The Daily - Special Episode: A Crash Course in Dembow, a Misunderstood Pantry Staple and Simple Tips to Keep Calm and Carry On

Episode Date: June 3, 2023

This weekend, we’re bringing dispatches from Times critics and writers on great music, TV, movies, recipes and more. They’re all part of a new series called “NYT Shorts,” available only on NYT Audio, our new iOS audio app. It’s home to podcasts, narrated articles from our newsroom and other publishers, and exclusive new shows. Find out more at nytimes.com/audioapp. On today’s episode: An ode to the Dominican musical genre dembow.  The many uses of Worcestershire sauce, an often misunderstood pantry staple. A Times health editor on how she holds it all together. 

Hi, I'm Kim Severson, a food writer with The New York Times, back once again with more from our new series, NYT Shorts. These are bite-sized dispatches from our reporters, editors, and critics. You'll be the first to know about their latest obsessions and what they see coming next. It's just an amazing thing to watch. I love it. I'm calling it now. I'm not afraid to call it now. It's the movie that unlocked my love for cinema. I am crying. I'm crying a little bit.

Find them and more on our new app, NYT Audio. It's available now to all our subscribers. First up, Isabelia Herrera writes about music for The Times, and today she's giving us a crash course in Dembo. When I was a kid, I would go on these trips to the Dominican Republic to visit my family. We would make sure we went to the beach at some point. It was about, you know, two hours away from Santiago, where my family is from. On the way to the beach, we would often see these vans that were like really just, you know, had huge speakers, like just covered in subwoofers.

There would be a lot of gasolineras, which, you know, these gas stations where a lot of these vans would just kind of park. And it was basically like as soon as you pulled up, you could just feel the bass. I would roll down the window and just like dance in my seat. That's one of the first times I really remember hearing Dembo. I'm Isabel Herrera, and I write about music and culture. Growing up in Chicago, I didn't really hear Dembo in the street anywhere. It was mostly something I listened to at home or with my brother. But when I moved to New York, it was everywhere,

and it was finally like, someone gets it. Like, I see myself here. I'd hear them both coming out of, like, a bodega or coming out of people's cars, just, like, blasting on the street out of people's windows. Your body will uncontrollably move.

I mean, it's definitely, like, the danceable, like you just can't, you have to bop to it as soon as you hear it. So Dembow is all about having a good time. You know, a lot of the songs are about dancing or partying or doing drugs. And because this is a sound that comes from working class black neighborhoods outside of Santo Domingo, a lot of people look down on it. The Dominican government censors songs that they think are explicit. You know, people who are socially conservative really dismiss the genre as vulgar and obscene.

Dembo is not the first genre that experiences that kind of backlash. I mean, any genre that comes from the street often gets that type of criticism. So, you know, if you dismiss dembow, you're really missing out on a larger and richer, deep cultural history. It holds, you know, the history of Jamaican dance hall in it. It holds, you know, elements of proto-reggaeton

from Puerto Rico, hip-hop from New York. But Dembow's signature sort of style is that they crank the tempo up, sometimes to like 140 beats per minute. And it is like breakneck rapping over it, a lot of repetition in the chorus, and that repetition is super central to the genre and its catchiness. If you're just getting into dembow, I think you absolutely need to listen to Olalfa. He is the king of the genre, he is the funniest one,

he is the wittiest one, and he is definitely your entry point to get into Dembo. You can really hear how hard he goes in Demagage Gigogu, which is his song with Bad Bunny from 2016. The title is a reference to the word demagogo, and demagogo is Dominican slang for someone who's a hater, someone who's a jealous person, and the title is this, you know, really witty wordplay in the sense that it's like expanding all the syllables of demagogo. It's not just demagogo, it's demagagegigogu.

That's how much of a hater this person is. That's how much of a jealous person they are. It's sort of like you encompass all of the possible syllables and vowels of the word. I got to see El Alfa and to see the king of dembow, someone who really came from the street and brought this music that has been dismissed for so long to sell out Madison Square Garden was huge. I mean, you could hear like the chair shake, you could just hear everyone screaming the lyrics, you know, there were Dominican flags waving everywhere. I mean, it was really like a carnival.

