Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards (49 page)

“I’m not going to thank anybody; I’m just going to say I damn well deserve it.”

“I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me! You really like me!”

“I just want to thank everybody I’ve ever met in my entire life.”

Allspice

Allspice’s spicy aroma hints of nutmeg, pepper, ginger, juniper, cloves, and cinnamon—all spices. As a result, people assume that it’s a spice blend when it really comes from a berry. Cooks use it as both a sweet and savory seasoning, but allspice is worthy of distinction for its strong flavor and its rich history.

Spanish explorers in the West Indies discovered the evergreen tree
Pimenta dioica
in the early 16th century. The tree’s white flowers develop berries that are picked and dried in the sun to give us allspice. It takes four to five years for a Pimenta tree to bear fruit, and the berries have to be picked at just the right time, before they ripen, because the fruit’s flavor exists mostly in the rind of the unripe berries. When the berries do ripen, they lose a lot of their aromatic properties. The tree grows wild only in the Western hemisphere and is produced (for commercial use) primarily in Jamaica, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico.

South Americans have used allspice for centuries as a meat curative and as a flavoring for chocolate. The spice came to Europe in the early 17th century, and soon it was called “English spice” because the English were its largest distributor (having colonized Jamaica in 1655). In 1693, Europeans started calling it allspice—a name chosen to convey the multiple spices it seemed to contain—and the popular misnomer stuck.

Over the years, different cultures have adapted allspice to particular uses. It remains most popular in the Caribbean, where it flavors jerk dishes, but it’s also used to flavor sausage in Germany, stews in the Middle East, and cakes in England. In Scandinavian countries, it’s used to marinate herring.

Some also swear by allspice’s medicinal properties. It has a mild anesthetic quality, sometimes relieves arthritis pain, and has been used as an aphrodisiac. People also add it to hot tea to eliminate gas pains and other digestive problems.

For more than 400 years, French monks of the Order of Chartreuse have made their namesake elixir, and allspice has been cited as a secret ingredient. Legend says that a French diplomat named François Annibal d’Estrées gave them the recipe in 1605. It includes 130 plants, herbs, roots, and leaves in a brandy base. Rumored to deliver long life, the elixir definitely delivers a strong punch—it’s 142 proof, or 71 percent alcohol by volume. It quickly became popular among locals. A less-potent version, green chartreuse—a mere 55 proof—was made available to those who wanted it for its medicinal effect. It’s still available today, as is yellow chartreuse, a slightly stronger version (80 proof). The monks continue to sell the liqueur to finance their monastery.

Allspice can also be found in another herbal liqueur: Benedictine, a cognac-based beverage with herbs and roots. It was first developed in the 16th century for Benedictine monks and is still around. On the bottle is the phrase
Deo Optimo Maximo
(“to God, most good, most great”). A lovely sentiment for allspice too.

•During the Napoleonic wars, Russian soldiers put allspice in their boots to keep their feet warm. The spice made their feet smell better too, and allspice got a reputation for being a men’s toiletry item. Today, its oil still turns up in colognes, aftershaves, and other things with “spice” in the title.

•The Mayans used allspice to embalm corpses.

Newman’s Own

In December 1980, Paul Newman made a batch of homemade salad dressing (a mustardy vinegarette) in a bathtub in the basement of his Westport, Connecticut, home. He called his friend, writer A. E. Hotchner, and asked him to help fill old wine bottles with the dressing, which he intended to give to his neighbors as Christmas gifts.

Newman had been making his own salad dressing for years. He was never happy with store brands (too many chemicals, sweeteners, and artificial products), and in restaurants he’d often go into the kitchen and mix up his own.

After filling up a few dozen bottles, Newman and Hotchner found themselves with half of a bathtub of dressing left over. Newman figured he could bottle the rest, sell them to a local upscale grocery store, and pocket some cash. It never happened. Newman and Hotchner got sidetracked with the holidays, and Newman spent most of the next year filming
Absence of Malice.

Newman still thought his dressing was good enough to sell commercially. In 1982, he approached several food companies and bottling plants, but none were interested. So Newman and Hotchner decided to do it themselves. Newman put up $40,000 in seed money, leaving now and again to go film
The Verdict
, while Hotchner tried to get the company off the ground.

Deciding that they should probably taste-test their dressing before they spent a lot of time and money marketing it, Newman and Hotchner arranged a test against bestselling dressings at the kitchen of a Connecticut caterer named Martha Stewart (yes, that Martha Stewart). Of about two dozens ballots, Newman’s was judged the best on all but two—not bad for a homemade dressing. Newman left the tasting ecstatic, declaring himself “the salad king of New England.” Hotchner and Newman decided that Salad King would be the name of the business, and the next day they formed Salad King Inc.

A friend put Newman in touch with Stew Leonard, owner and manager of Stew Leonard’s, the biggest supermarket in Norwalk, a town near Newman’s home of Westport. He told Newman that he liked the dressing and it was good enough to sell, but there was one problem: It would flop if he called it Salad King. And he said, in order for the dressing to sell, Newman’s face would have to be on the bottle. Newman’s response: “Not a chance in hell.”

