Just The Caffeine Talking

Kitchen Report: Bucatini Alla Flamande

These weeks of enforced leisure have inspired me to go ahead and do some cooking projects I've long put off. I did the first of them this past Saturday, a dish called Bucatini Alla Flamande.

It's a molded pasta dish — you line a pudding basin or a rounded double boiler with semi-cooked bucatini, line the inside with a forcemeat paste, then fill with cooked meat and bechamel sauce, cover with another layer of bucatini, and cook the whole thing over a pot of boiling water for about 45 minutes. When it's done you invert the basin onto a platter and if everything has gone properly, you get a sort of pasta beehive or igloo full of meat.

Bucatini, incidentally, is a long pasta like spaghetti, but it's a hollow tube.

I got the recipe from one of my dependable pasta cookbooks: The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces, by Diane Seed. It leads of the section on "Special Occasion Dishes" and would definitely be a showstopper if it comes out right.

Making it was quite long and involved. I started the process about four hours before we could eat anything. Admittedly, one of those hours was devoted to making stock, and in the future I'll do that part a few days in advance. After that I made the sauce, essentially a puree of cooked celery-carrot-and-onion with some stock to thin it. So far, so good.

Then I made the "meat paste" — the layer that's supposed to go inside the pasta envelope and seal the cracks like spackle. The recipe was charmingly vague about what meat you should use, so I went with cooked chicken. In future I may try something a bit gummier, like maybe stewing beef. The book was also vague about how much bechamel to incorporate into the paste. I later found another vague recipe on line which did at least give an amount, and I had far underestimated it. So my paste was more like the sauce. In fact, given that it also contained pureed celery-carrot-and-onion, I realized that the meat paste was really supposed to be meat and bechamel with some of the sauce for flavor. In future I'll do it that way, which should knock another half-hour off the cooking time.

Getting the bucatini to coil around the inside of the double boiler bowl was very tricky and involved some swearing, but I finally managed to get it done, and then smeared meat paste (I just love saying "meat paste") all over the inside.

The filling was a mix of chicken, tongue, and ham. The ham dominated the flavor, but it was good so I have no complaints. The tongue added richness (and the leftover tongue became tacos de lengua the next day. I layered in the chopped meat and the remains of the bechamel, then topped with the last of the meat paste and made a flat layer of bucatini for the lid.

Forty-five minutes later it was time to serve. We got it inverted onto a platter in one piece, but had trouble getting the bucatini to leave the bowl (despite a lavish layer of butter). Diane suggested lining the bowl with parchment or foil next time, and I may do that.

And then we ate it all up. No leftovers. It was good, no question. But the ratio of 4 hours preparation to 15 minutes consumption is a little high. If I can get the prep time down to maybe 2 hours I'll try making it again.

What's interesting about the dish is what it doesn't contain: tomatoes. Also almost nothing in the way of herbs or spices, nor any cheese. There's garlic, salt, and pepper. That's all. The main flavors are ham and carrot. It's quite good, but very far from the typical red-gravy southern Italian culinary stereotype. I am inclined to think it may be a very old recipe, from before 1500, although the absence of spices argues against that. Every other Renaissance-era dish I've tried has a ton of saffron, clove, or some such in it.

I confess to a little dissatisfaction with the cookbook. Most of the recipes in The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces are clearly written and appear to have been tested, but I think this one got in through a back door. The author claims to have gotten it from a Neapolitan aristocrat, and I believe her because it reads as if she simply transcribed a handwritten recipe jotted down by someone reconstructing it from memory.

Anyway, now that I have the basic concept down, I may experiment a little. I have the idea that this would make an excellent seafood dish, using some gummy fish like cod for the spackle, and filling it with crabmeat and shrimp, or maybe a chopped lobster tail. The vegetable puree sauce is very much like my father's recipe for Crawfish Alla Nantua, so I think it would do well with crustaceans.

