Bub’s Sangria

When I lived in Montana back in the 1990s, one of my coworkers shared with me a homemade cookbook—a smallish, green-covered loose-leaf job full of hand-typed recipes and hilarious commentary. The author, whom my coworker declined to identify (perhaps it was he himself), had apparently made the book just for fun. My coworker said he had encouraged this fellow to seek publication, but that he had repeatedly declined. Too bad!



I photocopied a few of the recipes, but I wish I’d copied the whole book.

The writer of this cookbook had adopted an alter-ego with the pseudonym “Snodgrass,” who was part hillbilly buffoon, part everyday Joe, a guy-in-the-kitchen making tasty chow with whatever’s available. Except this common Joe had an extraordinary vocabulary and wit. There’s a deceptively well-educated writer behind the bumbling cook sharing his culinary discoveries, describing his cooking techniques in hilariously perfect descriptive terms.

Today, I imagine this writer has a blog somewhere and is entertaining the hell out of his readers. I hope so. (Trust me, I’ve looked.)

And I hope the writer finds my post, here, and contacts me, because I’d like to thank him (her?) for creating such a fun cookbook. And like my coworker, I’d like to encourage him to seek publication—even if just an Amazon publication. Even if just online. And I’d love to credit him by name.

Below is one of the recipes I copied from “Snodgrass’s” little masterpiece. I hope you hoot at it just like I did when I first read it. By the way, it loses something when converted to prettified computer-kerned type. Its writer took great care in typing out the whole work in glorious Courier and hand-drawing text boxes and arrows, and affixing color prints on the pages. Yes, there were staged photographs of rustic characters sprinkled throughout the book, too. Apparently it was the author and his friends, in disguise.

After reading this recipe, you’ll wish I would also share the other recipe I copied from this book, three entertaining pages of “Wilson’s Legendary Incandescent De-Escalated Thermonuclear Enchiladas” . . . just as I wish I could peruse the entire “Snodgrass” cookbook again.

Enjoy! And if you are the original anonymous Snodgrass, I hope you’ll contact me.

33. Snodgrass’s Brother Robert’s Salubrious Native Fruit Elixir
and All-Purpose Inebriant

more generally known as

BUB’S SANGRIA

Snodgrass discovered the formula for this important health-food beverage during one of his latter-day expeditions to New England. Bub wrote it down on a piece of old Kleenex box and gave it to Wifey who lost it for several weeks before rediscovering it under a stack of five-week-old mail and paraphernalia on the kitchen counter.

This is an excellent way to dispose of about a gallon of cheap rot-gut Burgundy. It requires no cooking and very little proficiency in any enterprise other than pouring, mixing, and drinking. It does need to age at least a day after you’ve assembled it. The end product is a nice sharp fruity punch with certain edifying inebrious properties.

Bub’s original formula was for half a gallon of wyne. But Snodgrass has made a few strategic volumetric modifications in order to enhance the more efficient exploitation of metric wyne bottles. This recipe makes enough Sangria for a whole Sunday School picnic.

• a 3-liter jug of BURGUNDY or some other cheap RED WYNE
• 1½ cups of BRANDY
• ¾ cup of SUGAR
• 3 LEMONS—squoze
• 3 ORANGES—squoze
• 3 APPLES—sliced thin (greenish apples, Bub says)

1. Go down to the store and see what kind of BURGUNDY is on sale. Buy a 3-liter jug. When you get it home, drink 2 or 3 big mugfuls. You need that much space in the jug.
2. Squeeze Yr LEMONS and ORANGES into a big pitcher. And fish out the seeds. Pour in the BRANDY and the SUGAR and mix it up. Dissolve as much of the sugar as you can. Then pour it into the wyne jug.
3. Finally, slice Yr APPLES and stuff them into the jug with everything else. Shake it all up until everything seems to be properly scrambled and the sugar is dissolved.
4. Let it sit at least 24 hours before you drink it.

. . . Isn’t that a hoot? Wouldn’t you like to read more of Snodgrass’s recipes and culinary commentary?

In all seriousness, sangria is not exactly quantum physics; adjust everything to your tastes. Most people mix it in a big pitcher instead of stuffing the fruits all down the neck of a wine jug (as funny as that idea is). Basically, you fortify and sweeten the red wine with sugar and brandy and flavor it with sliced fruits; let it sit overnight, and the result should be rather syrupy and thick. Adjust flavors to taste. Sometimes I add some lemonade or orange juice.

Then, what most people do (which Bub’s recipe doesn’t mention—perhaps he misplaced the bit of Kleenex box this part was written on) is, upon serving, to add club soda or seltzer, or possibly a lemon-lime soda such as Sprite, to thin it out a bit and make it bubbly. Serve it over ice and garnish with fruit slices. A perfect punch for a hot summer evening!

Opulent Hypocrite?

After the last post, I think I need to explain something about myself: I gave up drinking a couple years ago. I invented the “Opulent Opossum” martini well before I quit. Back then I was having fantasies (which I still harbor) about turning our basement/garage into a private nightclub, a rathskeller, with an occasional decadent cabaret band, serving drinks and appetizers out of the old coal bin (there’s a window in it that would be perfect as a serving window). The Opulent Opossum was going to be the house martini. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Last week Dad told me that rathskeller-type basement “party rooms” were common among his parents’ generation, Germans, who had endured Prohibition and probably felt like they had to keep some booze squirreled away. His aunt and uncle in Kansas City carved a little place for a table and stuff behind their furnace. Even our own basement, here at Grandma’s house, had had a small table and chair for enjoying a sandwich and a beer on a hot summer day before air-conditioning. But I digress . . .

I’m not going to go into all the details, but let’s just say that on the spectrum between “perfectly healthy social drinker” and “major alcoholic,” I was somewhere in between. There really is a gradient, and I had reached a point where I recognized I was drinking unhealthily often and for the wrong reasons. It wasn’t full-blown addiction, but it was an ingrained habit, and I was leaning on alcohol pretty heavily. So I decided to give it a rest. Maybe forever.

It hasn’t been all that difficult. I had feared it would be much harder than it was. The hardest part was weathering the increased intensity of emotions that I’d been dampening for so long with alcohol. Also, it was difficult to quit just before Oktoberfest, which was just before the holidays, of course. And those are all prime times to enjoy good microbrews, excellent wines, and lovely, complex whiskeys. Ahhh . . .

Okay, it was challenging, but I went easy on myself, I had good support from my sweetie, from an experienced and clever therapist, and from everyone else . . . and it’s all going okay.

I’m very glad that I decided to stop drinking before it got to be a bigger problem than it was. And I encourage anyone reading this to think about it—if you are wondering if you drink too much or for the wrong reasons, then don’t be afraid to examine the idea with a therapist. There is indeed life after alcohol.

But I’m not going around telling everyone else to quit, and I’m not going to stop serving alcohol at my dinners and parties. For that matter, I think that because I stopped drinking before I had developed a major problem, I get to enjoy the “gray zone” that many recovering alcoholics find extremely uncomfortable—so I’ll let myself have rum raisin ice cream and brandy sauce on my bread pudding. Mirin on my soba. Nyquil when I’m suffering from a cold.

I don’t think my position is too hypocritical, and so far it’s working very well for me.

For that matter, when I really want to feel like a hypocrite, I’ll go down to the deli and order me a veggie sandwich . . . with bacon.

. . . Now that’s a hypocrite.

Our Signature Martini—The Opulent Opossum

Most of the recipes I’ll be sharing here are good ol’ recipes—family treasures, simple things that Gourmet Magazine doesn’t bother with. But this recipe is different: I invented it! It’s not good ol’ anything. It does, however, pay homage to my Grandma S, who loved martinis, and to my Grandpa R, who loved elderberry wine. Here it is.

The Opulent Opossum Martini

1.5 oz. gin
splash of elderberry wine

Shake with ice; strain and pour into a chilled martini glass.

Garnish with a spring of pigweed.

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What’s pigweed??!! Well . . . we call it that, but it’s actually not a “true” pigweed (in the genus Chenopodium). Common names of plants are just a mess. So, what goes for “pigweed” at our house is actually purslane, Portulaca oleracea, which is a common damned, creeping weed of sidewalks, gardens, and fields. It’s almost succulent and has pretty leaves. It’s a wild edible.

The root systems of purslane must be made of millions of microscopic, immortal fibers, ’cause when I yank one out of our front planter, sixty tiny new ones sprout up in its place. I kid you not. Apparently hogs like to eat purslane. And yes, like dandelions and other pestiferous weeds, it originally came from Europe. You can actually buy purslane sometimes at the farmer’s market (people use it in salads, as potherbs, etc.), but come on. Quit spraying Roundup for a while, and you’ll have your own crop eventually.

Oh, another thing: If you want, of course, you can substitute some other offensively weedy wild edible (young dandelion greens, clover, sorrel a.k.a. sourgrass, shepherd’s purse, flowering tips of henbit, etc.) as the garnish. These weeds are really quite pretty, especially when they’re drifting around in a martini glass.

Pigweed or peppergrass, it’s the spirit that counts.

(Some information in this post is from Wild Edibles of Missouri, second edition, by Jan Phillips, 1995, but don’t go looking in there for drink recipes. Oh, and in the pictures? That’s henbit as a garnish. It’s the only thing that’s out this early in the spring! Thanks, Sue, for the photo shoot. I’m glad you enjoyed your photographer’s bonus: drinkin’ the props!)