Ulmer Beer Mystery Solved - sorta

A short while back, we published this picture and talked about Ulmer Beer - noting that Ulmer seemed to be the only beer in town and in research found that The Sterling Bottling Co., bottled the beer that came out here in barrels on the Long Island Rail Road.  We felt like Sherlock Holmes incarnate.

Now we find that there is more to the story and we really missed the obvious....that is if we can ever make the deduction that the Ulmer's of brewery fame had something to do with our village other than shipping it beer.

We looked at the 1910 phone book to see if there was truly an Ulmer living in our midst and couldn't find one.  Mr. Petty, who owned the above pictured wagon to deliver his bottled brews was there but no Ulmer. So when this picture from about the same time popped up, our brain wheels actually started to move a bit.

It seems that we not only had an Ulmer Building but an Ulmer Block; beverage store on the corner, the fashion store in the middle and the A&P Grocery on the end.   The photo is clearly labeled the Ulmer Block, Greenport, NY.

We searched Ancestry.com for leads and found none.  The Ulmers of Brooklyn fame are in the middle of countless Ulmers in that neck of the woods so we are at a loss. But that is something we enjoy. Everyone loves a mystery.

Our journey this morning takes us to the Ulmer Block on other business and we are going to nose around some...see what is up...magnifying glass to the ready, cap on, cloak, no pipe....here here my dear Watson.

We'll report to you later.

Leftovers

We would like to report that this is easy.  Actually, after you have been through the drill one time, it is.

For you readers who want to do this over the holidays coming up, well, I can't tell you every cook's secret but:

1.  use a big turkey and just debone the ribs etc....leave the legs and thighs where they are..otherwise you get a football rather than a bird.

2. just buy chicken breasts and thighs - SKINLESS...no one will every every know.

3.  If you can get duck breasts, well they are unbelievable in this...but to do the entire duck thing, you have to render the fat in the skin otherwise you get rubber skins, and that is too much fat by 10x's.

4.  Because all the fat is out of this to start with, any dressing you put in...and you should layer it, needs to be on the moist side.

OK so far?  Bone the turkey.  Put it on its skin side down. don't worry...it will be a mess so just get plenty of room. FLASH: "pre-lay" the butcher's twine underneath as you will but binding this together at the end and it gets heavy....

Last...butterfly the breasts...that thins them out and makes for more even cooking.

Steps:

1. turkey skin down...season it liberally...then spread a fairly thin layer o dressing over all the breast meat.
2. butterfly the chicken and duck breasts so they are thinner...or you can just buy chicken that is already presliced breasts into scallopini like cuts.  layer this out.
3. cover with a thin layer of dressing
4. roll the whole thing up and use the butcher's twine to  kinda make it work.  you can use some skewers to get it to look like  a turkey if you want....for heaven's sake...don't get crazy.
5. We recommend, like all turkey, the low and slow method.  breast side down for 3 hours at 250. Breast side up for 9 more hours at 250 (it will flip easy and not fall apart). total 12 hours at low heat.
6. The inner temp should be in the 160 range as this will cook like crazy on its own after it is out. It stays steaming hot for an hour plus.  Just measure the temp in the dark meat of the turkey...when that is done it is all done.

Also it helps if you have a dog and a cat, 2-4 grand kids under age 4, no counter room, and a few other distractions .... that makes this a piece of cake.

Shop Local - Just One Thing

We just want you to think about one thing while you pile around this holiday gathering up the presents and well planned out gifts for gifting.

It is unrealistic to think that you can or expect you to find your holiday list within the confines of the Village and certainly you will venture to Riverhead and outlets or the big box stores and we, quite frankly go there too.  But get out that "to buy" list and go through it and see if there is just one thing - more is welcome of course - but just one thing that you can buy here in town at a local store. 

While we are on the subject, Thanksgiving is about giving - thanks of course - but more about being grateful. Our parents always recalled harder times, less forgiving times, and when we sulked as kids under the burdens of curfews or "to your room with no TV", they were quick to mention that if we were having a hard time now - well just you wait buster. In our less addled moments, we found something good to do - raking a neighbor's leaves, shoveling a sidewalk, opening a door or just plain saying hello and meaning it. Visiting a local store for that just one thing is a terrific gift in itself.

So let's make a deal.

Visit a local merchant and find just one thing on your many lists and find it here. Drop in somewhere for coffee or a cupcake, a sandwich or some hot soup, say hello, open a door. Smile a little bit.

Let's be friends....after all it is Thanksgiving.

Just some thoughts on our first chilly morning

Some of us old timers remember our parents talking about the winters when Long Island Sound froze over all the way to Connecticut. Even we remember the Shelter Island Ferry lanes being choked with ice and specifically on a New Year's Eve 20 or so years ago actually getting stuck in the ice and the other ferry nudging us through.

