What I Talk About

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

January 16, 2010 at 8:52 pm (Art, Food Culture) (Art, Feast Days, Feast of St. Anthony, Food, Food and Religion, St. Anthony)

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.

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A Cake of Letters for the Season

December 14, 2009 at 11:35 am (Art, Culinary, Food Art, Food Symbolism, Global Food Culture, Seasonal Foods) (Art, Baking, Christmas Cakes, Desserts, Food, Food Art, Food History, Lettergebak)

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!

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Gettin’ Buttery Wid It

December 8, 2009 at 10:59 am (Agriculture, Animal to Food, Art, Culture, Enterprise, Food History) (Butter, Food, Food Art, Food History)

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?

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Men in Aprons

November 29, 2009 at 10:09 am (Art, Books, Culture, History, Social Aspiration) (Aprons, Art, Culture, henry james, History, Princess Casamassima, Work Clothes)

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.

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It’s All About The Herring

November 21, 2009 at 10:28 pm (Art, Food History, Food Symbolism, Gastronomy) (Food History, Herring in Art, Philosophy of Art, Red Herring, Sophistry)

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?

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We Live With Our Vegetable Friends

November 15, 2009 at 10:43 am (Art, Beauty, Books, Food Art, Food History, Food and Magical Thinking, Global Food Culture) (19th Century Surrealism, Amadee Varin, Anthropomorphism, Food and Meaning, Food Art, Humor, Imagination, Vegetable Art, Vegetable Illustration)

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

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When Two Wrongs Make a Right

November 8, 2009 at 12:39 pm (Cooking, Family, Food and Magical Thinking) (Cooking Mistakes, Family, Leftovers, Life, Loss, Soup)

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 can’t catch it to do anything to it at times. 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 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 at this primal bright time of year felt like strange moonbeams entering the 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 in the kitchen was sometimes unusual. The exhaustion of keeping the everyday dancing along moved itself into the pantry and larder, where at times there would be things forgotten from the grocers, other things cooked which for some vague indefinable reason nobody really wanted to eat.

And so it came to pass that one day 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’ Soup Book.

The table was readied with 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 so taken to several days earlier! A statement perhaps made about the current reality?

Faith looked at the other soup sitting in its 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 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 scowling other 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 to leave Faith for the holidays alone, 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.

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

November 2, 2009 at 9:52 am (Art) (Basil, Blood Orange, Food and Meaning, Food in Art, Food in Poetry, Food Symbolism, Herbs, Isabella, Keats)

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

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

October 24, 2009 at 9:17 pm (Art, Food Art, Food and Magical Thinking) (Food in Art, Mushrooms)

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!

Amédée_Varin_-_L'Empire_des_légumes_2

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

October 19, 2009 at 10:08 am (Food, Food Literature, Food and Magical Thinking, Gastronomy) (Fictional Doctors, Folk Remedies, Food Writing, Food Writing Topics. Mushrooms)

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.

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

October 19, 2009 at 8:31 am (American Food, Books, Culture, Food Literature, Poetry) (1932, Food and Drink, Food Writing, Food Writing Topics, Literature, Louis Untermeyer, Poetry, Writing)

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.

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

October 18, 2009 at 10:02 am (Agriculture, Art, Current Affairs, Food, Food Art, Food Culture, Food History, Food Media, Food Symbolism, Gastronomy, Global Food Culture, History) (Art History, Culture, Food History, Food Writing, Food Writing Topics, Potatoes, Van Gogh, Van Gogh Museum, Writing)

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.

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Food Writing Topic # 4 – Ways of Foods within Braucherie

October 17, 2009 at 10:03 am (American Food, Food Culture, Food History, History, Traditions) (Braucherie, Culture, Folklife, Food History, Food Writing, Food Writing Topics, Foodways, Healing Arts, Herbalism, Penn Dutch, Traditions)

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.

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Food Writing Topic #3 – De re Rustica Donuts

October 16, 2009 at 2:06 pm (Books, Cooking, Culinary, Culture, Enterprise, Food History, Food Literature, Food Media, Gastronomy, History, Recipes) (Cato the Elder, De re Rustica, Donuts, Food History, Food Writing, Food Writing Topics, Writing)

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?

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Food Writing Topic #2 – Ruth Harkness

October 16, 2009 at 1:22 pm (Food History, Food Literature, Food Media, Gastronomy) (Food Writing, Food Writing Topics, Gastronomy, Giant Panda, Gourmet Magazine, Ruth Harkness, Travel Writing 1940's, Writing)

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).

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Food Writing Topic #1: Louis P. De Gouy

October 16, 2009 at 12:04 pm (Food History, Food Literature, Food Media, Gastronomy) (Cookbook Authors, Food Writing, Food Writing Topics, Gastronomy, Gourmet Magazine, Louis P. De Gouy, Writing)

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.

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‘Waste Not, Want Not’

October 15, 2009 at 10:50 am (Enterprise, Food, Food Art, Food Culture, Global Food Culture, Seasonal Foods) (Canning and Preserving, Food History, Food Preservation and Storage)

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.”)

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It Takes an Industrial Revolution to Make a Tender Dragee

October 13, 2009 at 3:50 pm (Enterprise, Gastronomy, History) (Cake Decorations, Dragees, Food History, Food Manufacturing, Food Preservation, Sugar)

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.

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Snipping the Pages of Gourmet

October 13, 2009 at 2:45 am (Cooking, Culinary) (Cooking, Gourmet Magazine, Learning to Cook, Magazines, Recipes)

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.)

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Neither Fish Nor Flesh Nor Good Red Herring

October 8, 2009 at 9:49 am (Animal to Food, Culture, Food, Food History, Food Politics, Food and Magical Thinking, Gastronomy, Philosophy, Religion, Traditions) (Beaver Tail, Belief, Fish Nor Flesh, Food, Food and Religion, Food History, 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.

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Not Your Average Cup of Jo

October 7, 2009 at 10:09 am (American Food, Art, Cooking, Culture, Family, Food, Food and Magical Thinking) (Cooking, Culture, Family, Food, Italian-American Cooking, Mothers)

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.

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

October 6, 2009 at 1:05 pm (Culture) (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!!!

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Van Gogh’s Potatoes

October 1, 2009 at 8:32 pm (Art, Food) (Art, Food, Potatoes, Van Gogh)

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Whole Lotta Be-Heading Going On

October 1, 2009 at 9:53 am (Culture, History) (Feast Days, Meal Planning, Religion and Food, Two-Headed Things)

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, Macedonian Serbian 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!)

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Warming Your Toes and Eating Them Too

September 30, 2009 at 8:32 pm (Food, Recipes) (Food, Offal, Pasta, Pig's Feet, Recipes, Trotters, Warming Foods)

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.

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Fire

September 29, 2009 at 6:40 pm (Art, Cooking, Food, Food Art, Food Culture, Food History, Philosophy) (Cooking, Fire, Food, Food in Art, Food Studies, Richard Wrangham)

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.

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Or the Golden Bowl be Broken – and Soup

September 22, 2009 at 11:46 am (Family, Food and Drink, Poetry, Survival) (Belief, Family, Food and Meaning, Hope, Soup, The Golden Bowl)

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?

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Russian Tea

September 19, 2009 at 10:12 pm (Art, Food History, Food and Drink, History, Manners)

Ryabushkin_tea

Чаепитие_в_Мытищах,_близ_Москвы

Kustodiev_Merchants_Wife

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Get Me To The Kasha On Time

August 21, 2009 at 9:07 am (Culture, Family, Food and Drink, Religion) (Breakfast, Buckwheat, Food, Jewish Food, Kasha, Religion, Romance)

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.

Fruit Cocktail: Does it Suck?

August 19, 2009 at 8:34 am (Culture, Enterprise, Food History, Food and Drink) (American Food, Ethical Food, Food, Food History, Food Politics, Fruit, Fruit Cocktail)

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.

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Farming: Lovin’ It?

August 13, 2009 at 4:19 pm (Agriculture, Commitment, Culture, Enterprise, Food History, Food and Drink, History, Survival) (Agriculture, Back to the Land, Culture, Food History)

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?

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Cooking Classes in Cotton Mills One Hundred Years Ago

August 12, 2009 at 9:30 am (Culture, Education, Enterprise, Food History, Food and Drink) (American Culture, Cooking Classes, Cotton Mills, Food History, Women's History)

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.

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Quantifications for the Five Minute Faux Foodie by Katerina la Vermintz

July 15, 2009 at 5:02 pm (Food Culture, Foodie) (Foodie, 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?

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The Five Minute Faux Foodie by Katerina la Vermintz

July 14, 2009 at 6:40 pm (Food Culture) (Foodie, 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

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Sonnets: Let Not My Food Love Be Called Idolatry

July 8, 2009 at 11:36 pm (Eating, Food) (Food, Food Poetry)

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!

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We Knew You Before You Were Famous

July 8, 2009 at 12:55 pm (American Food, Foodie) (Rock Star Butchers)

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.

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Return of the Native

July 5, 2009 at 9:37 pm (Food) (Brooklyn Heights, Dining Culture, Family, Henry's End)

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.

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

June 25, 2009 at 4:02 pm (Food Culture, Food Politics) (Food, Food Fear)

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.

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Picnic!

June 23, 2009 at 9:03 pm (Cooking, Recipes) (Food, Online Picnic, Picnic Recipes)

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!

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The Winged Pig

June 22, 2009 at 7:43 pm (Food Culture, Food History) (Alphabet, Food, Pigs, Poetry, Pork)

The sturdy letter ‘A’ starts the alphabet and so we must begin with sturdy things. For a piggy alphabet ‘angel’ will not do. Instead we must go straight to ‘animelles’. Animelles are a part of the piggy but not a part of the sow. But more on this later, perhaps. It has been a difficult task to write a piggy alphabet after the virtuouso performance by Suzy Oakes of whatamieating.com shown in the sixth comment on the previous post. But here goes:

A – animelles

B – brawn (follows along nicely after animelles)

C – caul fat which I love or crackling bread which I may love even more

D – devilled, which is a method of cooking pig’s feet

E – et tu, brute which is what you should say when you meet a pig

F – fidget pies

G – gelee

H – humorous, because pigs are

I – intestines

J – James. Jane Grigson writes that ‘This bland combination of pork, prunes, cream and the white wine of Vouvray embodies what Henry James described as ‘the good humoured and succulent Touraine’.”

