According to a new study in Nature Plants published June 10, 2019, many of the most popular wine varieties sold today are extremely genetically similar to the wines that ancient Romans drank—and may have existed for thousands of years longer.  To determine the genetic lineages of the wines they studied, researchers collected 28 grape seeds from nine ancient sites in France, with some sites dating back 2,500 years.  They then analyzed the grapes' genes and compared them with modern varietals—something that hadn't been done before and required a monumental cross-disciplinary effort by ancient-DNA researchers, archaeologists and modern-grape geneticists.  Of the 28 ancient seeds that the researchers tested, all were genetically related to grapes grown today.  Sixteen of the 28 were within one or two generations of modern varieties.  And in at least one case, the researchers found that consumers are drinking wine from the same grapes as medieval Frenchmen 900 years ago:  the rare savagnin blanc (not to be confused with sauvignon), a light, floral white varietal with rigorous growing standards and a small range of cultivation in eastern France.  In other cases, we are drinking almost the exact same wine that Roman emperors drank—our pinot noir and syrah grapes are "siblings" of the Roman varieties.  The researchers' findings demonstrate just how enduring wine consumers' tastes can be and how careful winemakers have been in preserving popular and enduring varietals, according to Nathan Wales, a study co-author and a lecturer at the University of York who specializes in paleogenomics (the study of ancient DNA).  "When we imagined people 1,000 years ago drinking wine . . . the question was . . . how different was the stuff  in that bottle?  Now we've got the answer," says Wales.  "It's incredibly likely that someone 1,000 years ago was drinking something that's pretty much genetically identical to what we drink today."  But wait.  Living things evolve, right?  Not domesticated wine grapes—we've hijacked natural selection to serve our own tastes for thousands of years.  It works like this:  Instead of letting grapes pollinate each other and go through sexual reproduction, most winemakers essentially clone their plants through a process called "vegetative propagation."  This can either involve inserting dormant buds into existing roots or taking a vine shoot from a mother plant and planting it directly in the earth.  The new vine remains genetically identical to its "parent," with all the ineffable qualities that make it produce merlots and pinot grigios.  Susie Neilson  https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/06/10/731272004/we-drink-basically-the-same-wine-as-ancient-romans-and-thats-not-so-great



APPLE FACTS  The crabapple is the only apple native to North America.  2,500 varieties of apples are grown in the United States.  7,500 varieties of apples are grown throughout the world.  100 varieties of apples are grown commercially in the United States.  Apples are grown commercially in 36 states.  Apples are grown in all 50 states.  In colonial time, apples were called winter banana or melt-in-the-mouth.  The world's largest apple peel was created by Kathy Wafler Madison on October 16, 1976, in Rochester, NY.  It was 172 feet, 4 inches long.  (She was 16 years old at the time and grew up to be a sales manager for an apple tree nursery.)  It takes about 36 apples to create one gallon of apple cider.  Find more apple facts at https://extension.illinois.edu/apples/facts.cfm



Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.  Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out.  They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced.  Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides.  For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality--photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid--and a wider public.  The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image.  But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does.  From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects.  Painting never had so imperial a scope.  The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.  That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption--the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed--seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures.  The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them.  Susan Sontag  On Photography  http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt.shtml



shifter  noun  1.  Term adopted by Jakobson from the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen (1860–1943) for indexical symbols in language—grammatical units with a deictic character (such as personal pronouns), which can be decoded only by reference to the specific situational context of particular messages:  time, place, addresser and addressee.  See also deixis.  2.  More broadly, any sign having a referent which can be determined only in relation to the situational context of its use.

https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100501871



Ming Tsai's love of cooking was forged in his early years.  Raised in Dayton, Ohio, he spent hours cooking alongside his mother and father at Mandarin Kitchen, the family-owned restaurant.  His experience taught him about restaurant operations and most importantly, the art of making customers happy through food.  In high school, Ming headed east to attend school at Phillips Academy Andover.  From there, Ming continued to Yale University earning his degree in Mechanical Engineering.  During this time, Ming spent his summers attending Le Cordon Bleu cooking school and apprenticing at area restaurants in Paris.  After graduating from Yale, Ming moved to Paris and trained under renowned Pastry Chef Pierre Herme and then on to Osaka with Sushi Master Kobayashi.  Upon his return to the United States, Ming enrolled in graduate school at Cornell University, earning a Master's Degree in Hotel Administration and Hospitality Marketing.  In 1998, Ming opened Blue Ginger in Wellesley, MA and immediately impressed diners from Boston and Beyond with the restaurant's innovative East-West cuisine.  In its first year, Blue Ginger received 3 stars from the Boston Globe, was named "Best New Restaurant" by Boston Magazine, and was nominated by the James Beard Foundation as "Best New Restaurant 1998".  That same year, Esquire Magazine honored Ming as "Chef of the Year".  The James Beard Foundation crowned Ming "2002 Best Chef Northeast" and since 2002, the Zagat Restaurant Guide rated Blue Ginger within the "Top 5 of Most Popular Restaurants".  In 2007, Blue Ginger received the Ivy Award from Restaurants & Institutions for its achievement of the highest standards in food, hospitality and service.  In 2009, Ming and Blue Ginger won IFMA's Silver Plate Award in the Independent Restaurant category recognizing overall excellence in the country.  In 2012, Boston Magazine ranked Blue Ginger as one of the 50 Best Restaurants.  In June 2017, after 19 years of excellence, Ming closed Blue Ginger to pursue other opportunities.  See more about Blue Ginger here.  In early 2013, Ming opened his second restaurant Blue Dragon - an Asian gastro pub located in the Fort Point Channel area of Boston.  The tapas-style menu features Ming's East-West approach with a twist on traditional pub favorites. Blue Dragon was named one of Esquire Magazine's"Best New Restaurants 2013" and one of Zagat's "24 New Restaurants You Need to Know About Around the US".  For more information on Blue Dragon click here.  Ming is the host and executive producer of the public television cooking show, Simply Ming.  In 2009, Simply Ming received two Emmy nominations for "Outstanding Culinary Program" and "Outstanding Lifestyle/Culinary Host", and received two Bronze Telly Awards in the categories of "Lighting" and "Art Direction".  Ming began cooking for television audiences on the Food Network, where he was the 1998 Emmy Award-Winning host of East Meets West with Ming Tsai.  Ming's Quest, his popular cooking adventure series, also aired on Food Network.  In the summer of 2008, Ming traveled to the Beijing Olympics with NBC's Today Show to provide viewers with insight into food customs and traditions that define his Chinese heritage.  In addition to television, Ming is the author of five cookbooks:  Blue Ginger:  East Meets West Cooking with Ming Tsai, Simply Ming, Ming's Master Recipes, Simply Ming One-Pot Meals, and Simply Ming In Your Kitchen.  https://www.ming.com/about-1



Franz Kafka (3 July 1883–3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature.  His work, which fuses elements of realismand the fantastic, typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers, and has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity.  His best known works include "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis"), Der Process (The Trial), and Das Schloss (The Castle).  The term Kafkaesque has entered the English language to describe situations like those found in his writing.  Few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime:  the story collections Betrachtung (Contemplation) and Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor), and individual stories (such as "Die Verwandlung") were published in literary magazines but received little public attention.  In his will, Kafka instructed his executor and friend Max Brod to destroy his unfinished works, including his novels Der Process, Das Schloss and Der Verschollene (translated as both Amerika and The Man Who Disappeared), but Brod ignored these instructions. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka



4th of July Salad  1 c. jicama, diced; 1 c. fresh blueberries; 1 c. fresh apples, diced or chopped; 1/4 c. thinly sliced radishes; 1/4 c. finely chopped fresh mint, 1/4 c. olive oil; 1/8 tsp.salt, optional.  Combine ingredients and serve.  Laura Syring



4th of July Salad Recipes  From the classic potato and pasta salads, to more creative uses of watermelon and corn, we have the perfect 4th of July salad for you.  https://www.allrecipes.com/recipes/1498/holidays-and-events/4th-of-july/salads/?page=2



http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2119  July 3, 2019