Now that Passover is approaching, Diane has taken over the kitchen, and after the big Seder meal we'll be dining off leftovers for a while. My next big cooking experiment probably won't be for two or three weeks. Watch this space.

Arisia 2020 Report, Day 2

Saturday the 18th was a light-duty day for me, which meant I got to enjoy the con as a member rather than as one of the dancing monkeys. 

Still fighting off my cold, I slept in on Saturday morning, starting my day by having brunch with my CSFW colleague Alexander Jablokow at a nearby Mexican restaurant. Many things of great import were discussed, though I can't quite recall any of them at the moment.

In early afternoon I sat in on a Meetup for gamemasters, discussing techniques, best practices, and resources. I had hoped to find some other gamers from western Massachusetts, but no luck. 

After that I took a turn about the dealer room and the Art Show. The quality of the artwork on display at Arisia is the highest I've seen at any convention since the Worldcon I attended in the summer of 2018.

In the late afternoon I watched a fascinating talk by David Shaw about the future of food. Unlike most studies of this topic, which focus on production, he concentrated on how new technologies and methods are affecting the art of cooking. Nor was this just theory: the talk was illustrated by slides of amazing dishes he himself had prepared. 

Following that I met with author Walter Hunt, chiefly in order to gush about his new novel Harmony in Light, and hear super-secret details of the upcoming sequel. 

After a rest to recharge my batteries, I put on my dancing-monkey costume and led a meetup for writers at 10:00 p.m. They were a great bunch, and I hope to see some of the works-in-progress they talked about during the session. 

And then off to bed and out like a snuffed candle.

 

A secret order of wizards rules the world. One man has vowed to destroy them. The Initiate by James L. Cambias is coming to a bookstore near you February 4. 

Today's Menu

This year's Thanksgiving feast was an epic one. Five adults, including one teenage boy, means we can paint on a large canvas. The menu:

Oyster Patties

Cremant d'Alsace

Shrimp and Oyster Gumbo with Rice

Turkey Breast Sous Vide with Herbs — Turkey Breast Sous Vide with Harissa

Cote de Roussillon 2014

Cornbread and Oyster Dressing — Gravy

Cranberry Relish — Jellied Cranberry Sauce en Boite

Stuffed Mirlitons — Green Beans Amandine — Roasted Brussels Sprouts

Shaved Carrot Salad

Pecan Pie — Apple Pie

Coffee

Assorted Cheeses

Port

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

Ancient Recipes

Very interesting BBC Travel story about re-creating ancient Mesopotamian recipes. Read it here. They include a lamb stew which sounds worth trying. 

The only surprising thing, really, is that anyone should be surprised that people living nearly 4000 years ago ate much the same things their modern descendants do. Food is a bedrock of culture — it's transmitted by families, not governments or schools; it reflects not only the traditions of the people but the land and its products; and foods seldom become obsolete. (I say seldom because it does seem that a lot of people in the Old World cheerfully gave up on turnips once they got their hands on potatoes.) Few regimes in history have been so totalitarian as to attempt to control how their subjects cook (though sadly more than a few have managed to prevent their subjects from getting any food at all).

If I do get around to trying the recipe, I'll write up an after-action report. If anyone else cares to tackle it, please share your results!

Vacation in Prague: Day 7

Over the past forty years of travel I've learned that one should always build in one or two unscheduled days when planning a trip. That way, if something's closed, or it's pouring rain, or someone gets a kidney stone, you have a little cushion so there's still time for all the things you wanted to do. And if there are no problems, then you've got a bonus day to spend as you wish.

Saturday the 20th was our bonus day.

In the morning Diane and I went out to a Farmers' Market, which was a bit disappointing. The food on display was lovely and impeccably clean, but all of it was obviously grown far from Bohemia, and it was all packaged for immediate consumption. No ingredients. I have no doubt that there is an actual farmers' market in Prague (probably several), but I expect it's out in the periphery someplace, easier for farm trucks to reach but probably much less scenic.

