My kids, on location with me during a recent Sky Full of Bacon shoot.

I’m trying to get ahead on Key Ingredients so I can work on other things— like actually making a Sky Full of Bacon video this year— so no time for lengthy disquisitions; just to have something posted this week, I’m going to lay a bunch of links on you. Enjoy!

1. At Archive.org, a corporate brochure in lofty language from 1909, for a Chicago wholesaler called Sprague, Warner & Co., which started around the Civil War as a grocery store. Many fascinating pictures of its state of the art plant along the Chicago river, where everything from storing cigars to roasting coffee was done. If you don’t recognize the name, later Sprague, Warner & Co. formed the core of a conglomerate called Consolidated Foods, which would ultimately rename itself for its best-known brand: Sara Lee.
2. This Eater interview with Nick Kokonas gives some interesting behind the scenes stuff about Next. The second part is the most interesting to me because it talks about the reaction to the Thai menu. As behooves the most lavishly praised restaurant in the history of the universe, he doesn’t bitch too much about what minuscule criticism that menu has received from certain corners (cough) amid the general lovefest, and he diplomatically covers his tracks a little so you can’t ID anyone too easily (other than perennial critical punching bag Pat Bruno). Too bad; I’d love to know what criticism at LTHForum, say, he finds informed, and which he finds absurd.
3. Speaking of Next et al., this very interesting NY Times piece about Hollywood’s maitre’d to the stars (who was laboring in obscurity in some fading ethnic restaurant until a power broker spotted his old world manners and gave him his big break) raises the same question I had about Grant Achatz’s ultra-exclusive bar The Office— did such things ever really exist, or did we only think they did because of the movies?
4. Okay, so there are tons of “funny” themed cooking shows on YouTube. That aren’t that funny. The food isn’t that funny in this one. But the theme is… (h/t Michael Morowitz)

5. After belatedly watching the New Orleans episode of No Reservations, I wanted to look up some New Orleans food blogs. Looka has been around since 1999 (1999! On what, Compuserve?) and is actually mostly about cocktails of late. Along with a post about Teen Wolf.
6. My friend Cathy Lambrecht’s tireless searching out of obscure midwestern tastes—like fried turtle— got some attention at WBEZ, when they linked to a talk she gave to Culinary Historians.
7. I’m guessing, from the unusually high quality, that this is raw footage from a commercial. Anyway, it’s for a sort of Chinese-Polynesian restaurant in Edmonton, Alberta, and it’s a real time machine piece back to Don Draper times: