Not ready to be made into a coonskin cap. Image via Old Chum.

1. Carry it around every day. A lot of people who are invested in what little space there is in their pockets make room for a pocket knife. Pocket Dumps, Everyday Carry.

2. Be wholesome. Mumbelty peg is a game of knife feats. It’s competitive and skill-driven, and the loser is punished heartily by having to pull a peg out of the ground with his teeth. The American Boy’s Book of Sport has diagrams of the knife-flipping tricks one must accomplish in order to be crowned winner.

There are other variations of mumbelty peg, including an ill-advised one that requires a pair of duelers with more stupidity than skill. The one who throws a knife closest to his own foot wins. Stick your own foot and you win automatically.

3. Skin a raccoon. If you come across a furry friend that’s given up the ghost, this guide teaches you how to turn that fresh road kill into a pair of fur socks (or cap, or pouch), using only nature’s tools. Which means the animal’s own brains.

4. Whittle. Art of Manliness’ guide to whittling takes you from knowing nothing to knowing something about how to fill up your time with little more than a tree branch and a pocket knife.

5. One thing you can’t do with a pocket knife is use it as a weapon. If you think through defending yourself while getting ambushed in a back alley, you’ll quickly come to the conclusion that you will have to get very, very close to an attacker before you can scratch the surface of the person’s skin with a pocket knife. If you’re thinking of attacking someone, you better hope that person is already in a coma, because you’re likely to get a knee to the balls before you can set your pocket knife in action. Here’s a run-down by an expert on why knife fighting is a crazy myth that, if executed, will end in tears and/or prison: “Knife Fighting Lies,” No Nonsense Self Defense.

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Errol Flynn, Nora Eddington, Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles enjoying the fruit of 10,000 years of human technology.

For a single ingredient wheat flour has an amazing number of iterations. It can be gruel or wedding cake, Wonder bread or baguette, croissant or hot dog bun. Flour seems simple, but it can give the occasional baker some anxiety — what exactly separates a good pie crust from a bad pie crust when it’s just flour, fat and water? Why is this cookie recipe calling for bread flour, and should I care that I don’t have it?

Read on for a primer. A little de-mystifying means better sweets for you.

A soft white loaf.

The thing that separates one type of flour from the next is its gluten protein content. The difference is big enough that a recipe that calls for one type of flour often turns out very differently if another type of flour is used. For one, high protein flours absorb substantially more water than low protein flours, and will produce stiffer doughs with the same proportion of water. Baking is all about proportions, and a recipe that calls for bread flour takes this into account in the recipe’s ingredient list.

As a guideline, different types of flour are classified under the type of baking they are normally used for. The flour that’s high in strong gluten proteins is generally called bread flour because it makes the highest, chewiest, lightest bread loaves. The gluten forms strong, straight bonds that make a stretchy-er product, a trait that works for other baked goods too, from sticky buns to that amazing New York Times chocolate chip cookie.

If a bread recipe specifically calls for bread flour, be sure to use it. The rising, and most certainly the kneading, needs to happen to the gluten proteins in bread flour. If you’re not using it, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

Christina Tosi of Momofuku Milk Bar fame uses bread flour for her cookies, and in her book calls it “one of those secrets.” The extra large pile of butter in her cookies makes a difference, and she cautions about over-mixing when using bread flour — too much mixing could stiffen and toughen the end product. This is a danger for most cakes and cookies. The trick is to stir in the flour by hand and stop stirring the instant you can’t see flour any more.

This unicorn cake is a long way from its predecessor, the moist gruel.

Pastry flour has a low gluten protein content, and cake flour even lower. This low protein content makes for a more tender baked good. Think of a tall layer cake. Do you want it to be stiff and chewy? No, you do not. You want it to be tender, with a round crumb. That’s why you use this flour when you’re told.

All-purpose flour has a protein content that sits between pastry and bread, and is the most commonly used flour. (Though I’ve found that recipes that play around with this standard can produce some pretty great textures.)

FAKE FLOURS
There are a few tricks to use one flour to mimic the gluten content of another. The operative word here is “mimic” — you can’t really turn an all-purpose flour into a pastry flour, but you can try to fool the gluten proteins into acting differently.

