Bluefish Cookbook or Rum Punch and Revolution

Bluefish Cookbook: Delicious Ways to Deal with the Blues

Author: Greta Jacobs

This book offers dozens of creative ways to prepare one of the Atlantic's most delicious--and most abundant--fish. It includes easy, kitchen-tested recipes for chowders, salads, fish cakes, sandwiches, fritters, soups, and even a pate. Old standards, such as Baked Stuffed Bluefish, and more exotic selections, such as Thai-style Blue Satay, will make even the most bluefish-rich household a place of culinary diversity. Also included are a primer on filleting and basic cooking methods, plus instructions on how to smoke bluefish and how to steam fillets in your dishwasher! This sixth edition includes several new recipes, archival photographs, and amusing anecdotes about bluefish and bluefishing.

A sampling of recipes:
Pesto Pasta Blues
Bluellabase
Marinated Bluefish with Chinese Vegetables
New Orleans Blues in Shells
Bluefish with Shrimp Sauce

Recipes in The Bluefish Cookbook from notable restaurants:

Bluefish in Guinness Batter, from O'Connor's Restaurant, County Cork, Ireland
North Wharf Fish House Stew, from Rob Mitchell's North Wharf Fish House, Nantucket
Spicy Bluefish with Summer Savory, from Michael Shannon's Club Car Restaurant, Nantucket
Bluefish Dijonaise, from Fiddler's Seafood Restaurant, Chester, Connecticut

New interesting textbook: We Are What We Eat or Good Housekeeping Easy Skillet Meals

Rum, Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in the 18th Century

Author: Peter Thompson

'Twas Honest old Noah first planted the Vine
And mended his morals by drinking its Wine;
He justly the drinking of water decry'd;
For he know that all Mankind, by drinking it, dy'd . . .
From this piece of history plainly we find
That Water's good neither for Body or Mind;
That Virtue and Safety in Wine-bibbing's found
While all that drink Water deserve to be drown'd.
--from a drinking song by Benjamin Franklin

There were, Peter Thompson notes, some one hundred and fifty synonyms for inebriation in common use in colonial Philadelphia and, on the eve of the Revolution, just as many licensed drinking establishments. Clearly, eighteenth-century Philadelphians were drawn to the tavern. In addition to the obvious lure of the liquor, taverns offered overnight accommodations, meals, and stabling for visitors. They also served as places to gossip, gamble, find work, make trades, and gather news.

In Rum Punch and Revolution, Thompson shows how the public houses provided a setting in which Philadelphians from all walks of life revealed their characters and ideas as nowhere else. He takes the reader into the cramped confines of the colonial bar room, describing the friendships, misunderstandings and conflicts which were generated among the city's drinkers and investigates the profitability of running a tavern in a city which, until independence, set maximum prices on the cost of drinks and
services in its public houses.

Taverngoing, Thompson writes, fostered a sense of citizenship that influenced political debate in colonial Philadelphia and became an issue in the city's revolution. Opinionated and profoundly undeferential taverngoers did more than drink; they forced their political leaders to consider whether and how public opinion could be represented in the counsels of a newly independent nation.

Peter Thompson is Sydney Mayer Lecturer in Early American History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Cross College.

Early American Studies

Peter Thompson shows how opinionated and undeferential taverngoers in colonial Philadelphia did more than drink—they forced their political leaders to consider whether and how public opinion could be represented in the counsels of a newly independent nation.