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Kowalski Heat Treating News, Notes, and Valuable Information for Anyone Trying to Keep Their Metals & Alloys Hard, Flat, Straight or Sharp

Mother’s Day

May 7, 2021/0 Comments/in Friday Afternoon /by Steve Kowalski

I THANK YOU FROM DEEP IN MY HEART

FOR ALL YOU’VE DONE FOR ME

AND I BLESS THE LORD FOR GIVING ME

THE BEST MOTHER THERE COULD BE!

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY

WE LOVE YOU!!

Thanks to Town&Country Magazine for publishing these great quotes.

See all 30 HERE.

“All Can Make Cones”

April 30, 2021/0 Comments/in Friday Afternoon /by Steve Kowalski

I don’t suppose all those small humans pictured above really care how the ice cream cone is made—but I do. :))))) Read on my friends!!!

Ice cream. It’s awesome – in bowls is good with syrup and peanuts and dash of whipped cream. But I think the most fun is in a cone. No matter your age, there’s just nothing like shaping, licking and spinning a cone, catching the drips and savoring the deliciousness. As a “foodie”, I have pretty much tried every flavor out there – maple walnut (not a favorite), superman, cherry chocolate chip, moose tracks and of course good old vanilla. Ben & Jerry have had fun with names and mixtures, but I think my favorite is vanilla, because it goes with everything! Stopping in the supermarket aisle, I’m amazed at the variety in container size and different taste choices. And then there’s the cones – for me it’s a toss-up – traditional or waffle. I saw online that today marks a great day in history linked to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. Officially named the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, it has become a uniquely powerful magnet for food origin stories, including the hamburger, the hot dog, peanut butter, iced tea, the club sandwich and cotton candy. All have been alleged to have been invented on the fairgrounds in St. Louis in 1904, or at least popularized there. But none of them actually were. There is one classic American food item, however, whose origins truly are linked to the 1904 Fair: the ice cream cone. Despite dramatic tales of quick-witted ice cream vendors running out of cups and rolling waffles into improvised cones, this is a story about good old-fashioned hustle, the ambition of newly arrived immigrants seeking their fortunes…and, of course, plenty of lawyers. How much more all-American could a food story be? Here’s a detailed video and detailed history. Enjoy the read, and thanks to YouTube and seriouseats.com for the info.

How to Make Ice Cream Cone Inside the Factory
And Check This Out!

