Emily's Hot Dish

The worst ‘milkshake’ I ever had was in Berlin in 1973.  We were desperate for a taste of home so we stopped at a Wimpy’s Burger.  This was before there was a McDonald’s on every block and the Wimpy’s looked reassuringly franchised.  (Wimpy?  Remember Popeye?  Wimpy was his fat sidekick who would obsequiesly snivel, “I’d gladly pay you Tuesday, for a hamburger today.”  Anyone under 50 may have to Wiki that.)  Anyway, somebody thought that would be a good basis for a burger restaurant and franchised it.  And the burgers might have been OK, I don’t really remember.  What I do remember is that the milk shake came out in a glass.  And it was milk, shaken.  We tasted it again.  It was just milk with bubbles that could only have come from vigorous shaking.  All we could visualize was the night staff standing in the back, poring over a German-English dictionary, shrugging, and shaking some milk for all they were worth.   

Let’s be honest, I steal most of my recipes.  I think we all do.  How many people actually make up something new?  Not many, I’d guess.  (Of course, there was my highly original Pickled Beet Whipped Cream, which, contrary to the scornful derision of my family, wasn’t that bad.) 

Aunt Joyce, a master cook herself, once told me that there were no secrets.  Everything was in a cookbook somewhere.  I mean, with 6 billion people on the planet eating two or three meals a day, that’s a lot of food and people talk.  

But every so often I think I come up with something myself.  Now, this may be a nice bit of self-delusion.  There’s a phenomenon where you get a great idea and a month later read about somebody else with the same idea. Except they market it and make a million bucks.  Did they read your mind?  No.  We’re all subject to roughly the same pool of information.  The same stimulus.  The same events.  The same background knowledge.  That the same ideas would occur to two or more people isn’t strange, it’s almost inevitable. 

Then there’s the Forgetfulness Phenomenon.  You learn something, time passes, you forget that you learned it and it occurs to you seeming like an original idea.  This may have happened when I discovered

The World’s Best Chocolate Malt

It happened at a resort my parents owned back in the 70s.  We were making malts but  they always seemed to lack a dimension.  Fullness?  Richness?   Some were OK but most were disappointments. 

Working  in the resort we had a commercial kitchen and lots of supplies.   At some point I decided to add marshmallow cream to a shake, filled it with chocolate and malt powder, and the gates to heaven opened. 

Really, I mean, this is the malt that your friends will do a double take for.  It’s rich, it’s sweet, it’s creamy/chocolaty/malty . . . it’s really, really good.  It’s so good that we can’t have it at my house.  Once you start making and eating these things, well . . . you gain weight.  It’s the same thing with triple-chocolate cake (cake mix, instant pudding, chips, and yogurt in a bundt pan.)  Good?  Hell, yes.  But just how fat do you want me?