Please, St. Anthony – I Think You Need A Bite To Eat

I always knew of the Feast of St. Anthony, because there was always some sort of festival with food happening somewhere around where I lived. But I never really knew too much about the guy himself. This year I decided to find out a little bit about him, and what I found astonished me. This man had some serious things going on in his life.

If I were he, I would be very hungry at the end of it all. I think he fully deserves his feast! Luckily, there are some people out there making really good things for St. Anthony (and the rest of us) to consider eating on his day. One of my favorite food bloggers has some great food ready – wander over to Peter Battaglia’s A Food Obsession to see it! And two more of the best bloggers on Greek food, life, history and culture I know also have a different and fascinating food offering for St. Anthony’s Day – one I particularly like. You might too if you visit Maria Verivaki’s Organically Cooked and Mariana Kavroulaki’s History of Greek Food.

A Cake of Letters for the Season

Here we have yet another painting with the ubiquitous fly on the loaf of bread. This time I’m not going to try to discover the meaning of this. I’m just going to assume that the painter believed in realism so intensely that the instant of the fly’s settling became a part of the piece forever. Alternately maybe he found a dead fly and stuck it on so as to relive that moment over and over as he painted, the moment the fly so carelessly lit, before taking flight again mostly likely a few seconds later.

But what is that pile of letters? Has the painter gone mad from inhaling paint and turpentine fumes, is he imagining the alphabet toppling over sideways on the table next to his roast bird? Is this a prelude to surrealism?

No, it isn’t. It is actually a cake. Or it may be the beginnings of the cake, really. The cake itself is called ‘lettergebak’ or ‘letterbanket’ and it is made for St. Nicolas’ birthday on December 6.

Every Saint Nicholas day each family bakes a cake shaped like the letter of each person in the families’ first name; these cakes are called (letterbanket).

I love the way these letters look! You will find a recipe at this site. These appear to be filled with almond paste. I can find absolutely nothing wrong with that idea at all.

Happy Birthday, St. Nick!

Gettin’ Buttery Wid It

It all started with a word. I don’t know where I saw the word, but the word was ‘butterwife’.

The word fascinated me. What was a butterwife? I knew it was not an alewife which is a fish, nor a fishwife who is a person who alternately shrieks in scathing tones and/or is a woman who sells fish whom supposedly is married not to a fishhusband (which would seem to make the most sense) but to a fisherman.

I started down a slippery slope of butteryness. Let me take you along with me as I traverse the path as it wound gently and oleaginously forward.

Butter wife, a woman who makes or sells butter; -- called
        also butter woman. [Obs. or Archaic]
        [1913 Webster]

Notes from one butter-wife:

“We bought a 11-acre farm; my husband was a good dairyman and a first class butter maker, but we could scarcely pay taxes and interest and live, until I took up crochet work. I managed thus to pay $200 on the mortgage every year, but the strain was too great, and overwork ruined my health—but the mortgage was paid. Meantime I have had only one new hat in eight years and one secondhand dress, earned by lace work. We are of the better class and have to keep up appearances, but the struggle is heartbreaking and health destroying. We have worked night and day. Our two sons have had to give up a higher education to work, and both have decided mechanical and constructive ability.”

“Suggest some feasible plan for caring for the farm help without making them a part of the family. Many of them are dirty, vulgar, profane, and drunken, yet they eat at table with us; our children listen to and become familiar with their drunken babblings. Our privacy is destroyed, our tastes and sense of decency are outraged. We are forced to wait upon and clean up after men who would not be allowed to enter the houses of men of any other vocation. Do not misunderstand; the farmers’ wives care little for social status. It is not because they are hired men that we wish them banished, but because oftentimes they are personally unworthy.”

I have to admit . . . when I read foodies gush about how wonderful it is to make their own butter I think of these other women from another time.

The tools above are used in buttermaking.

Of course there is always a flip-side. In butter the flip-side (on a couple of different levels) takes form in the shape of this margarine dragon!

Being buttery, butter is a natural political companion. From President Taft’s White House Cow (which is much like President Obama’s White House Garden!) to Teddy Roosevelt, who in his autobiography (in the chapter ‘Practical Politics’) mentions butter and apparently thumps his fist on the table while doing so

bread for myself and my family. I had enough to get bread. What I had to do, if I wanted butter and jam, was to provide the butter and jam, but to count their cost…

At the end of following along all this and getting quite buttery about it all, I came across something which made me re-think things. Would I really want to be a butterwife when instead I might be able to be a milkseller? If I were a milkseller I could have an adorable donkey and we all could stand in the middle of a charming little green hayfield in Cologne. How romantic! The possibilities in life are always worth thinking about, don’t you agree?

Men in Aprons

I’ve been thinking about aprons lately. What they are, what they mean, what they look like and things like that. You may think this denotes the approach of mental enfeeblement on my part, and it could be so – but I’m enjoying it very much thank you!

Women in aprons are one thing, of course. And men in aprons are yet another. Whether we are all the same under the aprons is an idea available for musing upon, naturally.

I’ve been hanging around with a guy in an apron, at least on the pages of a book. Hyacinth of ‘The Princess Casamassima’ has been with me every night recently as my head hits the pillow before falling asleep. At this point, that translates to 447 pages of him – with still a bit to go till the story ends at page 591. Hyacinth wears an apron when he works as a fine bookbinder – and the aprons of his co-workers in the small shabby shop figure in the narrative which is supposedly about a princess but really about a short Englishman who is really a Frenchman in ways. But back to aprons!  Here are some to look at:

No aprons for cooking! That surprised me a bit. I think of cooking first, really, when I think of aprons.

It’s All About The Herring

Herring with bread, beer, scallions and  . . .  a beetle??

Herring with dried out black bread, a gloomy potato and a glum turnip

Pickled herring as food and as delightful frame for what looks like a gravestone

It’s difficult to decide in this piece whether the ham and the herring are about to bite each other, marry each other, or waltz together.

Here we have our herring ready to eat with onion, apple, walnut, and yet another insect, this time a big flying one rather than a beetle.

The herringpackers are obviously working very fast to get all these herrings to the table. It looks as if one of them expired on top of a pile of herring. Maybe he’s just taking a nap. I don’t blame him.

I have to wonder whether any of these paintings are sophistical refutations. Red herring, anyone?

Or the Golden Bowl be Broken – and Soup

The almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail; because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets:

Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

Ecclesiastes 12:5-7

If a golden bowl exists in the form of a food, then surely that food must be soup. For in soup, in every language and in each place of the world there exists the essence of the golden bowl.

The golden bowl is life pared down to the core and the golden bowl is life exalted. It is of the utmost richness and of the most despairing poverty melded together in one single idea of the human spirit with its tenacious hold on today and on the next day and on all days imagined forward.

Hope is the word, in any language, written in the broth held in the golden bowl.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops — at all –

Emily Dickinson

Hope is also the thing left in Pandora’s box, saved for eternity as all the evils flew out among the world.

Soup has a literature, a full one. You can read about soup each day of the week for a year at least and never be done with it. And this is good. But hope does not reside on the pages of a book. It lives in a golden bowl, and there is sometimes a spoon alongside it.

Inside the golden bowl are different things. For the mother with small means and many children it could be made out of the leftover bones and scraps of the meal the night before. For the man of the world with a lady to impress it could be rich with cream, bedecked with truffles. For the lover of the hunting life (whether they hunt or not) the bowl might have a fine shank of venison standing proudly upright in its center. All hopeful things, all things to make one believe.

Soup is the thing that makes one believe. A golden bowl. In my family we have one soup which more than others, makes us believe.

Do you?

Russian Tea

Get Me To The Kasha On Time

Kasha‘s been on my mind lately. That’s natural, since autumn’s almost here and the time for deep nutty things has come. Well of course to my mind it’s always the time for deep nutty things but when the air seems to hint at briskness and gray rains, I also want to eat deep nutty things. So kasha is the way to go. Kasha is made from buckwheat.

When I think of kasha I think of Jewish food – and this is for no good reason. But at some point in time the idea of kasha varnishkes entered my mind as a romantic sort of food (not that I’d ever eaten it, I hadn’t) and stuck there, along with the idea that being half-Jewish was a rather romantic thing to be. I’ve never been religiously Jewish (though I have been religiously romantic at times) but my father whom I met once and knew for a year or so was Jewish. So in my genetic half-Jewishness I imagine that in some way I have a deep longing for kasha varnishkes. What’s not to like? You’ve got kasha and you’ve got bowtie pasta – two good things! I should love this thing!!

I made kasha varnishkes once and it was an okay sort of experience. Actually it offered me about the same level of genetic religious sustenance in a romantic way as a bologna sandwich on Wonder Bread with yellow mustard gives my WASP side. How much is that? I don’t know. Are these things measurable?

I do love kasha as a breakfast cereal, though. Hot (oh god yes, I do microwave it rather than stand stirring over the damn stove) and drizzled with good honey and whole milk, kasha for breakfast is a nourishing thing, religious or not. I think somehow it actually is. Religious, that is. But let’s not give it a name, for some things are best left unspoken.

More on kasha.

Fruit Cocktail: Does it Suck?

Fruit cocktail is a ‘nothing’ kind of food. Lots of people think it sucks. Yet in ways it is an Ethical Food. What is an Ethical Food? Why of course it is a food that fits whatever code of ethics you choose to embrace. But if you don’t want to have to worry about it too very much, it is very easy to find a code of ethics to follow about food simply by googling the term Ethical Food and there will be things online you can read, swallow, and repeat.

How to figure out what to think about fruit cocktail may be a bit more difficult than the more usual things one has to figure out like foie gras or Kobe beef or tuna sashimi – you know, the foods we all eat every day – which therefore are vital to have some story to stick to about when asked by someone who doesn’t have those foods to eat – because fruit cocktail does not exist as something to be discussed much except to either say “It sucks,” or “I like it,” or “Give me all the cherries”.

There’s no separate entry for fruit cocktail in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America but just a note that the term ‘fruit salad’ preceded it – noting who says so and why they say so. But we know, don’t we? That fruit cocktail is not fruit salad. There is no entry for fruit cocktail in The Oxford Companion to Food either.

Is this an example of some sort of national shame? After all, we ‘invented’ fruit cocktail in the United States, as much as one can invent anything. Here’s one explanation of how it all happened:

fruit cocktail has been a staple of the canned fruit industry since at least
the 1940’s.  The combination of pears, grapes, peaches, pineapple,
syrup and bright red cherry halves was one of the most popular products
Del Monte Plant #3 produced.  It is generally agreed that fruit
cocktail was developed as a way make use of the fruit scraps left when
bruised or damaged fruits could not be used in canning.  But the exact
origin of fruit cocktail remains a mystery.

There’s more information given if you read further at the link provided. But here’s what caught my eye: way to make use of the fruit scraps left when bruised or damaged fruits could not be used

Now if that isn’t good husbandry of resources I don’t know what is! Ethical indeed. What else would you do with these fruit scraps? Throw them away? Fruit cocktail may actually be a silk purse made out of a sow’s ear.

Think about it. And while you’re doing so, I’ll just take those cherries please.

Farming: Lovin’ It?

Here's a photo taken on a farm one hundred years ago.

What do you think is being picked? And can you guess the age of the picker?

Cooking Classes in Cotton Mills One Hundred Years Ago

What, you may wonder – is this? Women in long dresses and aprons, looking industrious though perhaps not so cheery. I came across this photo while browsing and it stopped me short. ‘Cooking Classes’ it said. Cooking classes? Why, this looked nothing like the somewhat ecstatic always hungry for knowledge cooking class atmosphere I’ve seen photos of here and there. But of course cooking has not always been cooking in the same ways to people. It has felt different to various people in various times and places.This photo is of a cooking class offered by a cotton mill in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1909 – one hundred years ago from our lives now.What were these women thinking? Were they happy to be in this class?Here is another photo of a cotton mill cooking class, in 1920. Different fashions worn somewhat, and maybe a few shy smiles being shown. Through joy? Or from a beseeching request made to smile by the photographer? Or maybe those few women are like me – always going around with a little smile on their faces for absolutely no good reason whatsoever?In the time between the two photos there had been an important world war, of course. Sandwiched right in-between those ongoing cooking classes at the cotton mills.

Food Art in Gastronomica

One of the great things about Gastronomica is that Darra Goldstein knows a lot about art. What I mean to say is that she knows a lot about Art. The good stuff, the stuff that is capitalized, the stuff that is artlessly artful.

Another one of the good things about Gastronomica is that there is a page on the website which features some of the AIF (Artists-In-Food) who grace the pages of the print journal. So right from the virtual page one can browse and click on the artist’s pages and see even more of their work.

What’s that you say?

Oh. Where’s the link?

Right here!

School Cafeteria Food is Not Why Kids Can’t Read

Although there is some fuss going on in the cultured foodie-segments of society about the terrors of the food served in our public school cafeterias, it is a fact that Dreadful School Cafeteria Food is not why kids can’t read.

True, the fact must be faced that it is (barely) possible that some children – when feasting their eyes on the day-glo glop scooped out at lunchtime in school cafeterias across the land – may think of that food as a gastronomic prize for their day’s studies, if they are prone to thinking deeply about their food as linked to philosophy and to their life. If the child is like this, he might just go and decide to live up to the promise of it all by becoming day-glo-glop-like himself.

But somehow I think there’s more to it. Somehow, I think the quality of the teaching going on in the school system could also have an effect on the level of education being attained by those who consume it. But please don’t tell my kid’s teachers this – it might come back to haunt me with the mysterious Lowered-Grade Syndrome I’ve heard tell of that can supposedly happen if you don’t make nice with the teachers. This syndrome is of course related to the mysterious Rise-In-Grade Syndrome that one can make happen by revising essays to fit with the teacher’s own particular political bent. Tried and true, this one – in my experience. Not with all teachers, but with some.

My children are in high school now, but I remember the days past with fondness. Upon arriving home from school my kids would fill my ears with happy schoolday anecdotes about many things, including the words their teachers had spelled wrong on the blackboards that day. They thought that was pretty funny.

How did my children know the words were spelled wrong? Probably because they read books. Reading can set things into memory. Why didn’t their teachers have these elementary-school words set (spelled correctly) into their memory at some point – either during their formative years of education or during their four years of required studies in the higher-education system? It’s beyond me.

But tsk tsk. Why am I complaining about spelling, and teachers not being able to spell. It’s such a small thing. Teachers put up with the most incredible challenges in the daily tasks of managing the classroom within the bureaucracy that ties the classroom and all those within it into a macrame-like knotted sculpture of what one can do and what one can not do. Having a teacher who can spell words correctly can be the least of the problem.

I was amused by the stories related to me at the end of school days during elementary-school years. But the end-of-the-day stories I hear now, during the high-school years, are even more amusing. Amusing, that is, in a vaguely horrific sort of way.

Ugly behavior – or more often behavior along the lines of startling behavior that one looks away from quickly – happens in the hallways of  any high school. Sexual harassment is clearly the top winner in this category, with core groups of boys who are apparently unable (or unwilling) to not ‘talk dirty’ to any girl who passes by their line of vision, leaving the girls feeling not so much like students but more like a shambles of a vision wrecked before it even happened. I say that ‘one looks away quickly’ because that is exactly what the teachers do. They appear to have grown blinders.

One good thing (for the kids being bullied – not so much for the bullies themselves) is that the bullies-in-general who burgeon in rank and number during the middle-school years have calmed down to some extent by the time they enter high school.  Alternately it could be that some of them are simply not at school any more most of the time – they’ve fallen through the cracks existing in the worlds of those designated to be responsible for them.

The funniest thing though (and one does need to laugh at something for a sense of relief after looking closely at some of these other things) is that the teachers (who in the elementary system were merely for the most part bad spellers) have become replaced by teachers in the high school system – who are often much more interesting in a number of ways. And when a high-school teacher is amusing, they can be really amusing. Even moreso when they’ve somehow managed to survive the system for fifteen or twenty years doing exactly the amusing things they do.

Not to say we don’t enjoy this. A good story is a good story, and the day ended without a good story about school somehow seems wrong.

But back to the topic. My thesis was that ‘school cafeteria food is not why kids can’t read’. School cafeteria food is the least of it, the way I see it. It is not just the amount of sugar, the ‘balanced diet’, the dreaded soda machine, the frozen pizza and traditionally frightening frozen pea glop.

It can be other things. It can be a teacher who does not teach, yet who somehow manages to go on not-teaching for years. A teacher who sets aside the book planned-to-be-used-as-curriculum in favor of watching movies and having the class stuff envelopes for her latest fund-raising project to bring money into the sports program. One who thinks Las Vegas is in California. One who thinks sweetbreads are something made from bread and sugar. One who insists that the word ‘promenade’ does not come from the French language, does not mean ‘to walk’ but instead was invented to mean ‘high-school prom’. One who thinks the movie ‘Mamma Mia’ is a French movie. One who is teaching students planning on entering the fashion industry to pronounce Cartier as car-tee-urrr.  (Oh yeah. That will go over big in a job interview.)

One has to wonder if either a drug-scan or a brain-scan would be useful in these situations. Or maybe even some standard form of accountability might be found to put in place.

That all this can happen in an ‘AP’ class where college credit will be given for completion of the class is just the cherry on top.

Bad cafeteria food – that’s the least of it. That’s my thesis, anyway. But really, when considering it all at length, I definitely have to keep firmly in mind the always-useful words of Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

Excuse me. My throat appears to be itching.

The Fireside Cook Book by James Beard – 60th Anniversary Edition

It startled me to see The Fireside Cook Book peering out from the bookstore shelf. The biggest surprise was how very new the book looked. The editions I’ve seen have been battered and worn, food-speckled, and with the non-shiny essence of the year 1949 – the date when The Fireside Cook Book was published for the very first time.

The new edition is red and green and yellow-brown and bright, and the illustrations – tossed in as if by a mad generous cook into a huge happy salad – are a look into another age of cookbooks.

Playful line drawings seem to be on almost every page, each one broadly drawn and colorful: An enigmatically smiling woman holds a garden spade as she bends over the earth almost-bursting out of her clothes while planting cauliflower in a garden as a little bird sits nearby watching her closely . . . a black-coated coachman throws delicately curled reins around the neck of a lime-avocado-green horse resembling a Lippanzauer as it pulls along a Cinderella-story coach labelled (writ large and bold and even saucily) SAUCES, and there upon the top of the coach sit the sauces in their jugs and bottles, merrily bumping along.

It all sounds just too precious. But it’s not. The book’s content crunches any initial questioning thoughts of ‘just too precious’ into a puff-ball which disappears with a slight ‘pouff!’ noise somewhere never to be seen again in the 1217 recipes on the 306 pages.

In this book are recipes, menu planning ideas, information on food purchasing, notes on seasonal cooking, the food of other lands and more. The recipes are written by someone who knows them too well to make a great fuss over them, someone who knows that any recipe ultimately answers to the cook, not the other way around – where cooks answer to the recipes which have somehow transformed themselves into pettily demanding divas. And yet the recipes in this book are far from unsophisticated.

This is not a specialist cookbook, though specialized ingredients and methods can be found in any given section. Beard’s mention of chayote, in 1949, is an interesting example of how very unassumably forward-looking he was.

Mark Bittman writes the foreword, and at the end of it comments:

“The man was born to teach cooking”.

I’m glad he wrote this, for the book jacket bio draws a strong picture of the other aspects of Beard: the well-qualified expert; the world-traveller; and the man who was quite intensely industry-connected.

My vision of Jim Beard (drawn from stories told to me by those who knew and worked with him during his later years in Manhattan) is in alignment with Bittman’s comment. I imagine him as consummate teacher first, bon vivant second, and writer through it all.

‘American Cookery’ is still my favorite book by Beard, but The Fireside Cook Book – this bright new edition – is coming right up close behind it as a very near second for my affections in the world of his writings.

Bread of a day, wine of a year, a friend of thirty years. I’ve always loved that saying. Maybe I’ll tag on to the end of it ‘a book of sixty years’.

Superheroes: Food and Fashion: "We Be Stylin' "

Superheroes seem to keep popping up in my world.