Antecedents to the ice cream cone certainly existed long before 1904. People had been eating ice cream from various cone-like containers for decades; they just didn’t eat the containers themselves.
Way back in 1807, Philibert-Louis Debucourt created an etching called The Interior of the Café Frascati, which shows, alongside elegant Parisians enjoying lemonade and punch, a woman lifting to her mouth an oddly spiral-shaped utensil, containing what might very well be ice cream. Culinary historian Robin Weir claims that this is the first pictorial evidence of an ice cream cone, and he might be right. (it could also be a really ugly spoon or the world’s first corn dog).
As ice cream grew in popularity in the 19th century, roving vendors began selling it on city streets in a variety of cups and containers, including cone-shaped glass utensils and the notoriously unsanitary “penny licks” —tiny stemmed glasses in which ices were sold at the British seashore and on London streets.
One of the earliest alternatives to the penny lick was “hokey-pokey,” devised by immigrant street vendors in London in the 1870s. A British journal described hokey-pokey as “a coarse kind of Neapolitan ice” made with a blend of one part water to two parts milk, sweetened and thickened with sugar and cornstarch. The mixture was frozen, pressed into rectangular molds, then cut into slices and wrapped in white paper, to be sold from vendors’ carts.
In both England and the US, Italian immigrants dominated the urban ice cream trade, and innovations within it. In 1901, Antonio Valvona, an Italian citizen living in Manchester, England, filed a patent for an “Apparatus for Baking Biscuit Cups for Ice Cream.” The device was designed for baking “dough or paste…composed of the same materials as are employed in the manufacture of biscuits [that is, cookies], and when baked the said cups or dishes may be filled with ice-cream, which can then be sold by the venders of ice-cream in public thoroughfares or other places.”
The following year, Valvona teamed up with Frank Marchiony, an Italian immigrant in New York, to form the Valvona-Marchiony Company, which produced the patented cups and the ice cream sold in them. Valvona operated the firm’s factory in the UK, while Marchiony ran the American operations, first on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and then in Brooklyn as trade grew.
By 1904, Marchiony had advanced from pushing a solo street cart to operating “two big wafer and ice cream factories” and a fleet of 200 carts, according to a newspaper profile at the time. But Marchiony’s carts had plenty of competition on the streets of Manhattan, including from those of his cousin, Italo Marchiony, who had worked for the Valvona-Marchiony Company briefly, but by 1903 had established a rival ice cream firm. In September of that year, Italo Marchiony filed a patent for his own “molding apparatus used in the manufacture of ice cream cups and the like.”
Italo’s innovation, he claimed, was that his design made it possible to mold biscuit paste “in particular and unusual shapes” that were not possible before due to “the delicacy of the substance molded and the difficulty of forming and extracting the same from the molds.” Unlike Valvona’s two-part mold, which had a hinged top and bottom that closed like a clamshell.
And that’s where things stood on the eve of the St. Louis World’s Fair. People were eating ice cream from edible containers, but nothing that anyone today would consider an ice cream cone.
One thing we know for sure: Visitors at the World’s Fair ate plenty of ice cream in cones—or cornucopias, as they were called at the time. Mrs. F. M. Hicklin wrote home to her family in South Carolina that the “waffle cornucopia filled with ice cream” was a treat widely enjoyed on “the Pike”—the Exposition’s version of a midway, a mile-long strip lined with cafes, amusements, and food concessions.
The long cones have waffled sides and pointed bottoms, and they appear to resemble the molded type of waffle cone familiar to us today instead of just a rolled-up waffle. This suggests that the confection was neither an improvised creation from a waffle stand nor a product of Valvona’s or Italo Marchiony’s biscuit-cup mold.
Some suspect that it wasn’t the work of last-minute desperation, but rather a dodge to get around restrictive concessionaire licensing. To sell any sort of item—from jewelry and souvenirs to food and beverages—vendors had to apply to and be accepted by the Exposition’s Division of Concessions and Amusements. The competition was stiff, for there was a fortune to be made from selling snacks and drinks to daily crowds of 35,000 or more captive customers.
All we know for sure is that the ice cream cornucopia had been introduced to America, and it was about to become an even bigger hit than it had been at the Exposition.
By May 1904, newspapers from Florida to North Dakota were running ads and articles that referenced “Cornucopia Ice Cream Sandwiches.” Many noted that the trendy new product had originated on the Pike in St. Louis.
In August, the Macon Telegraph profiled the Cornucopia Waffle Oven Company of St. Louis, which had just been awarded the cone concession for the Tri-State Fair in Georgia. “This company is introducing a new novelty for serving ice cream,” the paper reported. “They were first introduced at the great world’s fair at St. Louis and immediately, on account of its daintiness and neatness, became the most popular confection and have proven equally so in the East, and especially at the parks at Coney Island, Atlantic City, Chicago and various other famous resorts.” The ice cream cone had arrived.
Back in Brooklyn, Frank Marchiony’s business at the Valvona-Marchiony Company was thriving. A profile that year in the Brooklyn Eagle reported that Marchiony was “constantly adding to the plant” and that Valvona-Marchiony had become “the largest manufacturer of the kind in the United States.”
In the now-booming ice cream cone market, the Valvona-Marchiony Company had a valuable asset: Antonio Valvona’s patent for his “apparatus for baking biscuit cups.” The firm landed a big victory in 1905 when a federal judge sustained the validity of Valvona’s patent and ordered a competitor named D’Adamo to cease using his version of the device, which the judge declared to be “identical with the complainant’s, except in a trifling detail.”
In 1910, the Valvona-Marchiony Company’s lawyers started going after competitors selling cone-shaped containers, too, slapping patent infringement suits against companies from Missouri to Ohio to Indiana. Marchiony hired private detectives in Pittsburgh to infiltrate the Star Wafer Company’s factory and identify what they claimed were copycat baking molds. On July 10, 1910, Frank Marchiony even filed suit against his own cousin, Italo, who had since moved out to Hoboken, New Jersey, and was operating a large factory with his own patented molds.
In a surprising twist, the federal court in New Jersey ruled that Italo Marchiony’s patent was invalid and infringed upon his cousin’s firm. “Structurally and functionally the devices are substantially alike,” the judge determined, then added insult to injury by stating that “the defendant [Marchiony] never invented a single detail of the apparatus in question.” Italo was ordered to discontinue production and pay damages, but his lawyers secured a stay as they appealed the decision.
The Federal Court of Appeals in Philadelphia settled the matter once and for all in 1914, in a case that subsumed the Italo Marchiony appeal and that of many other manufacturers. The judge took a narrow reading of Valvona’s patent, concluding that his innovation was limited to details of the mold’s design related to heat conduction (now that’s something we love here at KHT) and in no way prevented others from creating other types of baking molds.
“All Can Make Cones!” the International Confectioner trade journal jubilantly declared. The Valvona patent became essentially useless, and the American ice cream cone industry has never looked back.
Curiously enough, none of the records from the many court cases make any reference to the St. Louis World’s Fair, and none of the defendants purported to have invented the ice cream cone by rolling up a waffle. It wasn’t until more than a decade after the Fair that people starting making such claims. Almost all the tellings involve an element of drama—typically, an ice cream vendor runs out of cups, or guests start ruining their clothes as they eat melting ice cream with spoons, and some crafty person saves the day with a rolled-up waffle.
With so many competing after-the-fact stories and so little tangible evidence, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever know who came up with the ice cream cone. Maybe the real lesson from this story is that the certainty and drama we crave in food histories—the idea that a single person had to have been the first, and that their invention was made in a flash of brilliance to solve an immediate emergency—what we here at KHT proudly call “solving you most pressing PIA (pain in the @%$) Jobs!”