We did get some fruit for breakfast and took it back to the flat, along with some croissants from a bakery we passed along the way. After eating and showering the three of us set out a couple of hours later with two vague goals: find a thumb drive for Diane to use at the biology conference which was the whole reason we came to Prague, and possibly look in at the cinema museum.

Our course took us southeast, toward Wenceslaus Square (which is really a boulevard) and the more modern, trendy part of Prague. En route we stopped for lunch at a restaurant/pub called "Lokal" which has apparently been serving up the same hearty grub and beer since the 1920s (to judge by the decor). It has the "beloved and unchanging local institution" feel of a classic diner or a Southern cafeteria. Dumplings were had.

We gave up on the cinema museum, after determining that none of us was really enthusiastic about the plan. After that we just sort of wandered, looking for a thumb drive. In the U.S., one can find them for sale at most office-supply shops, department stores, and supermarkets, but apparently the Czechs only sell them at dedicated electronics stores. I don't know if there's not as much demand, or whether Czech computer users are more devoted to "cloud storage." It's not the sort of question one can ask easily.

We did see some lovely interwar department store buildings, with glass roofs and Art Deco sculptures. It appears that independence and the triumph of Modernism don't seem to have put a damper on Czech architects' love of putting statues on buildings, it just made the results more streamlined.

With a drive in hand we navigated homeward by dead reckoning, stopping along the way to get the gloppiest Prague treat: Trdelniks filled with ice cream. Trdelniks are a kind of cake or brioche wrapped around a cylinder and cooked over an open fire. I've found a couple of Web sites angrily asserting that they're not a traditional Czech dish but rather some rank imposture from Slovakia. Anyway, they're pretty good plain, and when filled with soft-serve they're . . . pretty messy. Imagine a giant ice-cream cone with a big hole in the bottom ineffectually plugged by a small cookie.

And that's about it for our trip. We spent the evening packing and getting checked in for our flight home. Robert and I handed all our spare Kroners to Diane to use during the week-long biology conference, and the next morning he and I got a cab to the airport. Sixteen hours later we were home.

Next Time: Impressions and Reflections.

Vacation in Prague: Day 6

Another late start on Friday the 19th — didn't leave the flat until past 11 a.m. The adventurers crossed the river again and braved the Prague light-rail transit system for the first time. Since most of our previous explorations had been within the rail-less Old Town section, we hadn't bothered. One purchases tickets at tobacconist shops and then use a scanner aboard the tram to activate them. This is a common system in Europe; in Naples one can only get subway tickets at the tobacco stand even inside the main train station. We managed to work out how to use the scanner on the tram with the help of a young Czech couple with a cute baby and matching hairstyles (kind of a Mohawk gathered into a ponytail). The young woman even gave up her seat to this aged tourist, so you can be sure I took the opportunity to yield it back at the next stop to the first even slightly middle-aged looking lady who boarded.

Our tram route involved a longish detour with a hairpin bend and a curve around to the north of Prague Castle, because of course streetcars don't handle steep inclines well. Our destination was actually off to the southwest of the castle: Strahov Monastery.

What with locating a tobacconist's shop and figuring out the tram system, we didn't reach the monastery until noon, which is when it closed for an hour so that the monks could celebrate Mass in the chapel. So we had a leisurely lunch at the restaurant next door. Bread dumplings were present.

The monastery had two main attractions we were hot to see. There is Yet Another Baroque Library Hall — two of them, in fact, one all dark wood, the other plasterwork and gilding. Gorgeous. As at the Klementinum, visitors could only look in at the doorway because a thousand people a day breathing on the books would turn the whole place into a mess of mildew in short order.