They are appearing in more forms than I’d ever imagined on the pages of the book I’m reading right now – ‘Who Can Save Us Now – Brand New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories’ . They’re on the pages of  ‘Mental Floss‘ magazine this month in the article ’5 Comic Superheroes Who Made a Real World Difference’. They showed up in great form at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. And last month they took to the runways at The  New York Chocolate Show, capering and mincing along in astonishing costumes – no longer made of strange stretchy materials – but constructed instead of the fruits of the cocoa bean, warped by knowledgable chocolate-focused culinary materialists and reimaged to be stylin’.

(More images here on telegraph.co.uk.)

While reading the ‘Superheroes’ book I wondered what sort of superhero I’d be (if only I could be one). I’d have to be something to do with food, I thought. These new superheroes can take many different forms. Some are described in this review from bookgasm:

One of my favorites was “The Pentecostal Home for Flying Children,” in which Will Clarke examines the aftereffects of a promiscuous costumed crimefighter and a town full of easily seduced Baptist women. The result is a slew of snotty kids who can fly and wreak havoc on their neighbors’ privacy and well-being. It takes a rather dark, disturbing turn.

Another highlight is the heartbreaking “The Horses Are Loose” by Cary Holladay. Its little-girl protagonist is born with the knowledge that she has the power to fly, but can only use this power once. She’s saving it for a grand plan that she hopes will save her single, clinically depressed mother from a lifetime of misery. If it doesn’t move you even a little, read it again.

Some pieces are straight humor, like the Sea Monkeys-oriented “The Snipper,” from Noria Jablonski, and Sam Weller’s “The Quick Stop 5®,” in which a chemical accidental transforms a quintet of convenience-store employees into mutants with the powers of beef jerky, a Slushee, condoms and the like. It’s one of the better stories in the entire volume, marred only by an over-reliance on pot humor.

At first I thought of fruits and vegetables, but my mind became a curious blank slush. No, ‘Banana Woman’ – who would stroll through the most luxurious shopping areas of major cities of the world trying to make the universe a better place by finding the most perfect outfit to buy that ever existed! (while saving cats and dogs and old ladies from ugly-faced muggers who were trying to steal their sardines, bones, and handbags by hitting the muggers over the head with a huge banana that would grow in an instant before your eyes from the end of her right middle finger, leaving the malefactors covered in a pool of disintegrating banana mush rapidly turning brown and attracting flies) would not do.

Besides, it seemed to hint at penis envy.

Forget the fruits and vegetables. On to meat.  Fish were not something I considered – though actually something could be done with a giant clam. Or with a jellyfish. Ever get stung by a jellyfish?

After sifting through various ideas for becoming a meat-based superhero, the decision was made. It was perfect. I would be ‘Caul-Fat Girl’.

I haven’t exactly worked out all the details yet, but basically somehow I would extrude a huge net of caul-fat whenever and wherever trouble arose in the world. I could then wing it through the air to cover and entangle in its fatty folds every single person who was causing all that trouble.

(Actually I thought of honeycomb tripe first, but caul fat is easier to work with. And besides, I’m not crazy about anything along the lines of the name ‘Tripe Sistuh’.)

But what do real Superheroes actually eat? This is important to know. I looked to the BBC for answers, and as always, the BBC came up with some.

Some superheroes need various foodstuffs to give them their strange but wonderful powers. Eric is just a normal schoolboy but if he eats a banana he becomes Banana-Man. When Olive Oyl is in trouble, Popeye opens up a can of spinach and becomes a regular pillar of strength, and all that is needed to give Scooby Doo a little encouragement is a Scooby Snack – a rather delicious dog biscuit. The Flash burns calories in a flash, and in order to re-energise has to eat copious amounts of burgers, fries and power-shakes without any affect on his fabulous skin, and Roger Ramjet would never find the strength to beat up the bad guys without his Proton Energy Pills. Superheroes who get their powers this way all suffer from the same problem – those powers wear off without a constant supply of their magic food.

The first time I read this I scanned it too fast and got a bit worried, for I thought Roger Ramjet was eating Protose Energy Pills and it shrunk my image of him. Protons – now there’s something fine to eat. Protose I still have my doubts about.

It’s good to live in a world filled with Superheroes. I hope the chocolate doesn’t melt too soon.

A Better Stove for Half the World?

The Economist has an article this week on something we often take for granted: the kitchen stove.

IF USER demand were the sole driver of innovation, the biomass cooking stove would be one of the most sophisticated devices in the world. Depending on which development agency you ask, between two-and-a-half and three billion people—nearly half the world’s population—use a stove every day, in conjunction with solid fuel such as wood, dung or coal. Yet in many parts of the world the stove has barely progressed beyond the Stone Age.

Another part that matters:

In the refugee camps of Darfur, the dough for the staple food, assida, requires vigorous stirring of the cooking pot. “None of the stoves we tested had been built with this in mind,” says Ashok Gadgil, the head of the Darfur Stoves Project. Only after the stoves were seen to tip over during cooking did Dr Gadgil and his researchers go back to the drawing board and refine the design. Other findings from the Darfur project shone new light on cooking habits. The original stoves had been designed to boil water, but researchers found that for each meal, two-thirds of the fuel was used to make sauces by frying onions, a process that requires a more intense, continuous heat. One criticism of BP’s Oorja stove is that it does not get hot enough to make traditional Indian breads.

If such cultural factors are not taken into account, people will not use the stoves.

A worthwhile article to read.

Here’s the link.

It's got to be said (but not too loudly please): Clam Dip.

Clam dip springs eternal.

This is a wonderful thing – for some people.

There was always a bowl of clam dip placed out on the sideboard with Fritos, celery, and carrot sticks at  Christmas dinner when I was a child. It was an awesome thing somehow, this clam dip. It was all-powerful. It stood for something  – though exactly what it stood for is impossible to precisely define.

The Fritos were part of the whole thing. I can taste the combination now as I write this, and truly how bizarre it is! Crunchy little oversalted thick curly corn chips aided and abetted in crime with whatever clam dip really is (for I believe it is somehow created by a metallurgic process similar to alchemy but with the products of the dairy cow and the ocean: sour cream and clams -  but I don’t want to linger too very long on this thought) coming together on the sideboard in an all-powerful and controlling mass of atoms gently mounded in its delicate red-and-gold poinsettia-glazed bowl .

It was powerful in taste and powerful in how people reacted to it.

I have a cousin who would have dived into the dip head-first if anyone would have allowed it.

As the announcement came to ‘come and have a snack’ he took off through the air like a marble from a slingshot. By the time we all walked in he was bent over the bowl of clam dip almost snuffling the stuff up with the Fritos as fast as the naked eye could see. The celery with its pale fluffy leaves was just there for show . . . as were the stiff little carrot sticks. Nobody ever ate them.

“Give someone else a chance,” his father would admonish him, and he’d back up six inches or so and let a few hands take a few swipes at the stuff.

I didn’t care. There was something about the clam dip that appealed to me deeply. I wanted it, badly. But each year I took one bite and felt like fleeing, anywhere, to Canada, to the deep snow outside, under the white-linened table, or even to the nearest hot dog stand which was hundreds of miles away.

I find the stuff repellent.

But clam dip is such a lovable thing! I tried, I really did. Once I even attempted a homage to clam dip – an essay all bright and bubbly, all serene and jolly, all heartwarming and devout. It wouldn’t happen. No rhetoric could stretch that far, no way no how – not from me . . . not on clam dip.

The clam dip recipe my aunt makes is an excellent one, for she is a very good cook.

And Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without clam dip (and maybe Fritos to go with it) in many homes across the land.

Clam dip. It’s got to be said.

Just don’t say it too loudly, please.

For one thing, it will scare me.

For another, I heard that my cousin (now a man well into middle-age and not usually prone to excessive behavior of any kind) actually ate the entire contents of the clam dip bowl last year. Not a drop left for anyone else.

He survived, and there are more like him everywhere.

There may be one near you.

The Cat Who Came Home (for Christmas?)

I’ve just gotten back from a drive started three hours ago. And I have a gift – an unexpected one!

I have our cat.

Our cat, who disappeared four and a half months ago.

We’ve had this cat for seven years. But when we moved to this new house in August, she got out into the back yard too quickly – and must have wandered off and become lost, unable to find her way home.

We walked all around the neighborhood, calling her name. We put up posters. I searched the ads for ‘found cats’ and even called a few. But none of them were her.

I told myself (and the children) she must have gone across the street to where the fields roll on for several miles, verdant with hay, trees in the distance, cows grazing here and there. She was always a good hunter, I said. She just wanted to move out to the real countryside. I was bluffing, a bit – for I feared worse.

We still missed her.

But Christmas is coming, and it was time to get a cat in the house. I don’t really believe in homes without cats. I’ve had them, but an warming aura goes missing from them, the very moment one walks in the door.

We looked at the cats for adoption at the petstore, on ‘petfinder.com’, in the posters tacked up at the market. None of them seemed exactly right. But this weekend was the weekend I’d decided we were going to get a cat (or two) and I called the shelter to find out if they were open tonight. Yes, she said, they were open. We could come down and fill out an application.

Adopting a cat has become a bureaucratic business. You have to have references and prove a proper home is there for the cat. You must wait until you are ‘approved’ by the ‘agency’. Then you can dole out the close to one hundred dollars per cat that it takes to adopt and take your cat home.

I was getting rather drearily tired of this whole thing. I remembered when we first brought Pavlova home, from the local vet where we lived out in the countryside. Cats and kittens were valuable and beloved things in this rural area, but they were readily available without too much fuss – to anyone who was ready to care for them! But those times were gone, and town living demanded the paperwork and the proofs.

But I’d go pick up the kids from school, I said to myself, and off we’d go to the shelter to do it.

For some reason, just before walking out the door, I clicked onto Craigslist/Pets. I’ve never done that before. Scanning down, I saw a few for adoption. But it was time to go – I was already almost running late. I was just about to click off the site when I saw it:

Black female adult cat, six toes on each front paw, found in area, for adoption.

The note had been posted three weeks ago. Could it be Pavlova?????
I called the phone number, and was astonished when someone actually picked up the phone.

To make a long story short, our cat is home.
How she got to be an hour-plus drive out into the countryside, over hills and dales and one-lane covered bridges in a small two-room ramshackle propane-heated house on a dirt road where two lively young white-tailed deer stared at the car as we drove by staring at their beauty, how Pavlova came to stay with a kind woman who fed her along with her own two cats till this rather miraculous day twelve days before Christmas, on the exact day I was setting out to gather one or two other cats into our own home – is somewhat of a mystery.

Pavlova can sing! She decided regardless of her name, to be a singer rather than a dancer. She purrs and mews and prounces will not eat her supper unless I sit with her to keep her company. But she can not talk, to tell us what happened.

But Pavlova is home.

Pavlova, is home.

Sugarplums are Fast Food

The Fast Food Feminist posted a collection of links to sugar plum recipes last year around this time – along with some philosophic musings.

Here is the post:

Sugar: Many Ways of Sweetness

Photo Flickr-Phil Gyford

Are there different ways to be “sweet”? Women are defined in general presumption to be like the rhyme “sugar and spice and everything nice” (whether we wish to be or not)(personally I have no problem with the sugar or spice part but that word “nice” does tend to grate on my nerves)(nice nice nice blech)(reminds me of how guys sometimes look at a girl and say “Smile!” to her. Pah. Smile yourself, my friend.)

Does sugar have more than one flavor or bite?

I decided to look to sugarplums for wisdom.

Sugarplums are thought of as a Christmas sweet – though many people have never seen or tasted one. What are they?

Fast Food Feminist put on her detective hat to find out.

Food Reference.com tells us that sugarplums were originally sugar coated coriander, rather like the sugar coated seeds which many know from the end of a meal at an Indian restaurant. In olden times these were called “comfits”. Comforting things.

Andy’s Orchard

tells us that Queen Isabella and Benjamin Franklin loved sugarplums. I’m not sure whether that fact will make me run out to chow down on some, though the examples shown are well-rounded and solidly bourgeois and even look as if one alone might make a delicious meal.

Historic Gode Cookery

has a different take on the sugarplum, saying they may have been actual plums preserved in sugar. I wish sugar could preserve me, too, but so far there is no proof that this could occur.

The Christmas with Anne of Green Gables

website has an excellent recipe for sugarplums made in the Victorian fashion (always so jolly, you know) that includes crystallized ginger, which I personally adore. It’s pretty fast to make, too.

Those who prefer the intellectual gourmandism of Saveur Magazine

will likely swear by the recipe provided in their forums.

There is a blogger named Sugarplum

who this year did not make sugarplums at all but who instead provided sweetness in life through cranberry-pistachio bark, a recipe I too know and love, as much for its fastness as for its foodie-ness and imagined femininity though of course one does have to imagine a bit to guess at that.

Kentucky Cook

knows sugarplums as wild plums to be gathered from the fertile earth, then to be carefully laid out, sugared and dried. A simple feast, an earthy thing of honor.

The women who write in the Traditional Witches Forum

speak of the same ingredients and technique for sugarplums as Saveur does. Which brings to mind the question: Does a rose by any other name smell as sweet?

Playing on the sweetness and light of sugarplums,

Whole Foods Market

gives us a recipe for Sugarplum Tofu with Udon. Another way of sweetness, this one with a corporate relations link at the top of the page.

Sugarplums are many things, of differing varieties.

Therefore sugar apparently is as you like it, if we follow the wisdom of sugarplums.

………………………………………………………………………………..
There have been a few changes since last year: Whole Foods changed the title of their recipe to not include the word ‘sugarplum’ but rather just ‘plum’. I wonder why. Was the word ‘sugarplum’ just a bit too perky for Whole Paycheck Foods? Oh well. Likely we’ll never know.

And the link to the sugarplum recipe from Diary of a Kentucky Cook is now here.

Sugarplums always start their rounds this time of year – the visions of them created by the well-known poem, dancing round in our heads – is so warming, so old fashioned, so slow food. But sugarplums are fast food.

They are so easily made in the home kitchen today. Most recipes are just chop stir shape for the most part.

It’s funny to think of sugarplums being fast food.

Now if I had to grow the ingredients that went into them, or if I had to dry or shell things, or chop down sugarcane or even peel and distill the stuff to make sugar, then to my mind sugarplums would be slow food.

Actually I’m sort of glad that sugarplums are fast food. I don’t have a whole lot of time around the holidays and no wish to wear an apron (or chefs coat for that matter) for two or three weeks straight.

So I will dream of fast food tonight.

Sugarplums. They dance in my head, and rather quickly too!

Fighting the Ballontine (or 'The Meaty Nightmare')

I can not decide what to serve on Christmas.

This is not unusual – I can never decide what to serve on Christmas.

There are reasons for that (as there are reasons for most things). (Whether those reasons are reasonable or not is yet another question but let’s set that aside for the moment).

Ballontines keep popping into my mind this year.

Being plagued by thoughts of ballontines has kept me quite busy. I’ve spent many hours looking up recipes, all the while quite productively avoiding the kitchen itself.

Larousse Gastronomique, (1961 Edition) on ballontines:

This term describes a kind of galantine which is normally served as a hot entree, but can also be served cold.
The ballontine is made of a piece of meat, fowl, game, or fish, which is boned, stuffed and rolled into the shape of a bundle.
To be precise, the term ballontine should apply only to a piece of butcher’s meat, boned, stuffed, and rolled, but it is in fact also applied to various dishes which are actually galantines.

A ballontine is not a galantine. There is a much different sense about it. There is actually something good and fine about a ballontine at its heart, whereas there is really nothing good about any galantine. Galantines are merely pride served chilled, glazed and decorated. They are ancient idiots, barking up the tree of pomposity.

A ballontine is better. It is an ancient idiot also – but since it is served hot, it is tasty.

There is really no good reason to make either one unless you are heading out for a voyage on a steamship and want to make something that will impress the other thousand guests which will also last for a good two months while everyone nibbles on it here and there all the while admiring the skill that must! have gone into making it.

Yet the ballontine is calling my name. Making one is like sitting down to write a novel in chapters – rather than just tossing off an essay here and there.

The last time I made one I could not stand to eat any sort of meat for more than a month. The boning of the duck, the pureeing of this kind of meat filling and that kind of meat filling, the chopping of the duck livers, the decorative slicing of the other several kinds of meat, the arranging of the duck skin to cover it all just so, the roasting of the bones and the making of the stock – it warped into a sort of meaty nightmare.

Couldn’t stand the sight or taste of pistachios either, since they had been dotted here and there within the ballontine.

Yet the ballontine is calling my name.
Never fear – I will fight it with all my might.

The Ballontine Marches Forward

I haven’t trounced the ballontine yet. It continues its sneaky advance.

There are a few recipes for ballontines online. Not a lot. The ballontine has lost to the galantine in recent years, badly.

Here’s part of a recipe for a galantine I found online – it does make mention of a ballontine some number of paragraphs into the recipe: (Note – this recipe is from a cookbook published in the year 1889 titled ‘Choice Cookery’ by Catherine Owen. Please try to stay awake – the directions are not only lengthy but also loquacious!)

Galantines are so useful and handsome a dish in a large family, or one where many visitors are received, that it is well worth while to learn the art of boning birds in order to achieve them. Nor, if the amateur cook is satisfied with the unambitious mode of boning hereafter to be described, need the achievement be very difficult.

Experts bone a bird whole without breaking the skin, but to accomplish it much practice is required; and even where it is desirable to preserve the shape of the bird, as when it is to be braised, or roasted and glazed for serving cold, it can be managed with care if boned the easier way. However, if nice white milk-fed veal can be obtained, a very excellent galantine may be made from it, and to my mind to be preferred to fowl, because, because as a matter of fact, when boned there is such a thin sheet of meat that it but serves as a covering for the force-meat (very often sausage-meat), and although it makes a savory and handsome dish, it really is only glorified sausage-meat, much easier to produce in some other way. This is, of course, not the case with turkey; but a boned turkey is so large a dish that a private family might find it too much except for special occasions. On the other hand, galantines of game, although the birds may be still smaller, are so full of flavor that it overwhelms that of the dressing. The following process of boning, however, applies to all birds. To accomplish the work with ease and success, a French boning-knife is desirable, but in the absence of one a sharp-pointed case-knife may do.

That’s just the beginning of the directions. I had a startled moment of recognition when first reading this, then realized that the author sounded very much like my friend Katerina la Vermintz (who actually has a habit of sounding exactly like me if I don’t edit everything I write really rigorously!)

The cookbook, which is online here, starts everyone off on the right foot by instructing the readers as follows:

Choice cookery is not intended for households that have to study economy, except where economy is a relative term; where, perhaps, the housekeeper could easily spend a dollar for the materials of a luxury, but could not spare the four or five dollars a caterer would charge.

Many families enjoy giving little dinners, or otherwise exercising hospitality, but are debarred from doing so by the fact that anything beyond the ordinary daily fare has to be ordered in, or an expensive extra cook engaged. And although we may regret that hospitality should ever be dependent on fine cooking, we have to take things as they are. It is not every hostess who loves simplicity that dares to practise it.

Well, dearie me! I daresay I could spare four or five dollars for a caterer. Where is the phone number? Please advise.

Right now I must take my leave. Something to do. I think it might be something along the lines of making dinner!

The Way of Three Mothers at Christmas

I’ve had three mothers at Christmas, in my life.

Like the Three Wise Men, each mother had a different precious gift they carried along to offer. These gifts were not for a child as invested in hope and wonder as the one we think of as being born on Christmas Eve. The gifts they offered were for their own children – imperfect though those children may have been in actuality or in promise.

One mother was my own. One was the mother of the first man I married. And one was the mother of the second man I took a chance on marrying.

Yet they were my mothers, too.

I was lucky in that way.

I’ll tell you about their gifts, the gifts each one offered for this season. Each one was so very different.

This will be a Christmas story. Of some sort.
I wonder if any of you will recognize yourself (or your own mother) in my three mothers.

(To read further, click on Part Two here)

Three Mothers, Three Magis and some Magic

(This is Part Two of ‘The Way of Three Mothers at Christmas’)

The word Magi is a Latinization of the plural of the Greek word magos (μαγος pl. μαγοι), itself from Old Persian maguŝ from the Avestan moγu. The term is a specific occupational title referring to the priestly caste of Zoroastrianism. As part of their religion, these priests paid particular attention to the stars, and gained an international reputation for astrology, which was at that time a highly regarded science. Their religious practices and use of astrological sciences caused derivatives of the term Magi to be applied to the occult in general and led to the English term magic.*

Magic does exist. It exists at the edges of things, in curved angles and tiny corners.

