Hundred-year-old balsamic

Aging categories break down into twelve years (labeled red), eighteen (silver), and finally 25 to 100 or more (gold). To give you some idea of this vinegar’s rarity and expense, the bottles you see in these photos are typically three inches (7 cm) tall and hold 2.39 ounces.

The Austrian Imperial Napkin Fold

The Imperial Fold, brought out only for state occasions, arose from the Habsburg court sometime during the nineteenth century. You can marvel at these serviettes/dinner roll snugglers at various museums throughout Austria such as the Silberkammer (“Silver Collection”) at the Hofburg Imperial Apartments in Vienna. The technique behind this art form has traditionally been known by only two people at any given time. That’s a little hard to take literally, but in any case it remains a scrupulously guarded State secret.

A few years ago a certain “Joe Worm” surfaced on YouTube to disclose what he himself has determined, after lengthy study and scholarship no doubt, to be the correct process.

Now ideally one would start with a starched and pressed linen, but here he settles for a limp, wrinkly cloth scrounged from the kitchen for his napkin and the hardwood floor for his tabletop. Have you locked your doors, black-taped your webcam, and pulled down the shades? If so, here is Joe’s video. ▭

Busted:

Dear Mr. Worm,

I am a representative of the Austrian State Government. Please remove this video and terminate your account immediatly [sic]. Failure to do so will necessitate our Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und Terrorismusbekämpfung (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism) to take drastic measures…

In all seriousness, thanks for figuring this out so I can sleep tonight.

Max Burns

Jamón ibérico de bellota

Might this be the ham that never saw a church potluck?

In the southern and southwestern parts of Spain you’ll find the black Iberian pig or pata negra. It’s relatively small and slow-maturing (for a pig, anyway), characterized by its ebony hooves and an enviable talent for growing tasty ribbons of fat between its muscle fibers. The breed goes back a thousand years and appears to have descended from a hybridization between domestic pigs the Phoenicians introduced during the Bronze Age and wild boars.

They stack the hams under layers of salt for 14 days to dehydrate them and then dry-cure them for 12 to 48 months in sheds high up in the mountains. However sinful its flavor may be, they say the meat’s fat portion is largely monounsaturated like olive oil.

All that tranquil puttering about in oak groves and curing sheds isn’t terribly cost-effective, of course, so the end product will set you back. North Americans seeking the paramount jamón ibérico de bellota from specialty food importers will need to fork over $80 or so per pound (which can add up to $900 or more for a whole ham) depending on the donor pig’s acorn history, though the 2009 Christmas season left Spain with a rare glut of ibérico along with lesser jamones they were forced to unload at deep discounts and even in some cases give out free as promotions.

Libyan desert glass

Normally it’s safe to assume this sort of material is a form of obsidian, a volcanic glass used since ancient times for various ornamental purposes and to make super-sharp knives. Indeed there is some volcanism in that area.

But Libyan desert glass is very different. While obsidian averages between 50% and 70% in silica content, here we’re seeing about 98% which is equivalent to that of modern glass. Also, we now know through cosmic ray track analysis LDG is about 28 million years old versus nine thousand or so for the nearby volcanoes.

If you rule out pre-human atomic warfare that pretty much leaves the heat of a meteor impact as the culprit. Glassy fragments formed that way are called tektites and you’ll find lots of them elsewhere in the world — that New Age favorite Moldavite being an example. But LDG stands alone in its chemistry, clarity and color. Clayton didn’t know this, but local cultures going back thousands of years had also prized it. Note the scarab in the illustration.

Demand for a semi-obscure novelty like LDG from collectors and gemstone hobbyists is modest, so at the moment you can pick up high quality rough for what comes out to around $2000 per pound. My own favorite fantasy (I think it’s safe to assume no one has tried this yet) is to melt several pounds together, add some flux, blend well, and cast from that a set of drinking glasses.