K – kidneys

L – lights and lungs

M – mesentary

N – nose ring

O – O! O oO! O! is the common sound made by someone the first time they taste a whole roast pig.

P – Pen

Q – Quiet, which a pig is not

R – Rooting

S – St. Anthony, the patron saint of sausage-makers

T – Tourtiere

U – Urban Foragers which is what pigs were, in the streets of New York City back in ‘olden times’

V – Vauban, who at one time calculated that in twelve years ‘a sow could accumulate 6,434,838 descendants‘

W – Wienerbeuscherl

X -Xanthippe, who married Socrates who wrote “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied“

Y – yippeee! is the appropriate response when good barbecued ribs appear

Z – zabaglione is an excellent dessert to eat after roast pork.

Yes, the pig took wing. It was a stretch, but the alphabet is done.

Charles Monselet has a poem for us!

For all is good in thee;

Thy flesh, thy lard, thy muscles and thy tripe!

As galantine thou’rt loved, as blood pudding adored.

A saint has, of they feet, created the best type

Of trotters. And, from the Périgord,

The soil has blessed thee with so sweet a scent

It could have woo’d Xanthippe, all her anger spent

To join with Socrates, whom elsewise she abhorred

In worship of this lord

Of animals, dear hog: angelic meat, say we.

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Pigs, Unblanketed

June 20, 2009 at 9:49 pm (Culinary) (Alphabet, Eating, Food, Pig, Pork)

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.

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

June 19, 2009 at 8:22 am (Food) (Cantus Circaeus, Cooking, Eating, Food, Learning, Memory, Pork)

‘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?

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Haute Jello

June 16, 2009 at 7:22 pm (Food Culture) (Food and Fashion, 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.

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Fruit, Apron, Poem, Recipe

June 15, 2009 at 5:53 pm (Cooking, Culinary, Food) (Food, Poetry, Recipe Writing)

Take one part poem (in this case Christopher Marlowe). Add fruit, other ingredients, slip on apron and stir well. Voila! Recipe.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies;
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair linèd slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs.
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my Love.

Ingredients (found in poem):
Rosewater
Bay leaves
Lamb
Saffron
Watercress
Mango
Hazelnuts

Directions:
Make a pilaf seasoned gently with roses (rosewater), purest gold (saffron) and other aromatic vegetables.

Take pretty lambs (chops or butterflied leg) and cover them (marinate in olive oil) with leaves of myrtle (bay leaves).

Grill pretty lambs over straw or charcoal till no longer wooly.
Dress with gown (salad) made of ivy buds (watercress), coral clasps (mango dice) and amber studs (toasted hazelnuts).

Sauce with love at time of service.

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On The Virtues of One and Keeping the Pastisio Fires Burning

June 15, 2009 at 8:58 am (Food Literature, Global Food Culture) (Cookbooks, Craig Claiborne, Food, Pastisio)

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.

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Les Livres Qui Reste(nt) Ici

June 13, 2009 at 8:00 pm (Culinary, Food, Food Literature) (Books, Food History, Waverly Root)

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.

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Wherefore Art Thou, Book of my Dreams?

June 11, 2009 at 11:12 am (Food Literature) (Body Image, Books, Cookbooks)

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.

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Pippi Karen-Stocking’s Big Adventure

June 5, 2009 at 9:14 am (Global Food Culture) (Adventures, Africa, Burundi, Children's Literature, Narrative and Reality, Pippi Longstocking, White Gloves)

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!

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On Eating Something to Understand It

June 2, 2009 at 4:27 pm (Cooking, Eating, Food Culture, Food History) (Food, Francis Trevelyan Buckland, Zoophagy)

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 . . . .

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

May 28, 2009 at 8:33 am (American Food, Cooking, Food Culture, Seasonal Foods) (Creasy Greens, Food, Foraging, Gardening, Greens, Ramps, Vegetables)

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!

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

May 26, 2009 at 8:26 am (Eating, Food Culture, Food History, Global Food Culture) (Bush Meat, Exotic Meat, Food, Rhinoceros, Wild Game)

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.

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

May 24, 2009 at 10:22 am (Food Culture) (Eating, Food, Rhinoceros)

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).

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I'll Have a Violet-Sweet Potato Latte Please

May 15, 2009 at 8:18 am (Culinary, Food, Global Food Culture) (Flavor Balances, Food, Latte, Mochi, Strange Food, Sweet Potatoes, Tim Burton, Violet Food)

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!

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Moira Tuscanaro: A Cat’s Philosophy of Cooking

April 14, 2009 at 1:03 am (Cooking, Food) (Cats, Cooking, Food, Moira Tuscanaro)

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.

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

February 28, 2009 at 11:15 am (Cooking, Eating, Food, Food Media) (Cooking, Cooks, Food, Food and Science, Food Culture)

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.

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I Would Not Eat an Axolotl

February 27, 2009 at 6:50 am (Eating, Food, Food Culture, Food Symbolism) (Axolotl, Food Poetry)

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.

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Big Fish Eat Little Fish – Van der Heyden Views Dinner

February 5, 2009 at 4:47 pm (Eating, Food, Food Art, Food Culture, Food Symbolism, Recipes) (Food, Food and Philosophy, Food and Proverbs, Food in Art, Lent and Fish)

‘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.

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

February 2, 2009 at 4:57 pm (Eating, Food, Food Art, Food Media, Food Symbolism) (Food, Surrealism, Surrealism in Food, 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

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Gammon and Spinnage: The Grocery Store

January 29, 2009 at 9:58 am (American Food, Food, Food Culture) (American Culture, Food, Gammon and Spinach, Grocery Shopping, Recipe, Words and Phrases)

“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.

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

January 27, 2009 at 6:03 pm (American Food, Cooking, Food, Food Culture, Food History) (Cooking, Cooking Fuels, Cowboy Cooking, Food, Food History, Son-of-a-Bitch-Stew)

You’ll have to see it to believe it:

Extreme History – Cooking on the Chisholm Trail

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

January 22, 2009 at 12:22 pm (American Food, Cooking, Food, Food Culture, Food History, Food Media, Gastronomy) (Banana Pie, Cooking, Food, Food History, Food in the 1940's, Gourmet Magazine, Tino Rossi, Vintage TV Ads, Wild Foods)

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:

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

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

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

January 13, 2009 at 6:58 pm (Food, Food Culture, Food Literature, Food Media) (American Food Writing, Food, Food Literature, 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.

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Perfection Salad: Perfect? Or Perfidious.

January 13, 2009 at 9:23 am (American Food, Cooking, Food, Food History) (American Food, Cold Foods, Food, Gelatin, Jello, Perfection, Salads, Vintage, Vintage Recipes)

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

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Entre Lenotre

January 11, 2009 at 7:05 pm (Cooking, Creative Non-Fiction, Culinary, Food, Food Culture, Gastronomy) (Chefs, Cooking, Culinary, Food, Gaston Lenotre, Lenotre, Memoir, Pastry Chefs, Professional Cooking, Restaurant Culture, Women in the Kitchen)

(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 . . .)

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Gaston Lenotre, A Kitchen, A Chef or Two

January 10, 2009 at 12:14 pm (American Food, Creative Non-Fiction, Culinary, Food, Food Culture, Gastronomy) (Cooking, Food, Gaston Lenotre, Lenotre, Memoir, Pastry Chefs, Professional Cooking, Restaurant Culture, Women in the Kitchen)

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.

……………………………………………………………………………..

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 . . .)

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Gaston Lenotre 1920-2009

January 9, 2009 at 4:44 pm (Culinary, Food, Food Culture, Food History, Gastronomy) (Chefs, Culianary, Food, Gaston Lenotre, Pastry, Restaurant Culture)

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.

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Payard’s Chocolate Epiphany

January 6, 2009 at 10:06 am (Book Review, Cooking, Food, Gastronomy) (Baking, Book Review, Chocolate, Cookbooks, Cooking, Desserts, Food, Pastries and Cakes, Payard)

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.

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

January 4, 2009 at 6:04 pm (Cooking, Food, Food Literature) (Amblongus, Cooking, Crumbobblious, Edward Lear Recipes, Food, Gosky Patties, Nonsense)

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.

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I’m Not Just Here For The Food

January 2, 2009 at 10:57 pm (Food Culture, Food Politics) (Barry Fig, Food, Food Philosophy, Food Politics, Women and 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
…………………………………………………………………………..

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.

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

January 1, 2009 at 1:31 pm (Cooking, Food Culture, Global Food Culture, Recipes) (Back in the USSR, Branston P.I. (C.K.L.E.), Cooking, Food, New Years Day Food, Picnics, Russian Food)

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.

………………………………………………………………..

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

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

December 30, 2008 at 10:06 pm (Cooking, Global Food Culture, Recipes) (Cooking, Desserts, Food, Roly Poly Pudding, Samuel Whiskers)

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!

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

December 30, 2008 at 11:57 am (Food Symbolism) (Food, Food Philosophy, Food Symbolism)

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.

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

December 29, 2008 at 12:17 pm (Food Politics, Total Mysteries) (Artisan, Bubblegum, Candy, Food, Food Politics, Locavorism)

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.

…………………………………………………………………………………..

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

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This Ain't No McDojo Drunkard

December 28, 2008 at 6:09 pm (Food Art, Food Media) (Food in Cinema, Kung Fu Films, Over-Imbibing, Wine)

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

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

December 27, 2008 at 11:15 pm (Book Review, Food Literature, Food Media) (Book Review, Deborah Madison, Edible - An Illustrated Guide to World Food Plants, Food, Food Books, Food Literature)

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.

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

December 23, 2008 at 10:14 am (Foodie, Global Food Culture) (Chocolate Shoe, Christmas, Food, Food and Fashion, Happiness, Paris)

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.

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This Mother is Mine, At Christmas and Forever

December 20, 2008 at 9:59 pm (Creative Non-Fiction) (Christmas, Christmas Story, Creative Non-Fiction, Mothers, Women and Culture)

(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.
………………………………………………………………………………

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.

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Jingle Foodies: A Quiz on the Foods of the Season

December 20, 2008 at 1:06 pm (Cooking, Food Culture, Food History, Food Media) (Christmas Foods, Food, Food Media, Foodie)

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!

