C.

In 2021, six San Francisco Bay Area restaurants were awarded 3 stars, Michelin’s highest honor. The 3-star honorees are: Atelier Crenn, Benu, Quince, The French Laundry, Single Thread, and Manresa. There are only 13 three-star restaurants throughout the U.S. (the six previously mentioned, plus five in New York, one in Chicago, and one in Virginia). Additionally, only six restaurants in the U.S. made the “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” list. Benu and Atelier Crenn in San Francisco and Single Thread in Healdsburg ranked 28th, 48th and 37th, respectively.

B.

The original spudnut, a potato-based donut, was created by American drug store clerk, Bob Pelton. After returning home from service in the navy in the 1930s, Pelton was inspired by German, fastnachts, yeast-raised fritters also made from mashed potatoes. As Dick and Mac McDonald were opening the first McDonald’s restaurant in 1940, Bob and his brother Al started the first spudnut shop in Salt Lake City. On Halloween, the Peltons handed out their doughnuts to trick-or-treaters. Salt Lake City resident, David Fisher, fondly recalled in an interview, “We would always take a couple of different Halloween masks with us so we could go back two or three times. Spudnuts were better than a crummy candy bar.” By the 1950s, 350 spudnuts stores were open across America. By 1964, spudnut franchises were selling over 400,000 donuts a day.

C.

While blue cheeses such as Roquefort, Stilton, and Gorgonzola, and are lovely with fortified sweet wines like Port, they are usually terrible partners for Cabernet Sauvignon.  Blue cheese is so powerful and salty that it strips the character right out of Cabernet and other red wines and makes them taste bland and dull.  While it may be tempting to add a dollop of blue cheese to a grilled steak, know that the Cabernet Sauvignon you’re having alongside is going to suffer.  A better pairing with Cabernet Sauvignon, according to Max McCalman, the first maître fromager (person in charge of cheese)— in a North American restaurant —would be Carmody, a cow’s milk cheese.  A, B, and D are among his other favorite matches.

C.

In Bordeaux, France, lamprey are an unassuming local specialty. These scaleless fish are caught from nearby rivers; they mostly live in coastal or fresh bodies of water. Lamprey can be 5 inches to as much as 3 feet in length and are often deglazed in red wine and baked into casseroles. Lamprey à la Bordelaise—consists of cured ham, red Bordeaux wine, various fresh herbs, garlic, leeks, and other vegetables blended into a thick stew. Just the ticket for a First Growth.

A.

Lestodons were giant prehistoric sloths directly related to the sloths that live today. Weighing from 2 to 4 tons, lestodons roamed the grassy plains of South America during the Cenozoic era, eating grass and other foliage. Occasionally, lestodons ate avocados, pits and all, which is the only reason we have avocados today. The pits were then excreted large distances away from their original parent tree which allowed the plants to proliferate without competing for water and sunlight. The avocado pit is what’s called an “evolutionary anachronism,” meaning its size was favorably selected during evolution for avocado plants to reproduce. However, no sloth on today’s earth is large enough to be able to ingest and then expel such a large seed, yet the pit still exists.

C.

If you drank as much English tea as I do (9 cups a day), you’d know that a Jammie Dodger is an English biscuit—specifically a shortbread one with a sticky jam filling. (Just right when it’s 3 pm, at least another two hours to go writing chapters for the third edition of The Wine Bible). Other classic English biscuits include: the Cadbury Finger, Fox’s Crunch Cream, the Hobnob, and the compellingly named Digestive.

C.

Ice cream. In 1920 the Volstead Act was passed by Congress, prohibiting the “manufacturing and sale” of alcohol. The law caused many adults to look for alternatives to wine, beer, and spirits. Advancements in refrigeration had occurred simultaneously with the ban on alcohol, so with no beer to keep cool, ice cream became the number one tasty treat of the Prohibition Era. It has been estimated that between 1920 and 1929, ice cream consumption grew 40% in the United States. Prohibition also sparked new innovations in the ice cream world—single-serve frozen treats like the Eskimo Pie and the first ice cream bar on a stick from Good Humor were invented to meet the new demand for ice cream treats in public spaces.

B.

The Scoville scale measures the amount of spiciness or “heat” in chili peppers, in Scoville Heat Units (SHU). Scoville Heat Units are assigned based on how much dilution is required for the “burn” of a chili to no longer be sensed by taste testers. This point of dilution is determined when oil extracted from the dried chili is diluted with sugar water to a certain concentration level. If a pepper rates 5,000 SHU, this pepper must be diluted 5,000 times before its heat is no longer detectable. Bell peppers rate between 0 and 100 on the SHU scale whereas serrano peppers rate between 10,000 and 25,000 Scoville Heat Units. The scale goes even higher— where ghost peppers earn 750,000 to 1.5 million SHU and the mysteriously named Pepper X rates 1.5 to 3 million SHU making it one of the hottest chilis on the planet.

D.

According to a Medium.com “Insider” survey, in most other countries and especially in Europe, coffee is consumed in small quantities, and usually quickly. Think of an Italian standing in a café taking one second to down an espresso. People in other countries find it strange that in the U.S. people drink huge cups of coffee and take them to go. For the record, we think it’s perfectly fine to eat peanut butter when you’re over 10 years old, but we draw the line at marshmallow fluff.

A.

The Ark of Taste is an international catalog of endangered heritage foods maintained by the global Slow Food movement. The goal is to preserve unique foods that reflect their culture and place, and to keep them from extinction by encouraging consumers to grow and eat those foods. Besides being rare, foods on the list must be “culturally or historically linked to a specific region, locality, ethnicity or traditional production practice.” The Ark of Taste was founded in 1996. Today, more than 5,000 products from more than 150 countries are on the list. Those foods include: Great Plains Bison from Canada; Bergamot Oranges from Calabria, Italy; Violet Asparagus from Liguria, Italy; Harrison Cider Apples from New Jersey; Meyer Lemons from California; White Strawberries from Chile; and Bull Boar Sausage from Australia. Slow Food publishes the catalog along with resources for those who want to grow or buy the foods on the list.

B.

The Detachable Mustache Guard was designed to be affixed to the rim of cups, tumblers, and wine glasses, in order to protect well-waxed whiskers from tea steam, beer foam, and red wine stains. Patented by, the presumably long-suffering and hirsuit, C. H. Barrows on May 28, 1878, the invention’s popularity spread throughout Europe, until potters began featuring a cup with a mustache guard built right in. For many decades, famous china manufacturers such as Limoges, Meissen, Royal Bayreuth, and others created their own versions. Mustache cup production slowed after 1920 and finally faded from cups altogether by the later 20th century. However, as facial hair returns to fashion, a plethora of protective paraphernalia has hit the market including the “Mo’ Guard”, “Whisker Dam,” and “Lipmaster.”