You can see it in a fleeting spark and remember it for years.

I have to give my three mothers new names. Three mothers, three Magi.

In the Eastern church a variety of different names are given for the three, but in the West the names have been settled since the 8th century as Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar. These derive from an early 6th century Greek manuscript in Alexandria.^[2] The Latin text Collectanea et Flores^[3] continues the tradition of three kings and their names and gives additional details. This text is said to be from the 8th century, of Irish origin.

In the Eastern churches, Ethiopian Christianity, for instance, has Hor, Karsudan, and Basanater, while the Armenians have Kagpha, Badadakharida and Badadilma.^[4][5] One of these names is obviously Persian, although Caspar is also sometimes given as Gaspar or Jasper. One candidate for the origin of the name Caspar appears in the Acts of Thomas as Gondophares (AD 21 – c.AD 47), i.e., Gudapharasa (from which ‘Caspar’ might derive as corruption of ‘Gaspar’). This Gondophares declared independence from the Arsacids to become the first Indo-Parthian king and who was allegedly visited by Thomas the Apostle. Christian legend may have chosen Gondofarr simply because he was an eastern king living in the right time period.

In contrast, the Syrian Christians name the Magi Larvandad, Gushnasaph, and Hormisdas. These names have a far greater likelihood of being originally Persian, though that does not, of course, guarantee their authenticity.*

Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar. Hor (no), Karsudan (no – reminds me of the Kardashians), Basanter. Kagpha (dramatic!), Badadakharida (musical), Badadilma. Larvandad, Gusnasaph, Hormisdas.

That’s a lot to work with.

Which would you choose, for three new names for three mothers at Christmas, if you had to choose?

Names are important. This needs to be thought out.

(*Source: Wikipedia)

(To read further click on Part Three here)

One Mother’s Christmas

(This is Part 3 of ‘The Way of Three Mothers at Christmas’)

Christmas was no joke to Rida.

What it was, was a hell of a lot of work.

It all began shortly before Thanksgiving and then progressed, as if drawn out on a blueprint.

At least the menu didn’t need planning. The menu for Christmas dinner was set in stone. Rida’s family were accustomed to certain things, and they expected these things to be the same each year.

A few times over the years Rida had tried new recipes, wanting to show a bit of creativity.

As she diced and chopped and stirred she imagined all the faces around the dinner table at Christmas. They would all break into wide smiles of enjoyment and the chatter of discussion would rise merrily about the new dish, as it was passed from hand to hand. The voices were filled with admiration.

When she did try some of these new foods, the grumblings and displeased faces that rose instead of what she had imagined shocked her slightly. But Rida was not by any means a drama queen. She just nodded, with a slightly guilty air. She said “Oh. Okay. I won’t make it again” and the offending New Recipe was moved quietly over to the sideboard, to be discarded at the end of the meal, with a bit of a longing glance from Rida as it went into the kitchen trash bin.

It was Christmas, after all. Her family deserved to be happy.

But still, she thought – there might be something she could make to add to the Christmas dinner table that would spark life into the dinner. It was a good dinner as it was, but always the same.

It never seemed as if everyone were completely comfortable, but this was Christmas dinner. Somebody was usually angry at someone else for some minor reason, and the food did not make this disappear – as much as Rida would have loved it to do so.

The new recipes tried now and then became smaller, more self-effacing. Instead of the extra main course, a vegetable side. Instead of a vegetable side, a relish. Instead of a relish . . . instead of a relish. Nothing, really – instead of a relish.

At other times of the year, the table that would hold the Christmas dinner was just a deserted table, unused, sitting in a room nobody ever entered. The rarely used good linens were stored in the chest, the decorative china received as wedding gifts firmly stuck behind the glass windows on shelves – that sometimes needed dusting – in the big solid piece of matching furniture which sat firmly on the other side of the room.

The view from the window was so pretty in this room. When it snowed, the panorama was just like a painting.

It was perfect.

But the table during the days before Christmas became a workhorse.

The day immediately after Thanksgiving, it sprouted a life of its own. Rolls of wrapping paper, tape, and ribbons grew in neat piles upon it. Boxes and piles of gifts for her family were laid at the other end, and the serious endeavor of preparing dozens of gifts (or maybe hundreds? it seemed there were hundreds of gifts under the tree on Christmas – the unwrapping took all day long) began. The gifts were destined to be stacked into huge piles of colored shiny exuberance under the lit tree in the front room that close-to-hit the ceiling.

The wrapping and be-ribboning and labeling started in between many trips to the mall to buy the gifts, the army of gifts the table held close – all tucked away in the room that nobody went into, till their holiday dinner had begun.

Rida moved quickly at these tasks, for though she was a homemaker, a housewife – without a job or profession in the outside world – her usual tasks remained to be done. The house had to be cleaned and dusted each day. The clothes laundered – her husband’s shirts starched just so, with heavy starch crisply formalizing the edges of cuff and collar into impermeable immovable stiffness.

Dinner had to be on the table (the kitchen table) at 6:30 each evening. Her husband would become upset if it was not. He expected his dinner at 6:30.

And the usual taking-care of the house, little things . . . like making sure nobody ran out of batteries or toothpaste – that had to be kept up with. “Buy two – always have backup” was the rule set by Rida’s husband, for nothing should ever run out . . . and Rida still went to Mass at least twice a week – for that was where God lived. He lived in the church, with the priest named ‘Father’.

Christmas expanded outwards from the workhorse table during the second week of December. It spilled out onto Rida’s kitchen table. The cards draped themselves together, falling sideways, entangled with stamps and envelopes and pens, handwritten notes to be done on each singular one, then the whole to be neatened up and hidden away before dinner preparations were started.

Somehow it all marched forward in an orderly and calm fashion. Everything got done.

Christmas came but once a year.

And at the end of it all, Rida had once more given her family a Christmas to remember.

Her gifts were apparent to all. A perfect Christmas, just as everyone expected!

There was an extra gift hidden within this perfect Christmas. Two gifts, really.

One was the gift to her children and husband.  They knew they could rely on her completely.

The other gift, more hidden in the recesses of things, tucked into the corners of wrapping paper and ribbons, peas and ham – under postage stamps and licked onto the glued flaps of envelopes – was a gift to anyone who wanted to recognize it. It was something to be considered, held, and mulled over – wondering if it was an example to be followed. Or not.

It was the not-small gift of selfless devotion.

That was one Mother’s Christmas, balanced ever-so-discreetly on the head of a pin . . . along with who knows how many angels.

(To read further click on Part Four here)

I Never Felt This Way About Tacos

The Christmas of My Second Mother

(This is Part 4 of ‘The Way of Three Mothers at Christmas’)

Ada had been cooking food for tables filled with people for as long as she could remember. That memory extended back to the small farm in Italy that was said goodbye to while still a child, to emigrate to America.

With six children now grown, Ada looked forward to each Christmas as a time to gather them all back together around in the home they had grown up in – the four brothers in one bedroom, the two sisters in another.

Christmas dinner was somewhat larger than her usual meals. Two or three kinds of meat, a baked pasta, three or four vegetable dishes – but there was no set or insisted-upon format. It was the food she cooked each day, just gathered together in a larger way. The china was not decorated with a Christmas theme,  but the tablecloth was old, linen, and full of memories. It was difficult for everyone to fit around the table, scrunched together on the bench lining one side of the long table, yet they did somehow, often taking turns – one slipping in here or there, another wandering into the kitchen to nibble and talk at the smaller  table there piled with food and spoons and newspapers and clutter.

It was comfortable at Ada’s Christmas dinner. People talked and ate and drank, and they even yelled sometimes to get themselves heard over the others. Laughter rang out and conversation flew as if it were the surrounding air itself. There were angers and resentments in this family, deep ones – but they could wait till later. Right now, they were simply suspended.

Ada, for once, sat down.

Ada never sat down when people were eating. It seemed an impossibility, against the laws of nature. As Mother, she swooped around and fussed and fed and questioned and demanded. But at Christmas she sat down, and it was like a small miracle happening right before one’s eyes,  blinked at in momentary disbelief.

Dinner was the thing on this day. The wrapped Christmas presents were few, small, desultory. And the dinner was all about the table, where everyone would gather.

The same stories were told year after year. Ada held pride of place with the story of her family coming to America on a big boat all together, and of  how soon all of them were working at menial jobs, all seven brothers and sisters – to send the oldest son to college. Then of how when this revered eldest brother  graduated with the degree bought by his siblings labors – he had disappeared from the family without a how-do-ye-do, without the promise of return of favors in any way at all.

And this was true. He had done this. And as he lived far apart from his family, wealthy and well-positioned, his no-longer-young sister remembered him. “It was America”, she would announce, “America”.

“It breaks the family. This never would have happened in Italy!” and everyone would listen and try to understand something for which there really was no understanding.

Ada chose to put the blame on the place, rather than on the person. Was there an answer? All we knew was that this man who was not here was missing out on something – and we looked at Ada’s son whom she had given her brother’s name. And we held it all in our hearts.

Another story of a Christmas long ago, when all six children were school-age was told – sometimes by Ada, more often by one of her children.

Ada had suddenly decided that this year, they would go to Mass on Christmas. Often they didn’t. Time was always short, things were always running late. The family never seemed to make it anywhere on time. Remembering this brought peals of laughter from most of the table.

On this year now long past, they would go to Mass, and not only would they go, Ada decided, they would go in style. People would see what this family was all about!

Ada bought fabric and made space for her sewing machine between the children’s schoolwork and the spoons and the newspapers on the table. And she cut and sewed for some number of days.

On Christmas morning, she insisted everyone be up early. Calling them downstairs, she held out a stack of black bundles. “Here”, she said. And each of the six children, from the littlest four-year old to the eldest fifteen-year old, was given a bundle. “Put these on, quick! And we’ll go.”

Some of her children were mortified. Some of her children were thrilled. What they had to wear to Mass that day, each boy and girl, were six matching black capes and six matching black berets.

Where had that idea entered her head?

The story of Madeleine perhaps? Where children wore capes . . . and where

In an old house in Paris that was covered in vines

Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines

In two straight lines they broke their bread

Brushed their teeth

And went to bed

The capes and berets did not bring the children into two straight lines. They remained, as Ada would say (with a look of wonder and sheer motherly pride): “Like spokes on a wheel – all different, each one going a different way.”

My mother Ada’s Christmas gift was not the food. It was not piles of shiny wrapped presents.

Her gift was of a table baited with food, leading those captured right to the brink of some stories, the sort of stories that can (and that must, at times) sustain us.

(To read the final installation of ‘The Way of Three Mothers at Christmas’ click here)

Gopher, As Food or Inspiration

I got pretty excited about gopher after hearing ‘Gopher Mambo’ by Yma Sumac:

What could I cook to go along with the gopher theme?

Here’s an idea, from Foods Our Forebears Ate:

Gopher stewed or fried is the most delicious thing, and I loved the pound cake mom used to make with sea turtle eggs and chicken fat. Now many of the wild foods can no longer be used as they are endangered. (And they say chicken fat endangers us!)

Now for some recipes! Let’s start with that Fricasseed Squirrel – make that Fox Squirrel. First if he was not trapped, check him over to make sure all the shot is out of him! You would hate to chomp down on a bit of metal while eating! Oops! Skin him first! Remove his innards and cut him into 6 pieces by splitting him through the backbone and then cutting the halves into 3 more pieces, each. OOPS! It’s been so long since I did this, I forgot if he has those little scent glands — better check! Then, dredge him in flour, seasoned to taste and fry him in some of the leftover bacon grease from breakfast (or from the crock you have been saving it in from past meals). Fry him up good and brown and remove him from the pan. Make a gravy of well-browned seasoned flour and water (some use milk, but for this, I don’t). Put Mr. squirrel back in the pan and simmer in the gravy till he’s tender as can be. Best served over grits with some collard greens & cornbread or mashed potatoes, garden peas & biscuits, or . . . Gopher tastes really good that way, too, but you can get a hefty fine nowadays for that one. Maybe you should just take my word for it.

I guess I have to take her word for it. No gopher for dinner tonight.

Jingle Foodies: A Quiz on the Foods of the Season

TimesOnline has posted a food quiz quite ornamental to ascertain whether your foodie knowledge is all shining and bright.

The Christmas Food Quiz includes some good questions:

5. Who invented the notion of a frothing soup in the manner of a cappuccino?

a Alain Chapel

b Gordon Ramsay

c Ferran Adria
6. Which chef created a Xmas menu last year where dishes included Babe in a Manger and Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh?

7. Which chef quipped “the discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star”

a Apicus

b Brillat Savarin

c Carĕme
8. What game was originally played with champagne corks rather than balls?

a Table tennis

b Squash

c Billiards

It’s worth taking a gander at (to see if they can roast your goose or not).

Cheers!

This Mother is Mine, At Christmas and Forever

(This is Part 5 of 5, of ‘The Way of Three Mothers at Christmas‘)

My other two mothers, the ones whose stories have been told, were Rida and Ada. Naturally, following my rather far-fetched reasoning process, these names came from the Magi.

the Armenians have Kagpha, Badadakharida and Badadilma

Rida from Badadakharida; Ada from Badadilma.

I’ve saved the name Kagpha for my ‘real’ mother. It suits her well.

As Christmas approached each year, Kagpha grew slightly more frozen than usual. Thanksgiving was a task managed, but then Christmas arrived so quickly.

The important things about Christmas to Kagpha were that it not be celebrated as a religious holiday (for she did not like churches) and that there be a tree – one that was not real (too messy) – and that it be covered with ornaments that were artistic and ‘different’.

She mostly looked forward to the holiday as a time when there would be the chance to travel home, or to where home was as a child – where her brother and his wife and children lived. This took all pressure off the holiday, for her brother’s wife was (as she noted with a certain tone in her voice) a ‘housewife’. This meant that Kagpha would be able to sit on the couch in her more and more frozen-like state, as the activity went on around her, without her participation.

Kagpha may have suffered from depression. Or, it may also have been what her brother claimed: That she was simply a deeply selfish person.

Things got worse than mere frozen-ness, as Christmas came along over the years. Instead of frozen-ness Kagpha had a sense of airy-ness – as if she simply wasn’t there. Then there was a switch, and Christmas-time became a time to celebrate the season as a Wiccan. My mother had decided she was a witch.

She gathered women around her for pagan lunches and dinners, and flaunted jewelry with bold symbols hung over her black dresses that would make those who practiced more traditional religions cringe with fear and distaste. Her anger grew outward.

But these times passed, and being a witch turned out to be not all it was chalked up to be, for Kagpha. The pagan celebrations were discarded, and in their place was nothing.

The last Christmas I remember with Kagpha, she said she did not want to cook. She did not want to buy presents. She did not want to do anything, she said – but the undertones in her voice belied the words.

So I made a dinner. A ham, some vegetables – fresh and good. Two desserts. And I brought it to Kagpha and hoped it would make her happy.

It did, but then there was the ham bone to deal with. The ham bone. Kagpha wanted to know if I wanted the ham bone. Why, yes – I said. I’ll take it home with me next time I see you, if that’s okay. I don’t really feel like carrying a ham bone home right now. Could you stick it in the freezer?

Kagpha’s freezer was empty but for two packages of Stouffer’s Welsh Rarebit, so I thought that would be okay.

But the ham bone was not to be forgotten. The ham bone was in her freezer, and it bothered her. The phone calls started coming every few days, then every day, then several times a day.

When are you coming to get the ham bone? Kagpha would ask. The ham bone is in my freezer! she would say, with hints of anger at the edges of her voice. How long do you expect me to keep this here???!!! she would close-to-shriek, over the telephone – the telephone which I now feared to answer.

Gathering my courage to face Kagpha, my mother, my only real mother – I called her. Please throw it away, I said. I don’t want it. Thanks, for the freezer space.

Christmas. It had come down to a ham bone which had somehow transformed into a scapegoat, for Kagpha.

Kagpha’s gift offered was the chance to develop empathy. There is often someone around who may need it.
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Each mother has a Christmas food associated with her. Rida: Sausage Bread. Ada: A dish of rich delicious bitter greens with garlic. Kagpha: Well – nothing will ever erase that ham bone from my memory, that is certain.

I’ve had three mothers at Christmas. I’ve been lucky in that way.

There Was No Old Woman Who Lived in This (Chocolate) Shoe

How our shoes define us! (Maybe even moreso than our haircuts? Arguable.)

Link to the online boutique of Jean-Paul Hevin, Master Choclatier

The feminist in me growls at this shoe. The image, the pain, the everything! The girl in me purrs at this shoe. My god. Or rather my goddess. How gorgeous. The chef in me bows in deep admiration at this shoe. My highest accomplishment in chocolate work was a chocolate cabbage (which is rather simple to make, if anyone wants to know). And the chocolate-lover in me wants to take a big bite of this shoe, if only I could dare to!

There was an old woman
Who lived in a shoe;
She had so many children,
She didn’t know what to do.
She gave them some broth,
Without any bread.
She whipped them all soundly,
And sent them to bed.

No, this was not the shoe of the old woman in that nursery rhyme.

Poverty is a hurtful thing. And those who can not afford chocolate shoes at this time, with all the careening power of the information superhighway slamming at them in every arena of life that they must do so, that they should do so – may be hurting right now.

Strangely, this hurt can come not from lack of anything really important or necessary but merely from the comparisons made between ‘them’ and ‘the Joneses’.

I know of no old woman who whips their children but I do know of a man who hits his wife at this time of year. He is angry. The anger is brought on by the season.

The season has its beauties, but every beautiful thing has a flip side.

I hope that nobody reading this (and nobody not reading this, for that matter!) has let the flip side bite them.

Chocolate shoes are fantastic things. But even better is peace of mind.

Another damned, thick, food book! Always scribble, scribble

Edible – An Illustrated Guide to the World’s Food Plants by National Geographic Society 2008, Foreword by Deborah Madison

Edible, an Illustrated Guide to the World’s Food Plants is a gorgeous book. The collection of food plants included in this volume goes far beyond what one would expect – it is thorough and full of amazements, even for the jaded peruser of All Things Fruit or Vegetable.

I once owned a similar book. It was an encyclopedia-like very large book. The illustrations were pen and ink, with watercolor. There was something fairy-tale-like about it. To stare directly and closely at a fruit or vegetable, to consume it with one’s eyes . . . it can be like entering another world.

In Edible, each plant is illustrated by a photograph – which may be even better than viewing the plants artistically rendered by hand, for certain purposes. The book is precise, scientific, exact, and demanding of the reader. This is not a book to sit down and read in one sitting.

The first section of the book gives a general history: ‘From Plants to Food‘. My only problem with this part of the book is that it reminded me of a high-school textbook due to the format, general structure and writing style. Well – let’s just leave it at that.

The good stuff starts with the second section: ‘A Directory of Edible Plants‘. Fruits, Vegetables, Grains, Nuts, Herbs, Spices, Plants Used as Beverages, and Plant Sugars and Other Products are the sub-categories. This section is 173 pages long.

Each plant is shown with common name followed by Latin name accompanied by a fabulous – yes I mean fabulous – photograph. Then the following facts are essayed: Historic Origins, Botanical Facts, Culinary Fare.

Proso Millet, Hyacinth Bean, Marsh Samphire, Mombin, Ice-Cream Bean, Bilimbi, Quandong. Poetry? Perhaps. Edible, too.

The book finishes up with a reference section of nutritional tables.

The foreword is by Deborah Madison, who should need no introduction to anyone who browses the food world for excellence.  The last line she writes is -

I mean, who knew that when the shell of the pistachio is split, it’s said to be laughing?

I didn’t. But I do know that curling up with this book makes me smile with pleasure, just like a happy pistachio.

This Ain't No McDojo Drunkard

(From Yuen Wo Ping’s epic kung fu film Shaolin Drunkards on YouTube)

Why I Could Never Be a Locavore in One Word: Bubblegum

To be a locavore, it’s possible that I might be able to give up tomatoes out of season.

Bananas, yes. Of course.

And really who seriously cares about kiwis?

But bubblegum is another matter. I do not believe that ‘gum base’ grows in my area.

If it did, I could be locavore. I could make my own bubble gum.

Then I could get a bumper sticker and put it on my car so everyone would know.

I’d tool around here and there in my car while blowing bubbles, placing my earnest gaze with a gentle hint of ever-so-slight underlying contempt upon those who know no better. But not too much. Gas miles to food consumption and foodie show-off factor – there is an algebraic formula that must be followed, of course.

Those glorious huge perfect pink bubbles would be emerging from my lips, as I turned my head right and left (and once in a while backwards as much as possible) so that all could see the gently glowing orbs the color of ballet slippers that would add just the right touch of glamour to my personal aura.

Pop! One would shatter, and quickly I’d have to be sure there was no elephantine flap of flattened pink gum hanging over sideways onto my chin. Then right on to the next bubble!

It’s but a dream, though. I haven’t made my own bubblegum yet.

But will it come out as good as DoubleBubble? As good as Bazooka? Where will my little comics come from that fit inside the wrap? These are small questions, really – in the face of my own potential artisan bubble gum, my own possible locavorism that will ring with absolutist purity in the Face of the Industrial Machine.

Pardon me. I must go think, and think deeply. And I will, right after I shove several of these shiny new bubble gum pieces into my mouth and have a popping spree.

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Image Source: foto_decadent/Tim Walker/UK Vogue December 2008/Tales of the Unexpected/The Marvellous Mischievious Magical World of Roald Dahl

Food as Grist for the Mill of Symbolization – A Meaty Read

Finding a vocabulary for meaning, within the subject of food, is not as easy as making a souffle. Food as food as food is one thing – the collection of words for the physical sensation of eating is a wide one (and a wonderfully extravagant one at its best!). If there is doubt in anyone’s mind as to this fact, a quick roll through MFK Fisher should dull the edges of disbelief.

But there is more than eating, there is more than taste. There is more than texture and color and science and heat and there is even more than the finest meal one ever ate. There is also (believe it or not!) more than the finest meal one ever cooked.

What on earth is this thing?

Meaning.

Food has meaning, and that is where mystery comes in the door.

‘Meaning’ is a flitty thing, a thing that soars and moans, grinds and bites, soothes and delineates. ‘Meaning’ stands real over time. It is rarely erasable. It is the proverbial worm in the apple while remaining as the private port in a storm.

How to take the meaning out of the box to look at it, is the question.

Trying to do this can feel like having numbed fingers and blind eyes while trying to open an ostrich egg with the slightest crack on its rough hardened shell. Fumbling away, pulling at the edges, no tools to use but knowing that if only it could be opened then voila! You are on your way to making your own sort of ostrich egg souffle. This souffle might not be to everyone’s taste when done but it would certainly be a wonderfully messy experiment – a fine way to pass the day.

Symbols represent meaning, though they do not pin it down exactly. They do, however, shape it into a slightly more manageable form.

The downside is that writing about symbols occurs mostly in academia and the reading of it feels as if one is becoming immured in some horrid deadly musty place where your eyes become heavy, a place where a nap is quickly required if you want to live even a moment longer, a place where if you don’t escape quickly enough you might be subject to having a conniption which would leave you febrile, weak and unintelligible for the rest of all time co-mingling and stuck forever in the Land of Academic Writing.

Here is an essay on Food and Meaning for those curious to read about it – it is academic but one can still emerge unscathed if you go in with a cautious eye and a nose ready for trouble. It actually is amazingly good.

Food Choice, Symbolism, and Identity by Michael Owen Jones

Sadly, there are only fifteen pages here of the entirety of the piece. I’m not sure how long the whole thing is – but even as a single mouthful the piece is quite meaty. It’s a good start to a vocabulary of  meaning (and the symbols which represent it) within Food.

Roly-Poly Pudding: A Cautionary Tale Though Sometimes a Delicious One

The last day of the year is a time for cautionary tales. Most everyone has their own to muse on, but if you find yourself shorted in this area you can always turn to The Tale of Samuel Whiskers and the Roly-Poly Pudding to give yourself a good fright.

Here is where the action begins in earnest. Tom Kitten has gone off on an adventure and in the process has been captured by hungry (aren’t they always) rats. The dough is gathered, the rolling pin pushed over to begin the task of making a fine Kitten Roly-Poly for dinner.

Poor Tom Kitten.

There are other sorts of roly-poly puddings to be made if you like the idea but without the kitten.

The Great British Kitchen has recipes made with jam, syrup, lemon, and mincemeat. And if all this is just too dainty for your taste, here you will find a good recipe for rasher pudding, also known as bacon roly-poly.

Any of these taste fine with champagne, ale, or tea.

Happy New Year!

Back in the USSR – A Russian (Georgian) Picnic for the New Year by Branston P.I. (C.K.L.E.)

Image Source: foto_decadent/Tim Walker/UK Vogue December 2008/Tales of the Unexpected/The Marvellous Mischievious Magical World of Roald Dahl

It’s not like Boris and I don’t have our challenges. Most of you think the life of a girl detective is an easy one. But my job gets tougher and tougher each day.

The last time I’d had a really good mystery to solve was back in May when I solved The Case of the Missing Snack.

There’s not much call for those with my specialised degree -  the C.K.L.E. (Certified Kitchen Lounge-About Eater) is a path one follows because one must. The gathering together of dross is not a part of the thinking process at all.

We’ve been spending a lot of time lately burning bangers and mashing mashers as a matter of fact. But always, always! in the finest fashions, you should know. Stiff upper lip and all.

But Boris has become moody. Around the holidays he longs for the cooking of his childhood. Or what he thinks was the cooking of his childhood, anyway. He actually grew up in Flushing, Queens – which you get to by taking a pot-holed highway to after going over some midtown bridge in Manhattan – but he believes he grew up eating Russian food.

And he hungers for it in an awful way.

So, for the New Year’s, I am making a picnic! A Georgian picnic.

We are having a pickled cabbage rose set just so in the center of the quilt we’ll recline upon. Then we will dive into chicken with walnuts. Because no picnic is complete without a bit of cooking done en plein air we’ll start a little woodfire off to the side to prepare some skewered eggs along with some grilled cheese.  Maybe a bit of steamed purslane would be nice as a salad (as it seems to be growing among a rockpile nearby it would not be dear at all, either!) For dessert we’ll just stay traditional and have the New Year’s Day treat of Gozinake. (When you are Georgian, there is no such thing as too many walnuts.)

I’ve even set up a movie screen behind the car and will play us a film.

It looks to be a fine day, though a bit chilly.

Cheers to all of you on the first day of the new year. And do give me a call if you need a good mystery solved.

I’m always hungry.

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Darra Goldstein’s The Georgian Feast is a must-read, for anyone interested in the foods of Georgia.

I’m Not Just Here For The Food

Hi, I’m Barry Fig. It’s been a wonderful New Years and I’ve had a great time.  Even though they forced me to wear this outfit.

I just wanted to say a few words, dudes. I used to be a human being too. But somewhere along the way while I was trying to make the world’s biggest cheese doodle, something happened and here I am.  A dog. And now a dog dressed up like a flying pig.

I tried to hang around with everyone at the New Year’s party but they pretty much kept throwing me bits of chicken from their plates and making coo-coo noises at me. I wanted to talk, dudes. I needed some serious communication to happen.

Nobody realized a thing that was sort of important. I’m not just here for the food. Food is great, but it’s only a part of it all. Chicken alone, no matter how great it is, just doesn’t cut it.

I used to like to cook, when I was a real dude. One day this chick showed me a poem that really pissed me off because it was sort of anti-cooking. I couldn’t stand her after that. Even though her legs . . . well, nevermind, dudes.

Here’s the start of the poem.  It must be wearing pink that made me remember it today.

All over America women are burning dinners.

It’s lambchops in Peoria; it’s haddock

in Providence; it’s steak in Chicago;

tofu delight in Big Sur; red

rice and beans in Dallas.

All over America women are burning

food they’re supposed to bring with calico

smile on platters glittering like wax.

It really pissed me off when this chick told me this poem because, well . . . it was like a slap in the face. I like to eat. I like to be cooked for. I can’t imagine anyone not loving to cook for me. Or, I guess – I couldn’t at the time, dudes. It didn’t make sense.

But wearing this pink costume and begging for scraps, and getting the scraps which were pretty damn delicious but nevermind it simply wasn’t what I wanted I wanted to be taken seriously – this poem came to my mind, guys.

What I’m saying is, take me seriously, even though I’m cute and wearing fluffy pink stuff. Talk to me like I was real, like I was one of you.

I’m not just here for the food.
Yours,
Barry Fig
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The poem What’s that smell in the kitchen by Marge Piercy can be found in its entirety here on Google books as excerpt from Arlene Voski Akavian’s book Through the Kitchen Window.

Stalking the Amblongus Pie While Frying Up a Bit of Crumbobblious Cutlet

Katerina la Vermintz sent me here. The rodents are so large.

She said to find her an amblongus to make a pie, and to hurry – as her crumbobblious cutlets are almost ready for the table! Mr. Lear is dining with her tonight and she does want everything just right.

She is essaying his two recipes published in the Nonsense Gazette (1870). He is famous, Mr. Lear. The dinner need be perfect.

I begged Katerina to make Gosky Patties, but she said last time they did not taste so very good. I wonder if there is something – some herb, some slight hint of garlic or turmeric – missing from the recipe.

TO MAKE GOSKY PATTIES

Take a pig, three or four years of age, and tie him by the off-hind leg to a post. Place 5 pounds of currants, 5 of sugar, 2 pecks of peas, 18 roast chestnuts, a candle, and six bushels of turnips, within his reach; if he eats these, constantly provide him with more.

Then, procure some cream, some slices of Cheshire cheese, four quinces of foolscap paper, and a packet of black pins. Work the whole into a paste, and spread it out to dry on a sheet of clean brown waterproof linen.

When the paste is perfectly dry, but not before, proceed to beat the Pig violently, with the handle of a large broom. If he squeals, beat him again.

Visit the paste and beat the pig alternately for some days, and ascertain that if at the end of that period the whole is about to turn into Gosky Patties.

If it does not then, it never will; and in that case the Pig may be let loose, and the whole process may be considered as finished.

I must fly! Amblongis are often difficult to find and my basket is yet empty.
Do pray for Lady Luck to be by my side.

Payard’s Chocolate Epiphany

I had an epiphany this morning.

As I sat at the red light in light traffic in my car after dropping off the kids at school, I realized I’d forgotten to throw on a coat.

And in that exact moment, as the radio blasted Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to Be Wild’ loud enough to be heard by anyone close enough and as I sat there with it blasting dressed in my fabulous pink bathrobe, I realized that I looked ridiculous.

Thank goodness there is a recovery plan for these sorts of epiphanic moments, the basis of which is one three-syllable word: Chocolate.

Francois Payard’s ‘Chocolate Epiphany’ is the best book to consult, and I’ll tell you why.

How many times have you looked at a cookbook to find exactly the same recipes as the last cookbook only written with different names and different recipe formats?

I find this happens more often than not.

Unless the book is one of the few designed to be at the forefront of cutting-edge (haute – sorry, these things cost money) cuisine (though it won’t be called ‘haute cuisine‘ for the term is passe) the recipes circle around each other – distinguishing themselves pretty much by a sense of style or by a hint of one or two small-yet-intelligent differences created by the author.

Cookbooks specializing in chocolate can often seem to be repetitive even more often than other cookbooks, for the genre is limited.

‘Chocolate Epiphany’ has more to say (on a variety of levels) than any other chocolate-based cookbook I’ve recently seen.

Try these on for size: Kougin Amanns – distinguished by Payard morphing the recipe into one with chocolate imbued throughout . .  . Chocolate Pavlovas with Chocolate Mascarpone Mousse – the pavlova shaped into a two-piece half-sphered ball which is then filled to break open with the touch of a fork to utter the syllables of its filling . . . a Honey and Saffron Apple Tart with Chocolate Chiboust, startling in the conceptualization of flavors . . . a Gateau de Crepes with Green Tea Ice Cream . . . and a Chocolate Paris-Brest which makes one wonder why the Paris-Brest was not made chocolate in the first place.

I’m off on the road to recovery – pink bathrobe and all. It doesn’t mind a splash or two of chocolate on it – and seriously, neither do I.

The only remaining question is what music to blast to best suit Orange Custards with Dark Chocolate Foam.

I’ll definitely get dressed up nice to eat my chocolate recovery prescription, though. Then I’ll wait for my next epiphany.

Hopefully it won’t be yet another one where I feel ridiculous.

Gaston Lenotre 1920-2009

Lenotre died today.

And I find myself strangely wordless.

It’s not that I have nothing to say, but rather . . . I may have too much to say – about Lenotre.

I never met him. Yet he was a pivotal person in the path of my life.

If I can place my thoughts into an orderly shape I’ll write about him tomorrow. And maybe past tomorrow.

Gaston Lenotre, A Kitchen, A Chef or Two

Some people remember the past through things they ate. Memory, place, time, flavor, people . . . all become woven together into a fabric not to be unravelled.

Just as when in those moments a piece of music will insinuate with its melody an entirely different time, now layered upon the present in a sudden spark, flooding the current reality with meanings imbued from the past. And those meanings are every bit as real in the ‘now’ as when they first were formed.

Not that memory is not a questionable thing. It is. But some memories are less fractured than others – one can only hope that the retrospective glance is not looking through the prism of the past less clearly but more clearly, with the focused light of objectivity found through years passed – something not be attained by banging at it, but nonetheless sometimes to be found seredipitously.

I remember the past not so much from things I ate, but more from things I cooked.

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The kitchen was hot that day. It often was, if you happened to arrive in the afternoon for work rather than in the early morning before the ovens and stoves and grill and fryolator and steamer all were operating at a pace similar to an animated Disney movie – at times almost ridiculously fast, almost out of control.

I could go in to work at whatever time pleased me, as the Pastry Chef.

At this upscale suburban Connecticut restaurant dropped as if with a bucket of hope from the sky into the center of a large black concrete parking lot with many yellow lines painted for the many anticipated diners-to-be, the pastries were ‘important’ but not all that important. Pastries and desserts weren’t important to the Executive Chef  – as the reputation of the place was to be focused on the food – not on the pastry. Pastries and desserts weren’t important to the owner of the restaurant because the Executive Chef had been bought at a dear price, and had to be coddled. Pastries and desserts weren’t important to the waiters and waitresses because in all the time past, they had not been stand-outs as part of the meal but merely follow-ups. In other words, there was no good tip money involved with the idea of dessert since the desserts themselves here in times past had not been worth the effort of  putting on a song and dance in order to up-sell.

The guys behind the line did their usual little dismissive dance when I walked into the kitchen. Roger’s prematurely almost-bald head flicked sideways away from his saute-pans for the briefest moment, the steam on his gold wire-rimmed glasses blending with the sweat on his forehead – the forehead behind which was a brain with an investment of some tens of thousands of dollars in the form of a Master’s Degree in Philosophy which had never been used in the form of a job (and which it seemed to me was not used in daily life either, if his attitude and behavior bore witness to what was inside his mind). His soft shoulders angled forwards and backwards in an I-dare-you shimmy, ever so slight while his legs inched slightly more apart, edging his crotch forwards toward the stove as if he were going to fuck it – as if he could fuck it if he just wanted to – which of course as we all know, no girl could ever do.

Frank was more abrupt. He could be, since he was a CIA grad. Slamming the oven doors closed and slapping a towel on the line, he sneered slightly in my direction with a cross between amusement and derision, and moved even faster than he had been before, his beard and moustache and his simple huge-ness of stature giving him the air of a strong but somewhat out-of-place furry black bear. He watched, bluntly, as I walked over to the ‘pastry station’ – the stainless steel table in the center of the kitchen where he’d piled anything extra he could not easily find any other space to put so that I’d have to move it all while feeling his gaze upon me the entire time, his eyes slowly chewing me up, same as they had been each day I’d walked into that kitchen – which at the time was for all of three long weeks.

As I lifted the piles of sheetpans, shifting them onto the racks where they belonged, a vision rose of a scene I’d walked in on at closing time the previous week – the Exec Chef was sitting there right in the middle of my nice clean stainless-steel assigned pastry-making table, pulling the sous-chef towards her then wrapping her legs around his chest as he slightly-squirmed, slightly-enjoyed it. She was drunk.

Better moving piles of sheetpans than having to see that again, I thought.

You have to wonder why one would even want to continue making pastry on that table.

But then Gaston Lenotre entered the scene.

(To be continued . . .)

Entre Lenotre

(Part 2, continued from preceding post)

No reason, really – why I should have been repulsed by that little scene on the table. The Chef was married but then so was the Sous Chef. Inequalities of power happen all the time. The Chef was gorgeous in an older woman sort of way – the thought did creep into my mind momentarily of her three children but then again it was said that hers was an open marriage. The Sous Chef was much younger than her and biddable. That’s exactly why he was Sous Chef. His wife was the ugliest woman I’d ever laid eyes on in my life. Still is, if I remember right. Why, I can’t explain. It was nothing precise or explainable. She was just plain scary-looking. Ugly. But the fact remains that watching the Executive Chef lean back onto the table laughing with her mouth in a wide open grimace, her legs grasping the chunky chested Sous Chef who was also rather grinning in a frightened sort of way – was repulsive.

It had almost been the last straw. I’d almost quit the job.

The ingredients that went into this recipe of being a professional cook in a restaurant kitchen were so different than I’d expected. I’d thought “Oh! I love to cook!” “Oh! I can do that job!” “Oh! I want to work in a restaurant!” and so, I’d applied for the job and regardless of the fact that I’d never cooked professionally, won the job after a horrendous first day where I thought I’d surely die from exhaustion, where I’d gone and laid down a little kitchen towel on the floor of the dirty white-trash-looking staff bathroom, far in the corner of the worst-lit longest corridor, and I’d laid there curled up for ten minutes to gather the strength to go back and do the job. Lifting fifty pound mixing bowls over my five-foot-two shoulder to pour batter into the prepared ten cakepans in a sweltering kitchen had not been my forte at any time before that day, and it was a bit of a mouthful to bite on.

I’d almost quit, but there was a triangle in the kitchen that I’d either walk out on or break out of victorious. And I was just angry enough to want to emerge victorious.

The triangle consisted of the Chef on one side. The line cooks, Roger and Frank, on the other side. And little Colette the French waitress who somehow had ended up in this eccentric place called Connecticut who ooh’d and ahh’d over the new offerings on the pastry cart (“I am glad someone knows how to BAKE” she would announce in tight short tones. “It has been HORRIBLE“) along with the Salvadoran busboys, who detested the line cooks and who loved cakes and pastries and taking a side wherever a side was to be found. I didn’t want to walk out on Colette and the Salvadoran busboys.

Roger turned up the volume on the radio set tuned to the hard-metal station to a screeching blast that day when he saw me walk in, and started to bob his head like a sick old duck in time to the bass notes. Frank pouted. I walked to the pastry station and right there on the spot where the Chef’s behind had been sitting several days before, I threw down upon that spot my weapon, and got ready to begin the attack.

My weapon was sweet.

My weapon was brilliant.

My weapon was a book.

The name of my weapon was ‘Lenotre’s Desserts and Pastries‘.

(To be continued . . .)

Perfection Salad: Perfect? Or Perfidious.

Here is a recipe for perfection salad from a 1905 (Knox Gelatine) book titled ‘Dainty Desserts for Dainty People’.

And here, for dainty people, is the downloadable text of the entire book.

Everything that grows

Holds in perfection but a little moment.

Shakespeare: Sonnet 15, 1.1

How Romantic! On Becoming a Chicken Farmer – The Egg and I

Postscript: A selection from Betty MacDonald’s classic book The Egg and I was one of the featured works included in Molly O’Neills’ American Food Writing – An Anthology with Classic Recipes.

From Soup to Nuts: More Eating in the 1940′s

In this vintage ad from the 1940′s we’ve now discovered how the Chiquita Banana Helps the Pieman – and have also had a fascinating demonstration on how to flute a banana.

But that’s only dessert. ‘Where’s the beef?’ (Clara would ask) – and here it is:

Recipes from Gourmet magazine during the 1940′s, from the archives. Note the simplicity of the instructions, and remember – the founder (in 1939*) and publisher of Gourmet was a fellow named Earle MacAusland, who loved huntin’ and fishin’  . . .  in a gentlemanly-gourmet sort of way.

