Category Archives: food

Redisintermediation exemplar: John Cope’s Toasted Dried Sweet Corn

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When we lived in Hanover, PA a few years ago, we started buying boxes of a Lancaster delicacy: John Cope’s Toasted Dried Sweet Corn.

It’s good, and difficult to replicate. No other cornmeal or bready preparations are substitutes. There are no doubt a number of delicious recipes possible, but the one that is printed at the top of the box (or bag, these days) is still best, just as using Jiffy Mix for corn muffins is better than the supernumerary suggestions of waffles or even johnnycakes.

Also, in re John Cope’s effort: it’s cheap.

Buy it from the manufacturer, or their distributor, in 12-bag cases, and including shipping it’s less than $3.50 per box.

Zingerman’s Deli, here in lovely Ann Arbor, charges more than $11 for a single 7.5 oz tin. Because it’s artisanal, no doubt. Or maybe the tin is worth the effort, since it’s made by hand by Russian Amish people specifically for Zingerman’s, and flown here sustainably or something. Because that would be a $7 metal tin, I guess.

Plus shipping, if you don’t live in lovely Ann Arbor.

And if you search for it at Amazon, you can pay a mere 100% markup. Plus shipping and handling. Or for some kind of odd bulk repackaging I’ve never seen before, slightly less.

Let’s just sit ourselves down a minute, in these days of local communitarian sentiments and economic crisis and belt-tightening and thoughtful economy and direct compensation of artists and craftspeople for their intelligent work and sustainable transportation and stuff… and think about those alternatives.

Less than $3.50 per unit, net, for twelve you could share among friends. Said money sent direct to the manufacturer, I assume. At least closer to them than any alternative in the supply chain.

Or $8 or more for retail pricing of the same volume. In a metal bin, if you’re really fancy.

I note, by way of a fucking point: It is not illegal, to date, for purchasers to enter into informal agreements with one another to collaboratively seek bargains by sharing informational or practical costs.

I’m going to spend December thinking about that, OK? The whole damned Black Friday of a month.

And my mind may wander from dried sweet corn to beer, or other foods, or books, or magazine subscriptions, or toys, or DVD rentals, or copy-editing one another’s writing, or consulting referrals, or newspaper article writing, or photography, or design, or gardening, or building houses and communities. It might make a bit of sense for me to look at cartoonish John Cope, with his stereotypical bushy beard, and think a minute.

Just one minute. Especially if I’m tempted to play at Black-bumper sustainability, and conspicuously consume artisanal foods without thinking about the supply chain that got them to me.

Winter squash caramel

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The local (MIchigan, or even just Midwestern) winter squashes are coming available in the local produce markets. Mexican winter squash is never hardened off enough, and lacks a sweet dryness that’s necessary for the way we cook it.

Which is: Cut the winter squash (butternut, acorn, delicata) in half, remove seeds, place face-down on a cookie sheet coated liberally with peanut oil, cook at 400°F until brown burned crap comes out around the edges.

Here’s the trick (one even my loving wife doesn’t understand or appreciate): Eat the brown burned crap.

As far as I can see, that’s the sugary juice of the squash, expressed and deep-fried in the peanut oil around the flesh of the vegetable as it desiccates and cooks. The natural sugars toast, then burn in the oil. They make caramel. Not like the crap you get from cane or beet sugar. Delicious squash caramel. Good enough, and flavorful enough, that you should eat even the black puffy crunchy stuff.

No, really: try it. Bitter? Yes. But bitter in a delicious way.

[At this point I walk back over to the stove and scrape more black burned squash juice chips off the pan, and then reach in with my hands and pick them off and stuff the tiniest fragments into my mouth.]

This is good. This is Autumn, distilled and purified. Browned, the flavor of senescence and comfortable decline. The sweetness of memory, the bitterness of unavoidable demise, the promise of stockpiled provender, of things set aside and kept long after the world sleeps—long after that ephemeral green crap of Spring and Summer can even be wistfully recalled.