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America Eats was a project of the Federal Writers’ Project, an initiative of the Works Progress Administration of FDR’s New Deal. The Writers’ Project consisted mostly of  out-of-work journalists of little renown, but it also included those who would soon become some of America’s finest writers, such as Zora Neale Hurston.

America Eats was the final project to be started by the Writers’ Project, and it’s publication was abandoned when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. But the unfinished manuscript – actually just boxes of unedited pieces submitted by writers from all over the country on what America ate, how it ate, and how it felt about what it ate – sat for some 60 years in the Library of Congress. That is until Mark Kurlansky found them while researching another food writing anthology and collected the most interesting pieces in his latest book, The Food of a Younger Land.

All this is just interesting background for a recipe for hot buttered rum out of The Northeast Eats, the section of the book concerning the eating and drinking habits of New England and New York, and written by one of the brightest stars on the Project roster, Kenneth Roberts.

Pour one fair-sized drink (or jigger) of rum into an ordinary table tumbler: add one lump of sugar, a pat of butter the size of a single hotel helping, half a teaspoonful of cinnamon, fill up the tumbler with boiling water, stir well and sip thoughtfully. If too sweet, use less sugar in the next attempt. If not sweet enough, add more. If the cinnamon isn’t wholly satisfactory, try cloves. If more butter is desirable, use more.

Of course, replacing that lump of a sugar with a teaspoon of honey (or more, or less) is sure to make this drink even better.

A couple of weeks ago I put some Sticky Mouth honey to work – making booze. Mead, or honey wine, is arguably the world’s oldest fermented beverage. You can almost picture the first brewing: some Neanderthal stumbles upon a bunch of bees in a hollowed tree, fills his water skin with the honey (and incurs a few stings), and then maybe forgets it in the corner of his cave when he gets back from hunting. What greeted him the next time he went for a swig was mead.

Despite this fictional prehistoric dude’s inadvertent success, I seem to screw up about half the batches I make. So this time I made three.

I’ve made a traditional mead in all three 1G batches, and the fundamental recipe is the same throughout:

Water (1 G)

Yeast (~1/2 tsp.)

Energizer and Nurient (~3/8 tsp. ea.)

But I’ve varied the quantities of honey I’ve used and the result will be three very different wines. In the first, I used 2 lbs of honey, and this will make a dry mead, similar to a white wine, with about 11% alcohol content. In the next, I used 3 lbs of honey, and this will make a medium bodied mead. And in the third, I used 4 lbs of honey, which will make a sack mead, or a very sweet traditional mead.

The three meads in their primary fermenters, where they sat for about two weeks.

The sack mead bubbling away.

The three meads racked into carboys, where they'll sit until until the fermentation process is complete.

These wines should be drinkable (not necessarily 100% properly aged, but drinkable) by May. That said, we’ll probably break into them before spring. A lot of people will talk about pairing meads with different meats or desserts, and that’s all fine, but to me nothing goes better with mead than ice fishing.

Check out this article in the October 10, 1925 edition of The Cariboo Observer (now the Quesnel Observer):

Each colony of bees makes about 200 pounds in a season, though one colony at the Lethbridge Experimental Farm broke all records for Canada by making 472 pounds in the season of 1923. A record of 21 pounds in one day by one colony was made in 1923 when the bees at the Experimental Farm averaged 189 pounds for the season, the high record for the year at the experimental farms across Canada.

It was an interesting editorial decision to put that beside an article titled “The War Against Insects.”

Known mostly for his CJSW radio show, The Blues Witness, Reverend Ron was also a beekeeper and a “guerrilla gardener.” He passed away last week. Here is his obituary and a tribute from CJSW.

Here is beekeeper Allen Garr showing off his unconventional bee yard. It sits atop of the Vancouver Convention Centre.

It’s also fabulously rewarding, because homemade honey is to the commercial kind as foie gras is to cat food.

That’s from today’s Globe. You can read the whole article here.

Every year, hives are transported from Alberta to BC in order to spend the winter there and be ready to pollinate fruit crops in the spring. The beekeeper will head into his yard at night while all of the bees are inside. Hives are loaded onto a flatbed, stacked five or six high. The truck then pulls out of the yard and heads West. Honeybees who headed home one day in an Alberta Canola field wake up in a BC blueberry field the next. Most days I think beekeeping by moonlight is pretty romantic, until I see something like this.

And if you think it’s a long trip for a bee that typically only flies a few kilometers fromher hive, it’s nothing compared to the roughly two million migratory hives that traverse the United States every year. These beekeepers, as Douglas Whynott puts it in his book Following the Bloom, are the last cowboys, the modern equivalent of the wranglers of the Wild West. While we’re still shoveling snow in February, honeybees, many of which are visitors from out-of-state, are pollinating almonds and citrus crops in California. They’ll make their way north after the bloom, pollinating other California crops, making into Oregon and Washington in time to pollinate the apples, pears, and cherries growing there. Then it is time to head east, where bees find a more permanent home in the fields of the mid-continent. But winter is just around the corner, which means another trip south.

Honestly, I’m not just posting this because of the band’s name. Well worth a look, as is the rest of the Music Fog channel on Youtube.

I went and took off our last honey crop not too long ago. We had been hoping for a late flow, but nothing materialized. Still, we’re glad to have taken what we did given what a strange season it was.

And now after the dry summer, it’s blowing early October snow outside. Bees’ll need to be wrapped up soon.

Here are a few pictures from around the bee yard this fall

We’re around at the newly re-opened Hillhurst Sunnyside Farmers Market every Wednesday from 3:30 to 7:30 until October 7th. Here’s a shot of Des and some weird lady we couldn’t get rid of.