Stew Leonard was the nation’s top seller of Ken’s Steakhouse salad dressing. He told Newman and Hotchner that if Newman put his face on the bottle, he’d get the Ken’s bottler to package 2,000 test cases and he’d sell it at his store with a huge promotion. Newman remained uninterested.

A few days later, Newman and Hotchner were fishing on Newman’s boat, the
Caca de Toro
. They were at an impasse. Newman didn’t want to plaster his face on the bottle. He thought it was crass, and similar to appearing on TV talk shows to promote his movies. He just wanted to make his all-natural dressing, call it Salad King, and put it in stores without calling attention to the fact that it was created by one of the world’s biggest movie stars. Hotchner suggested they just forget the whole thing. Newman had another idea: he’d put himself on the bottle, but give the proceeds to charity. Hotchner agreed.

The pair devised a Napoleonic “N” logo for the bottle, accompanying a picture of Newman wearing a laurel wreath. They also
created a slogan: “Fine Foods Since February.” And the name of the dressing was officially changed from Salad King to “Newman’s Own.”

Stew Leonard held up his end of the deal. He got Ken’s to produce 2,000 cases of dressing and held a promotion at his store in May 1982. He put a sign in front that said “Welcome Paul Newman.” Hundreds packed the store. And in two weeks, Stew Leonard’s had sold 10,000 bottles of Newman’s Own dressing.

What began as a lark quickly became a real business. Newman’s Own rented an office above a bank in Westport and furnished it with the actor’s patio furniture. In late 1982, the brand expanded with the introduction of a pasta sauce. In 1983, its first full year of business, Newman’s Own recorded sales of $3.2 million, with a profit of $397,000.

Over the past 25 years, Newman’s Own has grown into one of the bestselling salad dressing lines, but also one of the first companies to offer nationally available all-natural—and even organic—products. In addition to dressing and pasta sauce, Newman’s Own makes salsa, popcorn, juice, cookies, cereal, coffee, mints, and pet food.

All of those products have raised more than $200 million in profits. Newman had no idea that the proceeds he’d pledged to charity would amount to so much. True to his word, he (and Hotchner) have given away every penny. While the company is secretive about which charities it funds, it is very vocal about its complete financial support of the Hole in the Wall Gang Camps, summer camps for children with life-threatening illnesses. There are five in the U.S. and two in Europe and it costs nothing for the 13,000 campers who annually attend.

“The embarrassing thing is that the salad dressing is outgrossing my films.”

Empress Josephine

Marie-Joseph-Rose de Tascher de la Pagerie—also known as Rose—was born in 1763 on her family’s Martinique sugar plantation, where she acquired her love for gardening. At 14, she was married off to a rich young army officer, the Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais, and they moved to Paris. She bore him two children, but he was ashamed of her provincial ways and was so indifferent to her that she eventually obtained a separation. After lingering three more years in Paris, she returned home in 1788, where she remained until until a 1790 slave uprising forced her to return to Paris, now in the throes of the French Revolution.

In spite of their estrangement, her life was endangered when her husband, who’d been serving in the Revolutionary army, fell out of favor and was guillotined in 1794. Joséphine herself was imprisoned, and then released.

No longer unsophisticated, Joséphine caught the eye of Napoleon Bonaparte, then a rising young army officer, and they married in 1796. When Josephine paid 325,000 francs for a run-down country house outside of Paris, appropriately named Malmaison or “bad house,” Napoleon was furious. Josephine’s extravagances would continue to put a strain on their marriage as time went on.

Meanwhile, Josephine was tending her garden and filling it with her namesake—roses. Her passion for roses left a floral legacy that lives on in one of the most important rose books ever published and, more importantly, in gardens worldwide.

Empress Josephine’s passion for gardening was new and unfashionable when she began the garden in 1798. But she was determined to make her gardens both unforgettable and meaningful, and in the 16 years she kept them, she created a kind of “rose renaissance.”

Josephine was growing as many species of plants as she could. She introduced 200 plant species to France including jasmine, camellia, and phlox, as well as dahlias, tree peonies, and magnolias. She ordered plants from the best suppliers and spent as much money as she wanted on them (and was always in debt; when she died, her debts amounted to 2½ million francs). Even while France was at war with England and the continent was under continuous blockade, Josephine bought her plants from the London nursery Kennedy & Lee, persuading Napoleon to issue Mr. Kennedy a passport and papers of safe conduct. The Emperor was so obliging, in fact, that he often brought seeds and plants captured from British ships back home for her, including some new ones discovered by Captain James Cook in Australia.

Mr. Kennedy also assisted the Empress in the plan and layout of her gardens. Josephine’s goal was to bring every rose in existence to the chateau’s garden.

Josephine didn’t simply collect roses; she cultivated them, too. Previously, roses had been grown as an aromatic and medicinal plant; Josephine created interest in growing them for their beauty. Her garden’s reputation ignited an interest in rose growing so strong that by 1815, France had become a leading grower and exporter of roses, and by 1830, there were over 2,500 varieties.