The other draw is the Cabinet of Wonders. This is a little museum of curiosities, mostly from the 17th and 18th Centuries. It's a mix of natural history, anthropology, and art. They've got some Egyptian statuary and a sarcophagus (sadly most of the Egyptiana was off-exhibit), a few Chinese porcelain figures and bronzes, a suit of chain mail from someplace, and a small cannon. The natural-history collection has lots of shells, a narwhal horn, two "elephant trunks" which our reproductive-physiology expert identified as whale penises, lots of fish skins, a couple of crocodiles, and some interesting rocks.

It's not really worthwhile as a museum itself; but as a historical exhibit about what an early private museum would have been like it's wonderful. Between the Cabinet of Wonders and the two gonzo libraries, the Strahov Monastery is the perfect lair for a fantasy-novel wizard or school of magic.

We decided to stroll back rather than take the tram, as it was all downhill and we wanted to see more of the left bank of the Vltava. That plan was interrupted by rain almost as soon as we got out of the monastery, so we took refuge in a cafe long enough to have dessert and wait out the worst of the downpour.

Our route back took us across the Charles Bridge, which is one of Prague's most popular sights. I don't know why. It's a nice old bridge with lovely statues of saints and the life of Christ — but you can't really look at the statues or the bridge, or admire the view from the bridge because at any given time there's something like two thousand other people on the bridge taking selfies and complaining about how crowded the bridge is.

At the Old Town end of the bridge we did see a gentleman showing off his big boa constrictors. One was simply big but the other was immense — five meters long, at least. Both snakes got a lot of attention, and the biggest one definitely seemed to be posing for the cameras.

Napped at our flat again — I heartily recommend a mid-afternoon nap while traveling; it breaks the day up into two distinct phases and keeps you from dragging around and snapping at one another. In the evening we had a ramble about the square and stopped at one of the open-air cafes to share a plate of salmon sandwiches and drink a glass of wine.

A note about drinks: Prague is famous for beer, but I'm not one of those people who can discourse for hours about the differences among porter, ale, and stout. The beer was good, even the stuff our local contacts disparaged. My beer tastes were formed in America in the 1980s — the last gasp of the regional German-name breweries in the U.S. before the rise of craft brews and hipsters going on about hops. The Czech brews reminded me a lot of those beers (it's no coincidence that "Budweiser" is named for a town in Bohemia), and that was fine with me.

With wine I can be a bit of a snob. I did my best to stick to locally-grown wine while we were in Prague. Czech wines are sweeter than the western European and New World vintages I normally drink (I don't know why wines get sweeter as you go east), but they were pretty good. Or at least the white wines were; since it was hot summer weather we didn't really want any reds. If I ever go back to Prague I may try to work in a visit to some local wineries, to get a better sense of what Czech growers are doing. But if you go, I recommend trying the local product.

Next time: Not Much!

Vacation in Prague, Day 3

On Tuesday the 16th we slept until nine and breakfasted on croissants and scrambled eggs, then set out to see the sights of the Jewish Quarter. This meant much less walking, as our flat was right in the middle of that part of town.

We began at the Old New Synagogue, which follows the international tradition that things with "New" in their name are often the oldest of that thing around. (Examples: Novgorod, one of the oldest cities in Russia; the Pont Neuf in Paris; and the New Forest in England, which will celebrate its thousandth anniversary in a few decades.)

The Old New Synagogue was built in 1270 and looks . . . well, almost exactly like a Gothic chapel, but with no crucifixes and more Jews. It does have little booths outside the main chamber with slit windows looking in, for the women of the congregation. It was nice to see that the Old New Synagogue is still an active synagogue.

The legend of the Golem of Prague mentions that the inert body of the Golem was stored in the attic of the Old New Synagogue, so naturally our adventurers had to snoop around to see if there's any truth to it. The synagogue does have an attic, but it can only be reached by climbing up a series of iron rungs set into the eastern wall. The bottom fifteen or twenty feet of the rungs have been removed, so nobody can get up there without a ladder or a crane. (No mere human, anyway. A supposedly abandoned attic would make an ideal secret headquarters for a crime-fighting man of clay.)