We guess that the LIRR's snow-train-engine-plow, that still sits near the railroad museum off 4th Street, fell into some non-use about the time the railroad turnabout ceased to be used otherwise we think that this plow would do absolutely no good running backwards all the way to Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn. We have to think that perhaps our grandparents were telling the truth when they had to walk barefoot to school, 5 miles each was uphill and in snow up to their fannies.
Frankly, we miss the idea of things being that cold and perhaps snowy so that this "Big Bertha" would have to lumber out and clear the tracks.  You know those mornings; so cold the snow crunches underfoot, the cat won't go out, fireplace smoke all grey and rope straight against that robin's egg blue sky...you know the ones?

I guess we can miss it when we don't have it and decry it when it shows up.....but that's pretty universal and isn't limited to snow and that first cold wind.

Shelter Island and 1600 pounds of sugar

Well, its misty out this morning, mild and fall damp; wet leaves damp.   Shelter Island rests just to the south of where we are  looking and across a harbor area that turns the lights to little puff balls - almost like cotton candy. I'll give it til noon.

This is a strange little land, this island.  It rests between the north and south forks of the far eastern part of Long Island and connected only by ferry. At certain times during the late night you are there and better like it because there is no getting off of it except to swim.  Perlman, the violinist, has his music camp just across the way.  Homes perched high on the heights, a few hundred feet up probably have a few souls looking back at us in middle nights as  there is very little else to do there at this hour except to look for early morning fireplaces coming alive and coffee brewing here and there. At 3am it doesn't really matter.

A while back it was part of the original Plymouth Land Grant (1620 or so if memory serves) and eventually found its way to some sugar merchants - one in particular, a fellow named Sylvester, settled there. Signs dot the roadside all over the place and his original home or what remains still exists. We remember him a bit (not in person but from the historical markers) because he married a young lady (16 years of age) named Grissel Brinley - what a name!

About 15 years ago we went to a yard sale just up the street from the original Sylvester home.  It was a farmhouse that due to a recent death was being emptied and was under contract for sale.  The 1,600 pounds of sugar (about $5,000 at the local IGA store now)would buy about 1/100th of one of the 6 acres remaining at this homestead.  Shelter Island isn't for the faint of pocketbook. 

Anyway, in one of the out buildings that was used as a canning shed, was a wall full of canning jars (seemed to make sense). Hundreds of jars. Some were very rare and dated back 120 years....1870s actually.  On investigation this was one of the original "farms" on the island, blocked off into a substantial parcel from the nearly 12,000 acres.  The original farmhouse was rebuilt after the War of 1812 when the British invaded and burned a lot of the buildings. If walls could talk.

We keep the jar and it is now found in the kitchen where it stores brown sugar and generally decorates the counter top. We keep Shelter Island in sight out of our windows. Sometimes thinking that Shakespeare died about 4 years before this Island was the target of settlers and we think of the opening of Twelfth Night and Viola and her not being bound for Virginia but to Plymouth (and not all lost at sea save one) and finding her way to Shelter Island and her great great great great grand kids owning a farm and having a canning shed.....and of course owning our jar.

Notes from our far flung correspondents

We received a very nice note from Rick Boutcher who lives in Asingan in the Philippines.  He reports that it is about a 7 hour drive north of Manila and one of the few places left on earth where one can see the Milky Way. 
Rick is a retired physics professor and during his early years used to spend summers in Greenport.  He comes back on occasion and always visits. This is his wife, Priny, on a visit to the 67 steps on the sound.  He remembers when Main and the North Road's intersection was a round-about and I'm banking that he has a lot of other memories of the village from 60 years back and I've asked him to write to us on occasion and share them.

We were discussing memories just the other day. Events, days, gatherings etc., that took a long time to unfold are just snippets now, at best a glimpse but full of smells and sounds, the air on the skin so to speak but distilled or rendered down to an essence; a sauce in a pan reduced by 1/2.

We are of course pleased that he found us at http://www.greenportvillage.com/ and that he is writing us now and then.  We wish others would as well because it is a pleasant thought that when we scatter to the winds and find ourselves at nearly the other side of the world, the village will have a mystical draw on our senses.

Rick reports that his grandparents are buried in Stirling Cemetery having passed in the middle 60s. They lived on Carpenter Street, and we presume it was from there that he launched his summer adventures.  I'm certain we will hear more about all of this as he has promised to write and send pictures.

We will eagerly await them.

Yesterday - Armistice Day

We actually watched the second hand on a digital clock today at 11:11.11 noting that this is the last time this century that 12 x's 1 will appear.

Vetern's Day came about in 1919, a year after the Armistice ending the first world war.  Certainly if there was a horrible example of what nations do to their populations and what war grinds out, this was it...and that isn't in the least to discount the 92 years of wars that follow.

Sometimes we adopt World Wars as our own and project ourselves into the center of things and that is only natural and to some extent right.  Armistice Day should be about nothing if not about war being the last alternative and it is doubly sad if it isn't.  You can't wish back the dead.

Ravel, the French composer drove amublances during WWI.  That must have been a grisly task at best and a nightmare for decades at least. Ravel, as was the case with most of the French population, lost some if not many friends and family.  Ravel was a national treasure in France - a composer/artist of international fame perhaps not up for the trenches but a patriot and ready to do his part. 