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Gopher, As Food or Inspiration

December 19, 2008 at 12:17 pm (Food History, Recipes) (Food, Gopher, Wild Foods)

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.

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The Christmas of My Second Mother

December 19, 2008 at 10:42 am (Creative Non-Fiction) (Christmas, Christmas Story, Stories, Women and Culture)

(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)

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I Never Felt This Way About Tacos

December 18, 2008 at 8:55 pm (Total Mysteries) (Food, Silliness)

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One Mother’s Christmas

December 18, 2008 at 9:24 am (Creative Non-Fiction) (Christmas, Christmas Story, Women and Culture)

(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)

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Three Mothers, Three Magis and some Magic

December 17, 2008 at 10:10 am (Creative Non-Fiction) (Christmas, Christmas Story, Magic, Mothers, Names, Three Magi)

(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)

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The Way of Three Mothers at Christmas

December 16, 2008 at 11:11 pm (Creative Non-Fiction) (Christmas, Christmas Story, Mothers, Three Wise Men, Women and Culture)

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)

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The Ballontine Marches Forward

December 15, 2008 at 7:59 pm (Food Culture, Food History, Recipes) (Ballontine, Cooking, Food, Food History, Old Cookbooks)

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!

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Fighting the Ballontine (or 'The Meaty Nightmare')

December 14, 2008 at 10:38 am (Cooking) (Ballontine, Christmas Foods, Cooking, Food, Meat)

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.

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Sugarplums are Fast Food

December 13, 2008 at 5:06 pm (Food History, Recipes, Seasonal Foods) (Fast Food, Fast Food Feminist, Food History, Food Philosophy, Sugarplums)

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!

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The Cat Who Came Home (for Christmas?)

December 12, 2008 at 7:28 pm (Total Mysteries) (Cats, Lost Cats Returning Home)

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.

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

December 10, 2008 at 8:57 pm (American Food) (Christmas Foods, Clam Dip, Food, Food as Symbol)

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.

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A Better Stove for Half the World?

December 8, 2008 at 10:38 pm (Global Food Culture) (Cooking Technologies, Food, Global Food Culture)

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.

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

December 8, 2008 at 10:13 am (Food Art) (Chocolate, Culinary, Fashion, Food, Food Art, Food Conferences Gatherings and Activities, Mental Floss, Short Stories, Style, Superheroes)

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.

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

December 6, 2008 at 11:32 am (Book Review, Recipes) (Book Review, Cookbooks, Culinary, Food, Food Encyclopedias and Resources, Food Media, James Beard, Recipes)

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’.

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School Cafeteria Food is Not Why Kids Can’t Read

December 5, 2008 at 10:21 am (Food Politics) (Education, Food, Food Politics, Not Exactly or Precisely Food, Teaching)

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.

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Food Art in Gastronomica

December 4, 2008 at 5:19 pm (Food Art) (Food Art, Food in Art, Food Media, 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!

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On Just Another Day in New York and Dangers

September 11, 2009 at 12:07 pm (Current Affairs)

On September 11th the school secretary pointed to her computer screen as I stood there after dropping off my children that morning at the small rural elementary school. The children were then in Kindergarten and Second Grade. An airplane flew into the side of the World Trade Center as I watched the screen. It didn't seem real.

The words that came out of my mouth will probably shock you.

"Just another day in New York," I said, and turned to walk out of the office to go home.

"Just another day in New York" meant a lot of things to me. It meant that I'd lived in the city from when I arrived there as a throwaway/runaway at the age of fourteen years old. It meant that I'd not only survived as a fourteen year old to become someone more than double that age, but it also meant that I had thrived there in ways, and had opportunities that never could have been found in other places.

It meant that before leaving New York I'd been assaulted while walking up the beautiful tree-lined street in the 'good' neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights where I lived, lifted up by the neck and shaken as if I were a rag doll in the hands of a destructive toddler on a rampage. He wanted my money. I gave it to him.

"Just another day in New York," meant that the year before I left New York, I'd had an intruder come in through my back window overlooking the pretty garden while I was taking a nap on a Sunday afternoon. He wanted my purse. He got it. The neighbors were calling out to me as he somehow clambered down the back wall of the brownstone from the second floor – a true cat-burglar. I thanked them and went to call the cops.

"Just another day in New York," is what I thought to myself at that time also – more or less. I had no cash in the house, and he'd stolen my bank and credit cards. My worry was how was I going to buy a token to get on the subway to get to work the next day.

Well, obviously I found a way, and life went on.

"Just another day in New York," means a lot of things. It means that life, in New York, can be fast and hard and demanding and as dangerous as quicksand. It means that, in this time in history – when a person in this country for the most part can choose to live wherever they want to – it means that New York City has some thing, some rather magical thing – which draws people to it and which then keeps them there, not imagining they could ever want to live anywhere else.

Fact is, this city is alive – alive in ways that other places are not! It lives, it breathes, it talks, it shouts – and it does so with every emotion available to the human race.

"Just another day in New York." I went home that morning to the big house with the pool and the 18 acres, the place where I stayed way out in the countryside because that is where my husband had chosen to live, because he liked it and because I had agreed to it. And where mostly I was alone with my two young children, because he was not there due to business travel.

I turned on the TV and watched the second plane hit the side of the building – and this time I was horrified. Not just another day in New York.

Less than three months later I learned, from a phone call that came to my house rather than to my husband's personal phone – that he had been living with another woman during all that time I'd been taking care of our life out there in the countryside. Not the simpler aspects of playing house that people sometimes do, but actually living with, day by day – during these times where he had told me he was away on business.

Danger can come in ways large or ways small. It can happen in a rough and ready city or out in the pretty countryside where the cows look dolorous and the meadow flowers pretty. There are some places where danger is a part of daily life. Many people do not expect danger, but many people are actually expectant of it, for it is what they have seen and experienced in the places they live – either in their geographic or in their personal internal space.

"Just another day in New York," says more than all that, though. It says that somewhere here there is a greatness to be found, that somewhere here is a spirit that includes and celebrates and builds so very well that, even as it painfully gazes upon the ugly writhing face of terrorism large or small, "Just another day in New York". It says mouthfuls. Huge, air-filled, gulping mouthfuls.

It says surviving and thriving. It says life ain't easy. It swears like a taxi driver and with the accents of the guy at the deli counter. It gets you an espresso faster than a cat's eye can blink and it has a wonderful Brooklyn accent. Its speech patterns are reflective prisms of every place across the world and it's a kid from nowhere looking into the Cartier's window in wonder and disbelief.

It's hot dogs and bagels and caviar. And sometimes it's a plane set into motion aimed to hit you where it hurts.

………………………………………………………………………………………………..

My thoughts go out to all New Yorkers today and to everyone else who somewhere, have had a plane hit their own skyscraper of whatever architectural variety.

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Naming the Prodigal Cookbooks

August 24, 2009 at 6:35 pm (Books) (Books, Cookbooks)

Each one of these books left my shelves at one point or another, due to moving here or there hither and yon and not being able to carry all the books along – or from winnowing with the thought 'I never ever use this book'.

And yet somehow I've bought the same books again, at book sales when they appear before me.

1. Food for the Emperor by John D. Keys – A cute little book with recipes not overwrought and overextended. A simple collection of Chinese recipes yet somehow chosen with a deft touch towards some of the more theatrical or surprising dishes existing in the Chinese array of home recipes. I like it because the cover is black and shiny, the book is square, and overall the entire thing is elegant and useful, including the masterfully chosen quotes. This was the first Chinese cookbook I ever owned. Reason for choosing it as a prodigal return to the shelves: Memory.

2. The Art of Italian Cooking by Maria lo Pinto – A very basic Italian cookbook with surprising touches here and there in the recipes that cause them to shy away from the norm such as little bits of anchovies or cloves in places in the recipes other books would not have them placed. No fluff or drama, just good simple food. Reason for choosing it as a prodigal return to the shelves: Respect.

3. The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth by Roy Andries de Groot – One of the great travel tales of wandering through France while learning the Way of the Gourmand. A serious book and a romantic one. I've read it several times but have not read it yet with the knowledge discovered some time over the years past that the author was legally blind. Reason for choosing it as a prodigal return to the shelves: Curiosity.

4. The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins - Uh. The biggie of the past New Age of a certain sort of food. Expansive, cute, smart. Reason for choosing it as a prodigal return to the shelves: Can't think of one. It might be the bright red cover.

5. The Good Cook – Salads: Time-Life Series – Salads hot cold and everything in between. A good basic book with a little of everything. Reason for choosing it as a prodigal return to the shelves: Desire to see three recipes I could not exactly remember how written in the book. So it must be Forgetfulness.

6. James Beard's Fish Cookery – When Jim Beard wrote a cookbook or an article about food, it was thorough – or as thorough as any single person could stand in one easy sitting. I had a hankering to see his recipe for codfish balls with bacon. Reason for choosing it as a prodigal return to the shelves: Friendship.

7. La Cucina delle Regioni d'Italia – Trento – These little cardboard covered books on regional Italian food are charming. Half in Italian, half in English, small prints and colored paintings interspersed with sprawling poetry and recipes, the series is a testament to the delightfully unfettered. I had about six or seven of these books and gave them away. Recently someone told me that those volumes were worth several hundred dollars each. Reason for choosing it as a prodigal return to the shelves: Warning. (Think more before you give?)

My Prodigal Books all have their tales. They sit on my shelves and whether I use them to cook with or not, they speak to me. Of days past of days well spent of days squandered and of days where a final rest has come with a return to the place where the tales began.

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Fruit, Apron, Poem, Recipe: Pied Beauty (Gerard Manley Hopkins)

August 16, 2009 at 9:25 pm (Beauty, Food and Drink, Poetry, Religion) (Cooking, Food, Poetry, Recipes)

Glory be to God for dappled things -

For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firewood chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Ingredients (found in poem)

Well-marbled steak (brindled cow)

Waterchestnuts (chestnut falls)

Golden chanterelle mushrooms (finches’ wings)

Pear (whatever is freckled)

Chili-Tamarind Sauce (sweet, sour)

Steamed White Rice (whose beauty is past change)

Directions

Place brindled cow (well-marbled steak) on grill till heaven approaches with aromas bold in a pink-centered imperfection.

