Anne and I are hosting Thanksgiving for some family and friends this year, and today I went rummaging around for punch ideas. My favorite festive tipple was, of course, the one tantalizingly out of reach: In his great 2007 column on the dearth of Thanksgiving cocktails, in which he mines history for recipe cues, Eric Felten alludes to a candidate he'd commissioned from Greg Lindgren of the San Francisco bar Rye:

He proposed poaching quince in honey, water and mulling spices, and then using the warm fruity broth to flavor a glass of brandy. Very nice indeed -- if you succeed in finding fresh quince.

Sadly, Felten never printed the recipe from Lindgren, a well regarded bar owner, drink crafter and cocktail contest ringleader. Nor could I find it anywhere online.

One whois search later, I fired off an email to Lindgren asking if he might share the recipe he'd sent to Felten. I didn't expect he'd still have the thing handy, three years on, but in less than an hour he sent back full instructions, complete with pictures.

Even better, he's given me permission to reprint the recipe here.

A bit of backstory: The drink is dubbed a "Metheglin" in reference to a spiced drink of fermented honey popular in England in the early 17th Century, when the Pilgrims headed out to start Plymouth Colony (and then promptly ordered two hogsheads of Metheglin from back home). Felten asked Lindgren and other bartenders for a drink inspired by the brew.

Although Felten worried his readers wouldn't be able to source quince, I discovered a a nice trove at the first place I chcked, Monterey Market in Berkeley. They're on your immediate left past the front door, inexplicably lodged between the lemons and grapefruit (related to apples and pears, quince is not citrus). Pic below. Admittedly, things won't be this easy for all shoppers.

Without further ado:

Quince Metheglin

by Greg Lindgren

Ingredients

• 8 quinces (skins peeled)
• 16 oz wild honey
• 1 tsp cloves
• 1 whole nutmeg seed (crushed or chopped, not grated)
• 1 tsp chamomile
• 4 cinnamon Sticks
• 4 qt water
• 750 ml brandy (Germain-Robin Craft Method)

In a 4" deep baking pan (something sturdy):

Place peeled quinces in pan and drizzle the honey over all of the quince fruit.

Fill pan with water until the quinces are just submerged.

Use a mesh tea ball, or tea bag to contain crushed nutmeg, chamomile, and cloves. Drop this into the water along with 4 cinnamon sticks.

Cover the pan tightly with aluminum foil and put the pan in a preheated oven set at 425 degrees.

Let the quinces poach until they are soft all the way through. The poaching liquid will turn a sunset pink color from the quince flesh. Remove pan and let cool until it can be handled safely. Using tongs, remove all quince fruit, cinnamon sticks, and tea ball. Skim the poaching liquid if necessary. Reduce liquid on stove top. If neccessary add honey to sweeten. Combine quince poaching liquid with brandy to taste and keep warm on the stove top, or in a punch bowl that can hold warm liquid. 

You can discard the poached quinces, or use them to make a quince paste.

What I like about this beverage besides the great flavor of quince, honey, brandy and spice is the vibrant color. My photos here don't do it justice. (They appear amber/rust color).

In natural light the Quince Metheglin is slightly pinkish. 

This was very easy to make, the hardest part was being patient long enough to let the quince fully poach. Readers would have different sizes of pans, so my instructions were to cook by color and tenderness rather than time and exact measure. I checked my quinces at one hour in the oven and they were still a little white in the center while the liquid was just turning from clear to gold. An hour and a half later the quinces and the poaching liquid were the right color, and all the flavor was there.

I wrote to mix with brandy to taste. The base is quite sweet at 1 part brandy to 4 parts base ratio. I liked mine 1 part brandy to 2 parts base. Water could also be added to make it less sweet if necessary without adding too much spirit for some palates.

[Recipe text and photos (top) by Greg Lindgren and reprinted with permission. Lindgren photo via Rebecca Chapa's Slow Food Nation album. Consider a visit to Lindgren's bars Rye (a delightful mixologist hub), Rosewood and 15 Romolo.] 

An underappreciated reason for Twitter's success is that the service made it so easy to subscribe to things. Uniform button. One click and you're done. Remember how hard it was before Twitter, with RSS readers? Find feeds, pick feed, view feed, send feed to reader, import feed, pick a folder -- click click clickity click KILL ME ALREADY I GIVE UP.

But Twitter is kind of lame -- centralized, regulated, opaque and brittle. Frustrated users like Dave Winer say it should be supplanted by an open and decentralized system that can't Fail Whale or be pimped out for one company's benefit. That's true, and probably inevitable. But not until we get a "Follow" button that can work on any website and that skips choices only power users care about (feed readers, RSS vs Atom, summary vs full length feed, etc).