Fazioli Model F308 piano

One reason for this is that in order to generate the richest waveform a string needs to be struck very close to one end. The closer, the better. If A is the distance between a string’s tuning peg anchorage and the contact point of its hammer and B is the remaining distance from there to its other anchorage at the far end of the instrument (called the “singing length”), you want to minimize the ratio A/B. Mechanical limitations dictate A can only be so short, so you’re left to do what you can with B.

The other reason is that for a given pitch, a shorter string sounds “noisier” in tone and less musical than a longer one. Technicians call this inharmonicity. This is also why the singing voices of children, due to their smaller vocal cords, typically sound sweeter and more bell-like than those of adults even if you disregard the pitch differences. Cute for glockenspiels and Charlie Brown specials but undesirable for concert grands.

Currently the grandest of the grands is the Model F308 by Fazioli of Sacile, Italy. As the number implies, it’s 308 centimeters long or a little over ten feet. Specialized computer algorithms allow the company to finesse the bejesus out of the geometries of the strings, harp, and other components to achieve that length and coax the absolute maximum out of the total system.

But storm clouds loom: Klavins of Bonn, Germany, claims to be working on a Model 408. If it had to rely on the same material for its strings as the Fazioli, which I can’t imagine, it would need to torture them with around 75% more tension. Might this be a good application for carbon nanotube composites? These may well offer tensile strengths in the tens of gigapascals, many times what our toughest steels can now manage. Synthetic spider silk shows similar promise. Stay tuned!

The Gömböc

In 1995 Russian mathematician Vladimir Arnold set up two ground rules and conjectured that with enough ingenuity someone could design an object that would both satisfy them and always come to rest at the same orientation when placed on a flat surface.

The first rule was that its shape had to be entirely convex: a ruler would only be able to lie against it at a single point or at most a line segment — no valleys allowed. The second was that its density had to be constant throughout so that, unlike those self-righting clown toys, it couldn’t employ an offset weight of any kind.

After some false starts two Hungarian scientists, Gábor Domokos and Péter Várkonyi, managed to machine a successful gömböc in 2006. Since that time they’ve produced them in a range of sizes and shapes and in several metal alloys as well as in marble and Plexiglas. (Like those transparent dice in Las Vegas casinos, the Plexiglas models prove to the world they’re not cheating with hidden weights.)

In order for the gömböc to do its thing its manufacturing tolerances have to meet or surpass one part in 10,000. This means you need to treat them gingerly since if they suffer the slightest chip or dent they run the risk of getting stuck during their self-righting processes. They’re precision novelties and their prices reflect that.

What’s so miraculous, if not downright spooky, is that whichever way you set a gömböc down it will always have enough kinetic energy to rock and swirl around on its own until it finds that resting point. The name gömböc (pronounced “gembets,” more or less, with a hard G) comes from the Hungarian term for a roundish dumpling. The plural is gömböcök.

There’s a far older geometric toy called a rattleback that exhibits similar mind-of-its-own properties when spun.

Murrhine

But the genuine murrhine-with-an-H was a mysterious semitransparent synthetic stone artisans fashioned into goblets and other tableware for the ultra-upscale market. It started out as a liquid they poured into a mold and either baked or possibly left to harden exothermically on its own (like plaster of Paris or Portland cement). But the formula and technique got lost and forgotten sometime leading into the Middle Ages and the finished articles were so rare and precious we don’t have any recognizable samples to analyze¹.

Pliny the Elder (23-79 ce) tells us in his Natural Histories “The chief merit of [murrhine vessels] is the great variety of their colors, and the wreathed veins, which, every here and there, present shades of purple and white, with a mixture of the two; the purple gradually changing, as it were, to a fiery red, and the milk-white assuming a ruddy hue. Some persons praise the edges of these vessels more particularly, with a kind of reflection in the colours, like those beheld in a rainbow.”

It’s always possible someone will dig up some shards of murrhine or glean some more details from the literature (there’s an ample backlog of carbonized first-century scrolls waiting for restoration and decipherment, for example) and then we’ll have a better idea how and from what it was made.

