From Argentina With Love/flickr
Sarah Elton's lovely post today makes me want to see Seltzer Works, the documentary she mentions about one of Brooklyn's last seltzer men, Kenny Gomberg—and wish we had a seltzer delivery service in Jamaica Plain. I can't find one, but I do find Give Me Seltzer, a blog I'll start reading, by one Barry Joseph, who's at work on a history of seltzer he intends to make definitive. He's got seemingly everything about current brands, and also equipment and its history.
My own seltzer revelation came last December, when my stepdaughter, Jess, who always gets meticulously well-suited and thought-out gifts, bought us a seltzer-making machine from SodaStream. Even if I spent two years of my life researching bottled water and came to appreciate the nuance in different brands of soda water—and learned how little of it is naturally carbonated, despite the romantic spring-y brand names—I became a right-minded member of the tap water brigade several years ago. And was embarrassed to keep bringing home bottles of Pellegrino (in glass, always better) and six-packs of "Italian mineral water" from Whole Foods, in undesirable but lighter plastic.
Of course, I had long—long—ago bought an iSi siphon, which even today looks little different from the one my father kept in our living-room bar. It denoted Europe and sophistication, and also his own Hungarian love of seltzer, as Sarah brings out in her post. But anyone who's bought one and stocked little boxes of the shiny black mini-H-bomb carbon-dioxide cartridges knows, it's a constant annoyance to swap them out. And really constant, too: a standard size makes only 32 ounces, which I can go through at supper with barely a perfunctory offer of any for my spouse.