Our second stop was the Ceremonial Hall in the middle of the old Jewish cemetery. It was the headquarters for the old Jewish burial society, and is now a museum on the history of Jewish burial societies. I found myself wondering about the influences that group might have had on later Protestant fraternal orders, which were burial societies among other functions. Weirdly, one cannot actually get into the cemetery from the Ceremonial Hall.

Next door to the Ceremonial Hall is the Klausen synagogue, which was built in 1694 and looks . . . well, almost exactly like a Baroque chapel, but with no crosses and more Jews. Evidently Prague's Jewish community were willing to follow contemporary trends in ecclesiastic architecture. Nowadays the Klausen is a museum of Jewish rituals and practices, which most of our team of adventurers were already familiar with.

Still hunting for a way into the cemetery, which was right there, we worked our way around the block to the Pinkas Synagogue, undoubtedly the saddest of Prague's remaining synagogue buildings. It was made into a Holocaust memorial in the 1950s, so the place was stripped down to the bare plaster walls, which are covered with a list of names — all the murdered Jews of Czechoslovakia.

I found the memorial doubly sad, because it means that synagogue will never host another wedding or bar mitzvah ceremony. The well-meaning artists and architects who created the memorial destroyed the synagogue as a living institution.

Already in a morbid frame of mind we finally found our way into the cemetery, which is absolutely packedwith headstones. It looks less like a cemetery and more like a storage facility for headstones. One can roughly date them by appearance — the older stones are smaller and simpler, while the later ones get big and elaborate. This cemetery is no longer used for burials, I suspect because there is literally no room left.

The exit popped us back out at the Ceremonial Hall, and from there we walked south to the Maisel Synagogue, the last one on our tour. It's a much-rebuilt building, currently in its Franz Josef era Neo-Gothic incarnation. Like too many of Prague's synagogues, the Maisel is also a museum — in this case, of the history of Jews in Bohemia and Prague in particular. It did display some works by David Gans, the Jewish scholar and mathematician who was a contemporary and occasional collaborator of Brahe and Kepler during his time in Prague.

By then it was early afternoon, the perfect time to walk another couple of blocks south to Old Town Square in time to watch the famous Astronomical Clock strike two p.m. We kept our hands on our wallets in the crowd, as it seemed like perfect conditions for a pickpocket.

With our wallets intact we walked across the square, dodging people in giant inflated bear costumes, to the wonderful Gothic church of St. Mary Before Tyn, where we saw the grave of Tycho Brahe himself. The actual grave is marked with a plain slab bearing his name in big letters, but propped above it is the old marker, with a very long and hard-to-decipher Latin epitaph, plus a bas-relief of the great Dane himself.

After that we were dog tired, so plodded back to our flat for a nap and a change of clothing before our big fancy dinner out, at a restaurant called La Veranda (which did not, in fact, have a veranda). It was actually on the same block as our own building, so getting there didn't even involve crossing a street. We all got the six-course tasting menu and shared a bottle of Czech reisling on the waiter's recommendation.

The six courses consisted of:

(1) A tiny bowl of Vichysoisse, with a good potato flavor, not too milky.

(2) Beef tartare with little dabs of truffle mayonnaise. For some reason the Czechs have adopted beef tartare as a national favorite; it was on the menu at nearly every restaurant. From which we can deduce that the meat supply chain in the Czech Republic is reliable and well-inspected.

(3) Seared foie gras. This was amazing: the exterior was crisp while the inside was like a custard. We had to get more bread for the table with this course, as none of us wanted to waste a drop of lovely liver custard.

(4) Sea Bream, served simply enough with brown butter and lemon. Yum.

(5) A little beef filet with potato puree. It was described as sirloin but looked more like hangar steak to me. Excellent either way.

(6) Seasonal berries with white chocolate gelato and currant sorbet. I accompanied this with coffee.