The Edwin M. Stanton Fancy Back

This one dollar U.S. Treasury note of 1890 isn’t the rarest paper currency of that genre — others exist in far shorter supply, such as the 1891 thousand dollar General Meade that changed hands for $2.5 million in April 2013 — but it’s quite widely acknowledged as the most legendary and as the most elaborately yet elegantly designed.

Despite posing the ultimate 19th century counterfeiter’s nightmare, the Fancy Back’s layout doesn’t even seem cluttered. Note the enormous dimensional diversity among the various elements on the front side and the overall squint-your-eyes density contrasts on the back. As with most paper currency the stock was 100% cloth pulp made, in those days, by grinding up scraps of cotton and linen purchased by the wagon load from rag pickers.

There would have been a devoted team of master artisans attacking a project like this. Some would specialize in portraits, others in the lettering or organic ornamentation, and finally engineering types who would design, build, and operate the geometric lathes. Through elaborate systems of cams and gears, these latter Spirograph-like devices drove engraving tools to cut the rosettes and other fishnet-like embellishments.

Millions of Fancy Backs were minted and circulated (a blacksmith in 1890 would make about $11 weekly), but it’s estimated only 900 to 1300 exist today. Values nudge past $3000 for specimens in the very finest condition.

Note: A textual sockdolager like this should represent the ultimate challenge for an optical character recognition (OCR) application. Any takers?

Su filindeu

For the first, in early May or October you’ll need to don your best hiking gear and commit to a largely offroad 20-mile overnight pilgrimage from Sardinia’s Nuoro Comune northeast to the tiny village of Lula. There you’ll celebrate a Eucharist at the Santuario di San Francesco d'Assisi and be rewarded with su filindeu in hot sheep’s broth with Pecorino Romano cheese. (It’s a community effort, so don’t mind the plastic tableware.)

For the second, you’ll need to make reservations at either Nuoro’s Agriturismo Testone Inn (which is also a working farm raising the requisite sheep), Il Rifugio, or Ristorante Enoteca Ciusa for su filindeu nero, their prize-winning squid-ink-dyed variety.

The preparation should be straightforward. Knead up some simple pasta dough from semolina flour, water, and salt. Stretch it way out, doubling it over eight times, to get 256 threadlike strands. Align them in parallel over a wooden disk in three layers rotated at 60-degree intervals to form a gridded sheet. When dry, break up into pieces. Minus the layering and drying out part, Chinese stretched noodles have been made similarly for at least a thousand years and many chefs can do it. So what?

The challenge lies with the dough. The Chinese style is more alkaline due to additional ingredients (sometimes lye) which give it a rubbery elasticity. Simple Italian pasta dough is far less coöperative. Despite this, 50-year veteran Paola Abraini and her handful of protégées are able to draw it out hair-thin without breaking it. Likely variables: absolutely precise water and salt ratios with the flour and the speed and accelerations of your hands as you double it over and over to achieve that magical 256.

You only master these through many years of apprenticeship. Others on the island Ms Abraini has attempted to train, along with celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and some Barilla Group engineers who hoped to mechanize su filindeu production, all gave up in frustration.

The silent Messiah Stradivarius

Back in the 80s and 90s there was a lot of press about the more finely packed growth rings in the spruce and maple available to those makers, owing to the Maunder Mininum’s reduced growing seasons between 1645 and 1715. Other articles have cited the effect of microbes eating away tiny resonance-encouraging voids in the wood as it soaked in the Venetian lagoons awaiting the sawyers, and the presence of finely pulverized grains of quartz, calcite, aluminum oxide (white sapphire), garnet, and/or other minerals in the varnishes.

More recently we’ve seen physics professor William Fry demonstrate how intimately attuned these makers were ▭ to the way various twisting and pumping actions of the instrument’s body contribute to its sound. They modulated the thicknesses of the front plates in meandering patterns, and applied their varnishes in similarly uneven coats, both to optimize these quiverings and to compensate for the flexibility quirks of the wood that differed for each instrument.

