Jerry Stratton's Blog

Walt Disney’s The Swamp Fox was an influential take on Francis Marion’s life—very possibly an influence on Mel Gibson’s The Patriot, too.

As I complete my long-delayed projects folder, it’s time to bring my superhero roleplaying game, Men & Supermen, back to the future. Or at least back to the current decade or so.

“In Lexington, the center of revolt against the King…” One of the most modern figures of the American Revolution was a slaveholder and Indian fighter with a superhero name.

The second printing of the Padgett Sunday Supper Club Ice Cream Cookery fixes one typo, and adds one marvelous sherbet.

Two scripts to make repetitive BASIC lines easier to type from books and magazines, like The Rainbow.

The complaint that Trump supporters view him as an n-dimensional thinker betrays a complete lack of any dimensionality in the thinking of most of the beltway.

“This is going to get salty.”

“A lot of recipe writers and publications… present recipes in a way that they are very difficult to read. They put up roadblocks. They over-complicate them. They try to make something into something that it isn’t.”

Glen goes on a rant about a particular style of recipe-writing that also makes me laugh. It’s all about over-complicating things in ways that literally do nothing for the recipe. This particular cookie recipe hits one of them for me. He doesn’t talk about this in the video, but he does fix it in his altered version: it calls for unsalted butter… and then adds salt. I’ve pretty much stopped keeping unsalted butter on hand because every one of them seems to do this.

It’s why I put the note in A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book about converting sodium content to salt.

If the recipe required clarifying the butter, that might make sense. But it does not. It requires browning the butter, which is the opposite of clarifying. So, this recipe calls for a 10½ tablespoons of butter (an amount worthy of Glen’s rant) and ⅜ teaspoon of fine salt (ditto).

Of the three butters I buy—the store brands at H-E-B, Randalls, and Trader Joe’s—each contains exactly 90 mg of sodium per tablespoon. That means 10½ tablespoons butter contains 2,362.5 mg of salt. This is less than a percent off of what ⅜ teaspoon is. It’s a measuring error.

You could make this cookie and it would be just fine by using normal butter and not adding salt. Literally, the author required unsalted butter and then added exactly the same amount of salt back in.

As they say, watch the whole thing.

It all changed in 1927. So what did home refrigerators look like before General Electric’s 1927 monitor-top model?

O Living Bread From Heaven is not the most popular hymn sung to Samuel Wesley’s Aurelia. But it is among the most beautiful.

This very simple whipped cream dessert is also a great way to use up stale Easter (or Christmas) bread.