As brindled cow passively beckons its destiny, approach hellfire with sturdy pan and steady hand. Rapidly consign chestnut falls and finches’ wings (waterchestnuts and golden chanterelle mushrooms) to fiery brimstone along with toss of sweet oil in sturdy pan. With steady hand lead the dance of a well-informed jig.

Add whatever is freckled (thick slice of hard winter pear), being sure to crisp its curves and warm its heart.

Pool the sweet, sour (chili-tamarind sauce) on a plate of willing design then denounce the martyred steak upon it. Chestnut falls, finches’ wings, and freckled things (waterchestnuts, golden chanterelles, and pear) should glorify in circular testament to a fine edibility. Allow space for that whose beauty is past change to be included (steamed white rice).

Pray or not, as you wish. Lift pitchfork and pierce delicately to eat.

………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Another Fruit, Apron, Poem, Recipe can be found here at foodvox.

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Pig-Sticking

August 3, 2009 at 12:40 pm (Animal to Food, Books, Culture, Gamesmanship, History, Hunting, Traditions) (Ding-Dong Gallop, Hunting, Pig-Sticking)

A few days ago the words 'pig-sticking' came into my mind. It was as if the goddess of wonderful phrases had placed the words there to muse over. So naturally I got my happy feet on to go exploring among the pig-sticking ways.

Pig-sticking is a form of hunting pigs or hogs. It is not much done anymore since hunting with firearms is more effective for most hunters out of practice with pig-sticking ways. Likely it is more in the category of sport hunting than the other kind where the meat is desired more than the glory (or at the very least, as much as the glory).

Lord Baden-Powell of Gilwell (who has seventeen capital letters attached to the end of his name signifying some assumed-to-be-wonderful things about himself) attended to the business of describing pig-sticking in his book 'Lessons from the Varsity of Life' in 1924.

Here is a sketch made by Baden-Powell of the activity followed by a few notes (also by him) on the sport.

"He is plucky and tough, as fast as a horse, and can jump
where a horse cannot. He stands as high as a table, is long in the leg, and very muscular.
He doesn't hesitate to swim a river, even when it is inhabited by crocodiles; he seems to
think that the crops which the natives raise of melons, sugar cane' grain, etc., are meant
for him to devour, which he does extensively, and if a native objects he knocks him down
and tries to disembowel him with his murderous tusks.
Well, that is the fellow we hunt in India on horseback
with spears, and there is no sport can touch hog-hunting for excitement or valuable
training.

THE HUNT
Three or four riders form a " party." Beaters
drive the pig out of his lair in the jungle, and the party then race after him, but for
the first three-quarters of a mile he can generally outpace them.
The honours then go to the man who can first come up with
and spear him. But so soon as- the boar finds himself in danger of being overtaken he
either " jinks," that is, darts off sideways, or else turns round and charges
his pursuer."

There are many more things to be learned in this monograph. You can learn what 'coming a cropper' is, and about the Prince of Wales' hunting skills, and even better can muse on the additional phrase 'We had a ding-dong gallop.'

Yes, I do think this pig-sticking thing is a ding-dong gallop!

Link to Baden-Powell's story

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What I Talk About When I Talk About Cooking

July 29, 2009 at 8:31 pm (Food and Drink) (Cooking, Food, Writing)

What I talk about when I talk about cooking is love, friendship, hatred, commitment, fear and loathing, enterprise, history, survival, snobbery, craftsmanship, gamesmanship, culture, manners, myth, vocation, greed, fashion, desire, social aspiration, personality, professionalism, family, men and women, feminism, beauty, traditions, religion, art, poetry, the power of story.

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Candy with Manna in It

April 20, 2009 at 12:06 am (Foods with Manna as Ingredient) (Candy with Manna)

Here it is. Nice music!

More information on the whole thing here.

Another brand, which sounds like it came from The Hobbit – can be found here.

It says, about this candy:

Simplicity - Net Wt. 2oz. (56g) $8.95 Cacao Beans, Cacao Butter, Agave Nectar, Vanilla Bean, Crystal Manna, Love. (may contain traces of nuts)

Very possibly. But what a nice profit!

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The American Chestnut Trade as Manna

April 19, 2009 at 7:18 pm (Interesting Stories, Manna as Idea) (American Chestnuts, American History Cooperative, Food History, Manna, Southwest Virginia History)

Sounds like it in this story . . .

The nuts were important to people living in the southern Appalachian mountains and, as in Europe, they were especially important to the poorer residents. When the nuts matured and fell from the trees in September and October, the ground often was covered inches deep with them. People gathered them and either ate them immediately or stored them after setting the nuts in the sun to dry. When dry nuts were stored, steps had to be taken to prevent weevil damage, because their larvae commonly infested the nuts. The nuts might be heated in boiling water, or preserved with salt.¹⁴ They were eaten fresh, boiled, roasted, baked, or ground into flour.¹⁵ Partially dried nuts were particularly appreciated, because of their increased sweetness. 15

The task of collecting the nuts was often a delight to children, who remembered it fondly in their elder years. A Grayson County, Virginia, woman remembered:

On a windy night, we’d fall asleep dreaming of the ground covered with chestnuts which wind-shaken trees had let go. The next morning, breakfast was gulped down as we hurriedly put on old coats, caps and everyday shoes, grabbed buckets or baskets and headed for the closest big chestnut trees, calling back to remind our father to be sure to write an excuse for tardiness at school. Many of the nuts had already fallen out of open burrs and were hiding under masses of brown frostbitten leaves. Some were still inside of very prickly outside burrs but partly open revealing the velvet inside lining. Sometimes we had to use a foot to squash a burr to give up its fruit.¹⁶

16

To get the nuts, people often had to compete with animals, including domestic animals. “There was another chore that had to be taken care of on the farm,” wrote a Floyd County, Virginia, resident, “the picking up of chestnuts. You gathered the chestnuts, every one that you could get. If you didn’t have turkeys, you could get a pretty good supply. But you had to beat the turkeys to the chestnut tree in the morning if you were to get very many.” Another Blue Ridge resident recalled his impoverished childhood: “There was a time of year when we had food. That was in late fall after the gusty winds of a chestnut storm left the ground strewed with nuts. Pa and Ma would take us out by lantern light to beat the hogs to them.”¹⁷ 17

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A Conversation About Manna

April 18, 2009 at 1:10 pm (Defining Historically Edible Manna, Foods Named Manna) (eGullet, Food, Manna)

Here is a link to a conversation about manna held on eGullet. It’s called ‘Manna from Heaven – or rather, from Iraq’. I’m surprised I missed that conversation – it is an example of how eGullet could be, at its best.

There is a particularly interesting photo posted by Divina of the raw manna from Italy.

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More Bad Manna

April 17, 2009 at 5:48 pm (Food and Magical Thinking, Manna Gone Bad) (Confidence Tricksters, Food, Foodwriting, Manna, Religious Strangeness)

Why do I insist on writing about bad manna?

Simply because it exists, that’s why. Apparently, manna – like food – can be used in different ways that are not always full of love. What can I say. I’m rather sick and tired of people writing about food as if it were the Holy Grail – it all starts seeming just too much like an animated Disney movie. Food is food is food. And it’s a million other things. A tomato is not sacred unless you want it to be. Or if you are starving. And if people are talking in hushed reverential tones about that tomato, or those cookies, or that roast chicken – and they are not starving (or at the very least they are not starving for food) – then they are even loopier than I am. And that, is pretty loopy.

Here’s a link to manna used as a con:

Holding up two handfuls of letters, Clement says, “this is all different kinds of paperwork that Peter Popoff, prophet Peter Popoff has sent me.” Clement said the stack of letters is just a couple weeks’ worth of mailings. He’s already thrown out at least this much.

It all started when Clement’s roommates signed him up for Popoff’s miracle spring water as a joke. Clement was deluged – not with miracles – but with letters full of religious trinkets.

“Here is some miracle spring water,” he said while pawing through the letters. Then there’s, “a napkin with a picture of Jesus on it,” and also a tiny plastic baggy with some kind of white, crumbly material, “miracle manna cake is what it is.“

The religionification of food appears everywhere in the media of our culture today. The sense of food as somehow miraculous is heralded by the singing trumpets of foodwriters as if it were the Only Way. Or the Only Way for ‘Us’. Third-world countries are seemingly exempted from needing to feel miracles by the the foodwriters who pick up a dandelion leaf here in the midst of plenty to kiss it all over and bow to it.

Manna, of course, is a miracle. As a tomato may be.

But as I’ve said before (and I will find the source of the quote for it is one of my very favorites): “You can’t summon grace with a whistle.”

And if the everyday is imbued with sacred meaning by those who ache for the sacred – for whatever reason – then the con has begun, in some small way. And like the ‘little white lie’ in one of the VeggieTales stories . . . it will get bigger, and bigger and bigger till finally, it takes over.

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The Old Foodie Sends a Manna Tree

April 15, 2009 at 12:03 pm (Defining Historically Edible Manna) (1834, Food, Food History, Janet Clarkson, Manna, The Old Foodie)

Text not available

The other day I received a note from a friend. The note was filled with unexpected manna-things. Which was rather wonderful!

These manna-things were sent by Janet Clarkson, better known to her fans as The Old Foodie. I’m not sure where she found the time to find and send along manna-information to me – with a new book release Menus from History upcoming to edit . . . along with another one – The Pie – A Global History just published – but I’m glad she did, for right in front of your very eyes you will see that she sent along a gorgeous manna-tree.

The image comes from the 1834 issue of The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The story that goes along with the image describes at length what was involved in the collection of the manna-sugar from the tree in the year 1834. I wondered – what else happened that year?

The Whig Party is officially named by United States Senator Henry Clay.

The Spanish Inquisition, which began in the 15th century, is suppressed by royal decree.

Slavery is abolished in the British Empire (see Slavery Abolition Act).

The South Australia Act allows for the creation of a colony there.

The British East India Company monopoly on China trade ends.

Source: wiki

A rather calm year, all in all. But I’ll always think of it now with the exquisite illustration of the manna-tree from the Penny Magazine in my mind’s eye.