You’ll notice from the photo the C-shaped rims at its waist show no wear from errant bows and it has no chin rest or fine tuners installed. The idea here has been to preserve one Stradivarius in as virginal a condition as possible so violin makers and other researchers will always have an exemplar to analyze. It’s on the second floor of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Teosinte

There are several wild grasses native to Mexico and Central America collectively referred to as teosinte [tay-o-SEEN-tay]. Their finger-sized ears bear a single row of tough-skinned kernels which you can either crack and feed to livestock or grind into flour. At a high enough temperature some will even pop like popcorn.

The various species and subspecies of teosinte and domestic maize belong to the genus Zea, maize being Z. mays. Teosinte tends to spring up around maize fields and intermingle itself with the crops. The farmers have divided opinions on that. If you’re interested in experimenting with teosinte you can now readily buy the seed. They say it can be stubborn to germinate — it evolved in the wild to survive the digestive tracts of mammals — but that a dilute hydrogen peroxide solution will speed things along.

Gaspard de la nuit:
Trois poèmes pour piano d'après Aloysius Bertrand Euphony

Maurice Ravel himself expressed much the same attitude toward Boléro Frank Zappa would echo fifty-odd years later toward Valley Girl: basically, total bewilderment that such a spur-of-the-moment trifle drew so much adulation.

But you’ll never hear that kind of talk from either side of the table about Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, inspired by the poetry of Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841). It was and continues to be one of the most astonishing, multilayered pieces of music a single pair of hands can conjure from a keyboard. It’s also widely cited as the most technically demanding in the standard repertoire. Here’s a YouTube video of its Scarbo movement ▭, the last and most difficult of the three, played by Valentina Lisitsa (whose parents originally intended for her to be a ballet dancer).

In his book Mind Over Matters, Mystery Science Theater 3000 writer Michael J. Nelson shares his wry fantasies about being a popular college professor who rides to work on a reclining bicycle and, when the mood strikes him, inspires his protégés to ever greater transcendental heights with his own highly personal interpretations of Gaspard.

Byssus

Likely the most celebrated swatch of byssus is St. Veronica’s Veil, also known as The Vernicle or The Sudarium. Legend tells us St. Veronica comforted Jesus on the way to his crucifixion by drying his face with The Veil, which thereafter miraculously displayed his portrait. Among competing specimens claiming to be the Sudarium, The Veil of Manoppello, tightly guarded at a Capuchin friary four hours by train northeast from Rome, is easily the most impressive. Though the cloth’s actual image falls far short of what you see in the Northern Renaissance panel shown here, it’s hardly less mysterious.¹

Byssus textile is now so rare it has no quotable price and it’s only passed along as a gift. Several Sardinian women currently practice this painstaking art, most famously Chiara Vigo who dives by night off the Isle of Sant’Antioco to harvest the threads from secret underwater coves. She has visited The Veil of Manoppello and certified it — whether miraculous or not — as byssal. As for the noble pen shell, its populations have slumped alarmingly from overfishing for its more prosaic value as an entrée.

But not to worry. Someday soon you’ll likely see lab-grown byssal textiles and, once again, maybe have a chance to own a pair of gloves that will fold small enough to fit into a walnut shell.

The Luck of Edenhall

Outside of County Cumbria in northern England you don’t encounter the word “luck” in this sense very often. Here it refers to a talisman, most typically a work of fine tableware in stone or glass, the breakage or loss of which will surely spell doom for its well-landed owners.

Of the many lucks and rumored lucks in the area, that of Edenhall is the best known and quite arguably the most remarkable. It’s a flared, riotously colored beaker about 16 cm (6.2 inches) tall and 11 cm (4.33 inches) wide at its lip, a masterful example of Islamic decorated glassware dating from the mid 1300s. Its earliest owner of record was Sir Philip Musgrave, a baronet and royalist politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1640 to 1643, kept a low profile under the Commonwealth, then served again until his death in 1678.

The Musgraves guarded and treasured the Luck of Edenhall for generations until they fell onto hard times in the 1920s and passed it along to the Victoria & Albert Museum. Up until the time it got there it must surely have taken a few tumbles. The glass is pretty tough, though, and the family routinely kept it stored in a custom-designed leather case and took care to lay down something soft anytime it was brought out and handled.