Tequila Por Mi Amante

Oyster Waffles Shortcake

Creamed Woodchuck

Bachelor’s Defense

Moving right along, if you’re still prone to hunger pains, to some

Blacktail Buck Steaks

finished off with (don’t forget the banana pie too)

Imprisoned Fruit

. . . the recipe for which starts off with

Look over your tree carefully in the springtime, when the blossoms are gone and the fruit is just beginning to form. Choose a few choice specimens, each at the end of a branch, and insert the branch gently into the neck of a large bottle, until the fruit is well inside. The next job is to support the bottle so that it stays in place in the tree. This may be done with ropes, if the tree is large enough, or it may be necessary to build up wooden supports to hold the bottle.

At first, the native feel of the menu made me think of gentle old-timey innocent images in my mind. Little boys goin’ out to catch a mess of fish, oh so cute in their rumpled overalls

But then upon musing on the menu components a bit further, it seemed to me that (more likely) the intent of all this cooking (whether done by the above-mentioned ‘bachelor’ or by his feminine equal) would be in hopes of something more along the lines of this, from Tino Rossi, 1945:

P.S. Edit added: *This date (1939) is not confirmed by source (yet). No bessame mucho here. Yet.

What Does Roger Daltry Have to Do With Home on the Range, Cow Patties and Son-of-a-Bitch-Stew?

You’ll have to see it to believe it:

Extreme History – Cooking on the Chisholm Trail

Gammon and Spinnage: The Grocery Store

“I’m not a banana person. No! No, I’m not a banana person!”
And thus began my trip to the grocery store. A clean well-lighted place, and one that happens to often be entertaining. Today it was particularly so.

The not-a-banana-person was young and blonde. Young-and-Blonde wandered through the produce department, really wishing her boyfriend and all the rest of the world to understand her point. Her voice rose above the hum of carts and clatter and hundreds of people wandering through the fertile aisles.

Pushing my little steel rolling cart past the pharmacy section (there is a pharmacy in every good grocery store in America you know, and really for very good reason) I noticed the six foot tall brunette with hair flailing down to her behind – the hair clipped back ever-so-touchingly with a plastic and pink rhinestone barrette (this is a hair clip, people, not a beret which is a hat – and if you wonder why I insist on mentioning this it is because I’ve often heard people use the word barrette for beret around here – along with using the word toboggan which is a sled for going down snowy hills where I come from to mean a woolly cap worn in the winter) (sorry for the side thought but can you imagine being told Put your toboggan on your head unless you want to get a chill (?). Disturbing. Very.) but anyway this six foot tall brunette is buying cupcakes.

A dozen. Six in bright neon green with multi-sprinkles, six more in a turquoise blue the color of Elmo – also with multi-sprinkles. “Thorazine!” she barks out at the pharmacy attendant. “The scrip is for thorazine!”

From gammon and spinnage to cupcakes and thorazine. Cupcakes and thorazine. Cupcakes and thorazine.

A higher level has been reached. Last month in a snowstorm I edged my car past the car badly parked in front of the pharmacy take-out window glowing brightly from the front brick wall of the grocery store. “Prozac!” the woman bellowed into the window.

At the checkout the students are buying their staples. These staples can be defined in one single word important to the economy of our town: Beer. This is a college town, a town where the college is well-regarded, a town that exists because of the college. And it would not do so without beer, and lots of it.

Cupcakes and thorazine, cupcakes and thorazine.

A memory from last week slipped into my mind. My neighbors, in celebration of a sporting event win, had held keg stands past midnight two nights in a row. A glorious and horrible thing, a keg stand.

“I’m not a banana person!”

Cupcakes and thorazine cupcakes and thorazine.

What a world of gammon and spinnage it is, though, ain’t it.

Leaving behind the cupcakes and thorazine, the bananas expounded, the beer by the multi-keg, I pushed my little steel cart – always filled to the brim though I’d only come in for a few small items – right out the automatically-opening exit door.

………………………………………………………………………………………

Gammon and Spinach (from Word and Phrase Origins, Robert Hendrickson) – The expression gammon and spinach for “nonsense, humbug” is not as familiar today as it was in Dicken’s time, when he used it in David Copperfield. [ . . .] The phrase, most likely an elaboration of the slang word gammon, which meant nonsense or ridiculous story, is probably patterned on the older phrase gammon and patter, the language of London underworld thieves. The nonsense part of it was possibly reinforced by the old nursery rhyme “A Frog He Would a Woo’ing Go” (1600) heard by millions: “With a rowley powley gammon and spinach/Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley!”
………………………………………………………………….

Why not a recipe? Why not, a recipe. Here’s a good one: Spinach fiorelli with gammon and mascarpone from TimesOnline.

Oops. Do excuse me! It's dear old Svankmajer.

Wiki Doodle Dandy has this to say about the dear man:

Švankmajer’s trademarks include very exaggerated sounds, often creating a very strange effect in all eating scenes. He often uses very sped-up sequences when people walk and interact. His movies often involve inanimate objects coming alive and being brought to life through stop-motion. Many of his films also include clay objects in stop-motion, otherwise known as Clay Animation. Food is a favourite subject and medium. Stop-motion features in most of his work, though recently his feature films have been including much more live action sequences rather than animation.

A lot of his movies, like the short film Down to the Cellar, are made from a child’s perspective, while at the same time often having a truly disturbing and even aggressive nature. In 1972 the communist authorities banned him from making films, and many of his later films were banned. He was almost unknown in the West until the early 1980s.

Today he is one of the most celebrated animators in the world. His best known works are probably the feature films Alice (1988), Faust (1994), Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), Little Otik (2000) and Lunacy (2005), a surreal comic horror based on two works of Edgar Allan Poe and the life of Marquis de Sade. The two stories by Poe, “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” and “The Premature Burial”, provide Lunacy its thematic focus, whereas the life of Marquis de Sade provides the film’s blasphemy. Also famous (and much imitated) is the short Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), selected by Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animated films of all time.[2] His films have been called “as emotionally haunting as Kafka’s stories [3]

If one meal is not enough, there is more to watch on YouTube. Just whistle. You do know how to whistle, don’t you?

Just pucker up and blooooooooowwwwwww

Big Fish Eat Little Fish – Van der Heyden Views Dinner

‘Big Fish Eat Little Fish’ 1557 – Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Breughel the Elder is, of course, a piece of art that tells a story – a proverbial story. And how vividly it does so!

Here is no paper-tray and cellophane-wrapped water-injected boneless white chicken breast for the distanced senses of the diner. This is life full-tilt – the sea thrashes, the men struggle with knives huge and dangerous, small and pointed. The fish flail and scramble, the boats toss. I can smell it. The sea, the innards of fish, the pungent dank liverish smell. The scales fly in the air to land on an exposed cheek, the fingers are numb and cold, slippery with fish.

It reminded me, actually, aside from these musings of life – of stuffed squid. The big fish shape sort of looked like a squid, and naturally all those little spouting fishes were the filling – which had to include anchovy as a matter of course.

Here’s a recipe for stuffed squid (calamari ripiene). It looks almost exactly like the one I  make, except I chop up the anchovies rather than use paste . . . and only three squid to stuff? No. I think they must be larger than the ones I can find. Plus the stuffing/filling needs a generous handful of chopped Italian parsley added to it.

It’s very good.

Lent is coming up. I wonder if it is as common as it used to be to dine upon fish rather than meat.

Certainly the process seems no gentler,  after gazing at the image above.

I Would Not Eat an Axolotl

I would not eat an axolotl
For fear he’d get stuck in my throatl

It wouldn’t matter that I was hungry
He’d make my tummy feel too jumbeley

I’ve decided that
(For me)
Eating axolotl-y
Would be sheerly vacuous glaxoluttony.

It’s Not What You Eat – It’s That You Cook

Yes, I said “that”, not “what”.

Interesting article from The Economist, titled “What’s Cooking” from The American Association for the Advancement of Science. (Please do ignore the obvious capitalized letters and what they state in the shortening of that group’s name).

YOU are what you eat, or so the saying goes. But Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University, believes that this is true in a more profound sense than the one implied by the old proverb. It is not just you who are what you eat, but the entire human species. And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr Wrangham’s opinion is that its food is so often cooked.

Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.

In fact, as he outlined to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Chicago, he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity’s “killer app”: the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other—and subsequent—changes that have made people such unusual animals.

Sounds good to me. In fact, it reminds me of a poem.

We may live without poetry, music and
art;
We may live without conscience and live
without heart;
We may live without friends; we may
live without books;
But civilized man cannot live without
cooks.
He may live without books,-what is
knowledge but grieving?
He may live without hope,- what is
hope but deceiving?
He may live without love,- what is
passion but pining?
But where is the man that can live
without dining?
Owen Meredith

Honestly, I got so excited about this idea that I just held out my hand to grasp my coffeecup and down a bit of the subtle delicious brew and was so focused on the page that I grabbed my pen and pencil pot instead, and almost swallowed a handful of sharp pencils and pens.

Uncooked.
That’s the worst part.

Moira Tuscanaro: A Cat’s Philosophy of Cooking

It is Spring, dear ones! And after sifting through the many questions you humans have sent me I find there is one most preponderant, and it is this we will discuss today! Prrrrrrrrrr.

The question is: Moira, why don’t you Cats like to cook?

And I must tell you, this question is about as appealing to me (and therefore to all Cats) as raw asparagus.

Eck eck eck eck. Excuse me.

A Cat’s Philosophy of Cooking is simple. It is based on the fact that we are capable of living in the wild and by our wits. We do not need cookbooks or Ph.D’s to assist us through life (no, not in any of the nine we have!) and most certainly we set the table for nobody!

Why don’t we cook?

1. We do not have to. Meow.

2. Do you really think we want to wash dishes? We do have a nice rough tongue but it is better used to groom our lovely coats.

3. Humans need to have something they can feel good about. Most of them simply can not hunt as we can! Purrrrrrrrrrr.

4. We cats are Thinkers, not Workers.

5.  We do not cook for the same reason we do not bother to get married and stick a gold ring on our paws. Once you start doing this sort of thing you can end up having someone expecting you to do it endlessly while putting up with some of the silliest behavior on earth such as saying all is well and lovely while your spouse is spraying the intern in the Oval Office while at the same time he is pretending to be President. We are not politicians, we Cats. Eck eck eck!

Please feel free to e-mail me with any questions, dearies! Now just scratch behind my ear, right there. That’s right! Purrrrrrrr.

I'll Have a Violet-Sweet Potato Latte Please

Ugh. Or at least that’s what I thought at first. Violet-Sweet Potato Latte sounds like something in a Tim Burton film. There’s something frightening about it that makes its name transpose silently into ‘Violent-Evil Potato Latte’. What would happen if you drank it? Perhaps a crack would start to form on the plaster of the wall, slowly opening to reveal another world filled with multi-color polka-dotted baby lambs gamboling on anodized-steel hills and hummocks.

But I digress, and of course the picture I paint is merely modern agriculture as viewed by many people.

The more I considered the Violet Sweet-Potato Latte the more I liked it, though. Tasting the flavors in the  mind brings the conclusion that they could work. Who knows! The flavors could possibly work as well as the Starbucks Pumpkin and Spice Latte – which I have about once a year.

Is there any other thing made from sweet potatoes and violets? I decided to search. A quick search turned up nothing, nada, rien. But this Sweet-Potato Mochi recipe might be revised to add a touch of delicate violet syrup along with the coconut milk to good results.

Shades of Tim Burton again. What is that thing in the middle of the plate of mochi do tell?

Nevertheless though I be scared I be brave and the recipe does look quite good. The original source of this interesting mochi recipe is the Hawaiian Electric Company website, which maintains quite a collection of recipes not often found elsewhere. Mind-boggling, really. I can not imagine Con Edison doing this.

I’ve been musing on recipes strange because of a wonderful place I fell across the other day: Delicious Corpse. It’s now on my list of places to visit every day, simply because of the joy it brings.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Postscript: After writing this I got a note from a friend with the thought that the Violet-Sweet Potato Latte was not made from violet and sweet potatoes but instead from violet sweet potatoes. Hah! Apparently I’ve been viewing the world through violet-colored glasses in this search for things made with violets. I’m seeing little violet flowers everywhere, even when they are not there!

Who Loves Ya, Baby? (Can the Rhinoceros-as-Dinner Be Something One Loves?)

In studies of food and culture one fact crops up time and again: We do not like what the ‘others’ eat. We only like what ‘we’ eat. That is, until the ‘others’ become lovable to us in some way – acceptable companions at table. As the rhinoceros comes to the table to be eaten, it may be worthwhile to investigate who loves him before we cook him. Will he make the grade to be happily placed upon our tables for merry feasting?

The illustration above is from a 1959 children’s book titled ‘Rupert the Rhinoceros’. We can see that the dolphin loves the rhinoceros called Rupert but the story goes deeper than that. In this newspaper article from the Telegraph we learn of the tale of Rupert the Real Rhinoceros – who was for some time a family pet.

The question of whether one can eat a pet is a curious one. We eat things we love but not things we keep as pets, in most cases.

Other examples rhinoceros-as-dinner do exist. The Munster Family liked a bit of rhino for dinner – most particularly the tongue.

When it comes time for dinner, Lily is a whiz in the kitchen and always finds time to prepare a nice hot meal for Herman and family .Their mealtime included such delicacies as chopped lizard livers, cold rhinoceros tongue sandwiches, fillet of dragon, eggs (Gloomy side up), cream of vulture soup (Herman’s favorite), curried lizard casserole, rolled hyena-foot roast, bird’s nest stew (Grandpa’s favorite), warm ladyfingers with pickled frog ears, Dodo bird roast, cream of buzzard or iguana soup; cactus salad, and salamander salad with centipede dressing.

The New York Times describes a dinner in 1905 where rhinoceros was so devoutly desired that the menu was faked so as to deceive those so eagerly awaiting their bite of rhino.

The Canadian Camp had its annual dinner at the Hotel Astor last night, and the members and guests had a lot of fun despite scurrilous stories that the piece de resistance, which had been advertised as “filet of Bornean rhinoceros, sent from the Berlin Zoological Gardens with the compliments of his Royal Highness Prince Henry of Prussia,” was ordinary bear’s meat, or moose, or even plain, everyday beef.

The disillusionment must have been terrible.

The love of rhino can be very deep indeed. I leave you with a final story as example of a man who ‘glued himself to a rhinoceros’ buttocks’ to consider in the quest to decide whether rhinoceros is indeed loved (and if so, loved in the right sort of way to put it on the table for dinner).

Hungry? Or Merely Hubris-y: Rhino on the Table

Like any other thing we eat, there is the question of ‘why’? Why do we eat this particular thing? Do we eat it because we are really hungry? Or do we eat it because it just happens to be in front of us and available to eat? Or maybe simply because it happens to be the set time for a meal? These questions are the simpler ones. The more challenging questions have to do with tradition, history, culture, and power.

Power is not the least of things affecting what we eat – though in our culture that fact is not as apparent as it may be in other cultures.

In this short online documentary from National Geographic, the bush meat trade is summarized in a way that brings attention to some of the power issues circling around the eating of wild game or bushmeat such as rhinoceros in Africa. There was no mention of the lumber companies which have a hand in the story, but the players in this game – and the histories and traditions – all combine to create a not-so-small battle of ‘whose reality is the right one here’ – with very real results of the battle showing in day-to-day life in this place faraway from where we live and eat.

There is real hunger in some places. Hunger for food to stay alive. Then there are the other sorts of hungers. The complex hungers of status that play out in a number of ways.

Why would we want to eat rhinoceros? Or lion or tiger or bear? These things are not part of our cultural norms as edible things. Is the answer ‘I just want to know what it tastes like,’ a real answer – fully true and valid with no squirrelly levels of additional or alternate meaning underneath this flat-stated claim?

Perhaps in some cases it is for mere entertainment value.

We can buy wild game, including lion meat – online. Here, at this link, is a source. It is called ‘exotic meat’. Which of course has a different feel to the mind than ‘bush meat’ does. One of the satisfied customers giving testimonial on the website of this online exotic meat store was the pastor of a church in California, who states

“Anshu, The Lion Meat and the Python Meat was a hit. The guys found ways to cook it that were appealing. 500 people had a taste. Thanks for all your help.It was very nice to meet you and visit with you on the phone.” Yours, Jeff Beltz, Pastor, Hydesville Community Church

Dining upon the rhinoceros is certainly something to muse upon. We’ve come up close to the beast and have a few recipes ready if the need or urge arises.

The rhino is a homely beast,
For human eyes he’s not a feast.
Farwell, farewell, you old rhinoceros,
I’ll stare at something less prepoceros.

I think the rhino is rather cute, though Ogden Nash would disagree. Prepoceros, though – for sure.

Style – Resolved: Ramps, Passé. Creasy Greens, New!

Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions. (Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers -1970)

Ramps. I’m sick and tired of ‘em. You hear about them here there and everywhere. They are the new Darlings (or rather they are hanging on by a thread to being the new Darlings, but that is merely because there has been no contender for the title) of the Hip Veggie world.

For the past several years, ramps have been vociferously promenading the Red Carpet that was previously pranced upon by arugula merrily towing its attendant baby veggies.

Surely the time has come for a change. Ramps, my dears, are passé. I do not want to read of ramps anymore in drinks, salads, crusts, and soups. Soggy old ramps! Your day is past.

It is time for a New Star on the Red Carpet and it really should be Creasy Greens. From Dave’s Garden:

At the first hint of spring in the Appalachian Mountains, folks start looking for “creasy greens”. They are the earliest of any of the wild greens, often poking through the snow, and although traditionally hunted by foragers they are now grown commercially. Creasy greens are usually cooked long, like kale, mustard or turnip greens but they are equally good raw in a fresh salad.

Here’s a personal story about the Soon-To-Be-Star from The Herbwife’s Kitchen

When I was a tiny kid I used to love climbing around the hillside above our pasture looking for creasy greens in the early spring.

I still love creasy greens.

Creasy greens are Barbarea verna, in the mustard family. They taste a little mustardy, a little sweet, a little bitter. Reminiscent of very young collards, but wilder.

I like to pick them when they’re about to bloom, when they’re a lot like “wild broccoli” (or broccolini, rapini, broccoli raab, or whatever they’re calling it these days).

This season’s Spring Fashion is done with. Let’s get Cutting Edge. Start to think Creasy Greens.
You can even grow your own from Heirloom Seeds! To be ahead of the crowd!

Creasy Greens. Watch out for them. My fashion prediction is that you’ll see  them everywhere next Spring. And they won’t be cheap, dressed up in their new Red Carpet attire!

On Eating Something to Understand It

No, I’m not suggesting that you eat the refrigerator – I was just looking for an excuse to use the illustration. But it does raise the question of whether we ‘understand’, or know, or experience, our food in the same way if that food is an icy plastic-covered super-industrialized product created by a corporation for mass consumption or if that food is rather the odd turnip or potato pulled up at the farm by Pappy then carefully washed, sliced and stewed by Mammy with the bit of salt pork from the pig slaughtered each autumn by Uncle Wilbur.

Have you ever considered eating something unusual for the purpose of ‘understanding’ it? (This is not the same thing as eating something strange for the purpose of  bragging about it afterwards to all your eagerly disgusted friends!)

One family in particular of a studious nature took to this idea. Their tables were graced with some very interesting foodstuffs.

Not only was his house filled with specimens – animal as well as mineral, live as well as dead – but he claimed to have eaten his way through the animal kingdom: zoophagy. The most distasteful items were mole and bluebottle; panther, crocodile and mouse were among the other dishes noted by guests. Augustus Hare, a famous English raconteur and contemporary, recalled, “Talk of strange relics led to mention of the heart of a French King preserved at Nuneham in a silver casket. Dr. Buckland, whilst looking at it, exclaimed, ‘I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before,’ and, before anyone could hinder him, he had gobbled it up, and the precious relic was lost for ever.” The heart in question is said to have been that of Louis XIV. Buckland was followed in this bizarre hobby by his son Frank.

Like father, like son – Francis Trevelyan Buckland followed his dad William in the ways of the table.

