Food Friday: Boke Black Sesame Chocolate Ball
INDIGNITY VOL. 4, NO. 35
Previously in Indignity
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SNACK DEP’T.
Food Friday: Boke Black Sesame Chocolate Ball
IT HAD BEEN a while since we'd ordered from the Chinese grocery delivery place, and my older orders were inaccessible, which meant that I had to rebuild the shopping list. And that meant it was time to just scroll down the Snacks subsection of the Grocery section and click on whatever looked good. Along with all the savory options—crispy snacks shaped like jumbo french fries, but with a star-shaped hollow cross section, and flavored like spicy crayfish? Sure!—and the necessary haw flakes, there were these sweet sesame/chocolate balls.
The standard that the Boke Black Sesame Chocolate Ball needed to meet to count as a successful purchase, at $3.99 a bag, was "a nice change of pace." The glossy picture on the package, showing a broken-open confection whose contents went far past darkest chocolate brown to an uncanny lacquer black, kept my hopes from getting any higher than that.
Then I unwrapped and ate one. By which I mean two, which meant three. Other family members moved in on the bag just as avidly. The Black Sesame Chocolate Balls were a truly, compellingly great snack. They fit my grand foundational snack theory, as laid down in a previous incarnation of this newsletter: The key to a completely successful snack is that it must be slightly yet meaningfully dissatisfying.
The sesame balls were crisp and airy, filled partway with a melty chocolate that was, in the classic Asian dessert formulation, not too sweet. The sesame was nutty, but a little elusively so, compared to the nuttiness of other chocolate-confection partners like peanuts or hazelnuts. The crunchy parts dissolved in the mouth a little faster than the filling did, so the teeth were left yearning for something else to bite into—say, the next Black Sesame Chocolate Ball from the package. That would be ideal.
For comparison's sake, we still have a couple of bags of Lindt truffles sitting around from when I grabbed them during the last-minute drugstore Christmas candy clearance sale to stuff into stockings. The bags say "IRRESISTIBLY SMOOTH" on them, which is half right and half wrong: the chocolates taste fine but they are so overwhelmingly, suffocatingly smooth that it's easy, even desirable, to resist them. Eating one is like eating a triple-thick pat of butter, which is why the bags are still there, unfinished.
The Boke Black Sesame Chocolate Balls, on the other hand, are all gone.
ADVICE DEP’T.
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EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
INDIGNITY MORNING PODCAST
Indignity Morning Podcast No. 224: Panda deals.
Tom Scocca • Feb 23, 2024
VISUAL CONSCIOUSNESS DEP’T.
The Cereal Aisle
More consciousness at Instagram.
SIDE PIECES DEP’T.
MARGIN OF ERROR, a biweekly column by Tom Scocca, examining the apocalyptic politics and coverage of Campaign 2024 is available on Defector. The latest edition addresses the question of whether it would be a good idea for the Democratic Party to pick some all-new replacement for Joe Biden at its convention this coming summer (it would be a bad idea):
The 2024 Democratic presidential nominee is going to be Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris if Joe Biden drops dead or ends up fully incapacitated. The way to get a different nominee would have been for someone to start running against him in 2023. The forum for that grab-bag of younger, talented people to make their speeches would have been the campaign trail and the primary debate stage. No one—not one of these visionary future leaders—saw fit to do it.
AT FLAMING HYDRA Joe MacLeod enthuses about Flaming Hydra, Annie Rauwerda’s Depths of Wikipedia, and Stone Soup.
I worked at a place like that where stuff got de-rezzed, in Baltimore, MD at City Paper, an Alternative Weekly newspaper, which got sold and then lost a big chunk of its online archive because nobody cared enough to make sure it wouldn’t disappear. A lot of writers lost examples of their work.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP’T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of sandwiches from Modern Priscilla Cook Book; One Thousand Recipes Tested And Proved At The Priscilla Proving Plant, published in 1924, by The Priscilla Publishing Company, now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
SANDWICH FILLINGS
- Mix equal quantities of Neufchatel cheese and chopped olives. Season with salt and pepper and moisten with mayonnaise.
- Mix equal quantities of cream cheese and chopped olives. Season with paprika and salt.
- Mix equal quantities of cream cheese and grape jam.
- Mix one cup of chopped chicken with one-half cup of walnuts.
- Sweeten almond paste with powdered sugar, season with salt, and moisten with cream. Serve on unsalted crackers.
- Chop one large Spanish onion and mix with hot mayonnaise dressing. Season with salt.
- Chop two sweet green peppers, two sweet pickles, and two hard-cooked eggs. Mix with mayonnaise and season with salt.
- Mix equal quantities of peanut butter and chopped celery. Spread on white bread.
- Chop preserved figs and moisten with lemon juice. Spread on graham or whole wheat bread.
- Combine equal quantities of peanut butter and mild cheese. Spread between slices of white and brown bread.
- Cream a pimiento cheese, and put between one slice of brown and one of white bread.
- Mix together one cup chopped celery, one tablespoon of walnuts, and six olives. Use as a filling for dark breads.
- Cook one cup of chopped raisins until soft. Add one cup of chopped celery, and moisten with one teaspoon of lemon juice and mayonnaise.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
MARKETING DEP'T.
HAMILTON NOLAN—friend of, and occasional collaborator with, Indignity—has published his new book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor, which is out now, and you should read it!
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