Death moves a lot of people and he was no exception and between 1914-17 he wrote these various movements in a suite or collection of pieces called Le Tombeau de Couperin - the Tomb of Couperin (Couperin was an 18th century composer - very French and very much admired for his skill).  These pieces aren't to the memory of Couperin but to the individual deaths of spirits living in his friends.

The movements are:

• I. Prélude

"To the memory of Lieutenant Jacques Charlot" (who transcribed Ravel's four-hand piece Ma mère l'oye for solo piano)

• II. Fugue

"To the memory of Jean Cruppi" (to whose mother Ravel dedicated his opera L'heure espagnole)

• III. Forlane

"To the memory of Lieutenant Gabriel Deluc" (a Basque painter from Saint-Jean-de-Luz)

• IV. Rigaudon

"To the memory of Pierre and Pascal Gaudin" (brothers killed by the same shell)

• V. Menuet

"To the memory of Jean Dreyfus" (at whose home Ravel recuperated after he was demobilized)

• VI. Toccata

"To the memory of Captain Joseph de Marliave" (killed in action in August 1914)

We don't own sadness or sacrifice, nationalism or loss. We are just part of all of those who do.

Le Verrier's planet - Neptune - El Mistico

We are very blessed in our little Village as we can wander out into the night and see a dazzling set of stars and planets without a lot of city-type lights to hurt the view. Venus is very easy to spot as is Mars and Jupiter - Saturn a bit rarer and the twins of Uranus and Neptune - well we can't see them or if we could we probably wouldn't know it.

 

About the time Greenport came into being in some sort of first-formal way - and a hundred years before we really organized in 1838, a math guy named Le Verrier figured that there was a planet Neptune.  He calculated that it had some gravity to it and it made the other planets wobble a bit and then figured out where to look. Amazing.

 

We could only read about Neptune when we were kids. What pictures there were showed a fuzzy little ball of light spinning somewhere out there and it never rose or set like Venus or Mars or imposed with a red spot like Jupiter or was ringed like Saturn.

Now we find that this is a wonderous object of regard in our solar system with a dark spot of storms like Jupiters red spot and a faint set of rings like Saturn. It must be an amazing place - one that we will never visit except in our mind's eye.

We just wonder about it some and having something out there that we know about in some scientific way and yet we will never lay eyes on it without some lens or camera.  I suppose those who visited Atlantis and described it before it sank into the sea carried much the same type of message - describing the wonders of the city - but then telling the listener that "unfortunately you can't see it...".   Neptune is such a teaser.  One for the bucket list.

Morning Fog

We wandered downtown yesterday and were greeted by dense fog that, in a miracle of physics and sunlight, evaporated before my eyes - literally in minutes if not seconds.

Back in the 1950s there was a television show that had, as part of the opening sequence, a scene along the docks in San Francisco - famous for its fog. Of course the TV was black and white so all things were basically shades of grey but the image is pretty vivid still, half a century plus later.  The show was after Paladin and Gunsmoke and Broderick Crawford in Highway Patrol....stuck in there somewhere.
When down at the docks yesterday with the sun finally burning off the fog, a man and his son were standing, fishing poles in hand ready to get into that little boat and venture out a bit in search of whatever is passing through the bay at this time of year. They had to wait until they could see for reasons of safety alone but all of us, at one time or another, have been out in the clear and had the fog descend or rise - whatever the case - and cut us off from our surroundings.  The father did a great job of explaining fog but to an eight year old, the science was lost in the misery of not being able to fish as he was sure they were there and lunkers to boot.

Looking for a point here when there is none of course just drops us back to the obvious. Things fog up and then they clear and if you have something to do or want to do you can't fight nature - just wait it out. Just wait it out. Things often clear up on their own.

A puzzler

http://www.jigzone.com/puzzles/33157617995?z=0&m=4D25042DF3BD

Something really nice for an early Friday morning...

...or anytime for that matter. Grab a couple minutes. Sip some coffee. Have a knosh - but quietly of course. The household is never so quiet as these moments before dawn.  Pet your cat. Think noble and gentle thoughts.  Start the day with peace and serenity. Work can wait a minute or two...it really can.

Verticals and Blurs

Dock areas are something pretty linear in the morning light and calm water.  After too many episodes of Joy of Painting, one tends to note the pure vertical lines that reflect out to a soft blur, sometimes it being hard to find the spot where reality ends and reflection begins. Long time back in an art history class we talked about this and someone had to give a paper on the musical equals to the painted picture. We remember noting a couple things, not the least was that painters could easily compose a painting that went from one to the other and in essence use multiple techniques in one work; if this photo were a painting it wouldn't be considered bad technique to go from the clarity to the blurr - its just the way it is when it is seen - and that the overall is the work; not the technique.

In music - in composition of music - it is that fight to keep your compositional technique "pure" to one style or stylistic method that is the trick. At the turn of the last century there was a battle in technique between those who wrote music of reflections and those who composed like the docks - all vertical and clearly etched.

Two French composers, Ravel and Debussy wrote in both styles but the most successful pieces from each are clearly shoreline and reflection figurative speaking. See if you can spot which is which.