Buckland was a pioneer of zoöphagy: his favourite research was eating the animal kingdom. This habit he learnt from his father, whose residence, the Deanery, offered such rare delights as mice in batter, squirrel pie, horse’s tongue and ostrich. After the ‘Eland Dinner’ in 1859 at the London Tavern, organised by Richard Owen, Buckland set up the Acclimatization Society to further the search for new food. In 1862 100 guests at Willis’ Rooms sampled Japanese Sea slug (= sea cucumber, probably), kangaroo, guan, curassow and Honduras turkey. This was really quite a modest menu, though Buckland had his eye on Capybara for the future. Buckland’s home, 37 Albany Sreet, London, was famous for its menagerie and its varied menus. [4]

His writing was sometimes slapdash, but always vivid and racy, and made natural history attractive to the mass readership. This is an example:

“On Tuesday evening, at 5pm, Messrs Grove, of Bond Street, sent word that they had a very fine sturgeon on their slab. Of course, I went down at once to see it… The fish measured 9 feet in length [nearly three metres]. I wanted to make a cast of the fellow… and they offered me the fish for the night: he must be back in the shop the next morning by 10 am… [various adventures follow] I was determined to get him into the kitchen somehow; so, tying a rope to his tail, I let him slide down the stone stairs by his own weight. He started all right, but ‘getting way’ on him, I could hold the rope no more, and away he went sliding headlong down the stairs, like an avalanche down Mont Blanc… he smashed the door open… and slid right into the kitchen… till at last he brought himself to an anchor under the kitchen table. This sudden and unexpected appearance of the armour-clad sea monster, bursting open the door… instantly created a sensation. The cook screamed, the house-maid fainted, the cat jumped on the dresser, the dog retreated behind the copper and barked, the monkeys went mad with fright, and the sedate parrot has never spoken a word since.” [5]

Now that sounds like a fun place to visit! I never before thought the Dean of Westminster and his family so very exciting!

The only thing I feel really badly about is that I have not (yet) located their recipe for Rhinoceros Pie. Do you think perhaps Rhinoceros Pies is the magical thing inside the Holy Refrigerator illustrated above? Or is it a TV dinner in there? Or that famous organic turnip? Or some leftover canned spaghetti? Or . . . . ? What could it possibly be?!

And having eaten the things we eat, do we then understand them? Or do we write our own stories about them to suit our own pleasures and to fit our own mindsets . . . .

Pippi Karen-Stocking’s Big Adventure

For almost as long as I can remember, I’ve believed that I am Pippi Longstocking. My mother encouraged this belief as soon as I could scan pages in the Pippi book (this was before Pippi was immortalized in film). Pippi, after all, was from Sweden – and so was my mother’s father. Pippi was red-headed and freckled like me, and she not only was a ‘character’ (which was a good thing, in my mother’s mind) but she was the strongest girl in the world.

Before reading Pippi, I’m afraid the way I was shaping up was just not to my mother’s tastes. The things that seemed wrong to her had been introduced by my grandmother – including, at the grand old age of four years old, desperately wanting a lavender colored two-piece linen skirt suit with matching hat, tiny little clasp purse, and white gloves to wear to church – on Easter. My mother did not like church nor did she like the idea of girl growing up to be like a ‘church-woman’ in any way. So Pippi was the application of medicine she applied, and it took quite successfully!

Now Pippi had many adventures – the real Pippi. And so have I. If I had become a little lady with white gloves as opposed to becoming Pippi, I never would have been able to walk into a professional kitchen and learn to kick ass well enough in that environment to eventually become an executive chef. White gloves simply don’t cut it in many environments.

My big adventure, at this moment of my life, is raising my children. I raise them alone as a single mother. I’ve got my own ideas of what that encompasses, for me and for my children, and this adventure is of a rather quiet nature. It’s a private adventure. Not thrilling to talk about, in general. But I wouldn’t give it up for the world.

But a few days ago, Diana Buja left a comment (for ‘foodvixen the chef’) that mentioned going to Africa – where her own adventure takes place – and working for a month in the kitchen being grown there in Burundi at the gorgeous hotel built to charm tourists into visiting a fascinating and beautiful country  where hope lives right alongside terrible and deep challenges of the sort many of us will never have to face.

My heart soared in the face of this invitation. Pippi, me – I would go! I knew this adventure would teach me more than I carried along with me . . . for things like this always do. And I was ready to go!

After imagining just how it would be, after a bit of time reality set in. I may be Pippi, but I still have two kittens here at home – and I won’t leave them for this sort of adventure just yet. Because that is the sort of Mommy-Cat I am.

But what could I see, if I did go? Maybe I would see Gustav!

The hand of a crocodile at the Musee Vivant in Bujumbura. Urban legend has it in the countries surrounding Lac Tanganyika that within the lake lives a 30m crocodile known as Gustav. He is reported to have eaten over 100 people drowning after a ferry capsized en route to Burundi from Tanzania.

I’d have to decide whether I thought of myself as Stanley or as Livingstone, when I went to the place the two of them met in 1871

And there would be many interesting things to eat!

Dried fish, Lates stappersii known in Tanzania as "mikebuka". This species is endemic to Lake Tanganyika.

This would be an adventure of a Pippi sort! I’d love to do it – and maybe it will happen . . . next year? Or the year after? As they say, ‘God willing’. Let’s change that to ‘Goddess willing’ and I’m going to cross my fingers, too! The adventures we are allowed – and even those we sometimes fall into unwittingly – bring us to life. As do the stories we believe!

Some music? Of course!

Wherefore Art Thou, Book of my Dreams?

Have you ever really wanted a book of some sort so much that you started to fantasize about owning it? I don’t mean like owning it part-time, taking it out of the library then returning it. I mean like a book you just have to own.

I have, and it’s strange, because I don’t really want to own a lot of books. Most books I read and give away, if I own them. Yes, even cookbooks. Because the ones that are pretty, really pretty – are mostly just that – only really pretty. Ultimately they are boring. And the ones that talk of one thing or another – or perhaps they have stories in them – unless there is something startlingly exceptional I really don’t want to have to have those books staring at me accusingly from my shelves as I once again run my fingers right past their spines when looking for inspiration or entertainment.

But this one book, I really want right now. It’s not available in the US as far as I know. And since it takes every bit of all my energy and resources to sit right here at home taking care of the usual things of children and life, I’m not about to hop on a plane to Paris to get this book.

But I have had a fantasy about getting the book delivered. And I assure you, this fantasy surpasses by far any fantasy a girl is supposed to have about her wedding. My fantasies about weddings mostly go as far as seeing the cake and wondering what it tastes like. Rather compressed, this wedding fantasy. Oh well.

But my book. Now that’s a different matter. This is how it would happen: I’d be sitting in my kitchen writing on my computer. I can see out the window next to me as I do this. The mailman would appear around the corner, spindle-shanked in his shorts and socks and sandals. My mailman I am sure listens to NPR in his spare time. He is of medium height, has curly dark brown hair and round wire-rimmed glasses and he looks as if he frequents the health-food store, worrying about things that people worry about who frequent the health-food store. But no, this is wrong. I can not have my book delivered by my mailman, for several reasons. One is that his shanks are too skinny. It worries me, his shanks. If they were lamb shanks sitting wrapped in a styrofoam tray wrapped in clear plastic at the grocery store I would not want to buy them.

Do you remember the song from the Sixties that had a phrase in the middle of it ‘Who wants to dance with the lady with the skinny laiiiigs?’ the guy mockingly sang out right in the middle of it, and boy, I’ll tell you at the age of five or six or seven that song made me feel quite discouraged. Apparently nobody wanted to dance with ladies with skinny legs, at all! And my legs were very skinny. I felt terrible.

But anyway. At least that now I have acheived a more Botticelli-like form I don’t have to worry about that anymore! At least now I can look at the Venus-Clamshell lady and closely analyze as much as one can do without a microscope exactly how rounded her tummy is and whether it is more or less rounded than mine, and how all this will affect my outlook on life.

So forget the mailman. My book will be delivered by the UPS guy. The big brown truck will pull up, and park. The UPS guy will hop out of the truck door and walk towards my door. Now I always get a little nervous when the UPS guy delivers anything because of one particular thing. Fact is, the guy is just about my height. And since I’m pretty short, this doesn’t happen too often. But when it does it can be a little weird, because guys whose eyes are pretty much on a level with mine have an unusual aura. At least they have an unusual aura with me, when their eyes meet mine, and this is what makes me nervous when I have to sign the UPS thingie. There is a strange energy emitting from the guy who is pretty much my height. He is looking at me, and as I have the ability to see parallel worlds that exist alongside this regular one every once in a while I know the parallel world that is existing here, coming from the short guys eyes out towards me.

In his parallel world, both he and I are in the same place at my door but in a flash he is no longer a UPS guy. In a startling instant his UPS uniform sort of rips off all by itself and he is dressed in a Tarzan outfit. He is King of the Jungle.

Trust me, I cut that parallel universe thing off right at that point. I don’t want to know any more about it.

But here he is, anyway, with my book. He greets me, does the parallel universe thing, I sign the UPS magical signing thing, and I have a cardboard box in my hand with ‘Amazon’ printed on it. Joy! Oh joy! My book is here!

The rest, dear reader, you must imagine. How I rip open the cardboard, lovingly caress the cover, gently turn then wildly flip through the pages, staggeringly thrilled at the entire thing!

I went through my shelves the other day, to see what books I’d kept through many travels, too many damp cellars, and much giving-away of books. Here’s the list:

Waverly Root – Food

Time-Life Series Cookbooks – Vienna’s Empire

Ellen Brown – Cooking with the New American Chefs

Lenotre’s Desserts and Pastries

Craig Claiborne – The New York Times International Cookbook

Judith Olney’s Entertainments

Witty and Colchie – Better Than Store Bought

Alan Davidson – North Atlantic Seafood

Evan Jones – American Food, The Gastronomic Story

Maria Polushkin Robbins – The Cook’s Quotation Book

Roget’s Pocket Thesaurus

One book short of a dozen, in this category! To have almost a dozen books of my dreams – this is good.

But I can still dream of yet another. Even if I do have to meet Tarzan’s eyes momentarily to get it.

Les Livres Qui Reste(nt) Ici

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove

That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,

Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

The book remaining longest on my shelves, therefore deserving of Christopher Marlowe’s pastoral, is Waverly Root’s ‘Food’. Why should this be so? The poor old thing is broken-backed, it looks as if someone hit the edge of the bottom pages with red spray-paint lightly at some time, and the cover is the most repulsive olive-green to ever exist in the world.

In this case you can’t tell a book by its cover. Well, maybe you can. Depends on who you talk to.

Many people think Waverly Root was not quite de rigeur. Or rather, he may have been de rigeur but he was not right about a lot of things he wrote. This could be so. But above all, Waverly was entertaining, even in his sickening pea-green overcoat.

Let me show you Waverly. I’m going to flip open the book and see where it lands.

Broccoli. And E.B. White on broccoli. Chives. And He who bears chives on his breath Is safe from being kissed to death and then on to Martial on chives. FO, stands for fogas, a Hungarian fish. Yes, I know the fellow! LY stands for the lycopodium, whose root is no longer eaten as an aphrodisiac.

Parsley warrants a couple of pages, with a final mention of Platus then on to Chaucer in critical mode about a cook named Hogge of Ware who had some problems with parsley and a goose whose freshness might have been questionable

Of many a pilgrim hastow Cristes curs,

For of they persly yet they fare the wors,

That they han eaten with thy stubbelgoos;

For in thy shoppe is many a fly loos.

In the entry on rye we learn of witchcraft and ergotism.  SO stands for soump oil, a fat universallly used in the Ivory Coast, Chad, and East Africa, made from the intensely bitter fruit of the zachun-oil tree, which fails to explain why it is also called heglik oil

And Venus, of course, stands for a family of clams, notably the quahog, eaten with gusto in New England and when we get close to the end of the book, Waverly tells us that yellowtail (which in some places is called snapper or flounder) is called a I-don’t-know-what in Japan.

I don’t know what, either. But I do enjoy trying to figure it all out with Waverly.

And we will sit upon the rocks,

Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks

By shallow rivers, to whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.

On The Virtues of One and Keeping the Pastisio Fires Burning

The New York Times International Cookbook ‘by’ Craig Claiborne is among my small gathering of long-time book companions. I put the quote marks there because I’m not sure I see Craig anywhere in the book, aside from a preface where he lists a zillion names and gives thanks to a large city.

This is a book of recipes. Period. No commentary, no cultural notes, no cute little stories, no stressing over ingredients or substitutions, no ‘how to cook’ notes, no pages of equipment with details.

The collection of recipes is good and basic. So much so that the book feels substantive. But in terms of cooking from it – no, I never really did. It feels substantive, the book, but it is more on my shelves just because it feels substantive. Not because it is substantively useful to me.

There are several recipes in this book that were worthwhile to me, though. Very basic recipes but simple and delicious. Pastisio is the first – and the best of the lot. And if you don’t have pastisio every once in a while there will be a part of your soul lost. You will forget the glaring sun upon the open-aired sea, lose the taste of Retsina burning at the back of your throat, and rue the memory of cats sidling round your feet at the taverna.

Therefore it is important to keep the pastisio fires burning. One recipe. That’s why I keep this book.

You have to eat oatmeal or you’ll dry up. Anybody knows that. (Kay Thompson)

Kay was really talking about pastisio when she wrote that.

Haute Jello

Photo Micaela Rossoto

Haute jello is never out of place.
Haute jello does wonders for the face.
Haute jello is the friend to the figure
Haute jello makes a lovely picture.

In a pigs eye (and whatever else strikes your fancy)

‘In a pig’s eye’ is an American colloquialism meaning ‘not a chance in hell’. I’ve never heard anyone actually use it, but it does pop into my mind once in a while.

Rote memorization of facts someone else thinks go together because they were told at one time to memorize them sometimes strikes me as worthy of the phrase. “Here’s what you need to memorize,” they may say to me, and I may say back to them, “Why?,” and they may say “Because it’s always been that way,” and I may think to myself in response “I’ll do it your way in a pig’s eye!”

But a long time ago when magic and memory were topics happily married in the same sentence, there was a book which helped people do magic or memorize things they wanted to memorize, or some combination of the two.

The book was written by a man named Giordano Bruno. His ideas didn’t fit the general thinking of the thinkers of the times, so naturally they killed him off and he is now defined as a ‘martyr of science’. The name of the book with the cute picture of the hairy pig posted above is ‘Cantus Circaeus’.

Cantus Circaeus (“Incantation of Circe”) is an early work by Bruno on the art of memory with strong magical elements. It is written in the form of a dialogue between the great sorceress Circe and her assistant or apprentice Moeris. It opens with Circe’s incantations to the planets which appear to be based on Agrippa, De Occult. Phil. II, lix. These incantations are described as “barbara & arcana”. These are accompanied by various magical operations including the use of an altar, fumigations, and notae. This is followed by an Art of Memory.

According to I.P. Couliano, “Giordano Bruno’s magic is based not only upon the Ficinian tradition but also on techniques relating to the art of memory. This art consisted of a manipulation of phantasms or inner images, whose purpose varied from the mere learning by heart of a text to mystical contemplation.” (‘Magic in Medieval and Renaissance Europe’ in Hidden Truths: Magic, Alchemy, and the Occult: 1987).

About right now I bet you’re thinking “What does this have to do with food?”, and “When can I get something to eat around here?”. Patience. And besides, if you are sitting here on the computer it’s likely you eat three hearty meals a day plus all the snacks you want, anyway. What’s the rush?

Today we don’t worry about Circe and magic too much. But we do think about pork a lot. So I’ve decided that knowing your pork and knowing it well (and being able to memorize what you know!) just may be important.

Above you see pig. Nice hairy pig. There is an alphabet surrounding the pig. For each letter there should be some piggy-thing which connects to eating the pig. Or cooking the pig. Or growing the pig.

Do you know what they are?

Pigs, Unblanketed

What is a pig, as far as food goes? The alphabet pertaining to pig in Bruno’s Cantus Circaeus is more esoteric than practical, for most purposes. And rather unkind, too! My own philosophy of pigs is much like Grimod de la Reyniere’s.

Everything in a pig is good. What ingratitude has permitted his name to become a term of opprobruim?

Therefore, it is imperative to have an alphabet to remember him by. I’m not aware of any pig alphabets, so we’ll have to make one up! At least we’ve got a start, from the chart posted above.

B – Butt (and Bacon!)

C – Chop

F – Feet (also known as Trotters)

H – Ham (also Ham Steak)

J – Jowl

R – Roast

S – Sausage (also Spareribs)

Lots of letters to go. Can it be done?

Some inspiration, from a man named (of course) Charles Lamb:

He must be roasted . . . . There is no flavor comparable, I will contend to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, crackling, as it is well called – the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance – with the adhesive oleginous – O call it not fat! but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it – the tender blossoming of fat – fat cropped in the bud – taken in the shoot – in the first innocence – the cream and quintessence of the child-pig’s yet pure food – the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna – or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result or common substance.

Picnic!

Is there ever a time when a cloth should not be spread out on the grass, after carefully kicking away the small stones and bits of leaves and tiny branches, hoping that for once, for only once – the laying-about will be as comfortable as seemingly promised, the food will not spill sideways or be attacked by bold wild flying insects, the wine will not spill on the shirt-front?

I don’t think so. It should always be time for a picnic, and I’ve been invited to one!

Louise at Months of Edible Celebrations is having a picnic, and the table has started to be laid. Are you curious to see what everyone is bringing? I am! And luckily I’ve got a list. Here’s what we’ll be eating:

Apple Pie with Dutch Crumb Topping from Miranda

Buttermilk Spice Cake from Mary

Chocolate Cherry Pie from Janet

Dilly Potato Salad from Gloria

Election Day Cake from Erica

Fruit Cocktail Meringue Pie from Erica

Gluten-Free Upside-Down Cake from Dia

Hangar Steak with Chimichurri Sauce from Stacey

Ice Cream in a Bag from Marjie

My gosh, what a lot of food! Incredible! Louise asked me to bring something I often seem to talk about.

Jello. Haute Jello.

It was kind of her to ask me to bring this, for it really is only an idea. No recipe. Just a silly poem and a picture. But my goodness, what a lot of recipes from this picnic! It’s best if I just bring some hot air, don’t you think?

The food looks great, everyone. See you at the picnic!

Food Fear: Trust your food about as far as you can throw it

Lots of people have food fears lately. With good reason, too. Once in a while there are outbreaks of nasty things that do immediate damage within our food systems. Our fast foods and convenience foods are loaded with tricky ingredients that apparently make people unable to stop eating them while slowly their weight ballons and their health may be affected. Even organic foods are tricky – they might come from a factory farm and still be ‘organic’ but what the USDA calls organic and what other people call organic may be different. Local foods are fine as long as the grass-fed cows are not pastured with the free-range chickens (although it makes a pretty picture for sure). And if you don’t know why, then there is yet another thing to find out about and be scared of!

How to decide what food to trust. There are many opinions. So many ways to sort this out that even that can be frightening.

I’ve decided to take things into my own hands. For a long time I’ve known something about fear and trust. And what I know can be boiled down to a few words, which it could be you’ve heard before:

“I’ll trust him as far as I can throw him.”

Absolutely. There is meaning in that phrase. When someone says that to me, there is no question in my mind as to ‘what it means’. It is clear and decisive. And there is methodry involved, scientific methodry. Throwing.

I decided to test some new foods from the supermarket today, compared to some I already buy, to see how far I could trust them. Who knows. It might be the packaging full of chemicals. It might be chemicals in the growing process. It might be the way the corporation is run. It might be the caloric content. It might be the way the food has been treated. It might be gluten in excess or sugar there’s always sugar or worse some sugary thing made from corn. I need to find out what I can trust.

I walked to the playground nearby to conduct this test, so that the foods would all be calm and content, pleased to be in a joyful childlike environment. And I started throwing.

Each throw was the same. I used the same amount of strength and stood in the same exact place. And here are the results:

The little frozen challah breads came in as the clear winner in trustworthiness since they could be thrown the furthest. Next it seemed as if the asparagus and the honey bear honey were a tie, though the asparagus was right in the center unafraid of the test and the honey bear honey sidled off to the left a bit.

Lamb chops, banana leaves, and granola were somewhere in the middle. Trustworthy but apparently worth watching a bit, just in case they try something.

Last was the tofu. It did not go very far. Distressing, for tofu always presents itself as one of the foremost trustable foods. But then again, it often is like this. Underneath the bluster of loud ideology can be found some pretty big cracks if one chooses to look.

I hope this scientific method to determine if your food fears are justified helps you as much as it has helped me. Please send in your own results from any testing you may undertake.

