His book about collectors is Dusty Booze: In Search of Vintage Spirits.

When you think about cocktails in history, who do you imagine making and serving them, and where? It's inevitably a man in a bar, right? This, despite the fact that the majority of our cocktail consumption has taken place at home. Dr. Nicola Nice shares a very accessible women's history through the hostesses who shaped cocktail history. Her book, The Cocktail Parlor: How Women Brought the Cocktail Home, takes a look at how women shaped cocktail culture. 

Lesley Jacobs Solmonson opens her book, Liqueur: A Global History, with an extraordinary sentence from 18th century writer Polycarpe Poncelet, "I look on a well-prepared liqueur as a species of musical air." She says that Poncelet really captured both the ephemeral nature of liqueur and also this emotional resonance it has." Lesley's book would be a great gift for a father who loves liqueur.

"Absinthe is special. It's the only spirit that was banned in almost every country around the world for most of a century," says Evan Rail, whose latest book is The Absinthe Forager: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal and the World's Most Dangerous Spirit. This book, which reads like a detective story, unravels the mystery of a man who defrauded collectors at the height of the spirit's popularity.