All in all, an excellent dinner, and we cheerfully climbed five stories back up to our flat and collapsed.

Next Time: Technology!

Vacation in Prague, Day 1

A note to the reader: because I am too lazy to hunt around the option keys on my laptop to find the right characters, I am spelling all Czech words without accents or other diacritical marks.

We flew to Prague via Philadelphia, with a five-hour wait between landing in the hometown of W.C. Fields and our flight across the ocean. It's nice not to be rushed when one travels . . . but I can think of a lot of places I would rather spend my time than an airport. Pretty much all places, really.

The flight was long but uneventful. At one point I glanced around the cabin and could see four people watching Aquaman and three viewing Captain Marvel on the little seat-back screens which keep the passengers tranquil. Of the two, I recommend Aquaman as the better movie to watch with no sound.

We reached Prague on Sunday morning, spent time in line waiting to get our passports stamped, waited some more for our bags to appear, and finally got a taxi into the city. Our rental flat wasn't actually ready yet, so we killed some time by having lunch nearby and lingering shamelessly.

The flat was pleasant enough. The building looked like post-World War I construction, very solid but not unattractive. Our apartment had high ceilings and good ventilation, so it was quite comfortable even on the warmest evenings. As it was an AirBnB property, the furnishings were the usual mix of thrift-store items and IKEA. Reminded me of my first apartment.

The main flaw was that it was described in the listing as a third-floor apartment, and that was technically true. If one got into the coffin-sized elevator and pressed "3" one arrived on the landing by our door. However: recall that in Europe, the elevator doesn't start on floor 1, but on floor 0. Also, our building had commercial space on the ground floor, so floor 0 of the apartments was actually on what we Americans would call the second story. In short, our third-floor apartment was on the fifth floor, and the tiny elevator meant that two-thirds of our adventuring party had to climb the stairs every time we returned.

This is not mere griping, as it is interesting to see how it affected our sightseeing. Because there was a high "fixed cost" of going out (you'd have to climb five flights of stairs), we tended to go out on extended expeditions, often with multiple goals, rather than just popping in and out on a whim.

After unpacking and resting up (our internal clocks thought it was bedtime in the middle of the afternoon, plus nobody slept well on the plane) we ventured out into Prague!

A little orientation: the part of Prague we were staying in was the Old Town (Stare Mesto). The specific section our flat was in was the old Jewish quarter — indeed, we were just across the street from the back of the Moorish-fantasy Spanish Synagogue building. The heart of the Old Town is Old Town Square (Staromestske Namesti), home of the famous Astronomical Clock and a spectacular early 20th century monument to Jan Huss.

More to our purposes, Old Town Square is also home to both the Prague Tourist Information office and the Czech Tourist Information office. We hit both and loaded up on brochures, maps, and timetables.

We woke the third member of the party and went out for dinner at a different nearby restaurant, where we tried our first authentically Czech meal. We shared a platter of traditional Czech appetizers — cheese, smoked meat, pickled sausage, onions, and head cheese. This cried out to be accompanied by beer, so I had the first of many beers in Prague. I honestly believe more beer is consumed by volume than water in that city. (During tourist season, at least.)

For my meal I had something called "Moravian Sparrow" which turned out to be a pork stew accompanied by two different kinds of braised cabbage (red and white) and Czech bread dumplings (houskove knedliky). I believe I had bread dumplings at least once a day for our entire visit. They're pretty good. Dr. Kelly had braised rabbit (also good) with potato dumplings

After dinner the rest of the adventurers wanted to stay in the flat and look at screens, because you can't do that in Massachusetts, so I ventured out on my own, taking advantage of Prague's very late midsummer sunset to have a look at the city and get my bearings. I wandered along the Vltava river, passing the Rudolfinium concert hall and reaching the famous Charles Bridge before turning back.