To approximate pastry flour with all-purpose, use one part (by weight, preferably) of cornstarch (which has no gluten) to two parts all-purpose flour.

To fake all-purpose flour with pastry flour, add ¼ part vital wheat gluten to 2 parts pastry flour. How you find yourself in a situation with pastry flour and vital gluten, but no regular flour, I don’t know, but there’s the solution just in case.

When science goes too far. A dessert book on cobbling cakes together from snoballs and twinkies.

Cake flour can’t be mimicked — its starch and fats have been altered by chlorine to be able to take drastically different proportions of sugar and liquid for a very distinctive, velvety soft texture. For the most delicate cakes, like a lemon chiffon, you will have to drag yourself to the store and get a box of cake flour. For less fussy cookies that call for cake flour, you can get away with whipping up a batch of fake pastry flour.

THERE ARE MORE FLOURS
Whole wheat flour has the highest protein content of all, but a lot of the protein comes from the germ and aleurone layer of the wheatberry, which doesn’t form gluten, and the germ and bran particles get in the way of gluten formation. Substituting wheat flour in a recipe that calls for a white flour will throw off the moisture proportions of the recipe and significantly alter the texture. Best to find an equivalent recipe written specifically for whole wheat flour.

Graham flour is an 1800s version of a healthy whole wheat flour, and is usually white flour with the germ and bran added back in. It tastes different from whole wheat flour, but one can be substituted for the other.

Durum wheat flour — the kind used for pasta — is an entirely distinct species of wheat and shouldn’t be substituted.

Home economics was an exacting discipline.

SEEDS OF GRASS
Staying true to the type of flour is the difference between a good cookie and an amazing one, an ok cake or a great one. In the end, it’s not that big a deal, deciding on a flour is more of an assessment on your tolerance for imperfection at that moment.

What’s certain is that flour is more complicated that it looks.

Flour’s been around for 10,000 years, and was one of — if not the first — plant to ever be cultivated by humans. So the history of flour — and the things we can make with it — is closely tied up with human technology.  The part that we use for white flour is are the insides of tiny, individual seeds of grass. It used to take the most muscular men hours to grind wheatberries into an edible meal, and even then, it could only be made into a starvation-delaying, gloppy mush.

A few hundred years ago, separating the germ from the bran and endosperm advanced from being powered by humans or animals, to getting milled with the power of flowing water. The flour this yielded made a lot more than mush, but a cookbook from 1747 still instructs you to beat a cake batter “all well together for an hour with your hand, or a great wooden spoon.”

These days, electric mills slice open wheatberry seeds and a highly sensitive machine separates each particle of ground up endosperm by its miniscule weight, to give us white flour. This sounds like the last word in milling technology, but to this day we can only remove about 75% of the endosperm, but it makes up 83% of the seed. More exact milling could mean higher grade flours for ever-better textures.

That’s just milling techniques – to this day research scientists still dedicate themselves to wheat science and we can only hope that one day, all that mental exertion will translate to a baked good of unimaginable deliciousness.

Celebrating flour and human technology with a rocketship birthday cake.

FURTHER READING
On gluten-free: “It’s rather interesting that the whole celiac disease problem has created a celiac fad diet,” says Dr. Leo Treyzon, who specializes in gastrointestinal disorders at the UCLA. And, “I think there’s a perception that gluten-free equals health. It’s just not the case.” Both from NPR.

Measuring flour correctly makes all the difference. If you don’t have a baking scale, here’s how to do it: How to measure flour, Food52 (video)

A kernel of wheat, Maine Bread

Sliced Bread, Wikipedia

Remember the global food and grain crisis? Bankers figured out that bread is pretty important to people, then found a way to mess it up. “How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis,” Foreign Policy.

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Languidly drinking without interruption.

Punches are originally from India (panch in Hindi), and were taken around the world by the boozy merchant sailors of the British East India Company. The idea of a cocktail you don’t have to make one at a time is good, so where ever it went, it took. The undiscerning rabble stuck by a charming rhyme to make their punches: “One of Sour, Two of Sweet, Three of Strong, Four of Weak.” Easy to remember if you’re already three sheets to the wind, but also handy when the kinds of alcohol and available mixers changed at each docking.