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DO YOU LIKE CONTESTS?
Me, too.
As you may know the Kowalski Heat Treating logo finds its way
into the visuals of my Friday posts.
I. Love. My. Logo.
One week there could be three logos.
The next week there could be 15 logos.
And sometimes the logo is very small or just a partial logo showing.
But there are always logos in some of the pictures.
So, I challenge you, my beloved readers, to count them and send me a
quick email with the total number of logos in the Friday post.
On the following Tuesday I’ll pick a winner from the correct answers
and send that lucky person some great KHT swag.
So, start counting and good luck!
Oh, and the logos at the very top header don’t count.
Got it? Good. :-))))
Have fun!!

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Bierernst & Ninkasi

April 23, 2021/0 Comments/in Beer, Friday Afternoon, History, Trivia /by Steve Kowalski

I had a dream the other night after finishing this week’s blog post. I combined my love of beer with my love for my logo. I know, crazy right? Anyhow, any bar, restaurant, or back yard party I went to, people were drinking my beer… And loving it!!!!! So I had some mockups made of the bottle label from my dream and put them on a brown bottle and a green bottle. (I like the brown bottle.) Then I thought I’d have different colored bottle caps for the different types of beers: Ales, Stout, Wheat, Lager, Porter, etc. And in my dream I had 14 beer & brats trucks to go to local fairs and other events!! Ha!!! Not only that, I had a fleet of tankers that look like beer cans transporting my beers all over the country. Cool, huh. Then there’s my beer taster, Dingo. Nothing goes out the door unless Dingo says so. (Dingo also protects the beer recipes.) Whacky dream, right? But so much fun. What do you think of the beer’s name in my dream: “Kowalski’s World Famous Brewskis”? Should I make this a beer brand?? Let me know. I’m tempted…really tempted. And now I’m really thirsty. And really hungry. :)))

A little song to get you in the mood to read on.

