menu testing at lana del ray's country club
and why they're always out of cherry cola ribs.
While many of you have been spending the quarantine teaching yourself to make bread, I’ve been making a concerted effort to listen to more albums. It’s no replacement for seeing live music. It isn’t even as good as a serendipitous encounter with a catchy beat or a song that transports you, but it can provide the longform pleasure that an endless rotation of 15 second snippets in your feed or the enraging echo chamber that is the Spotify algorithm cannot.
When I listened to Lana Del Ray’s 2021 release, Chemtrails Over the Country Club, I immediately revisited her back catalogue to figure out why I was expecting to hear more about dessert. In her 2012 breakout, Born to Die, you enter a veritable soda shop. Two songs, Diet Mountain Dew and Cola Pussy, are named after sodas. Later soft ice cream and cherry pies are making life sweet like vanilla. Cinnamon is sprinkled throughout her song books. Fast forward to 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! and between Venice Bitch and Bartender we’ve got the ingredients to make a Cherry Coke Float. So surely an album named after a category of dining establishments is going to have some food references?
It does not.
But by the end of the record I was fixated on what might be on her country club menu.
Lana’s brand of street tough love songs give us the impression she’s been following Marilyn Monroe’s diet of grilled meat, raw vegetables and barbiturates for the last decade. How many references to candle in the wind can you make before we succumb to the constant assertion that you’re this generation’s tragic sexpot? Three is the answer.
Lyrics aside, the album cover suggests that the menu would probably include a lot of midcentury cuts of meat. Chopped steak, prime rib, sirloin, baby back ribs? Maybe cherry cola ribs nibbled seductively in a leather jacket and pearls?
But when I started cross referencing what country clubs served in California in the 1960s where I assume Lana Del Ray spends most of her consciousness, ribs were largely absent. Vintage Menu Mania returned only one listing that was struck from the menu with a green highlighter. Yet this image of rib nibbling persisted. The more I listened to the album the less I would be deterred by a lack of corroborating evidence. Strengthened by the lingering ‘why not?’ vibes of 2020 cooking, I set off to make cherry cola ribs for an imaginary country club run by Lana Del Ray.
My first attempt was in the oven under the influence of Delish which turned out as about as forgettable as 2015’s Honeymoon.
In the process I learned how completely unchill it is to cook ribs. There are membranes to tear, unruly fats to trim, multi-step flavoring processes and hours of cooking. Lana doesn’t have time for this shit. She’s got pin curls to tend to before languishing heartbroken by a pool in LA. There’s not time to burn the candle at both ends and make ribs. She needs someone to do the leg work.
I’m the perfect candidate. Stuck in a cavernous Baltimore kitchen still unvaccinated with a another rack of ribs already in the fridge. The second time I worked with a pressure cooker under better guidance from Kevin Gillespie and Melissa Clark. Things tasted much better, but did not result in anything I could photograph with a hazy filter for that perfect vintage LA glow. So just keep sipping those sodas in the sun, Lana, because the menu’s not quite ready.
Some things I learned:
After every great pop album full of soda shop love Lana packs her bags for a road show of brooding ballads set outside LA
Removing that membrane on the back of ribs makes a big difference
Marinating ribs in Sprite (AKA a citric acid and sugar bath) for 4+ hours is good
Coating ribs with Dijon mustard and a lot of pork seasoning/rub before cooking is a gamechanger
Pressure cooking (35-40 minutes on high pressure) > baking in an oven (300 degrees for what feels like two years)
Searing the pressure cooked ribs for about 15 minutes to get that caramelized crust is what turns them into show stoppers
works for 4 pounds of pressure cooked baby back ribs or grilled chicken thighs
cherry-cola barbeque sauce
what you need
1 3/4 (14 ounces) cups cherry coke
2 cups ketchup
2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 teaspoons hot smoked paprika
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon molasses
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1 tablespoon dried minced onion
1 tablespoon dried mustard
what to do
Add ingredients into a medium sauce pan and stir to combine. Simmer, stirring occasionally for 20 minutes or until thickened. Use to coat ribs (or chicken thighs) while cooking.