The Charles Bridge is the oldest bridge in town, and for a long time was the only bridge. The Old Town end of it is also the heart of the cheesiest tourist section of Prague — strip clubs, one of several TORTURE MUSEUMS, shops selling cannabis beer, visitors peeing in the shrubbery, and my first encounter with the Prague Pedal Party Bar (a mobile beer bar, powered by the pedaling of the patrons on board; it careens about Old Town Prague from pub to pub every night).

Properly tired after a long flight, a big meal, and a long walk, I climbed the five flights up to our third-floor apartment and collapsed for a long sleep on my first night in Prague.

Next time: The Castle!

Culinary/Literary Notes

I can usually eat something without telling the world about it, but tonight I made a grilled marinated Porterhouse steak with an heirloom tomato salad, followed by fresh-picked ripe strawberries and ice cream. All served up on the porch on a perfect evening.

But that's not what I actually intended to post about today. Lately I've been reading Dumas on Food, an English translation/abridgement of Alexander Dumas's Grand Dictionaire de Cuisine.

The entry on "Cavaillon Melon" includes the following passage, which I commend to all my fellow authors:

"One day I received a letter from the municipal council of Cavaillon which informed me that they were establishing a library and were desirous of securing for it the best books which they possibly could. They therefore begged me to send them those two or three of my novels which to my mind were the best. Now, I have a daughter and a son, whom I think I love equally; and I am the author of five or six hundred volumes and belive myself to be just about equally fond of them all. So I replied to the town of Cavaillon that it was not for an author to judge the merits of his books, that I thought all my books good, but that I found Cavaillon melons excellent; and that I consequently proposed to send to the town of Cavaillon a complete set of my works . . . if the municipal council would be willing to vote me a life annuity of twelve green melons."

"The municipal council of Cavaillon . . . replied by return of post that my request had been unanimously endorsed, and that I would certainly receive my life annuity, which in all likelihood is the only one that I will ever have."

While I don't have an oeuvre of six hundred volumes, and so probably can't parlay a set of my books into a lifetime supply of anything, I think I could manage a one-to-one swap. If you like science fiction or roleplaying games, and have a Zamponi sausage or some chanterelles, contact me.

The Baristiary

For more than twenty years now I've done a lot of my writing in coffee shops. It gets me out of the house, I can observe my fellow pseudointellectuals and blowhards, and I don't have to answer the phone or walk the dog.

In that time I've seen a lot of coffee shop employees. A lot of them are part-timers, and the turnover is high, so even in towns where we only spent a couple of years I've gone through multiple generations of baristas. After a while one notices some recurring types. Here is the fruit of my decades of fieldwork: The Baristiary.

THE CONNOISSEUR: Some people work at Starbucks or a local coffee shop in order to make money. And then there are the ones who work there because they care a whole lot about coffee. Connoisseur Baristas are the ones who can deploy a whole battery of wine-snob vocabulary to describe differences among coffee varieties and roast styles.

Good Points: Actually do know what they're talking about, which can be interesting for the first hour or so.

Bad Points: The second and third hour, plus the barely-concealed sigh when you just want regular drip coffee.

THE INTENSE GUY: Always male, usually below average height and with very short or no hair. Either no tattoos or a full Yakuza paint job. Generally a few years older than the rest of the staff. These guys seem quite bright and articulate, very hard-working, so much so that you're a little surprised to see them pulling lattes for minimum wage. That surprise lasts until they engage someone (maybe you) in conversation. The Intense Guy has one or two subjects that he cares intensely about and has researched extensively. The most benign Intense Guys care intensely about some musical or cinema subgenre, but unfortunately most of them care intensely about socialism, or Objectivism, or genetically-modified crops, or (sigh) national politics. Their extensive research consists of having read one book which Explains Everything, and a bunch of Web sites put up by other Intense Guys. A few Intense Guys go on to become store managers or get real jobs, and the rest wind up on watch lists somewhere.

