Updated: 5/25/26 to correct an error in a quote attribution.
This is part 1 of a series on “clear ice” that I’ll be rolling out over the next few months, with posts covering my way to make it at home, the global ice trade (a.k.a., the “frozen water trade”, which happened to ship mostly clear ice), and a look at one of the most famous ice vendors of the 19th century.
The Discovery
One of the most useful kitchen skills that I learned in recent years was how to make “clear ice” at home. Beautifully clear ice elevates your cold drinks, melts more slowly than standard ice1, makes a lovely sound when it taps the side of a glass, can make your drink easier to consume2, and is nice to look at.
But the default state of ice at home is cloudy: cloudy ice is produced by automatic ice makers (50-75% of the volume is cloudy), standard ice cube trays, and the spherical forms you might have seen at kitchen or bar supply shops3. Fortunately, it’s not too hard to make crystal clear ice at home.
Some days I feel like I could spent all day trudging through my email accounts and still feel like I’ll never get caught up. This is one of the reasons I don’t spend much time blogging — when I’m not at work I avoid the computer because of the looming mountain of email, or I get sucked into email management and suddenly my non-work computing energy is gone.
Keyboard Shortcuts Dull The Pain (A Little)
In my many years of Gmail use, keyboard shortcuts have always been important4. Two of my favorites are ‘[‘ and ‘]’, which archive the current conversation and move to the previous or next conversation. They are great for dealing with the promotion and update tabs: 1) scan or read the message, 2) tag if necessary, 3) tap [ or ] to go forward or backwards.
A little while ago, I took another look at the list of shortcuts and noticed that ‘#’ will delete a conversation (Gmail’s storage is sizeable, but with the torrent of email, it can eventually fill up). That’s great, but to truly make it useful, you need to change additional settings. Let’s step through the process
First, change your Gmail settings to turn on keyboard shortcuts and “auto-advance”. Click the gear in the upper right corner, then click “See all settings”.
How to see all settings in your Gmail account
Next, go to the General tab and click the “Keyboard shortcuts on” option.
Turning on keyboard shortcuts in Gmail
Then go to the Advanced tab, and click the “Enable” radio button for Auto-advance. Note that the direction for auto-advance (whether it goes backward or forward in your email list) is set in the General tab.
Activating “auto-advance” in Gmail
Finally, take a look at the list of keyboard shortcuts, as there are many more useful ones in Gmail. I use ‘j’, ‘k’, and ‘x’ a lot when I’m cleaning my email lists. ‘j’ moves the selection down one message, ‘k’ moves up one message, and ‘x’ selects a message. That’s great if you have a bunch of consecutive messages that you want to delete or archive — just tap ‘j’ then ‘x’ multiple times, and the ‘#’, ‘[‘, or ‘]’ key when you’re done.
Searching for the list of keyboard shortcuts in Gmail
Once you have the settings configured, here is one routine you can use to speed up your trudge through your personal email quagmire:
Open a message
Decide if you want to file it, archive it, delete it, or move to the next message (i.e., put it off until later).
File it: select the folder where it should be filed (‘v’ shortcut); or Label it: select the tag for that message (‘l’ shortcut)
Archive it: ‘[‘ or ‘]’, depending on which direction you want to move in your email. The next message will appear
Delete it: ‘#’. The next message will appear.
‘j’ or ‘k’ to move to the previous or next message without changing the status of the current message
An Email Dream
A New Year’s wish: an annual “update of the e-mailing lists”, in which ALL newsletter/sales pitch/advertisement providers send an annual OPT-IN message to subscribers. If you don’t reply with an opt-in, you’ll never get another email from them until you ask for it. Or perhaps a rule that if I buy or donate something, they are allowed just one email for each dollar you spent. So for the $50 I spent at vendor X, they can send me 50 emails, not 4 emails a day until I find the tiny Unsubscribe link. To be sure, there are a few that perform periodic list clearing, i.e., “Please click this link if you want to continue hearing from us”. I suspect this would be popular, but could it be legislated?
I’d like to see the same thing for non-profit solicitations. An annual mailing with a form that asks “Should we remove you from our mailing list?” (and might also ask for money, perhaps phrased as “If you are leaving our mailing list, would you like to make a goodbye donation?”
But I probably never will. The incentives are all in favor of sending more emails. Once someone has your email, it costs them nothing to send one every day, and we’re all so used to being blasted by every company and non-profit that we can’t hold a strong enough grudge to never deal with them again.