Now that I have “both my shots”, I thought it would finally be fun to get out a bit and reconnect with some of my good friends. (I hope this is something you all are doing as well). After many text message exchanges, we decided to get our “boy’s” group (Actually, we call it our “playgroup”!) together. You are never too old to have a great playgroup! We decided to get in an early season round of golf. Challenged by the NE Ohio weather, we caught a brisk, bright sunny day and enjoyed “knocking” the ball around (some good pars, bogies, doubles and yes, some not so good “snowmen”) Talk about a PIA (pain in the @%$) Job! All told, I have to admit – it was a blast. Not having the opportunity to visit together for almost a year, we wrapped up our round and met in the clubhouse afterwards to share some good laughs about our “flog” while catching up on family, kids, grandkids, work, “jabs” and more. For those of you who understand golf, our “19^th hole” of course included having a snack or two (or three) and a fresh, cool draft beverage. Our attentive waitress passed around a menu filled with dozens of beer choices – light, dark, lagers, stouts, ales, porters, IPA’s – oh my! Perhaps it was the setting, or the fun of seeing friends, but I must admit, my selection was immediately refreshing and delicious. It got me to thinking about why we still have beer as a beverage option and how popular this truly ancient beverage still is today. I went exploring online and found some cool info on the history and early regulations of beer. With so much history to write about, I picked some of my favorite nuggets to share, with lots of links to help you dig deeper. Thanks to Wikipedia, NPR & heinonline.com. Enjoy, and next time on the links, be sure to finish up with a “cold one” and think of your buds at KHT.