Easy following is not a "should" for supplanting Twitter but a must. As Joel Spolsky once wrote, large user bases are built by ruthlessly improving usability:

Whenever you "lower the bar" by even a small amount, making your program, say, 10% easier to use, you dramatically increase the number of people who can use it, say, by 50%."

More usable products, in other words, are more used. For evidence of this look to Tumblr. Like Twitter, Tumblr has a built-in feed  reader and one-click following. This made Tumblr's bloggers quite active; even without a 140-character limit, the company adds five times as many posts as rival WordPress each day, with 1/15th as many users. The feature is so powerful Google's Blogger eventually copied it.

It's going to be tricky, but there's got to be an open way to enable one-click subscriptions outside and across the Twitter, Tumblr and Blogger sandboxes. There's been a big emphasis on the technical aspects of supplanting Twitter, but these user interface details are every bit as important.

It's because editing prose involves so much time judging your work, I decided.

In programming, you typically judge your work in a fraction of a second. Your code compiles or it doesn't. Your Web app feature works or it fails. Sure, you'll spend long frustrating stretches debugging the code. But even then your head stays in a creative place. You literally have to hunt for flaws in your work, and so the act of debugging becomes a process basically identical to that of programming - imagine a solution to the problem, write/edit some code to test your theory, run the code, observe results. It's just more creation.

In writing prose, you judge your work by reading it. This takes minutes or hours for a longer work rather than milliseconds. Minutes or hours of finding flaws, many entirely subjective, in your own writing. The deleterious effect on your mood is predictable, if sometimes subtle.

This repeated switch in mental modes is inefficient and unpleasant, which is why many writers prefer pounding out a first draft without doing any self editing, and even without using notes. Of course they eventually have to surrender to the editing process, and to the ping-pong of mental state changes. This draining back and forth is largely absent from the process of programming, save for those rare hero coders who carefully re-read and refactor their working software so it can be more easily understood and modified by other people. But that's an optional and very occasional process -- not, as with writing, one integral to the process of creation itself.

The only consolation is that the writer will never, like the programmer, spend days or weeks trying to fix a single mysterious bug. Unlike, say, C, the English language is mushy enough that some things can, in the end, be fudged.

Anyway, tonight I was plowing through the second chapter, "Actual Drinks," and, amid many weird cocktails built around fortified wines from the Iberian peninsula, there was an intriguing entry distilled from Amis' time down South America way. The drink, "La Tequila con Sangrita," is sort of like a Mexican Bloody Mary, but with the booze served separate from the tomato stuff.

With some tweaks -- Amis' version serves three and is built, inexplicably, using Tobasco sauce and Cayenne pepper -- the two-fisted drink was something Anne and I agreed, emphatically, we can get behind. What's more, I think it would be ideal for the Mexico-Argentina World Cup match next Sunday, 11:30 am/2:30 pm depending what part of the U.S. you're in. Here's my adaptation of Amis' recipe:

• 1.5oz tequila, neat, unchilled, in its own glass. A good blanco works fine, provided it's 100 percent blue agave. I don't suppose a more expensive reposado or anejo tequila would muss things up, but the pricey stuff is certainly not necessary. Just avoid Cuervo and other mixto tequilas.
• 1.5 oz tomato juice. I used a fresh roma tomato and pressed it through a mesh strainer; juicing one with clean hands would be fine too, provided you're OK with pulp and seeds, and I don't imagine canned juice would be so terrible. Tomatoes can well!
• Generous 1/2 oz fresh lime juice. Or, if you can't be bothered to measure, half a large lime or a full smaller one
• 1/2 teaspoon (or more, say four dashes) Tapatio, Cholula, or other Mexican hot sauce. Or Tabasco if you're hard up - if it's good enough for Amis, you'll probably be fine.
• Two pinches salt.

Amis on how to serve:

The tomato concoction and the tequila do not meet until they arrive to start a joint operation in your stomach. Each partaker gets a small glass of neat, unchilled tequila and a twin glass of the stirred, also unchilled red stuff, and sips in alteration...

You will find it a splendid pick-me-up, and throw-me-down, and jump-on-me.

Sounds about right. Sangrita means "little blood," which is what I hope our southern neighbors inflict on those Falkland-grubbing Argentine bastardos. (I guess. I've actually not been following the Cup. But... Salud!)

Rovzar: 

By  putting the "gossip" label on them...  the paper is revealing how it actually feels about these blogs: that they're actually just fluff.

Fischer

He uses the phrase "gossip blog" over and over, as if to hypnotize the reader.

Ya seriously where did the New York Times get the idea that people from the likes of Gawker, Dealbreaker, Curbed, Crushable and MediaTakeOut are "gossip bloggers?" One can ONLY GUESS:

(Via:  Gawker homepage, Dealbreaker homepage, Curbed about page, Crushable about page, MediaTakeOut homepage, and Goooooogle search of Mediaite.)