Now and then I come up with a simple solution to a problem that’s causing me trouble. In this post, I share two small home and office ‘hacks’: preventing finger burns on metal pot lids and avoiding unintended pop-up help windows on your computer.
When I saw “Ice cream, bisque of black bread, a la Delmonico” on an old menu, I knew I needed to track down its story. Usually when this happens I lose interest or get nowhere finding the answer, but sometimes lightning strikes and I find the answer.
The bisque of black bread was one of these lightning strikes5.
This mysterious item was on the menu of the infamous whale meat luncheon at the American Museum of Natural History in 1918. When I first saw the menu item, I wondered “What the heck is a bisque of black bread? That sounds bizarre.” But as I think about it more, I recall bread and chocolate, bread pudding, the use of rye flour in sweet pastries in Kim Boyce’s Good to the Grain, so perhaps it isn’t such a bizarre idea.
I sometimes wonder if software designers really use their product, because there are some very bad interface designs out there. To be sure, what is “good” and “bad” is highly subjective, and my denoting something as “bad” is the result of my collection unique quirks and foibles, and perhaps there are many users who just love these design decisions.
This post looks two annoyances: 1) Gmail’s changing subject line and 2) Evernote’s note save alert.
I’ve been a user of Google’s Gmail for too many years to count, and although it’s one of those things that people love to hate, I find that it has many useful functions that help me dig out the Augean Stables that is today’s email world. For example, the email categories (Primary, Promotions, Social, etc.) are essential.
In any case, I am probably stuck with Gmail, as switching to a new email service would be a months-long project to move my subscriptions, inform everyone, deal with the archive, and so on.
I hate that Gmail’s composition window doesn’t stay still. I start writing a new message with the To: block, next the subject line, and finally the actual message. While I’m writing the message, Gmail switches the subject line between what I originally typed and “Draft saved.” This happens at random intervals, perhaps based on the number of characters typed, or a time interval. It’s annoying.
When I’m drafting emails, I’m definitely not writing the Great American Novel or something that historians will study in the future, but I often need to concentrate. A blinking subject line doesn’t help.
I wonder: Do I really need such an alert that my message has been saved? Is the mighty Google and its Gmail team so nervous that I’ll lose faith in their product that I need to be bashed in the eyeballs so frequently7? Couldn’t it be a small graphical element that is green for saved, red for not saved?
The two annotated screenshots below illustrate this. (The screenshots don’t show another annoyance, where the subject line in the listing of Draft messages also changes now and then, something that is visible when I have a small message on the bottom of the screen.)
If there is a “less screen motion” setting somewhere in Gmail’s long set of menus, I’d love to find it. In the meantime, a decent method is to pop out a reply, then view the draft in full screen mode, as this makes the blinking subject line relatively smaller. A better solution might be related to my recent discovery of Microsoft’s Power Toys application. One of the toys is “Always On Top,” which locks a window to the top of the ‘pile’ on your screen. I stretch a folder window so it is short and wide, use the “Always On Top” feature on that window, then put the window over the “Draft Saved” area.
Evernote’s Save Alert
Evernote is another one of my essential software products (and one that I pay for with an annual subscription fee). For many years it has helped keep me organized, free my mind of distractions (like shopping lists), record what I cook and bake, save random articles, and more. Evernote is great tool, but has design element that drives me crazy: the user is constantly reminded of the save status of the note, often every second or so, with alternating “Saving…” and “All changes saved” messages (in the Desktop and Browser versions). These are illustrated in the two annotated screenshots below.
This is especially annoying on the Desktop version, because the program has continuous access to a hard drive ready to save a zillion notes. There are almost never connectivity issues like a spotty WiFi connection.
As with Gmail, when I write on Evernote I’m not writing life-and-death legal briefs or the next great novel. But I’m paying an annual fee for the service and would like it to be less annoying.
As with Gmail, do I really need such an alert that my message has been saved? Is the Evernote team so nervous that I’ll lose faith in their product that I need to be bashed in the eyeballs so frequently? Some quick theories: this annoyance is created by the 20-something designers who are so immersed in digital technology that they don’t notice changing text; showing the current text is the easy thing, a few programming steps, compared with a much longer process to make something less noisy (plus updating the documentation to explain how the save alert works, e.g., “When the circle in the lower right is a dull yellow, it means that your changes haven’t been saved. When it is a dull green, the changes have been saved”).