Good Points: Efficient at the job, willing to go beyond the standard drink list.

Bad Points: You may actually care very intensely about the same thing; that never ends well.

THE TEMP: Hard to describe because you only see her once. Maybe you said, "You're new here, right?" and the Temp said, "Yeah," and the next time you came in she was gone. If you ask the other staff about her, expect either a derisive snort or a shrug.

Good Points: New face.

Bad Points: Never stays long enough to learn the job.

THE LIFER: If you're nineteen, working at a coffee shop is pretty cool. It's not very hard work, really; the hours are usually pretty flexible; you get to chat with other local hipsters and intellectual poseurs. It's less cool when you're thirty-nine, but about half the coffee shops I go to have a Lifer on the staff, who decided that going to college parties, following local bands, getting stoned, and going mountain biking are all he or she needs out of life. Very likely to have neck or face tattoos.

Good Points: Continuity.

Bad Points: You worry that your children will wind up like that.

THE FOUNDER: The one who started it all. Usually a man, unless the shop offers a lot of baked goods. Forty to fifty years old — a few are older, and took this up after retiring from a much more prestigious and high-paying career. Essentially a combination of The Connoisseur and The Lifer, but with some entrepreneurial talent, a source of capital, and fewer tattoos. This is the mysterious older guy who comes in at odd times, asks the customers how they're enjoying their drinks, frowns slightly at the people with laptops open, and then goes behind the counter and rearranges everything while muttering "we have a system for this!" When he leaves the staff put everything back where it was.

Good Points: If you have a complaint, it will be listened to and probably acted upon.

Bad Points: You tend to learn more than you care to know about the problems of running a small service-sector business.

THE OVERWHELMED: It's too intense behind the counter! There's orders to fill, transactions to ring up, spills to wipe — the pressure is too much! When this barista is on duty, even with others on hand to help, everything is a crisis. Expect shouting, swearing, and lots of under-the-breath grumbling. Especially about how much you put in the tip jar.

Good Points: Amusing to listen to.

Bad Points: Treats any request as an intolerable burden.

THE HOT ONE: This Barista is young, fit, ridiculously good-looking, and either has no tattoos or actually chose ones which are flattering. Clothing is cut off, form-fitting, transparent, or all three. Customers of the opposite sex spend an awful lot of time making awkward small talk with this Barista, and the tip jar is always topped-up. Goes home at the end of shift with a partner who is either even hotter or "that?!"

Good Points: Nice to look at.

Bad Points: Out of your league, sir or madam. Actual coffee-making skills are likely to be minimal.

THE TATTOO BORE: "This one says 'Do or do not, there is no try' in Chinese. Or maybe it's Japanese. I don't remember. Anyway, it's a quote from Gandhi. This is a picture of the cat I used to have, and this is a picture of my current kitty. This is the Viking rune for Coexistence. On the back of my leg here I got a unicorn, because that's my spirit animal. And on the other leg I have a pentagram — this one is point up which makes it a silver magic sign. Point down is hurtful magic. Then here on my back . . . "

Good Points: Um . . .

Bad Points: As long as there's some un-inked skin left they can alterate between talking about the tattoos they already have and the tattoos they're going to get.

THE STUDENT VISA: Usually a couple of years older than the normal run of Baristas, the Student Visa dresses like an adult, does a reasonably professional job, and — despite the heavy accent — has interesting things to say. Often the Student Visa is both an expert on some extremely difficult academic subject, and a huge fan of some obscure aspect of American pop culture. Sadly, in a couple of years the Student Visa will move on to  well-paid tech job in California, or go back home overseas to become Deputy Minister For Foreign Trade.

Good Points: Has probably had all the coffee drinks in their original form and knows what they're supposed to taste like. Also: functional human being.

Bad Points: NSA is probably logging your Web cruising while you're in the cafe.

I expect there are some types I've missed. If anyone has additions, please feel free to add them in the comments.