Lucky for us, we’re not limited to what can be dredged up at the port. Here are four punch recipes, dug up or invented (and taste-tested) by Lydia Reissmueller, who’s made cocktail magic in legendary bars from New York to Moscow. Right now, she’s running Tender Bar out of Portland, Oregon.

Stir up these punches for your next dinner party. You’ll feel classy, while sitting back and getting nice and toasted with your friends.

These punches are the opposite of a handle of 5 O’Clock vodka mixed with Dr. Pepper. They’re made with good alcohol and sophisticated ingredients, but are simple to put together. Stick close to the measurements to get the subtleties of flavor. After each spirit, Lydia recommends a brand or varietal.

Nothing finer than a glass of punch by the fireside.

Cranberry Punch (about 15 servings)

1 bottle of gin (Tanqueray or Beefeater)
10 oz Cointreau or Grand Marnier
10 oz unsweetened cranberry juice
10 oz freshly squeezed orange juice
2 teaspoons of almond essence (not the fake stuff)
1 bottle of dry sparkling wine (Gruet Brut, cava or prosecco)

Combine all ingredients, except for the sparkling wine, in a punch bowl. Stir together and store covered in the fridge for at least 2 hours. Once you’re ready to serve, stir the the punch again, then add the bubbly. Put an orange twist* into each cup and and ladle in the punch.

*The nicest twists don’t need special tools. Find a ripe, brightly-colored fresh orange with thick, firm skin. With a small knife (or a regular vegetable peeler), slice off a thin, ribbon-like peel, similar to what you’d get peeling a potato. Do this over each cup so the spray of orange oil lands in the cup. Twist the peel into a spiral to release even more oil and throw it in the cup.

Even the hat is ready for a cocktail.

Royal Pomme Punch (12 Servings)

(Lydia learned this punch from the able hands of James Meehan at PDT New York)

3/4 bottle Dubonnet Rouge (an herb-y wine aperitif)
12 oz Apple Brandy (such as Laird’s Bonded or Calvados)
24 Dashes of Angostura Bitters (or 3 oz St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram)
3 oz fresh squeezed orange juice
12 oz Champagne

At least two days ahead of time, fill a rectangular plastic container with water and put in the freezer to make a big block of ice. Make sure it fits in your punch bowl.

In a pitcher filled with ice cubes, stir together the Dubonnet, apple brandy, orange juice and bitters. Pour the punch through a mesh sieve or cheesecloth into a chilled punch bowl.

Pull your block of ice out of the freezer and let it thaw for 15 minutes until it slides out of the mold. Gently put it into the punch. Top with champagne and serve.

Fun with punch.

Boozy Mulled Cider (makes about 30 servings)

1 gallon of fresh apple cider
2 bottles of amber rum (Appleton’s VX, or a bourbon like Buffalo Trace)
2 apples cored and thinly sliced
4 cinnamon sticks
1 small handful of whole cloves (about 20)
1 small handful of cracked black peppercorns (about 25)
5 cracked green cardamom pods
2 tablespoons of freshly grated ginger

Optionally, you can also add 1 cup of lemon juice (and their peels) and 1 cup of brown sugar.

Combine all ingredients — except the booze — in a pot over medium low heat, stirring occasionally, for 30–40 minutes.

Turn off heat, or turn on lowest possible, and add liquor of choice, stirring well. Strain to order with a tea strainer, OR put all the spices (except cinnamon) in a tea sack in the pot. Serve within 3 hours of making.

Make punch. Give the gracious hostess a chance to sit down and enjoy the night.

Swedish Punsch

This is an original recipe by Lydia. Swedish Punsch doesn’t taste like anything you’ve ever had. It tastes like a Dutch sailor’s grog from 300 years ago, with the snappy freshness of a daiquiri, but with more depth and lots of earthy spicy herbiness.

This is high proof for shelf life. If you can’t drink it all the first time around bottle and cork the stuff — it’ll keep in the refrigerator for months.