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Mrs. Beeton’s Manna (Croup) With an Added Touch of Darwin

April 14, 2009 at 5:17 pm (Foods Named Manna, Groceries) (Darwin's Letters, Eating, Food, Manna, Manna Croup, Mrs. Beeton's Puddings, Semolina)

I’m getting a bit peaked from lack of manna. The last time I managed to eat anything associated with manna was about a month ago. And it’s not from lack of trying.

So I was happy last night when I came across the inestimable Mrs. Beeton – who as is her wont, had an answer. ‘Mrs. Beeton’s Manna Croup Pudding’. I like pudding.

The recipe, linked here, says I need some manna croup to make it.

I haven’t seen manna croup on my grocer’s shelves so I had to find out what it was – and where to get it!

Mrs. Beeton had part of that answer for me, tucked away only as far as Chapter 42 of her tome.

2507. Semolina, or manna croup, being in little hard grains, like a fine millet-seed, must be boiled for some time, and the milk, sugar, and egg added to it on the fire, and boiled for a few minutes longer, and, when cold, used as the other preparations.

Semolina! Hey, I can handle that! And it won’t take Godly intercession, either!
I decided to see if there was any more information to be found on manna croup, and who should pop up but good old Darwin! Now Darwin does seem to be popping up everywhere lately, but how lovely to find him in a discussion of manna croup!

This is from a letter to Darwin from J.D. Hooker (who has a name like a snakeoil huckster to my mind), that starts of course with ‘My Dear Darwin,’ and goes on to say (among other things)

Seed of Glyceria fluitans is abundantly collected (from the wild plants) & eaten in Holland & Russia & exported also, being the true“Manna Croup”.—^f5 Zizania was & is eaten abundantly by N. Am Indians, but is not cult.^f6

I’m glad to know this but am now going to purposely forget about it and simply go back to plain semolina, for as I noted – I am getting a bit peaked here and want some pudding now rather than say, in four years or so by which time I might get all this sorted out.

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Poussin's 'Gathering of the Manna' – Une Histoire

April 13, 2009 at 5:21 pm (Art)

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More Manna in Art

April 10, 2009 at 1:28 pm (Art) (Food, Manna, Manna in Art)

I’ve decided to start a collection of manna art. The stories of money and politics hovering behind the artistry of these visual expressions of manna are interesting tales of intrigue and power in themselves! Some of these histories might be a topic for a later post. (To view the earlier post on manna art, just search the sidebar for ‘Art’ and clickey-clickey).

Alessandro Allori

Netherlandish (Antwerp Mannerist) Painter (Falling manna is on right side of triptych)

Aurelio Lomi

Nicholas Poussin

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Manna Found in October 2003

April 2, 2009 at 12:27 pm (Interesting Stories) (Belief, Food, Manna, Religion and Humor)

During my research the other day I came across a newspaper story from The Holy Observer dated October 15, 2003.

SINAI PENINSULA, EGYPT – In a startling new discovery that is turning the heads of biblical scholars and skeptics alike, manna—a nondescript bread-like eatable—has reportedly been found covering the ground each morning in a dry and desolate region outside of Serabit El-Khadem.

Hossam Almeleh, an anthropology student at the University of Cairo, was conducting a research project with Dr. Daunis Abadi and two of his classmates when he stumbled upon a 27-acre desert flat completely covered with a white bread-like substance.

I was pretty happy, let me tell you. Not only was manna around, but there was even a photograph of it! Granted, I thought to myself “This doesn’t look like the manna I’ve been reading about in any of the forms I’ve come across it so far, but then again it’s important to keep an open mind.”

There wasn’t time to read the whole story when I first found it, but today I’ve had the chance, and I’m totally thrilled by the whole thing! Here’s more from the story:

Locals from a small village nearby told reporters through a translator that the substance is food and they had been gathering and eating it each day for weeks.

While most people are only concerned with the cause of these events, some locals, who are the beneficiaries of the acres of manna, haven’t changed their attitudes in thousands of years.

“This sucks!” grumbled Josai, a farmer’s son. “Since this crap is free my parents barely let us eat anything else!” He added, “Me and my brother even have to gather it for them!”

Many people throughout the village share Josai’s perspective and wish it would just go away. One woman lamented, “If I have to eat these stupid honey wafers for forty days, let alone forty years, I think I’ll die.”

I was beginning to get a bit bewildered. Would it, could it, really happen that manna would appear and locals would say “This sucks!” (?)

There were some other thoughts offered in the article:

Dr. Martin Bleamer of Vanderbilt University is doubtful. He has been onsite in recent days studying the events in an attempt to explain this mystery. He comments, “Our goal right now is to reverse engineer a recipe for the bread so we can pinpoint its origin and maybe even patent a mannaburger.”

From belief to commerce in one easy step. Isn’t it wonderful!

For the full article, please view original source at The Holy Observer.

If you have time, you may want to read this, also.

Sometimes reading the fine print matters.

Now I’m off to figure out how to Twitter this story.

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Manna Found in New Jersey

March 26, 2009 at 9:47 pm (Foods Named Manna) (Cheeseburgers, Food, Manna, New Jersey Cheeseburgers, Vintage Fast Food Diners)

White Manna and White Mana are the names of two fast food diners in the U.S. state of New Jersey, named after manna, the Biblical food. They were originally opened by Louis Bridges, who purchased the original diner that was introduced in the 1939 New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Park, Queens.^[1] Both buildings were manufactured by Paramount Diners of Oakland, New Jersey in the late-1930s.^[2] Bridges owned five diners, all named “White Manna”.

The White Mana, located in Jersey City as a historical landmark and was the 1939 World’s Fair building, including the first Mana to open. When originally introduced, it was called the “diner of the future” and an “Introduction to Fast Food.”^[1] According to the present owner, Mario Costa, Jr., the reason for the difference in spelling was a result of an error when the sign was serviced.^[3] It is famous for its hamburgers and sells approximately 3,000 a week.^[4]

Source of quote? Why the ever-ready wiki, of course.

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Rogov Talks Manna

March 25, 2009 at 1:03 am (Interviews on Manna) (Daniel Rogov, Food, Food Philosophy, Gefilte Fish, Manna)

I caught up with Daniel Rogov, author of the manna cakes recipe I tried.

I’ve heard Rogov call himself a curmudgeon more than once, so was eager to see what sort of curmudgeonly thoughts he would have about manna.

Here’s what he said:

Q. What word comes immediately into your mind when you hear ‘manna’ (?)
A. Dessert

Q. Do you think of manna as something that offered ’salvation’ or as a thing that offered mere ’survival’ or as a combination of both or as something else (and if so, what would that be) (?)
A. Neither. A great symbolic myth.

Q. Is there a wine that would go well with the manna pancakes from your recipe?
A. Yup….Sauvignon Blanc or Champagne

Q. Is there any particular food or wine whose taste brings ‘manna’ to your mind?
A. Caramel crunchies

Q. Where should one go first, in real-life travels or in literature, when searching for manna?
A. One might do better to look for gefilte fish. Or, well, caviar.

Q. Do you have any thoughts to add to ‘Manna for Breakfast’?
A. Nope.

Q. If manna comes from heaven, does it bestow some essence of Godliness to those who consume it?
A. Is there a “:Heaven”? Is there a “God”?

Rogov’s done a great job in explaining what manna is, personally, to him. I’m going to think about his answers and maybe try some caramel crunchies. I’ve already had gefilte fish before in life and am not sure that should be the focus of my search, unless I can find a gefilte fish that somehow speaks of salvation.

I trust Rogov in matters of scholarship, for I’ve heard him use the word epistemology without the least hesitation or stutter, and believe this is not due just to the good wines he drinks but has more to do with the fact that he really does know his stuff.

If you’d like to read more of Rogov (I always do) you can find a collection of essays on food here at Stratspace, and you can find Rogov’s Wine Forum here at this link – which also has a section for food talk.

In Hebrew, the word manna is said to mean ‘gift’. Rogov, you’ve made me smile. Thank you, then, for the manna.

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I See Manna Today in The White House Vegetable Garden

March 24, 2009 at 7:42 pm (Food and Magical Thinking, Philosophy) (Food, Food and Symbol, The White House Vegetable Garden)

Manna is something to eat. Or it was, at one time, as we are informed through various pieces of literature.

Manna also is a symbol.

And like other food symbols, it has meaning. Think ‘turkey’ as an American and you’re thinking happy family around the dinner table, and tradition. Which may or may not be true.

In today’s world, I see manna. Or I see things that resonate within the same circle of symbolism.

I see manna today in the idea of The White House Vegetable Garden.

I believe it is, for many people, manna.

Is manna real?

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1927: It Was A Good Year For Manna

March 24, 2009 at 1:31 am (Manna and Science) (1927, 1929, Food, Food and Religion, Food History, Manna, Plant Lice Excretion)

Eighty years ago it was 1929.

And what a year it was!

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 ushered in a worldwide Great Depression.

In the Soviet Union, General Secretary Joseph Stalin expelled Leon Trotsky and adopted a policy of collectivization.

A British high court ruled that Canadian women are persons.

The British Broadcasting Company broadcasted a television transmission for the first time.

In the Middle East, rioting occurred between Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem over access to the Western Wall.

Just two years before all this happened, there was word of something happening on the Manna Front. Time Magazine reported on August 21, 1927

A miracle belonging to Judaism and a puzzle belonging to science were reported solved last week. Manna, gift of Heaven upon which the Israelites fed on their exodus from Egypt to Canaan, was but the excretion from the bodies of certain coccids, a kind of plant lice which infested the tamarisk shrubs of the Sinai Peninsula.

Plant lice excretion. That is manna. Really, the whole thing is rather miraculous. (In some way or another!)

The world is so full of a number of things

I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

Robert Louis Stevenson

……………………………………………………

(1929 facts source: wiki)

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What Manna Says To Me

March 22, 2009 at 4:04 pm (Food and Magical Thinking) (Film, Food, Manna, My Dinner With Andre, Philosophy)

From ‘My Dinner with André: “You’re Okay – Hang In There!”

About the movie ‘My Dinner With André‘ (source: wiki)

The film consists almost entirely of a long conversation between two acquaintances in an upscale restaurant in New York City. It is based largely on actual conversations between Gregory and Shawn, and covers such subjects as experimental theatre, the nature of theatre, and the nature of reality.

Gregory is the focus of the first hour of the film as he describes some of his experiences since he gave up his career as a theatre director in 1975. [ . . .] Perhaps Gregory’s most dramatic experience was working with a small group of people on a piece of performance art on Long Island which resulted in Gregory being (briefly) buried alive on Halloween night.

The rest of the film is a conversation as Shawn tries to argue that living life as Gregory has done for the past five years is simply not possible for the vast majority of people. In response, Gregory suggests that what passes for normal life in New York in the late 1970s is more akin to living in a dream than it is to real life. The movie ends without a clear resolution to the conflict in world views articulated by the two men.

The movie was filmed in the then-abandoned Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, Virginia.

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Recipes For Manna

March 21, 2009 at 1:40 pm (Philosophy, Recipes, Uncategorized) (Food, Food Philosophy, Manna)

What do you think of when you hear the word ‘manna’, in terms of food? Anything in particular?

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Time for Manna Pancakes!

March 20, 2009 at 11:56 pm (Cooking, Passover) (Food, Kosher or Not, Manna)

How to cook a manna pancake: First you catch the manna.

I’ve gotten to the place in the story where the pancakes are ready to cook. Now to the recipe.

If you’ve ever visited a recipe website, you’ll see lots of recipes. Ingredients, directions, all written out in detailed specifics so that anyone reading can follow along. But do they follow along?

It doesn’t seem so. Each comment has a new direction to give, an ingredient substitution, a comment about timing or technique. And each one thinks theirs is the best, the most delicious, the right way to do things!

But what happens when you’re making manna cakes? Can they be altered without daring the magic?

I followed the directions as best I could. The flour was wrong. Too dense. Then I needed more water because of that. Then I loved that coriander so much that I needed to sprinkle a bit more of it inbetween the cakes, for extra savor. But otherwise . . . but otherwise I followed the recipe.

My manna cakes were made in a teflon pan. Teflon apparently is a good thing for manna cakes. They toast nicely and do not stick!

Manna pancakes are not like what you get at IHOP. Let me make that completely clear. They are not like what you get at IHOP in any single way you can think of. Manna cakes are more like thick crepes or maybe like flatbreads. In any case, IHOP is the other side of the coin.

I toasted my manna cakes and put them on a plate. Cautiously I took a bite. It was good. In a clear and simple sort of way. Actually, it was delicious. A manna cake will fill a person up, for sure. They will not be hungry for a good long time afterwards. Nice to know, if you are ever in a desert without sustenance and need something real to last you a while – not just like a Snickers Bar or something.

Putting the ingredients away and clearing up afterwards, I glanced at the matzo meal container. There, in a corner, in fine print – it said: Pareve. Not for Passover.

That’s okay. At least I think it is, for me.

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My First Taste of Manna

March 20, 2009 at 2:15 am (Flavor) (Food, Food and Meaning, Food and Memory, Manna)

There’s a funny little tickly feeling somewhere inbetween my heart and my tummy.

I just had my first taste of manna.

It astonishes me how easily this first taste happened. A few clicks on the computer, a recipe found – and a recipe, surprisingly, from someone familiar to me.

I never did find matzo cake flour. I had to make my own. Even that was simple enough, the blender whirring away madly shooting the matzo meal up into a shape like a fountain, as I hit the ‘aerate’ button over and over, the pale wheat showering and falling into a lightened fluff with the slight essence of grain edging gently out in a fragrant aroma.

In a round glass bowl I poured the flour and tossed in the ground coriander. Ground coriander is surely a heavenly ingredient – it makes you breathe in deeply to capture its sweet warmth, to bring it up through your nose and straight to your soul. Then I made a indentation – a bellybutton – in the center of the coriander-scented flour. The bellybutton was filled with a generous dab of sesame oil, and as I filled it I myself was filled with memories.

Of the first time I took a high pile of flour, hollowing out a center into which to break an egg, to mix outwards, to blend disparate ingredients from their center together into a rounded soft mass with give and take which could be kneaded, rolled out, cut, twisted or shaped, baked, and finally . . . finally, eaten. The bellybutton.

Of the aroma of the first loaf of whole wheat bread I ever baked. The loaf ended up as heavy and dense as a New York City phone book, but the deep wheatiness, the smell, was outstanding. The smell was good and rich and pure and enticing, so enticing that again and again a bite would have to be taken from the loaf, even though again and again it would disappoint, not being able to hit the level of the simple and amazing aroma.

Of my father, who I only knew briefly, meeting him for the first time when I was fourteen years old. I mourned for how we might have known and understood each other, though he never ever was a father to me.

In the middle of all this, as I stood with my hands in the dough kneading and musing, my daughter walked into the kitchen. “What are you making, Mom?,” she asked, our black cat gleaming green eyes at me from her arms. “Manna cakes,” I smiled. And as she walked away chattering my eyes filled with tears. The dough was stiff, difficult to work. These doughs without eggs often are. It looked like sand, flecked with lighter and darker bits, and it smelled rich and deep, and it was not just dough. It was my past. It was my past that I’d lived and my past that I hadn’t had a chance to live. And it was my now, with all that it held, which was this daughter who held black cats with green eyes in her arms, my daughter.

This was manna, and this was before I even took a bite.

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Manna for You, Manna for Me

March 18, 2009 at 1:28 pm (Philosophy) (Food, Manna)

I’ve asked a number of people, lately, about manna. I say “What do you think about manna?,” and I get a lot of interesting looks in return. My favorite look is the double-take, where the person’s eyes literally blink two or three times while their head turns sideways and then quickly back in a fast darting motion (probably they are looking for an escape from the lunatic facing them).

Then I say, “You know, manna. You know what manna is, don’t you?”

Now that they understand I am not going to take out a bible and thump it or alternately try to sell them a new diet pill, they answer me.

“Of course!,” they say, still somewhat reluctant to talk about things other than the weather or Bernie Madoff. “The stuff that falls from the sky.”

And that is it. That is manna.

But then there are the ways we must really think of manna when we must really think of manna (which apparently is not often at all).

ReaderX in commentary seemed to see it as a desired salvation of sorts by groups of people seeking a ‘fix’ – which is what I always thought of manna as – a clear thing, a good thing, simple and pure in appearance (though perhaps questionable in true effect when taken and applied as a life-tool).

But in further exploration it seems this might not be the case for everybody, when they (have to) think of manna.

Maybe manna seems like a simple salvation for those on the outside of things, looking in.
Maybe, in the story, it is really something else.

But these musings are in the philosophic realm, and the real deal here is to Eat.

Today I’ll continue my search for the right kind of flour. Tomorrow, I’m going to look further – to find another kind of manna to dine upon.

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Matzo Cake Flour Does Not Grow on Trees

March 17, 2009 at 1:50 pm (Groceries, Religion) (Food, Manna, Manna in Art, Patience)

I knew this adventure was not going to be easy. Setting out to taste manna in all its forms, as a project, has its drawbacks. Most of the things called ‘manna’ are difficult to obtain.

But on my first try? With one small ingredient?

These things are sent to try us.

I can not find matzo cake flour to make Rogov’s pancake recipe.

I live in a town that is not a city. Not a place to easily find manna ingredients. But there are other ways to do this. The matzo meal I bought can be ground to a much finer texture (in one of the electric machines in my kitchen – not with mortar and pestle though if I really want the manna experience probably it should be done by hand) then sifted. To make the flour light, angelic-like.

Patience. A part of manna.

Now the other thing that’s bothering me today is the things coming out of the heads of the guys in the manna experience rendered as Art in my last post. What are those stubby things on the heads of two of those guys? They are shooting flames, too! Why?

And will this happen to me?

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Journeying to Find Manna, I Find Rogov

March 16, 2009 at 1:49 am (Journey, Recipes) (Daniel Rogov, Food History, Manna, Matzo Flour Pancakes, Religion and Food)

Like any seeker of truth, I must travel afar. Undertake perilous journeys to faraway lands. Be ready for dangerous adventures. And always carry my American Express Card.

It’s time to do it. Make the plane reservations! Find a decent hotel and even more important find one that serves good coffee! Pack the bags, choosing clothes wisely and of course leaving plenty of room for new clothes to bring home. This is all part of the manna thing.

But wait, I forgot. I have two children at home! I am ready for perilous journeys but definitely not ready to listen to their bickering alongside me in the endless quest. I prefer to hear their bickering at home.

Therefore the manna must come to me. And serendipity has already magically occurred! I clicked here and there et voila! Right before my eyes appeared an article written by one of my favorite people in the food world – Daniel Rogov.

I really can not imagine a better place to begin! From ‘Manna for Breakfast’ by Rogov:

Of all the events described in the Bible, there are few that inspire more awe than the miracle of manna. The Sinai Dessert is an especially harsh environment, but for forty years as the Hebrews wandered through the dessert in search of the Promised Land, they had no problem in finding their daily food. Every morning, shortly after dawn, the Hebrews were graced with as much of this wafer-like delicacy as they could consume during the day. Delivered directly from the heavens, one had to do no more than gather his or her share, eat as much as they liked and then look forward to the next day’s crop.

There is of course, another, somewhat more caustic view about manna. Even though the Old Testament and tradition concur that manna contained the ingredients of every delicious food and suited the taste of all who partook of it, some speculate that forty years of manna made for a fairly monotonous diet. So unhappy were the Israelites that at one point they actually complained to Moses that “…we have naught save this manna to look to”. With neither a bowl of chicken soup or a good pate de foie gras in sight, life might have been fairly difficult.

And here I thought manna was only the Good Stuff, the Best of All Things Possible, the thing with feathers that spake (that’s how you have to talk when you talk of these things) of Salvation somehow. Obviously this was the Goyim half of me thinking. But there’s more!

Some etymologists suggest that the Israelites, puzzled over the mysterious substance, called it man, the name of a sweet with which they had become familiar when in Egypt. Even today this sticky, honey-like juice exudes in heavy drops in May and June from certain shrubs found in Sinai. In the Rashbam commentaries, however, it is noted that while this may account for the naming of the miraculous provender, it cannot account for the feeding of so many people, for man is found only in minuscule quantities.

Others suggest that the name simply reflects the confusion of the people who could not identify the substance and comes from ma-nah, a word combining a Hebrew root with an Egyptian stem and meaning “what is this?”

