Reverse Engineering the Funyun

When Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Dave Arneson died earlier this month, barely a year after the other co-creator Gary Gygax passed away, I knew I had to write something. Over thirty-five years ago, when Gygax and Arneson created the game that would become known as Dungeons & Dragons, no publisher would touch it. So, instead, long before zines were cool and the DIY ethic had a name, the two decided to turn that bitch out themselves, and within the first year, sold all one-thousand hand-assembled copies from their first print run.

Within only a few years, D&D would become iconic for a whole generation of marginalized geeks.  By the early 80s, the game was popular enough to attract the ire of concerned parents and the nascent religious right, who claimed without evidence that the game was harming the youth. Eventually, actual sociological research (Imagine that!) would vindicate gamers, finding that teen gamers suffered no measurable harm from the game and in a number of measures were actually better adjusted socially than their non-gaming peers. In the meantime, though, the controversy did manage to produce a spectacularly shitty Tom Hanks film…

Anyway, a session of D&D can easily go on for hours, during which time significant quantities of crappy snack foods are often consumed. And for some reason, the phrase “Funyuns and Mountain Dew” has become a common shorthand for gamers’ eating habits. So, in tribute to Gygax and Arneson, here’s my effort to make something at home that vaguely resembles the iconic geek snackfood. I wasn’t able to get the texture quite crispy enough, but after the fold is the formula for my first attempt. Perhaps you food fans can improve on it.

Tots

Making homemade tots is hardly rocket science, so I can’t figure out how so many of the recipes online get it so badly wrong. Seriously, mashed potatoes? The traditional method, apparently, is to lightly steam the taters, grate them, season, press the gratings into a mold, chill, and let the potato starch do the binding. I don’t have that much patience, nor do I possess a suitable mold, so I add a bit of all-purpose flour, about a half tablespoon to a tablespoon per potato, and in lieu of a tot mold, I press them into shape by hand, using a little force to squeeze out any excess wetness. Works just fine. Fry ‘em up until they’re golden—if you don’t have a deep fryer, oil in a cast-iron skillet will do the job nicely—and then bake ‘em on a baking sheet until they’re crispy and suitably tot-like.

I was going to write about the history of the tot, but John Kessler at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has already written in some detail about the Tater Tot’s secret origin and the resurgent interest in tots among hipsters and foodies. And now that I’ve eaten a heaping plateful of childhood nostalgia, I’m feeling a bit like nap time is overdue…

Quince Poached in Rum

So, I poached a quince in rum with a little vanilla and all-spice. This was my first experience with quince (I’ve since incorporated them in a very expensive and tasty, but not very photogenic cobbler), and I went with something simple. The fruit themselves are interesting: far too astringent to eat raw, the uncooked fruit nonetheless gives off this tremendous aroma that can fill an enclosed space in little time at all, a scent somewhere between pineapple and pear. I’m tempted to buy another just to keep around for the aroma.

Anyway, after a bit of searching in the library, I didn’t really find much of interest on quince itself. The fruit seems to have once been more popular than it is today, now relegated to the exotic fruit section (even though the quince I bought was grown here in California). But otherwise, there wasn’t a lot I could find about the fruit’s history. So a bit about the other main ingredient here, which I had already known had a fascinating and turbulent history: rum.

Turns out English varieties of yeast didn’t do all that well in the colonies, and it wasn’t until hardier German varieties were introduced in America that the states began brewing in earnest. In the meantime, colonists still needed to get their drink on, and the demon rum, produced by fermenting the molasses imported in large quantities from the West Indies, quenched the colonists’ need to get crapulous. Apparently by 1700, the per capita consumption of rum among American colonists came out to around four gallons per year. Such was the demand for rum that British duties and taxes on molasses helped fuel the colonial unrest that eventually led to the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. The war wasn’t just about freedom; it was about the freedom to get shitfaced on a budget.

Now I doubt many of the colonists wasted good rum poaching fruit, but it didn’t turn out too shabby. I used maybe a half cup of rum, a splash of vanilla extract, and a pinch of all-spice to start, popped it in the oven, and added water as necessary to keep it from drying out. Toward the end, I sprinkled on some demerara sugar, let it sit under the broiler for a minute or two until the sugar began to brown and caramelize. Not too bad…

Guido Dogs

I’m still alive. I’ve just been too stupidly busy to cook anything historical worth posting about, but I did indulge recently in a nostalgic moment from my own personal history. Back in high school, I had a good friend who inexplicably went by the nickname Guido. And after a long, hard day of D&D or tabletop wargamming, we’d sit back, watch some Monty Python, and eat what he called “Guido dogs.”

Guido dogs were, as far as I can recall, a mixture of sliced hot dogs, beans, pico de gallo, and mayonnaise, spooned into toasted hot dog buns. I’ve replicated the admittedly disgusting sounding but surprisingly palatable concoction with LightLife Smart Dogs and Nasoya Nayonaise. It looks and sounds foul, I know, but it’s really quite good. Perfect with a large helping of Flying Circus and whatever cheap booze your friend Guido can lift from the liquor store. I kinda miss high school sometimes.

Caramelized Onion Quiche

I won’t pretend that the above has anything to do with history, not yet at least. It’s a tester recipe for a forthcoming book by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, using tofu and other ingredients to substitute for the traditional egg. But the quiche itself actually does go back quite a way, to the medieval kingdom of Lotharingia, roughly corresponding to the region of Lorraine in modern-day France (hence, quiche Lorraine). In the English-speaking world, the word quiche itself doesn’t appear in the language until the early twentieth century, but instructions for egg-based tarts appear as early as the fourteenth, in Forme of Cury, a manual of cookery for the court of Richard II. Medieval quiches appear to have been typically more heavily spiced, slightly sweetened, and often mixed with chopped beef marrow or pork. When I feel sufficiently motivated, I might just have to whip up some seitan and make a mock-medieval version…