1 bottle Batavia Arak (available online at Drink Up NY)
1 bottle Aquavit (Krogstad or Linie)
20 oz ginger honey syrup**
20 oz lemon juice
20 oz orange juice
freshly grated nutmeg for garnish

Combine all ingredients well, and serve it cold or warmed over a low flame. Dilute with water just before serving:  add 1 cup of water to the mix if serving warm, or 2 cups of ice if serving cold. Ladle cold punsch over ice, or warm punch straight, and grate nutmeg on top as an aromatic garnish.

**Combine 1 cup finely chopped fresh ginger, and 1 cup of water in a sauce pan and cook over medium heat for 20 minutes. Add 2 cups of raw honey, turn off heat and stir. Let cool and strain well through a mesh sieve or cheesecloth.

A well planted drink.

Image research by Gijs van der Most.

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Not a knob more than what you need. A TV designed by Dieter Rams. Image via Life as an Architect.

“Weniger, aber besser” — less, but better.

Industrial designer Dieter Rams, born in Germany in 1932 (and still alive), was concerned with the chaos going on in the world around him: chaos as a result of the Wars, the Great Depression, and later, the more subtle, but also pernicious chaos of disposable design and planned obsolescence that was the purview of his trade.

Dieter Rams, no doubt arguing for understated avant garde. Image via We Heart.

In the early 1980s, when disposable culture was new and heated, Rams asked himself: Is my design good design? And rather than pat himself on the back with an unexamined “yes!”, Rams set out to define good design with a list as sparse and functional as his work. Moving from aesthetics to sustainability to (un)obstrusiveness, his now-famous Ten Principles of Good Design became one of his most enduring creations. Read it here, illustrated by his work: Good Design, Vitsoe.

Dieter Rams' barely designed Braun T1000 radio, closed. Image via Fuel Your Product Design.

Hardly more ornate when open. Image via Fuel Your Product Design.

Rams’ designs are simple and purposeful, with a clean and manageable appeal and an unfailing functionality that lasted. Rams hated the American cars coming off the assembly lines — to him they epitomized the evil of design that had to be updated every two years. His styles endure because he believes in designing objects as little as possible.

Dieter Rams' Nizo Super-8 camera. The design is still current, the technology, unfortunately not. Image via Cloud Front.

During his 34 years as head designer at Braun, he developed hundreds of designs, none of which had useless colors, baubles or textures. They were basically the opposite of today’s over-designed everyday objects — things like our modern-day garish toothbrushes with incomprehensible hinges, myriad bristle types, contrasting neon colors, rubber spots and pointlessly sinuous handles.

AWE IS A MOVING TARGET

While Rams’ designs are meant to be timeless, humanity is not is so constant. In a speech to the Braun supervisory board in 1980, Rams announced: “I think that good designers must always be avant-gardists, always one step ahead of the times. They should – and must – question everything generally thought to be obvious. They must have an intuition for people’s changing attitudes. For the reality in which they live, for their dreams, their desires, their worries, their needs, their living habits. They must also be able to assess realistically the opportunities and bounds of technology.”

Influence at work. The Dieter Rams pocket radio's similarity to another iconic white music-playing box is not at all accidental. Image via the University of Houston.

(Image research by Michael Wojtas)

FURTHER READING

According to Dieter Rams, Apple is the only company to uphold his Ten Principles of Good Design. Dieter Rams vs. Jonathan Ive: The Future of Apple is in 1960s Braun, Gizmodo.

Before Dieter Rams, all record players were giant wood-and-brass things. Then he made “Snow White’s Coffin.” Rams tells the story: Dieter Rams by Cold War Modern, YouTube.

Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams by Keiko Ueki-Polet and Klaus Klemp, Google Books.

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Spider webs are stronger (and spookier) than kevlar. Photo by Russell Watkins via the UK Department of International Development.

1. “Animals and plants build structures of incredible complexity without the energy-hungry high temperatures, pressures and toxic chemicals with which we process raw materials in this fossil fuel age, and without generating useless waste.” From Inspired, Naturally, Financial Times.

2. A spider’s web is “made with an input of only dead flies and sunlight, and yet is 5 times stronger than kevlar.” Edible Architechture, Design Observer and Spider’s Dragline, Biomimicry.

3. Sharklet Technologies is inhibiting bacteria through pattern alone. Hospitals are using it on medical surfaces to slow the spread of illnesses, and the revolutionary idea all comes from the skin of the Galapagos Shark. Technology, Sharklet.

