Welcome to the Schudown!
Hello, readers! Welcome to the Schudown, formerly Amanda’s Schustack. If you are receiving this communication via email, thank you for already being a subscriber. I have now migrated completely off of Schustack and you can continue to receive my newsletters in your inbox just like before. And if you are already a paid subscriber and reading this via your inbox, double, triple thank you! You are still supporting my work, but you are no longer supporting Substack.
I explained the reason for the switch in my previous post.
Anyway, hi. Whew! That was a tough decision. Moving is always stressful. But it seems as though nothing major got broken.
So what now?
Well, Schudown is still me. I still have a foot in the wine, spirits, and cocktail industry and I will continue to cover related topics and some that are a bit outside that splash zone. I’ll still provide you with the occasional playlist. I will still answer reader questions and interview people, but I will need to change the name of that section of the newsletter from Brass Tacks With Schustack to something else.
Thoughts?
I don’t know why I made the association in my mind, but changing platforms made me think of a fun story about my mom from before I was born. It takes place in the mid 1960s when my parents lived on the Upper East Side of New York City in an apartment that had an open kitchen that looked out onto the living room, separated by a counter. My mom had pre-batched some Grasshopper parfaits (ice cream, crème de cacao, and crème de menthe) for a dinner party to be served as dessert.
In the 1960s, Grasshoppers were having a moment. The classic sweet, creamy, chocolatey, minty, green cocktail—born sometime at the turn of the 20th century and popularized at Tujague’s in New Orleans in the 1920s—was so trendy as a flavor profile, with or without alcohol, that it was almost its own verb. You “Grasshoppered” things—Grasshopper Pie, Grasshopper Cookies, Grasshopper Mousse, Grasshopper Jello, etc. If something was described as “grasshopper green”, the default association was with the creamy substance you eat or drink, not the insect.
So a batch of Grasshoppers were prepared and poured into parfait glasses for the guests, and needed to set for a few hours in the fridge. From the living room, my mom could be seen opening the fridge door, walking the few steps to the parfait glasses, grabbing one in each hand, and by the time she made it back to the fridge, the door shuts.
So my mom—who by then was in medical school, btw, not that it’s a terribly important detail that would affect whether she can cook or carry parfaits, but perhaps explains a preoccupied mindset—would walk back to the counter with the parfaits in each hand, set them down, return to the fridge, return to the counter, pick a Grasshopper up with each hand and…
Yep, their by now utterly fascinated guests witnessed this little ballet like like three or four more times until my mom was finally snapped out of her sweet, minty-fumed reverie.
Anyway, one door closes, another has delicious treats waiting.
Thanks for sticking with me.