Like it was so fun. It was constant movement on theival. It was so fun. It was constant movement on the stage. It was a great time. He made a lot of comments through the show and in his audience banter being like, who said the Dominican Republic couldn't go global? Who said Dembo wouldn't make it? As this kind of celebratory moment for the movement.

You know, my reaction was just like, yes, finally, thembo made it. I listen to thembo pretty much every day, whether it's on my running playlist or my cooking playlist or, you know, just to get pumped up for something. And I think you should do. Okay, next up, we're talking about food with my friend and colleague who has done a little pantry spelunking and has come up with a bottle you probably already have on your shelf and which I cannot spell nor pronounce. Hi, I'm Melissa Clark. I'm a food reporter at The New York Times, and I'm standing in my kitchen next to the pantry. In this series, we're going to take a deep dive into the pantry. God, you know, did you know I have two jars of Marmite? Why do I have two jars of Marmite? I mean, when was the last time you actually explored everything in your pantry?

What is this thing all the way in the back? If you're like me, you buy a condiment, maybe you'll use it once, put it in the back of your pantry and completely forget it's even there. Oh, sweetened black vinegar. I'll bet you have an entire meal in there just waiting for you to discover it and make it for dinner tonight. I'm opening it up and it smells so savory. Well, I'm going to help you figure out what to do with all of those condiments in the back of your pantry, how to use each and every one of them to its absolute best. Oh, God, it's so good. I love it. And today we're going to talk about something that's a real pantry staple, Worcestershire sauce. Worcestershire sauce is

absolutely essential in Caesar salads. You need it for your Bloody Mary, but what else can it do? And what even is it? So Worcestershire sauce was developed in the 19th century. It was actually developed by pharmacists, pharmacists named Lee and Perrins, in the town of, no surprise here, Worcester in England. Worcestershire is made up of four main ingredients. So you've got anchovies, which have a saltiness, they have an umami depth and a little bit of a saline fishy flavor. You have molasses, which adds sweetness. You have tamarind, which gives a very bright fruity flavor, almost like a citrus flavor. And then you have barley malt vinegar, which is sharp and acidic.

And all of those were fermented together with some other seasonings. There was garlic and shallots. There were spices. And when you ferment all of these things, they blend into this just very rich, very fragrant sauce with a bold flavor. And it keeps for a long time, too. So that bottle of Worcestershire in your pantry, you can still use it even if you can't remember when you bought it. So if you're thinking, well, where would I want to use Worcestershire?

Think about where you'd want to use Asian fish sauce. Asian fish sauce has a ton of umami. You can just add a little bit to anything and it's going to brighten the flavors. It's got salt. It's got that depth, that almost caramelized nuance. Worcestershire sauce accomplishes a lot of the same things. But it also has a little bit of sweetness and it has more acidity. Fish sauce is going to be a funkier flavor.

Worcestershire sauce, it's like the whisper of an anchovy. It's like, hmm, here I am. I'm adding this, you know, this depth of flavor, this salty umami flavor. And yes, there's anchovy, but you can't really taste it because it's integrated. It's part of the sauce, but it's there and it's doing work for you. What else can we use Worcestershire sauce for? Have you ever made a pot of stew or soup and you're just cooking and you're not following a recipe and you're tasting and you're like, oh, my God, this needs something. And you know it needs salt, but it's not just salt.

It needs something else. So in those moments, that's where you are going to go into your pantry and you're going to say, OK, condiments, who shall I choose to put into my soup pot? Because you need that extra. And Worcestershire is my go-to. A little bit of Worcestershire just perks up your stew. It's almost like adding bouillon to your soup. You know, instead of a bouillon cube, a couple of dashes of Worcestershire. It's adding life.