Since the 4th century, scholars and monks at Saint Catherine’s monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai have held that manna originated from the secretions of the scale insects that made their homes on the tamarisk shrubs that are common to the Sinai. Modern scientists concur with this as a possibility and speculate that a massive swarm of Trabutina mannipara had invaded the Sinai during this time, thus allowing for large quantities of their secretions to be “harvested” each morning.

I want to taste these things.

But right now, I’ll have to try Rogov’s recipe instead.

To capture at least the basic flavors of manna, one might care to try the following pancakes.

225 gr. cake quality matzo flour, sifted
2 tsp. dried coriander leaves (gad in Hebrew, cusbara in Arabic), ground extremely finely
1 Tbsp. sesame oil
about 2 Tbs. honey

Resift the flour together with the ground coriander. Place the flour in a bowl and in the center make a well. Into this pour 1/2 cup of boiling water and the oil. Mix into a dough and then knead on a well floured board until smooth and elastic. Divide the dough into 12 equal portions.

Roll out a portion of the dough into a 10 cm. circle and brush with the sesame oil. Roll a second portion and with this cover the first. Roll the combined circles to make a 15 cm. pancake sandwich. Continue the process until all of the dough has been used and 6 pancakes sandwiches are ready.

Heat a heavy skillet, without oil, and in this one at a time fry the sandwiched pancakes, turning once so that both sides are cooked. The skillet should be kept moving constantly to prevent the pancakes from sticking, and cooking should be done over a moderate flame.

When all of the pancakes have been cooked, separate the sandwiched pancakes. Spread one side of each pancake lightly with honey and fold each single pancake in half and then in half again. Serve at once or cover with a lightly dampened cloth and set aside to keep warm until ready to serve. Yields 12 pancakes.

I’m going out to buy some matzo flour. Manna Cakes, here I come!

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What Do You Think About When You Think About Manna?

March 15, 2009 at 2:32 pm (Life and Religion) (Advertising, Manna)

. . . that is, if you think of it at all. I usually don’t. Yesterday I didn’t!

Yesterday I simply ran from thing-to-do to thing-to-do. There was not a spare moment for anything resembling ‘thought’. I was like an ant among many other ants, all running and building and eating in between the running and building and . . . well, you get the picture.

If I’d had a moment for thought it probably wouldn’t be about manna.

But then, that’s why I like it!

Sometimes manna does pop into my mind. It pops into my mind at times while reading about food or wine, when people are talking about what they eat or do not eat.

Manna pops into my mind when I see advertisements for food, or for drink. “It’s the Real Thing!” Coke smilingly announces from every ounce of media outlet they can find. A friend told me of billboards she’d seen recently while driving across the mid-west: a representation of a bottle of Coke being poured into someone’s throat on one side – - – with huge bright letters spelling out ‘happiness!’ dancing across the rest of the billboard set out on the side of the flat multi-lane highway.

I don’t bring a whole lot of knowledge of manna to my quest. Actually, what I think about when I think about manna is some vague notion of tiny loaves of bread falling down from the sky to save people. And that’s about the extent of it.

What a wake-up call when I searched for ‘manna’ in the first place I could think of – wikipedia!

All I can say is, there’s a whole lotta manna goin’ on.

Here’s a link to the oodles of manna fun going on at wikipedia.

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Why Manna?

March 14, 2009 at 1:05 am (Armchair Travelling) (Adventure, Cultural Anthropology, Food, Magic, Manna, Religion)

If there is any food that could be defined as magical, it is manna.

I like the idea of magical food. Does that mean I believe in the idea of magical food? I’d like to.

But magic can only happen in the right circumstances, to my mind. It is like luck, or serendipity, or grace in that way.

As an armchair traveller, I’m setting out on a search for manna.

What the effect will be upon me . . . I really don’t know. But at the very least I’ll learn a thing or two.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's Idea of Manna

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M.F.K. Fisher: Dining Through Hardship and War With Simplicity and Sophistication – The 1940's

January 16, 2009 at 12:16 pm (American Food, Book Review, Food, Food Culture, Food History, Food Literature, Food Media, Gastronomy) (1940's Food, Food History, Food in Wartime, Food Writing, Gastronomy, MFK Fisher, The Economy, Women and Culture, Women Authors)

Ouch. It’s January 2009, and wallets previously ready to fly open at the slightest beckoning call of the local free-range organic rabbit (head still on, bones intact, tiny tail bone looking rather pitiful now shed of its cute fluffy fur) for $7 per pound – which effectively makes the cost of the meat shorn of the bones somewhere around $15 per pound – those wallets are balking.

But it is not 1940. And we are not in London. And we are not kept busy in the ways the Women Firewatchers shown in the above photograph (from British Vogue in 1940 by Lee Miller) were kept actively busy at that time.

But getting back to the wallets of 2009. Some will still open. Many more will not.

Pain shows in the hearts and faces of men and women when facing their finances. Not only have their retirement funds been hobbled but food – right now – today! – is becoming more and more expensive. What’s a person to do?

This poverty is a different shape, here and now in 2009, than it has been in times past. For aside from the fact that the grocery stores are still filled to over-brimming with every product from almost everywhere in the world, there is the question of those wallets. Are those wallets as damaged as they have been in past times of hardship? Not being an economist, I can’t answer that.

But I do know that in past times though there may have been mortgage payments and utility bills and all the usual expenses of day-to-day life, there was no monthly cell-phone bill . . . there was no monthly cable or internet connection bill . . . there was no high health insurance payment due . . . there usually was not a second or third car payment bill due . . . and let’s not even start talking about the cost of a higher-education where funds must be saved or financed for the Masters or Ph.D rather than for the Bachelors degree – which now for the most part is about as useful to the job-seeker as a High School degree was in times past – useful, that is, as a mere nod into the door of a low-paying entry job.

In times of hardship one looks to times of past hardships for answers: what to do, how to survive. There’s also the sense of seeking reassurance that indeed, people did survive. They did live and love and eat and hate and plot and plan and dream and finally either regain their feet – or if not – simply go on living, somehow.

One of our most-revered writers on life, food, and hungers – MFK Fisher – wrote a huge body of work during the 1940’s during times of war and some hardships. Consider the Oyster (1941) was written as she and her husband Dillwyn Parrish fled a war-torn Europe to come back to the US. Dillwyn was dying – in a most painful way – in a way where his body was slowly, bit by bit, being claimed by Buerger’s disease. How to Cook A Wolf was published in 1942 – the year when the rationing (already in place in England) finally came to US shores.

Tires were the first item to be rationed in January 1942 because supplies of natural rubber were interrupted. Soon afterward, passenger automobiles, typewriters, sugar, gasoline, bicycles, footwear, fuel oil, coffee, stoves, shoes, meat, lard, shortening and oils, cheese, butter, margarine, processed foods (canned, bottled and frozen), dried fruits, canned milk, firewood and coal, jams, jellies and fruit butter, were rationed by November 1943.[3] (Source wiki-rationing-US)

How To Cook A Wolf is full of information about how to survive when there is little to survive on. I’ve read this book more than once, in varying circumstances. The time I most appreciated it was when I moved to Paris into a wonderful apartment whose heating system required the insertion of coins into a small box on the wall. It seemed apt to read MFKF then and there.

Much of what is in this book will not be accepted by today’s readers, looking for answers in terms of ‘what to eat’ when the pocketbook is hurting. Gently given advice to ‘Go fishing for your dinner‘, or to ‘Gather wild foods for the one daily meal’, and ‘Eat mush‘ (recipe provided) come to mind.

In 1943 MFKF published The Gastronomical Me – to my mind the greatest of her works. Here is life, punctuated by food. Food is the thing that binds, that ties, that rocks, that cradles – a river that the larger themes of existence flow upon, with the prose of MFKF as wind goddess moving it all along.

Then followed a novel, then the translation of Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste, and An Alphabet for Gourmets.

There are many ways to face being pinched by the dollar. As for myself, I won’t try cooking and eating mush – unless I really have to. And I am grateful that my days are not spent scanning the skies for warplanes and fires.

But I will read MFK Fisher. And not just only (or not even substantially) for the advice she gives (though some of it is good).

I’ll read her just for her words, alone. They’re better in some ways than even the most perfect slab of Kobe beef.

An added bonus? They are sustainable.
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Live recording of Billie Holiday from the 1940’s: Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do

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Lenotre’s Cakes

January 12, 2009 at 6:50 pm (Cooking, Culinary, Gastronomy) (Food, Gaston Lenotre, Lenotre, Memoir, Pastries and Desserts, Restaurant Culture)

(This is part 3 of 3 parts – the first two parts of the story are composed of the posts of the previous two days . . . )

This is what Lenotre taught me to make that day.

And that was the day I decided to not quit that job. And it was probably the day I decided I could actually become a chef, also.

So it is the Strawberry Cake that I remember most, about all of it – when someone says ‘Lenotre‘.

You had to be there to see all the results – among which were some line cooks with slightly different attitudes.

But the best thing really was that buttercream.
Mille remerciements a Gaston Lenotre.

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I Love QQ Food. Tang Yuen, Better Late than Never!

December 26, 2008 at 11:40 am (Cooking, Food Culture, Gastronomy, Global Food Culture, Recipes) (Celebration Foods, Christmas, Cooking, Culinary, Festival Foods, Food, Gastronomy, Glutinous Rice Balls, Holiday Foods, QQ, Tang Yuen)

I love QQ food. I love Q food too.

Q is not a question. Q is a texture. Or as expressed much more succinctly and beautifully by Zoe Tribur in the Spring 2006 issue of Gastronomica

QQ is a unique oral sensation that
cannot be mistaken for any other. When you put something
in your mouth—cold or warm, salty or sweet, dry or wet,
it doesn’t matter—if the substance ﬁrst pushes back as you
seize it with your teeth, then ﬁrms up for just a moment
before yielding magnanimously to part, with surprising ease
and goodwill, from the cleaving corners of your mandibles—
that is Q.

Many people do not like Q food. It is somewhat alien to the palate of the eater exposed solely to the foodways of the middle-class United States.

That’s okay. More for me.

I’ve found a recipe for a Q food served at the Winter Solstice way over on the other side of the world. Tang Yuen. It looks delicious. Yay, tang yuen!

It is a few days past the Winter Solstice, but better late than never. Perhaps this will be the start of a new tradition – our own post-Christmas Tang Yuen party!