I have searched the Evernote options many times, and have yet to find a “turn off save update” option. Perhaps I have missed it, and would love to know where this option is found. My current method of hiding the changing text is the following: 1) Settings…Notes…Note width – Optimize readability, 2) Make the Evernote window wide, 3) Move the Evernote window so that the update text is off the screen. The result of all of these changes is an Evernote window that has its annoying update message in a place that I can’t see (some virtual Windows screen). I hope that someday Evernote will change how message status is announced, and that I’ll be able to put an “Update” at the top of this section.
Last year, one of my pretty-good ideas was to go through my small collection of DVDs and look up the release date of each film, and then try to re-watch the film near the release date8. Back at the end of September 2022, the film of the week was the 1996 version of Emma, an adaption of Jane Austen’s novel of the same name (the release date according to IMDB was August 30, 1996).
Silhouette portrait of Sarah Josepha Hale by Auguste Edouart, 1842, National Portrait Gallery
If you love Thanksgiving, you should learn the name Sarah Josepha Hale.
Starting in 1846 and continuing until her retirement in 1877, Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879) used her position as editress9 of Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine — one of the most popular and influential magazines of the time — to campaign for a national Thanksgiving holiday in November. For many years, she wrote two editorials each year in the magazine explaining the benefits of a national Thanksgiving holiday and encouraging her readers to pressure public officials to establish the holiday. She also wrote thousands of personal letters (by hand!) to elected officials, to the influencers of the day (other magazine editors, prominent preachers, etc.), and to her wide network of friends and family.
When Hale started her campaign, Thanksgiving wasn’t a new concept in America. Towns, villages and states held harvest festivals that included a late-morning trip to church for a special service, followed by a feast10. But there was no national Thanksgiving Day — every town chose its own feast day. In 1789, President Washington issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation that set forth “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer,” but this was a one-time event.
When I first saw Mock Tomata Sauce on my screen, I had a few thoughts. First: ????. Next: I need to try this. And then: this reminds me of the delicious mostarda spread / sauce in the Gjelina cookbook (a concoction of lightly fried apples, coarse mustard, rosemary, etc.), so it will probably taste good.
Here’s Kitchiner’s recipe (mid-sentence capitalizations and “tomata” in original):
Mock Tomata Sauce. — (No. 293.)
Reduce sharp tasted apples to a pulp as in making apple sauce; pound them in a mortar with as much turmeric as will give them colour, and as much Chili vinegar as will give the same degree of acid flavour that the tomata has; add to each pint a quarter of an ounce of shallots shred fine; put all into a well-tinned saucepan and mix them well together, and give them a gentle boil; when cold, take out the shallot11 and put the sauce into small stone bottles; your sauce should be of the consistence of a thick syrup 12; this may be regulated by the Chili vinegar.
Obs. — The only difference13, between this, and genuine Love-apple Sauce, is the substituting the pulp of Apple for that of Tomata, and colouring it with turmeric.
Unfortunately, Kitchiner doesn’t explain why he includes this mock recipe (or any of the others — there are more than 15 “mock” recipes in the book).
The Buttolph Collection of Menus at the New York Public Library shows what people were eating in restaurants decades ago. It contains tens of thousands of menus, with the bulk from the early 20th century, when the collection’s creator, Miss Frank E. Buttolph, was actively collecting menus. In this post, I’ll highlight three seasonal menus and a creative menu for bankers.
A Stocking Menu from Detroit
The Christmas Spirit moved the Griswold House’s menu designer in 1900, leading to a stocking-shaped menu. Based on my reading of menus from around 1900, this one is fairly typical. It is loaded with French cuisine, and also has some game (roast canvasback duck and stuffed roast opossum). And celery, of course (restaurant menus of that era often had celery in the salad or appetizer section).
Apartment building used in Dark Passage, Montgomery and Filbert, San Francisco
A escaped convict is on the run in San Francisco, one step ahead of the police, trying to prove he didn’t commit the crime that sent him to prison. The only person he trusts is a wealthy woman who lives in a lavish apartment on Telegraph Hill.
That’s a basic mostly spoiler-free summary of the plot of Dark Passage, one of the great “San Francisco films.” Released in 1947, Dark Passage is notable for its use of location, notably the apartment shown above, and for its unusual use of the film’s biggest star — Humphrey Bogart — for the first third of the film. And like other San Francisco films, it has quite a bit of geographic weirdness. For example, when Sam the cab driver (Tom D’Andrea) tells Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) a story about a fare who got in the cab carrying a bowl with goldfish in it.