4.  A waxy Namibian bug who drinks water from fog, inspires a British architecture firm to try and build waxy buildings that gather water from fog. King fisher birds solve the sound boom issues of hyper-futuristic bullet trains. A cement company is harvesting carbon dioxide for building materials, just like their heroes, coral reefs. Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in Action, TED.com (video)

5.  If we’re using nature as inspiration for the future, then: Is the real fountain of youth delicious with clarified butter? Science Says Lobsters can Live Forever, but are Still Delicious, Planet Green, Discovery.

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Here at Kaufmann Mercantile we can really get behind some tried and true technologies. Coffee makers that don’t need to be plugged in. Pens, pencils, paper. Wood instead of plastic; sea shells instead of plastic. Enter the Museum of Obsolete Objects to remind us of the technologies that have fallen by the wayside. Some of them are irretrievably obsolete and happily so (even if you could get into a time machine to the 1980s to pick up a floppy disk drive, would you want to?).

Others, like the phonograph, have been replaced many times over technologically, but there’s never been a good emotional replacement. The phonograph will never be obsolete in my house, and judging by how picked over used records stores are, mine is not the only one.

The Museum of Obsolete Objects is actually a YouTube channel — none of those stodgy old floors and walls and physical presence. The videos are produced by the Jung von Matt advertising agency. A scroll through the years will get you all bleary-eyed for a time when love songs were shared on mix tapes and math didn’t get more complicated than what an abacus could do.

(Warning: The intonation-lacking, staccato voice of the robot woman narrating each video inadvertently and unfortunately makes a point: sometimes obsolescence is the result of being irritating.)

What are some things you’d be sad to see in the Museum of Obsolete Objects?

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Notes and a fish from the Clatsop, Oregon, field journal of Merriweather Lewis, February 24, 1806. Image from Brain Pickings.

1. Cursive is dead: “That cursive-challenged class included Alex Heck, 22, who said she barely remembered how to read or write cursive. Ms. Heck and a cousin leafed through their grandmother’s journal shortly after she died, but could barely read her cursive handwriting.” The New York Times.

2. Handwriting shrinks as desperation builds: “To Whom It May Concern,” from Assorted Street Posters, Outsiders, UbuWeb. Collected in New York from 1985 to the present.

3. Halfway between font and handwriting: hand-painted signs just won’t die. “Sign painters,” Imprint.

4. Just a little ink on one piece of paper and a transaction for the ages: The Sale of Manhattan, Letters of Note.

5. Five Voyeuristic, Cross-disciplinary Peeks into Great Creators’ Notebooks, Brain Pickings. (via a Design*Sponge tweet.)

6. Take Care of Your Little Notebooks, New York Review of Books Blog

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The Cricket Trailer at work looking space-age and efficient while inventor Garrett Finney plays the Ukulele. Photo by David Bates.

I’d been chattering for a week about spending the summer in a trailer dropped on the smallest patch of grass  and wildflower somewhere Upstate when I came across the Cricket Trailer over at Men and Women of Industry. (If you’re not fantasizing about camping now, you will be once you’ve seen their childhood snaps.) The lightweight, angular trailers were designed by Garrett Finney, an architect who came to camper design by way of NASA, where he worked on the International Space Station’s “Habitation Module” (astronaut-speak for “home”).

Inside the Cricket Trailer. Photo by David Bates.

Clearly, Space is full of space, but you’re not going all the way out there to hang out in your rec room. The Cricket Trailer is built on a similar concept. Finney believes that small spaces make “the ritual of daily life feel more connected to the outdoors.” In 1999, the sheen of outer space had worn off, and he turned to making another exploring machine, but one meant for lands already charted, that anyone could hope to get to within their lifetimes with little more than a car, a pack of hot dogs and a jar of peanut butter.

Showering inside the cricket trailer.

Room enough for two. A sample fold-out bed in the Cricket Trailer, with swivel nightstand. Photo by David Bates.