It’s just one way of making the world a better place.

Return of the Native

I am back from New York. The City. I left there about seventeen years ago, and have only returned three times since – once for a wedding, once for a funeral, and once after a divorce. New York was my home from the time I was fourteen years old till the time I left, basically – except for a few travels here and there – but I always returned.

I left New York to be married. To have children. To grow a family. And I have done so – though not exactly in the way I supposed I would, with a husband by my side, but rather without a husband by my side. That’s another story, for another time perhaps.

I returned to New York this time with my daughter. My daughter headed herself towards the city without any urging from me. It is where her heart has led her at the age of sixteen, to study art at one of the best schools that exists for studying art – and in one of the most challenging programs.

There is pathos in this picture, for the similarities between the way my daughter entered the city to begin her life there (if only for this month of summer school) and the way I entered the city to begin my life there are just about as different as day and night. But this is not about that, this is about the food.

It’s hard to get a grasp on the picture of a person through food, really. It can be drawn, a picture, of anyone – with food. The hidden meanings of the food can be brought forth, the adjectives and verbs tossed into the picture as if with a charcoal pencil, to ink out a personality. Quite useful, very entertaining. Often false. The delicate vegetarian can hold a heart full of driven hate and the meat-gnawing potato chip chomping pagan just might turn out to be a gentle soul cautious of ever saying the least offensive thing to anyone at all who may cross his path.

So I’m not going to try to do that – to draw a picture with food. Nor am I going to draw a picture of food. Instead I’ll just tell of a walk down a street in Brooklyn Heights that has something to do with food.

My daughter and I walked down the street in Brooklyn Heights. I showed her the apartment I lived in, before there was a person called my daughter, who now walked beside me. I pointed to the building where I’d knocked on my father’s door (the address of which I’d found to my great surprise in the phone book)(and to my even greater surprise found that he lived in the same neighborhood I had landed in) for the very first time ever to introduce myself to him without warning, at the age of fourteen. There were several restaurants whose doors had remained open all these years in the neighborhood that I’d lived in (a rare thing in the city) but we passed them by.

We walked way down to the end of Henry Street, and entered a narrow-fronted brick building. After all these years, during the time I’d grown a daughter, this restaurant had remained open. This was the first restaurant I’d ever eaten in, when I was around my daughter’s age – that made food something which held a sense of artistry within it, and a depth that went beyond my perception of what food was – or what it could be.

We sat at a table, and I looked up and saw the same guy cooking as had been cooking at the line all those years ago. It did not seem real, but it was. The menu had changed somewhat, but still had the fine touches but not glaring spotlights that spell a deft touch without a vaudevillian edge.

The food was good. It always was.

But I must say that any food pales in my mind and heart in comparison with that simple walk down the street to get there, with my daughter. One fourteen year old runaway had come back to the city she’d entered with a duffle bag full of clothes and forty dollars. That’s me. And she’d brought her daughter to go to art school, and to eat at the restaurant that had first inspired her to think of food in such a way that led to becoming a professional chef – Henry’s End.

Is this about food? I’m not sure. But if you ask me about food and my trip to New York, this is what comes to my mind.

We Knew You Before You Were Famous

You don’t need to be a rock star, neighborhood butcher. Really. We loved you just as you were before you were a celebrity.

Meow meow meow meow.

Sonnets: Let Not My Food Love Be Called Idolatry

Well rounded bagel with

Cream cheese and sable

Green capers and onions (red)

No fish tale nor withered nasturtium bud

Considers this swallow their bed.

Hanatsubomi, hanayu? Yuzu you are, till eaten.

As farro! O farro!

Creeps into lasagna

(Ancient as Zeus’ old bolt)

Kakigori clouds delicately

Fall freezing

And the soft bun’d hot dogs onion-ly emote.

There was a river!

It was the Hudson

But I saw my friend’s face before it

Biting bright Bowery pickles

Always quite crunchy and

The fat strudel of poppyseed  can hardly be

Grumpy.

Let not my food love be called idolatry!

Since all edible, these bites and baubles be.

Three themes in one

My love is

I bid you

Each

A bite,

A swallow,

A ruminative

Chew.

………………………………………………………………….

There you are, Sonia, per your request – my love letter to the happy New York foods!

The Five Minute Faux Foodie by Katerina la Vermintz

It has been brought to my attention that in certain circles the social attainment called being a ‘foodie’ is being discussed. This comes as no surprise to me for it is a most fascinating conundrum. I myself had left off discussing the term after one well-placed blogger wrote that the term did not need to be talked about anymore. It was not that I believed her, but rather that her decisive injunction had been picked up by the Press and reported as if it was important. Oh! I do admire the machinations of those who hire PR people!

But I am encouraged that I may speak just slightly of the Foodie. After all, in recent memory I have read a most brilliant discussion of whether a foodie can rightly be called a ‘fan’ of food on the ASFS boards by the luminaries there, and just today the estimable Rachel Laudan mentioned foodies in a post on her blog.

My area of expertise is etiquette, of course. If you have had a pea dropped down your frontspiece by men such as Le Rochefoucauld and his merry set etiquette is a requirement. I only most devotedly wish to assist the weary reader in these areas. Therefore I propose now a small and I hope delightful series of notes on how to become a five minute faux foodie. Most of you do not need more. Nor do you have the time for more what with Twittering and cellphones and trying to define and sell your brand whilst inbetween quoting the finer self-help quacks in the business today.

The hour is late. The cat waits for her food and dusk is falling. I shall have to continue tomorrow in these instructions. But do, please, have hope. We all can be five minute faux foodies and may enjoy the admiration of the masses. Instructions will follow.

Oh! Do forgive my terrible lack of comment for I do wish to say Happy Bastille Day to All!

A tout l’heure!

My devotions,

Katerina la Vermintz

Quantifications for the Five Minute Faux Foodie by Katerina la Vermintz

The five minute faux foodie must remember but a few things in society: deportment; etiquette; and a few useful phrases. We will briefly offer suggestions that may help if you are one of the many who aspire to this mantle.

Deportment: At the start of each day you must train yourself to put food first in mind. All other thought must be pushed to the side for later thought. What you will wear is not important nor are any business meetings. The weather is important only in that your menu will be planned upon it in certain ways. Sex is not important. It can wait till you’ve had a foaming cup of cappuccino and some chocolate. This should take you one minute each day to push other thoughts aside. Train well. As with all things, the training will prove well worth it!

Etiquette: Foodies come in various groups. You will find those who fill their time with foams and exquisite artistry at great expense. Others like to cook for themselves. Some groups focus solely on fast food or on pizza in foodie ways. Do not shudder in pain or disdain when you meet a foodie from a group other than yours. Remember, you are all foodies no matter how it is expressed! It may take one solid minute to learn to hide the sense of alienation you have upon meeting a foodie from a different group. One minute per day. It must be done.

Useful phrases: These change each year and must be learned. ‘Sustainable’ is your primary concern this year. Other words important to bandy about: ‘local’; ‘organic’; ‘grass-fed’; ‘sel de fleur’; ‘sourcing’; ‘porky bits’; and of course ‘exquisite’ is always useful. Learn your terms. One minute per day. Non non non! It is of course ‘fleur de sel’. Forgive me, my mind wandered – something about chocolate was at the edges, eating up all other thought!

Organic? Or not: The philosophy of being a foodie is one to come to terms with or you will be unable to carry yourself with the proper rigor. Each foodie must decide for themselves whether ‘foodie’ is a natural thing to be – something quite fine and natural that organically grew from the soil of the fertile cooks and diners before us or whether the ‘foodie’ is something created as a improved human being by, of course, the improved human beings who created it as a concept and way of being. This will take one more minute each day of study and thought.

If You Must Cook: If you must cook as a five minute faux foodie, remember to keep it simple. If you can buy the best and just put an expensive knife to it then lay it out nicely on a plate, that is the best idea. The financially-challenged foodie will have to find other means that take no time. Go to grains. Lentils, green French lentils, are always a good idea. Make sure you leave the container within sight for your guests when they walk by the kitchen. One minute for menu planning, if you must cook.

Dear readers, I do hope that those who aspire to the five minute faux foodie life will take heart from these modest injunctions and will jump in the pond with all the other foodies! You are worth it, even if you only have five minutes a day and are faux! Do not give up this chance, for after all – what else is there to do?

Fire

Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-color’d taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of day.

Shakespeare – King Henry IV

‘A fair hot wench in flame-color’d taffeta’. Fire is the image that hits the mind. Just how important is fire? Is it the thing that makes us ‘human’ (as Richard Wrangham proposed in his book last year – and which I’ve heard has been an idea propounded by other food scholars not as lucky as he to have their names bandied about as discoverers of this idea) because it allows us to cook therefore to want to gather together to share and be kindly and warm towards each other – eager to get our piece of the hunk of roasted meats?

Obviously fire has its downsides. Even corralled in a fireplace it may spark at the edge of the muslin dress so carefully worn to the tea party as in the 1802 James Gillray caricature above.

Fire is part of other things besides the warming of our common souls. The little family in this Hieronymus Bosch allegory of Gluttony (which is actually one of the Seven Deadly Sins no matter how strong the denials are from manufacturers of potato chips or foodies who lust after the latest seven-course meal by the hottest chef on the block) painted between 1475-1480 have their little fire to cook things set right there into the floor of the house – ready to use whenever the need arises. It looks as if a fat sausage is waiting to cook!

It makes sense that fire is a humanizing element, along with cooking.  It would seem to me that the singular benefits of warming one’s toes by the fireside would be as riveting a reason to bond with other humans as the idea of cooking food would be, though. Toes can get awfully cold in the winter-time. Or at least they did in the 1400′s as the fellow below shows us. It may be that even before that time there were cold toes.

Even cherubs can have cold toes, and cherubs are angelic.

So anyway. I think it’s a great notion to have (and a great scholarly thing to do to put together some proofs of it) . . . that cooking is the thing that makes us human . . . and  that the application of heat to food has created so much to bond us, to make us ‘better than animals’! But to me it is not the cooking. It is the fire. The fire, by itself, and the toes that can be warmed by it.

And both fire, and cooking – can have their downsides, their non-civilizing behaviors hinted at – their escape from the realm of being defined as excellent and wonderful. It can happen in an instant with the wrong food offered to a hungry person, or, as in the picture Arcimboldo paints for us here – when one of his fruit and vegetable heads gets struck by flames!

Cooking is such a dangerous art.

Warming Your Toes and Eating Them Too

There may be times when aside from simply warming your toes, you could be hungry. You might want to nibble on a toe or two. Or maybe even eat an entire foot.

I have a recipe for these times.

Pig’s Feet in Savory Tomato Sauce

Take two pigs feet, scrubbed and split. Cover with cold water, bring to boil – simmer for ten minutes. Drain and rinse.

Meanwhile make a braising liquid from six cups water, one sliced onion, a pinch of cloves, a carrot peeled and sliced, a stalk of celery sliced, a handful of chopped parsley,  a bay leaf or two, a pinch of thyme with some black pepper. Bring this to a boil, add the feet, reduce to simmer. Cook for about one and a half hours.

Remove feet from liquid and strip all meat from bones. Discard bones, set meat aside. Take one and a half cups of the remaining braising liquid – put in pot with one and a half cups chopped tomatoes, some chopped garlic, one tablespoon red wine vinegar, some chopped parsley, oregano, a pinch of sugar, salt and pepper. Add reserved meat, cover and simmer one and a half more hours.

Serve on a sturdy pasta topped with Parmesan.

This is a filling, rich, warming dish. It often surprises me how many people do not like the idea of eating pigs’ feet while at the same time slavering over bone marrow. The essential richness that denotes the finest qualities residing in poached marrow also live to the same purpose in a fine foot or two.

Whole Lotta Be-Heading Going On

It’s only natural that after thinking of eating the toes (as we did in the previous post) one would immediately take a closer look at the animal and then wish to eat the head. And we are not so proud as to have never thought of the idea, even in the sacred annals of religion.

Peter Paul Rubens drew a pretty picture of exactly this dinner idea, in his ‘Feast of Herododes’ painted in the early seventeenth century. No, he was not on drugs at the time – not tripping nor having an angry moment nor suffering from a bad case of indigestion (which we know from the quotes of masters can cause all ills). There actually is a feast day where the cut-off head is the cause of a celebratory dinner.

The liturgical commemoration of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist is almost as old as that commemorating his Nativity, which is one of the oldest feasts, if not the oldest feast, introduced into both the Eastern and Western liturgies to honor a saint.

The Roman Catholic Church celebrates the feast on August 29 as the “Martyrdom of St. John the Baptist” in the ordinary form and as “The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist” in the extraordinary form, or traditional Latin Mass.

The Church of England and many other national provinces of the Anglican Communion August 29. In the Church of England, the day is referred to as celebrate the feast on “The Beheading of John the Baptist.”

The Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic churches also celebrate this feast on August 29. The day is always observed as a day of fasting, even if it falls on a Saturday or Sunday (in which case the fast is lessened, but never entirely abrogated). In some Orthodox cultures pious people will not eat food from a flat plate, use a knife, or eat food that is round in shape on this day.

In the Eastern Orthodox churches following the Julian Calendar – the Russian, MacedonianSerbian Orthodox Churches, the feast of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist is celebrated on September 11. The day is always observed as a day of strict fasting. and

The Armenian Apostolic Church celebrates the Decollation of St. John on Saturday of Easter Week.

The Syriac Orthodox, Indian Orthodox, and Syro-Malankara Catholic Churches commemorate the martyrdom on January 7.

This brings to mind some potential difficulties for the preparer of such a meal, even though some of the days are fasting days. I mean, you want to have a real sense of the occasion, no? For the break-fast perhaps? And since I’m always the cook, I’m thinking ahead.

What if the thing to be be-headed is two-faced? How does one deal with that??? (And you and I both know there’s always a fair amount of two-facedness going around!)

That would be bad enough. What side to serve upwards, etc etc. But things can get worse. What would one do with this guy? He’s got an extra head in a pretty strange place, or at least so it seems to me.

Still, it could be worse. I really would have no idea where to start with this guy. Actually I think I’d run away, no matter how delicious he claimed to be (mmm those little crab-leg-like things – almost irresistible!)

Van Gogh’s Potatoes

I’ve Been Invited to More Than One Dinner. Which One Should I Choose?

I’ve been invited to four different dinners, all on the same evening. Please help me! I need to decide which one to attend. I would so appreciate your advice and reasons! Which one would you go to?

All four are shown here.

From Soup to Nuts: More Eating in the 1940′s Redux/Gourmet Magazine

This is a re-post, from back in January. Thought it might be a good time for it.

In this vintage ad from the 1940′s we’ve now discovered how the Chiquita Banana Helps the Pieman – and have also had a fascinating demonstration on how to flute a banana.

But that’s only dessert. ‘Where’s the beef?’ (Clara would ask) – and here it is:

Recipes from Gourmet magazine during the 1940′s, from the archives. Note the simplicity of the instructions, and remember – the founder (in 1939*) and publisher of Gourmet was a fellow named Earle MacAusland, who loved huntin’ and fishin’  . . .  in a gentlemanly-gourmet sort of way.

Tequila Por Mi Amante

Oyster Waffles Shortcake

Creamed Woodchuck

Bachelor’s Defense

Moving right along, if you’re still prone to hunger pains, to some

Blacktail Buck Steaks

finished off with (don’t forget the banana pie too)

Imprisoned Fruit

. . . the recipe for which starts off with

Look over your tree carefully in the springtime, when the blossoms are gone and the fruit is just beginning to form. Choose a few choice specimens, each at the end of a branch, and insert the branch gently into the neck of a large bottle, until the fruit is well inside. The next job is to support the bottle so that it stays in place in the tree. This may be done with ropes, if the tree is large enough, or it may be necessary to build up wooden supports to hold the bottle.

At first, the native feel of the menu made me think of gentle old-timey innocent images in my mind. Little boys goin’ out to catch a mess of fish, oh so cute in their rumpled overalls

But then upon musing on the menu components a bit further, it seemed to me that (more likely) the intent of all this cooking (whether done by the above-mentioned ‘bachelor’ or by his feminine equal) would be in hopes of something more along the lines of this, from Tino Rossi, 1945:

P.S. Edit added: *This date (1939) is not confirmed by source (yet). No bessame mucho here. Yet. My best guess is that date was when Earle first started conceptualization of the magazine that had its first issue in 1941. Wish I’d taken more care with saving my notes!!!

Not Your Average Cup of Jo

Walking into this house could make a person feel like they were entering a maze. Coats, hats, shoes and boxes, all pushed at one from their places where they hung floor-to-ceiling in an embracing disarray. The amusement park sense whispered of those dimly-lit back rooms at circuses where the tricky things were kept – those things used to amuse the crowds, things made of bits of strong cloth and sharp bits of metal, each one seeming to hint at small bashful smiles or haphazardly glimmering crooked grins. The overwhelming clutter of odd shaped paraphernalia made one think the Wizard of Oz must be around somewhere – if not the Snake Lady, or the Four-Headed Man. Something, though – something novel and startling would surely appear at the end of pushing through this dizzying claustrophobic tunnel.

At the end what actually appeared was a small, square kitchen. A rectangular 1950′s style formica-topped chrome-tabbed table was there, curled up against the wall like a spiritual haven. And in the kitchen was Jo.

She did not induce any sort of wonder in how she looked. Josephine stood about four feet eight inches tall, with steel-grey hair pulled into a bun wound low at the spot it touched the back nape of her neck. Her hair was always pulled back – except when she would retire to bed at night. Then the hair would cascade down her back in a total surprise of rebellion, a reminder that the old were once young and that the young will become old as sure as any thing can be on this earth.

Her hair in its neat bun suited her though, for she was a direct woman, a no-nonsense woman well into her mid-seventies. The kitchen, this kitchen at the end of the maze of hallway – was mostly where Jo lived. You could find her in other places . . . once in a while in the garden outside in the grassy lot at the side of her house, this tiny house that she and her husband and their six children called home. You might find her once or twice a year at the Catholic church – usually on a sacred day.

But the rest of the time, all the time, you would find Jo in her kitchen. For in her kitchen this tiny, uneducated, unpretentious woman was Queen. Jo cooked every day of her life. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Seven days a week, no respite. Nobody else would dream of approaching the kitchen to cook – not only because she was Queen, but because nobody wished to surrender the right to one single meal she cooked. Jo’s two daughters had been taught to cook in that kitchen, and her four sons had learned a bit too. But never was the taste, the same. It was not the ingredients, for they were the same. It was not the methods, for the methods she used were nothing if not basic. It was not the equipment nor the weather nor the mood of the person cooking nor anything, anything at all that could be found to answer the question “Why?” It was just Josephine. Was Josephine  an artist with the food? No. Or rather, not unless you believe that what an artist does is to somehow transport love through their art. For that is what Josephine did, and that was the taste which filled the mouths of those lucky enough to partake of it.

Jo’s food was love, made real enough to eat. “Hey, hey!” her small high-pitched Italian-accented voice would warm one as they entered the kitchen through the maze of the hallway- her kitchen, where she ruled.

“What’re you doing? Sit down, sit down, here, eat!” And there was no choice to be had. It didn’t matter if you were hungry or not. The plates and bowls of  food would be fitted in front of you with abandon on the table, this table cluttered with a zillion other things – by Jo as she moved busily back and forth in the small six-foot space between sink, stove, and refrigerator. You would perch on the red plastic kitchen chair and listen to a world of busy conversation, half in Italian, half in laughing English . . . and bowls and plates and pots of food would be set before you wafting hot steam and fragranced scents, food that said love, food that carried anyone who tasted it to a place of deep contentment and almost-childlike passivity.

What did she cook? Nothing new. Nothing too expensive or finessed, that’s for sure. Her food was prepared on a shoestring, but that shoestring could tie the world together and do it beautifully. There were roasts seasoned with garlic and fresh herbs, endless platters of strange bitter vegetables of all shades of green from Umbrian olive to Crayola spring. Some of the green things were from the garden, some came from the market and others were picked alongside the road. The small glasses of bitter homemade wine clinked against the medium-sized glasses of tepid water in a cacophony of glassware designs. There was polenta and rice and pasta, always with some variance of “ururu” or ragu – the tomato sauce which encompassed the house and part of the neighborhood too, with the aroma only a long-simmering, meat-and-herb imbued tomato sauce can give – the aroma that hints of bright sunshine and laughter, murmurs of an ease, simplicity and suppleness of life.