It's adding flavor. It's adding verve. So next time you've got your pot of whatever simmering and you don't know what to add, try the Worcestershire. It is there for you. You know what? I'm going to try that. I have learned to never sleep on a Melissa Clark cooking tip.

that. I have learned to never sleep on a Melissa Clark cooking tip. And finally, to send you off into your day, a new series called How I Hold It Together from The Well Desk. They started this little project during the pandemic, and you might recall it was very hard to just get through the day. But the series worked. They got through those days and many more days and decided to just keep it going. So here's Deputy Editor Kate Lowenstein on how she holds it together. I told my husband that I was doing a story called How I Hold It Together. And of course, he said, how about the first line is, I don't, which is funny because it's true. We have two young children. Our apartment's always a mess. Things are very chaotic in my life. But, you know, I have coping skills and I've been a health editor for a long time. So I have

a little perspective on which of those coping skills might be useful for other people to hear. So here's how I kind of hold it together. I feel like there are not a lot of good breakfast foods out there, personally. That's my hot take. And I have decided that I'm going to start eating non-breakfast foods for breakfast most of the time. And it has lots of advantages. going to start eating non-breakfast foods for breakfast most of the time, and it has lots of advantages. One, you can eat your leftovers from the night before, which is very fast and easy, sometimes standing and sometimes with the refrigerator door still open.

Two, it keeps me satisfied for much longer than a bowl of cereal. I think spaghetti makes a great breakfast. Delicious, spicy fish and cabbage soup. I ate this leftover fried calzone for breakfast the other day. It was not good cold. It was pretty soggy. But it kept me full for a while. So my hips and back often feel very tight and achy, especially after I've been sitting for a while. And there's a spot like right on the side of my hip that's just always kind of tight and tender. So something I find really useful is lying down on the floor.

Sometimes it's just lying down on the floor that feels good. But then also lying on a trigger point ball, which is a like four inch ball that's hard and smooth. And I put the ball on a yoga mat. I get down on top of the ball, kind of on my side so that the ball is right under my right hip. And at first it's really tight and tense and it hurts. But then I do a few deep breaths and I stay there a little longer and I feel the knot release. It feels like a massage where someone's going really, really deep. And if I stay on it for long enough, the pain kind of goes away.

So when I am finding myself having really overwhelmingly negative thoughts, like sweeping thoughts, like I never see my aging parents enough. And my kids eat no vegetables. And I'm so late on every story I'm working on. These sort of like overgeneralizations about how poorly I'm doing in life. like overgeneralizations about how poorly I'm doing in life. I've recently become able to notice when I'm doing that and think to myself, you know, what's going on? Are you especially tired today? And usually that is the case.

And on those days, I say, okay, today you're an unreliable narrator and you're not going to take yourself too seriously. And these thoughts are, we're going to just sort of hang them up and reconsider them later, because they're being heavily influenced by how tired you feel today. Not trying to have a conversation with myself about why it's not true, or certainly trying to stop the spiraling thoughts about how it is true, and just being like, all right, these are the thoughts we're having today. Let's move on.

Completely broke. I could not use it at all. And I really couldn't believe how sort of free and untethered that feeling was. So I took a tip from my friend Tom and bought a lockbox that has no overrides, which means you put it in, you set the time that you want to leave your phone in there, and then you cannot get it out, which is a little bit terrifying. But it has allowed me to feel much more present. You don't have that feeling of needing to check something constantly. And I can read a book or sit with my toddler who's doing something maybe not super engaging and doing it for 10 minutes even feels really good. I'm Kate Lowenstein and here's how I hold it together. I lie on a trigger point ball. I grant myself unreliable narrator days.

I eat dinner for breakfast. I put my phone in a lockbox. My son definitely did take the lockbox and lock it for two and a half days. My phone was not in it at the time, but it made me realize, you know, that it could go wrong. Well, our Saturdays together have come to a close. I hope you'll go find more NYT shorts on our new app, NYT Audio. It's available for free to all of our subscribers. Download it at nytimes.com slash audio app.

This episode was produced by Tina Antolini, Elissa Dudley, Sarah Curtis, and Tracy Mumford. Edited by Wendy Dorr and Lynn Levy. Engineered by Rowan Nemisto, Corey Schruppel, Daniel Farrell, and Sophia Landman. Special thanks to Paula Schumann and Sam Dolnick. I'm Kim Severson. Thanks for spending these past few Saturdays with me and download the app. You're going to like it. I'll see you when I see you.