The Cricket is also environmentally friendly, but more for what it doesn’t have than what it does. Finney didn’t pour years of expensive/intensive research and development into lightweight plastic and futuristic ceramics. It is made mostly of aluminum, wood and steel, which can be recycled. Every angle and corner is used, and the size sits exactly at the point where you don’t need a giant beauty-of-the-outdoors-negating SUV with enormous pulling power, but once it’s hitched, there’s no complicated propping up or assembly required to make it usable. It is small enough to tow by most cars, but you can still walk  straight into it to dry off after a quick jump in a roadside swimming hole.

Floor plans and sample build-outs. Kit out your Cricket the way you want.

The Cricket Trailer perched placidly by a lake.

All photos were taken by David Bates and came via Cricket Trailer.

FURTHER READING
From the Lean-To: Documerica. Outside.
Wildwood

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"The Natural House" (1974) by Frank Lloyd Wright.

1. The Natural House by Frank Lloyd Wright (pictured above and below)

This book, published late in Wright’s life, squeezes a lifetime of thinking about homes and architecture into one small paperback. A fantastic distillation.

A list of the profuse illustrations in "The Natural House"

 

2. First Person Rural by Noel Perrin

Perrin is a widely read and very witty New Yorker with an eye for the unjustly neglected. Like most New Yorkers, he fantasized about leaving the city to chase romantic notions of country life in Vermont. Unlike most New Yorkers, he actually did it. His “Person Rural” books (this is the first of a series) tell the story of living in the country (the nuances of buying a chainsaw, the pains of maple sugaring in the freezing cold) like it is.  Part of the book’s charm is that his careful instructions are aimed at a New York Times reader as if they were actually planning on living in the country, while subtly knowing that they never will.

Original cover for "First Person Rural: Essays of a Sometime Farmer" by Noel Perrin (1990). Photo by Erik Heywood.

 

3. The Yankee Peddlers of Early America by J.R. Dolan

The loosely settled American frontier depended on much-needed goods being brought to them by the traveling wagonloads of Yankee peddlers. This book gives a very readable account of their lives, their wares, and their rapidly changing times. I think this model is the future of retail.

"The Yankee Peddlers of Early America" (1968) by J.R. Dolan. Even the frontier needed socks. Photo by Erik Heywood.

 

4. Eva Hesse’s Datebooks

A rare look into the life and thinking of a great 20th century artist. Yale have published exact facsimiles of two vinyl-backed datebooks used by the artist in 1964 and 1965.

Book of translations and transcriptions of Eva Hesse's Datebooks from 1964/65, which are faithfully reprinted handwriting and all by Yale University Press.

 

5. Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander

Jerry Mander has a lot of weird and fascinating things to say about the dangers of humans ingesting artificial light from televisions, but I think the most compelling argument for the elimination of TV is summer itself.

"Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" (1978) by Jerry Mander.

 

6. F. Scott Fitzgerald and His World by Arthur Mizener

The OG party monster. This richly illustrated overview, written by Fitzgerald’s first biographer, pulls the reader into the thick of Scott’s sparkling, tragic life.

"F. Scott Fitzgerald and His World" (1972). The life and times of the man who made mint juleps inseparable from languid summer days.

 

7. Darwin and the Beagle by Alan Moorehead

A lot of armchair arguing still goes on about the significance of Darwin’s theories, but the 22-year-old naturalist did his homework the old-fashioned way — with a notebook and a ship. This oversized book is an amazing mix of color images and page-turning writing.

"Darwin and the Beagle" by Alan Moorehead. What if you went on a cruise and your ideas changed the world?

 

I asked Erik how he knew so much about books and this is what he had to say:

“I wouldn’t really know how to define my relationship to books. I love them, and I love the things that surround them. I have a weakness for bookshops and libraries. I can think about bookshelves endlessly. I love “reading furniture” and publisher’s histories and bookmaker’s supplies and old inscriptions and other people’s bookplates. I love the smell of books. When I was a teenager and everyone else was involved in healthy outdoor exercise, I was usually laying around in the grass with an open book laying on my face, breathing in the scent of the sun-warmed pages until I felt like I was in a daze. It’s still one of my favorite things to do and I don’t ever see doing it with an e-reader.  My favorite activity is working my way around my study, letting one book lead me to another, and leading me to books I’ve never heard of, which sends me out to more bookshops. I guess that’s how I know what I know about books: I’ve learned it from other books. I think it’s the best way.”

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