Often enough – but never too often! – Jo would take a heavy aluminum fork in hand to whip homemade ricotta with a bit of milk into a soft blanket to be thrown generously over hot ragu-covered macaroni, all to be served without further adieu. The creamy cool whiteness of the ricotta was just like a gathering of angels hovering and protecting, aiding and abetting the spicy sauce and the dense heavy dull pasta lowering below it.

There were other meals, so many. Sometimes on a cool windy Autumn day a grana padano would be grated to fall like golden tears into a rich chicken broth studded with whatever else happened to serendipitously appear that day . . . bitter greens, double-yolked eggs, fresh peas, rice. And the cheese melted just enough to allow that the tears  it first resembled were now gone, that all was now made right in the world, all in this bowl of golden soup.

The book has not yet been written of Josephine’s recipes. Would it be possible? Would the recipes, even if closely written and carefully detailed, even if filled with memories, would these recipes ever be able to do what they hinted in promise? Could they bring Jo’s love into reality again, in the form of a bite taken of a dish of food?

The answer to that question is, of course, unknowable. But the things of the heart remembered are exquisitely real. They are as solid and warming to the soul as any “real” thing one might bite into. They cannot be measured into tidy neat parts of any recipe – by cups or kilos or teaspoons or quarts. None of the best things in life can be. But their essence does remain, vital and true.

Neither Fish Nor Flesh Nor Good Red Herring

One of the interesting aftermaths of discovering you’ve been married to a psychopathic liar for years is an unavoidable new fascination with reality – the nature of it, the possible porousness of it, and by what ways and means can one determine exactly what it might be. People who have never experienced an utter and complete shifting of reality-as-known right before their very eyes have a hard time understanding this prodding and poking at the everyday things that go by on an everyday basis.  “What’s wrong with her?,” they mutter, as the questions and pokings continue on from my direction in the obsessive quest for Truth, capitalized.

I assure you – there’s nothing wrong with me that a good discussion of  beaver’s tail won’t cure – at least for the moment.

As you see in the painting above, a beaver’s tail is not just a beaver’s tail. A beaver’s tail is a fish, actually. or so they say. Have you ever seen a real live beaver’s tail?

There you have it. Doesn’t look too fish-like to me. Doesn’t look too palatable, either – but apparently there were times in past history when people had to eat what was in front of them and for some bizarre reason beaver tail was what was in front of them.

Why call it a fish? Well, I could write it out in my own words so as to sound like I’m working hard on providing creative content but why bother? Isn’t the act of doing that a bit of a fishy beaver-tail in itself? Here’s wiki, instead:

In the 17th century, based on a question raised by the Bishop of Quebec, the Roman Catholic Church ruled that the beaver was a fish (beaver flesh was a part of the indigenous peoples’ diet, prior to the Europeans’ arrival) for purposes of dietary law. Therefore, the general prohibition on the consumption of meat on Fridays during Lent does not apply to beaver meat.^[21][22][23]
The legal basis for the decision probably rests with the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, which bases animal classification as much on habit as anatomy.^[24] This is similar to the Church’s classification of the capybara, another semi-aquatic rodent.^[25]

There we have it. Someone decided to stretch things a little bit. I bet somewhere there were politics involved. There usually is, deep under the yumm-o surface of the things we eat.

What is this ‘neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring’ thing all about, though? After all, if a thing is a tail which is meat which has been decided by someone to be a fish yet it is not a red herring specifically (a red herring is not only a fish which has been cured to make them a red color but also was a ploy in the 17th century used by criminals – just drag an old herring over the escape route through the woods and those durn huntin’ dogs would lose their scent – Ah! Freedom all found in a rotten fish for the Bad Guys!) then what does this mean??

No evidence has been found, either in proof or denial, yet the fact that the earliest record of this phrase coincided almost exactly with the break between Henry VIII and the Pope, a break that could not have occurred unless preceded by a long period of disaffection, makes me suspect that the original significance of the expression was theological. One who abstained from either fish nor flesh when days of fasting were prescribed were neither Roman Catholics nor Dissenters, neither one thing nor the other – just plain irreligious. Charles Earl Funk, 2017 Curious Word Sayings and Expressions

Irreligion. There we go again. So often at the bottom of things. Yet we build more religions each day.

Snipping the Pages of Gourmet

Gourmet is dead! Long live Gourmet! The end of Gourmet magazine has arrived. Was the magazine sacred and wonderful? Or was the magazine elitist and blowsy? To me it was neither. What it was could be summed up in the word ‘useful’.

I’ve been trying to figure out recently how I learned to cook – and aside from some very specific instances in the professional kitchen or in my Italian-born mother-in-law’s kitchen, I just don’t know. This can happen when a person is self-taught . . . there are so very many places one picks from and corners one searches into that after the immersion it all becomes a blur. I remember reading Larousse Gastronomique from cover to cover – and it somehow took  a firm place in my mind as being the thing that taught me how to cook. But in thinking it over, how could it have? It is not that sort of book. Now, of course, having figured this out, I’ve got to worry about how having Larousse lodged in my mind may leave me at risk for being a secret Francophile, unaware of this possibly deep underlying affect upon my cooking psyche.

Gourmet was definitely a real and useful part of my very first introductions to ‘real food’ and how to cook it though, so perhaps I am yet to be saved from incipient Francophilia. The tiny thrift store in Darien I haunted one utterly otherwise-boring year had dusty piles of old Gourmets stacked in the back room, hidden under the sprigged-print rayon dresses from the 1940′s  tightly jammed onto the rack, right next to the muddled cardboard box messily filled with antiqued peachy pink soft silk spaghetti-strapped full-length slips from the 1930′s. The slips were ten cents each. The Gourmets were five cents. Obviously in both cases the permed little old ladies who ran the store didn’t have a clue of the treasures they were pricing to be given away for pennies.

There wasn’t a lot of space to store all these old magazines where I lived, so after reading from cover to cover (I can see the longest restaurant reviews in the history of man swimming before my eyes even now) I snipped. Some of those snipped recipes are still here in my files. Looking at them is like looking at a simple, basic cooking course – one that slightly progresses the student through a set of core ideas – though certainly not an extensive or a technically complicated course.

A sampling of saved recipes:

Part One: Make Simple Grilled Meats Taste Exciting
Apricot Basting Sauce; Orange Lemon Glaze; Yogurt Mint Marinade

Part Two: Easy Finger Foods to Build Yourself
Cucumber Stuffed with Whiting Salad; Tuna-Red Pepper Rolls; Shrimp Remoulade Tartlets

Part Three: Let’s Eat Peasant Food
Autumn Bisque The Red Lion Inn; Polenta with Meat Sauce

Part Four: Dare to Eat Offal
Calves’ Liver in Mustard Sauce; Pigs’ Feet in Spicy Tomato Sauce

Part Five: Simple Desserts
Chomeur Chez Helene; Carrot Cake The Picnic Basket; Apple Mousse

Part Six: Defining the Times
Smoked Salmon Mousse on Black Bread with Salmon Caviar and Dill; Almond Tart Chez Panisse

Part Seven: It’s Filo Dough – Deal with It
Lemon Galaktaboureiko

Reading each of these recipes has a sense of  song remembered – I can see the different stoves, the various pots and pans, spoons and bowls. They were made and eaten in houses, apartments, restaurant kitchens, and even on a sailboat.

I’m glad I had those scissors.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(With thanks to Elissa Altman who somewhere somehow in her writings made me think of recipe-clipping and Gourmet together in the same thought.)

It Takes an Industrial Revolution to Make a Tender Dragee

Dragées are big
Dragées are small
Dragées can be
Almost anything at all

Actually we can begin the tale somewhere around the year 1200 AD with an almond or two that need to be preserved and transported without that little problem food sometimes develops of going bad, rotting, tasting awful . . .

But some dragées dropped their almonds entirely. I particularly like the idea of a dish of  capon with pomegranates and red dragées.

Dragée production was quite an industry at times. Machines were designed to put on the silver gilding that makes the thing so delightful

This work was performed in ateliers – which is a lovely French word meaning workshop, which actually translates in reality sometimes into ‘factory’.

And who will do the sugaring? Not elves, I assure you. Elves do not live in France. Instead, there is a machine to do the work

Here’s a close-up of the machine viewed before on the atelier floor. Ah! I can feel that hot sugar melted to perfect temperature heating my face by just glancing at it!

Such pretty little things, dragées!!! And they started out seeming so very practical! And now . . . oh! What a lot of work.

‘Waste Not, Want Not’

It seems that lots of people I know are talking about preserving food these days. Janet Clarkson (The Old Foodie) even mentioned ‘bog butter’ in one of her posts the other day – and Sonia F. Bañuelos (whom I like to think of either as Agent S for her daring exploits or as Sonia F. Buñelos because of course, buñelos make a person smile)  – whose nom de plume is Saffron Paisley – is always cooking up something delicious to be put in bottles or jars for sustenance in days to come.

I live vicariously through other people’s preservings. There have been times in the past when I’ve indulged the urge, but not this year. This year, instead, I am collecting pictures.  And so rather than a taste of jam, I’ll show you the start of my picture collection on preserving foods.

‘The Canning Factory’ painted by Max Liebermann in 1879. Factory???!

Iceboxes. When iceboxes really meant iceboxes.

‘Mountain House Egg’ : “Freeze Dried eggs with bacon. Shelf stable for 25 years while sealed and kept in cool, dry, conditions”

Tian jian – this is cabbage. Pickled dried preserved Chinese cabbage. I’m always amazed at the power of cabbage to morph, keep, and sustain.

And finally, bog butter. Who would ever have thunk it? But they did. (“Line drawing of a partly destroyed wooden barrel with w:bog butter in it, found in Ireland. Bog butter is butter found in swamps, placed there for preservation.”)

Food Writing Topic #1: Louis P. De Gouy

I often have ideas for articles or stories or essays that I don’t follow up on for one reason or another. Naturally, I think these ideas are great because usually the idea is something I haven’t read about before (and I’ve done a pretty good amount of reading about food). I’m curious to see what others think about these topic ideas, so am going to post a few here. Among the questions I’d love to have answered by those who would comment (let’s hope someone comments!) are:

1. Does this topic interest you?

2. Do you see this topic being one interesting to the general public or to a more limited audience – and if so what audience?

3. Where could you see this story being published?

4. Does any specific foodwriter come to mind who would give this topic a better presentation than anyone else out there? If so, why?

Topic #1: Louis P. De Gouy was one of the original founders of Gourmet magazine. He was a highly experienced professional chef with an impressive work background. He also wrote a number of cookbooks on many varied topics – and each of these cookbooks was not only encyclopaedic in scope but filled with food history and stories of the food world. There appears to be a family connection to the Austrian royal court through his father who performed some office pertaining to the royal table. it also appears from a cursory glance that the de Gouys may have had an important place in the military or other offices of historic France, but whether Louis is of this same line is to be discovered. Louis’ books are not often discussed nor is his participation in Gourmet. It appears he may have died soon after his largest and most complete book was published and soon after Gourmet became established.

Food Writing Topic #2 – Ruth Harkness

As with the previous post, I have the same questions . . . for the topic of

2. Ruth Harkness wrote for Gourmet magazine during the 1940′s as a contributor sending missives from foreign lands about food and travel. One of her essays which gives an example of her topic area is described as ‘Ruth Harkness reminisces about eating ten thousand dollars’ worth of rare pheasants while living in a remote Tibetan lamasery.’ In current times, Ruth Harkness is better known as the giant panda lady – famous for carrying the first live panda in to the United States in her arms in 1936 (subject matter for an IMAX film). She died at the age of 47 in a hotel room. To me, an interesting figure whom I’ve never heard much about in the food world (unless I missed something).

Food Writing Topic #3 – De re Rustica Donuts

Around 160 BC there was a book written by Cato the Elder titled ‘De re Rustica’. This book contains many things, but one of the most interesting (to my mind) is a recipe for donuts. Has anyone made donuts from this recipe recently? If we are eager to follow Julia Childs’ recipes to see how it all works, why not make an ancient donut?

Food Writing Topic # 4 – Ways of Foods within Braucherie

Braucherie is an ancient folk tradition or culture which still exists in pockets of Pennsylvania German (‘Dutch’) life. It counts parts of  religion; lifestyle; ‘journey’ and healing traditions among the practices and rituals attending it. Food is naturally an important part of the particulars of the Brauchers way of life. I have to wonder about the Brauchers’ foodways, and also wonder about how they intersect with other traditional foodways from other cultures.

Food Writing Topic #5 – Cooking a Potato With Van Gogh

Van Gogh painted ‘The Potato Eaters’ (along with other compositions centered on the potato) during the time he lived in a community of miners where the subsistence level was close to poverty. His renderings of the potato express a sense of what life within that community held for its members.

Why did he decide to live within this culture? Was the potato indeed almost their sole subsistence? What was life composed of on a daily basis within this community – in foodways and other ways?

Were there recipes for potatoes beyond simply boiling (or roasting) and if so, what were they? If fat was used in the recipe where did it come from? What heat source was used to cook and where did it come from? How markedly different was this way of living than the one Van Gogh had enjoyed previously or afterward?

I’d like to think of Van Gogh (or of his servant or cook, if he had one at the time) preparing the very potatoes he painted for his dinner . . . to have a recipe close to what he might have made and eaten would be quite delightful!

This story also has the  potential ‘hook’ desired by many publications in that it could be tied to current events through linking to the recent opening of the new Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Food Writing Topic #6 – Louis Untermeyer’s ‘Food and Drink’

Louis Untermeyer was a prolific author, poet, editor, and anthologist – along with being honored by the title bestowed upon him of being our fourteenth Poet Laureate. In 1932 he published a book titled ‘Food and Drink‘ which apparently is an epic poem all about . . . well, of course! Food and Drink.

I’m not sure how many epic poems have been written (and published) entirely on the topic of what we eat and drink. This one certainly may be the only one of its kind authored by a Poet Laureate. The volume should be worthy of note in discussions of food literature, and I would hope it could stand alongside the writers we more commonly know about and honor the most (MFK Fisher comes immediately to mind) but of course there’s the possibility that the tonality of the piece hasn’t left it to age well.

It would also be interesting to know why Untermeyer picked up this topic at that particular time. What moved him to decide to write this book? Was it . . . ‘something he ate’?

The book is out of print, of course – but available. I haven’t seen it yet. I’m going to go order it now.

Food Writing Topic #7 – Marcus Funghi M.D.

Do you remember Marcus Welby M.D.? Why isn’t there a guy called Marcus Funghi M.D. ? He would be a mycologist who prescribed various mushrooms or mushroom recipes for each various ill his patients complained of.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Seven is a good number, so this is the end of the food writing topic posts for the moment. I’m going to let this blog sit for a moment while I go off to start Postcards From The Dinner Table.

Where in the World is Marcus Funghi M.D. ?

If you were hoping to find Marcus Funghi M.D. he is not here. His office hours have been shortened. If you need him very desperately you might find him here

Wait a minute! There he is, with his wife Fila!

I’ll Never Think of Basil in the Same Way Again

Basil. The royal herb. The aromatic genius of the kitchen. The leaf of choice, the taste most lovely.

The painting portrays Isabella, unable to sleep, dressed in a semi-transparent nightgown, having just left her bed, which is visible with the cover turned over in the background. She drapes herself over an altar she has created to Lorenzo from an elaborately inlaid prie-dieu over which a richly embroidered cloth has been placed. On the cloth is the majolica pot, decorated with skulls, in which Lorenzo’s head is interred. Her abundant hair flows over the pot and around the flourishing plant, reflecting Keats’s words that Isabella “hung over her sweet Basil evermore,/And moistened it with tears unto the core.”

Lovely leg stretching out there. At first I thought it was a hopeful caress. But no, they tell me, no. This is the banquet that preludes the deed!

The painting illustrates an episode from John Keats‘s poem, Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, which describes the relationship between Isabella, the sister of wealthy medieval merchants, and Lorenzo, an employee of Isabella’s brothers. It depicts the moment at which Isabella’s brothers realise that there is a romance between the two young people, and plot to murder Lorenzo so they can marry Isabella to a wealthy nobleman. Isabella, wearing grey at the right, is being handed a blood orange on a plate by the doomed Lorenzo. A cut blood orange is symbolic of the neck of someone who has just been decapitated, which is a sign of how Lorenzo will be killed by Isabella’s brothers. One of her brothers violently kicks a frightened dog while cracking a nut.

wiki, yes wiki source

more

When Two Wrongs Make a Right

Life can play tricks on people. And surprisingly, it can do so even on holidays.

I once knew a woman who dreaded holidays. From a month before any holiday her heart would begin to hurt. Literally, the spot right in the center of her chest would start to ache as if it were being squeezed by an old-fashioned orange juicer. What it was really being squeezed by was Fate, and as she told me – Fate is a terribly powerful thing . . . the moreso in that you often can’t catch it to do anything to it. It’s flighty and quick, it jumps out from behind corners then shimmers away, leaving ‘things as they were’ changed.

I myself rather dread the work involved in holidays. Two children and some cats can – to the generous giver – swing life into an alternate reality of stress. What to do? How to do it? Where to do it? How much to do? Where is all this money going to come from? What about the cards that should be sent? Do I start at the beginning of the month and plow through it like a sturdy work horse? How can it be simplified? Where, where, where is the time to do all this????!

My friend (we’ll call her Faith – it seems appropriate) hated holidays because her children, the ones she cared for on every other day of the year – were proscribed to go across many miles to their father’s house at these times. And as she described it to me, it was as if part of herself was being physically ripped off, torn raggedly at the edges, to be trotted away to some other place.

The holidays would approach and things would get tense. The children were worried, somewhat discombobulated. The shift of households during this primal and bright time of year felt like strange moonbeams entering an otherwise everyday world. My friend would try to smile more, to keep the holiday spirit aloft, to hug them more, to fold them into her arms so tightly that they might somehow magically become attached to her heart, never to have to leave.

How this translated to life in the kitchen was sometimes unusual. The exhaustion of keeping the everyday dancing along moved itself right into the pantry and larder. Things would be forgotten from the grocers, and other things cooked which, for some vague indefinable reason, nobody really wanted to eat.

And so it came to pass that one day very close to the time when the children would have to get on the plane with anxious faces and the determination to do right – it was suppertime, and supper was to be a soup. A rich soup, one they’d liked before. It was an Armenian meatball soup, from Arthur Schwarz’s soup book.

The table was readied, with wide soupbowls and warm savory bread. The soup was served. And nobody could stand it. It was wrong, wrong, wrong. It was simply wrong, and nobody really knew why. It was the same soup. But wrong.

Well, sometimes things are wrong.

How tired Faith was. And the children were cranky, understandably so. And hungry, too.

This soup was wrong, and not only that, there had been another soup not liked at all just several days earlier! A statement made, perhaps, about the current reality?

Faith looked at the other soup sitting in its covered bowl in the fridge. It was a lentil soup. “Why not?,” she thought. And she took the lentil soup, and took the meatball soup, and put them together in a big pot to heat and blend their flavors.

“Eat some bread,” she told her children.

And in about five minutes, or maybe seven – she walked towards the table with a small spoon in her hand, filled with the newly made Two Wrongs Soup. She fed one spoon into the doubting mouth of one child then went back and got another. Faith lifted that spoon into the mouth of the other scowling child.

And the scowls and the doubt softened. And so it went, for the rest of the meal. Faith scooted around the table shooting spoonfuls of the Two Wrongs Soup into the now-laughing mouths of the children, who loved every bite.

When the children got on the plane that year to leave Faith alone for the holidays, each one had been fed with something which started out very wrong, but worked out very right. Faith still had no faith herself in this thing called ‘the holidays’ but even within it all, there was the table of that evening of the soups.

And that was good.

We Live With Our Vegetable Friends

That line of William Blake’s – “Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow” is so true, in general! And yet as with all things on this earth, there is the exception which proves the rule. Amédéé Varin’s vegetable universe of 1840 certainly takes on the role of no shadow to imagination – it dwells instead rather deeply and brightly within it.

Rather than add words, it’s best perhaps to just enjoy the scene . . .

Here is more on Varin