Beer is one of the oldest drinks humans have produced. The first chemically confirmed barley beer dates back to the 5th millennium BC in Iran and was recorded in the written history of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia before spreading throughout the world. Ancient Chinese artifacts suggest that beer was brewed with grapes, honey, hawthorns, and rice and produced as far back as 7,000 BC. (wonder if they played golf too??).
In Mesopotamia, the oldest evidence of beer is believed to be a 6,000-year-old Sumerian tablet depicting people consuming a drink through reed straws from a communal bowl. A 3,900-year-old Sumerian poem honoring Ninkasi, the patron goddess of brewing (of course there is a beer goddess!), contains the oldest surviving beer recipe, describing the production of beer from bread made from barley.
Beer became vital to all the grain-growing civilizations of Eurasian and North African antiquity, including Egypt—so much so that in 1868 James Death put forward a theory in The Beer of the Bible that the manna from heaven that God gave the Israelites was a bread-based, porridge-like beer called wusa. These beers were often thick, more of a gruel than a drink, and drinking straws were used by the Sumerians to avoid the bitter solids left over from fermentation.
Though beer was drunk in Ancient Rome, it was replaced in popularity by wine. Tacitus wrote disparagingly of the beer brewed by the Germanic peoples of his day. Their name for beer was brutos, or brytos. The Romans called their brew cerevisia, from the Celtic word for it.
It was discovered early that reusing the same container for fermenting the mash would produce more reliable results, so brewers on the move carried their tubs with them.
Beer was part of the daily diet of Egyptian pharaohs, made from baked barley bread, and was also used in religious practices. During the building of the Great Pyramids in Giza, Egypt, each worker got a daily ration of four to five liters of beer, which served as both nutrition and refreshment that was crucial to the pyramids’ construction. (Beer as nutrition – wonder if Jackie will buy that one??)
In 450BCE, Greek writer Sophocles discussed the concept of moderation when it came to consuming beer in Greek culture, and believed that the best diet for Greeks consisted of bread, meats, various types of vegetables, and beer (obvious these guys were golfers too!).
The use of hops in beer was written of in 822 by the Carolingian Abbot Adalard of Corbie. Flavoring beer with hops was known at least since the 9th century. Hopped beer was perfected in the medieval towns of Bohemia by the 13th century. German towns pioneered a new scale of operation with standardized barrel sizes that allowed for large-scale export.
The use of hops spread to the Netherlands and then to England. In 15th century England, an unhopped beer would have been known as an ale, while the use of hops would make it a beer. Hopped beer was imported to England from the Netherlands as early as 1400 in Winchester, and hops were being planted on the island by 1428.
On this day, April 23,1516, William IV, Duke of Bavaria, adopted the Reinheitsgebot (purity law), perhaps the oldest food regulation still in use through the 20th century. The Gebot ordered that the ingredients of beer be restricted to water, barley, and hops.
Yeast was added to the list after Louis Pasteur‘s discovery in 1857. To this day, the Gebot is considered a mark of purity in beers, although this is controversial.
Recently excavated tombs indicate that the Chinese brewed alcoholic drinks from both malted grain and grain converted by mold from prehistoric times, (the resulting molded rice being (called Jiǔ qū in Chinese and Koji in Japanese)
Some Pacific island cultures ferment starch that has been converted to fermentable sugars by human saliva, similar to the chicha of South America. This practice is also used by many other tribes around the world, who either chew the grain and then spit it into the fermentation vessel or spit into a fermentation vessel containing cooked grain, which is then sealed up for the fermentation. Enzymes in the spittle convert the starch into fermentable sugars, which are fermented by wild yeast. Whether or not the resulting product can be called beer is sometimes disputed, but I’m guessing my foursome would pass on my “spittle” beer!
Asia’s first brewery was incorporated in 1855 (although it was established earlier) by Edward Dyer at Kasauli in the Himalayan Mountains in India under the name Dyer Breweries. The company still exists and is known as Mohan Meakin, today comprising a large group of companies across many industries.
The hydrometer transformed how beer was brewed. Before its introduction beers were brewed from a single malt: brown beers from brown malt, amber beers from amber malt, pale beers from pale malt. Using the hydrometer, brewers could calculate the yield from different malts. They observed that pale malt, though more expensive, yielded far more fermentable material than cheaper malts.
The invention of the drum roaster in 1817 by Daniel Wheeler allowed for the creation of very dark, roasted malts, contributing to the flavor of porters and stouts. Its development was prompted by a British law of 1816 forbidding the use of any ingredients other than malt and hops. Porter brewers, employing a predominantly pale malt grist, urgently needed a legal colourant. Wheeler’s patent malt was the solution.
In 1912, the use of brown bottles began to be used by Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the U.S. This innovation has since been accepted worldwide and prevents harmful rays from destroying the quality and stability of beer.
Modern breweries now brew many types of beer, ranging from ancient styles such as the spontaneously-fermented lambics of Belgium; the lagers, dark beers, wheat beers and more of Germany; the UK’s stouts, milds, pale ales, bitters, golden ale and new modern American creations such as chili beer, cream ale, and double India pale ales.
Today, the brewing industry is a huge global business, consisting of several multinational companies, and many thousands of smaller producers ranging from brewpubs to regional breweries. Advances in refrigeration, international and transcontinental shipping, marketing and commerce have resulted in an international marketplace, where the consumer has literally hundreds of choices between various styles of local, regional, national and foreign beers.
From my personal research, beer goes good with pretzels, chips, dip, crackers, pizza, wings, hot dogs, burgers, steak, spaghetti, cheese dip, nachos …. You?

Beer Mythology includes:

The Finnish epic Kalevala, collected in written form in the 19th century but based on oral traditions many centuries old, devotes more lines to the origin of beer and brewing than it does to the origin of mankind.
The mythical Flemish king Gambrinus (from Jan Primus (John I)), is sometimes credited with the invention of beer.
According to Czech legend, deity Radegast, god of hospitality, invented beer.
Ninkasi was the patron goddess of brewing in ancient Sumer.
The immense blood-lust of the fierce lioness Egyptian goddess Sekhmet was only sated after she was tricked into consuming an extremely large amount of red-colored beer (believing it to be blood): she became so drunk that she gave up slaughter altogether and became docile.
In Norse mythology the sea god Ægir, his wife Rán, and their nine daughters, brewed ale (or mead) for the gods. In the Lokasenna, it is told that Ægir would host a party where all the gods would drink the beer he brewed for them. He made this in a giant kettle that Thor had brought. The cups in Ægir’s hall were always full, magically refilling themselves when emptied. Ægir had two servants in his hall to assist him; Eldir [Fire-Kindler] and Fimafeng [Handy].
Recent Irish Mythology attributes the invention of beer to fabled Irishman Charlie Mops.

How does he do it???????

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