Note: The article in Gastronomica on Q is downloadable as a PDF file. It is titled ‘Taste’ by Zoe Tribur and is definitely worth reading, for any gastro of any astral sphere.

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Mark Twain Eats America – Writ Large and Small(er)

November 29, 2008 at 12:02 pm (Food Literature) (Food History, Food Media, Gastronomica, Mark Twain and Food)

Turtle Soup, anyone?

IN 1879, a homesick Mark Twain sat in an Italian hotel room and wrote a long fantasy menu of all his favorite American foods. The menu began as a joke, with Twain describing the 80-dish spread as a “modest, private affair” that he wanted all to himself. But it reads today as a window into a great change in American life — the gradual, widespread disappearance of wild foods from the nation’s tables.

Thus starts the succinct and warmly-laden op-ed from Wednesday’s New York Times. Strategically placed to be read on the day before our Thanksgiving, it reads in taste like an elegant prelude to the day – a frame upon which thoughts could be hung and embroidered.

Clicking the link to this story (which on my usual homepage was mixed in with all the other Thanksgiving offerings) the title appeared: ‘Where the Wild Things Were’. Maurice Sendak makes me jump with joy, so I started to jump with joy at even that least hint about anything to do with his books. If I were not just scraping by with barely enough sanity to know that I don’t want to embarrass my children by ruining the idea of ‘mother’ in some vital way for them, I’d buy and wear the T-shirt I picked up and held onto tightly at a store I saw recently – it was silkscreened with the cover illustration from ‘Where the Wild Things Are’. It made me sad to finally put it down and walk out of the store without it.

Discontinuing momentarily my musings on ‘what motherhood should be’, Maurice Sendak and goofy T-shirts I continuing on with reading the NYT piece.

The authors name was Andrew Beahrs, writing from Berkeley, California. Andrew Beahrs – where had I heard that name? Berkeley I dismissed from my mind – as much as I could, anyway. This wasn’t going to be about Sendak but it just might be good anyway.

Andrew Beahrs rocks when talking Twain. (Or when talking Samuel Clemens, who of course was who Twain was.) Here’s another snippet from his piece:

The Pilgrims appreciated wild foods for their contribution to survival; Twain, for their taste and their hold on his memory. All saw the foods as fundamental to the America they knew. None would have imagined that many would one day be seen as curiosities.

After finishing reading this piece, I knew where Andrew Beahrs had entered my mind before. And why this all seemed vaguely familiar.

In the Gastronomica Spring 2007 Issue: Investigations – Twain’s Feast – “The American” at Table, Beahrs writes of Twain and of the American foods he described in ‘A Tramp Abroad’ in a much more extensive piece. Not an appetizer, limited in size to the smaller plate of the op-ed page – but as a longer piece, as a full-course meal.

(That particular issue of Gastronomica is one of my favorites to date. If you do not subscribe to the journal, there is one downloadable article per month available through the website. The Spring 2007 offering was not the Beahrs piece, but H.E. Chehabi’s ‘How Caviar Turned Out to be Halal’ is an astonishing tale of political intrigue, social mores and tradition, the ways of formalized religion, ritual, and more.)

From Publisher’s Weekly Oct. 10, 2008:

Penguin Press has just acquired Twain’s Feast: ‘The American’ at Table. Laura Stickney beat one other bidder for North American rights via Emma Sweeney. In the book, author Andrew Beahrs will search for America’s lost foods with Twain as his guide, weaving passages of Twain’s writing and historical research into a narrative of Twain’s travels; Sweeney compares the book to Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (also published by Penguin Press) or Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral.

Yes, I think I’ll read it.

Links:
“A Tramp Abroad” by Mark Twain (section with menu)
New York Times Op-Ed “Where the Wild Things Were” by Andrew Beahrs

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I'll Take Two Pilgrims and Raise You a Buckled-Shoe Cake

November 26, 2008 at 11:35 am (American Food) (Faith, Pilgrims, Religion, Simple Gifts, Snake-Handling Church, Thanksgiving)

Images and stories. How they do shape how we think of the world – what it is to us, even when the stories or images may not be true or real.

I’m not religious in any formal way, but darn it all if I can shake off the image in my mind that God is some big vague-looking guy hanging around way up high in the sky somewhere beyond the clouds – no matter how hard I try. In the same manner, just push my Thanksgiving Button and regardless of any intellectual knowledge of what it actually was to start with, up pops turkey and Pilgrims in black clothes with huge hats and buckles on their odd shoes.

I think then of the Shakers, who were of the same ilk. Then the Quakers who fit in there with all this. A song comes into my head somewhere along here and it refuses to stop. I have to hear it over and over again for goodness knows how long.

Simple Gifts

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,

‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain’d,

To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,

To turn, turn will be our delight

‘Till by turning, turning we come round right.

Somehow I’ve known that song since nursery school. I still love it.

But it’s not what I thought it was as a four-year old – there’s more to it that that. There’s the fact that usually people know the words as ’tis a gift’ rather than as ’tis the gift’. This adds a very different meaning to the song – one that is pointed and sharp. ‘The gift’ is one thing and one thing only, not open to interpretation by those who sang of it. It was the core point of the song that ‘the gift’ was something to be desired (and worked for and suffered for) – and this was the only ‘gift’ that should matter. And that gift of ecstasy, of bonding with their God, was sought through dance.

A beautiful simple song with a passion wrapped so quietly within it.

There are four Shakers left in the last Shaker Community existing in Sabbathday, Maine. Only four Shakers. Their religion is a fascinating one. But then it comes to mind that the ‘Pilgrims’ associated with our Thanksgiving holiday – with their funny hats and shoes with buckles – did not come here seeking turkeys (though of course turkeys are a good thing to have if one wants to continue living rather than dying of starvation in a new land where grocery stores don’t exist and where one has not been trained in the actually-rather-knowledgable-art of farming . . . ever tried to even keep a plant already grown in a pot alive if you don’t have a ‘green thumb’?) but from what I understand – unless I missed something – our Pilgrims came to these shores to escape religious persecution. They just plain didn’t fit in, where they came from, and it was time to move – that is, if they wanted to follow their deep passion, a passion which was not about what buckle to put on their shoes or what stuffing to serve with the turkey but rather a passion which centered around who they as human beings were and what their relationship was to their God and how they would live to express this.

Not small potatoes. That is, if one believes that in some way human beings are more than a bag of bones tossed together with other ingredients to make an animal of sorts that ‘thinks’ and who has been lucky enough to have these opposable thumbs that help us build things of all sorts.

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Funny, the shapes seeking for ‘higher truth’ can take.

Several years ago I visited a church located within several hours of where I live. The church is one where snake-handling is the core participatory ritual that brings its followers a sense that they have found a way to experience the higher truth that the Christian Bible offers. This is not the only church in the country of this sort – though it is against the law in many states for these churches to exist.

I remember sitting in a pew near the back taking it all in. The women did not cut their hair – it was against the church laws . . . and they wore dresses and stockings and were all covered up. The men did not seem to have any rules of dress but they were all very conservative. I remember looking at the people of the church, this church that existed in a small covert hollow of poverty along a grim winding road in a tiny sad broken-down converted house, and I remember my first reaction. It was a visceral one rather than an intellectual one. To be honest, an initial sense of repulsion rose from within me.

What those Pilgrims must have put up with, before coming to our shores! What any Pilgrim must put up with, really – if they have a strong path to follow that does not merge and support the usual way of things.

But thereby hangs the tale.

The faux-Thanksgiving Turkey Dinner is just the tip of it all. But oh, where it can lead to, just the stories of interest as one follows the winding path around it!

“Oh the Places You’ll Go!” as Dr. Seuss (who of course was Theodor Geisel) wrote.

Happy Pilgrim Day!

Maybe I’ll bake a cake and frost it black with a big silver buckle. I love that image.

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No photo header today but instead something better: Jordi Busque is allowing me to link to his wonderful photos of the Mennonite in Bolivia.
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More on ‘Simple Gifts’ at the American Music Preservation site.

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An Onion Kind of Love

November 23, 2008 at 11:53 am (Seasonal Foods) (Food, Onions, Recipes, Seasonal Foods)

When cold winds blow I fall in love, and it’s always an onion kind of love.

Leeks, scallions, golden globe, purple sweet, pure white angelic, cippoline for me-poline. Each one sits in its basket of adornment sending little beckoning love glances my way, and I can not demur. I must have them, have them now and have them as much as I want.

Luckily they are not a love of the sort that means fancy clothes, perfect makeup, a new haircut or a new jewelry in the form of any sort of kitchen thing. My onions take me as I am – they are solid, always there, rarely frowsy, and don’t bite my bank account.

Yesterday I picked up a red-netted bag of plain yellow onions at the grocery store. Their skins were sleek and glowing.

I placed one on the cutting board. Now this particular one was not meant for any starring role. It was merely going to be tossed into the split pea soup that was developing in the pot with some wild abandon, for split pea soup needs an abundance of onions to be what it should be. (What should it be, you may ask? It should be the soup your children demand on a weekly basis – the soup that melds siblings who pick opposite sides of any plane of existence or idea as a way of life – into siblings who agree wholeheartedly – at least for the moment of the life of the pot of soup. That is what split pea soup should be.)

my humble yellow onion
from the red netted bag

was so very full of life

that it cried milky tears when I
struck it with my knife

It was a good soup. It was an excellent onion.

With the rest of the family of red-netted onions will be made some onion soup. Onion soup is most serious stuff. It breathes deep things into those who take their swallows of it, as long as there is not too very much cheese added to the toasted crouton. If you add too much cheese you will be made stupid.
At least for the rest of the afternoon or evening.

Onion biscuits will be made from it – so simple. Caramelized onions, wrapped up in biscuit dough and baked, they are a sort of Simple Simon Onion Tart. Onion biscuits know how to de-materialize very quickly. Various hands will grab them and whoof! Voila. Gone.

Cippoline agrodolce is a must for me, sometime around Thanksgiving. It doesn’t have to be the exact day, but it has to be around the day. It’s not about the day, it’s about the thanks which cippoline agrodolce always inspires.

My list of onion love goes on and on and on.
I do hope you have onion love too.
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I’ve posted here an onion love note from Dana Jacobi’s website. Dana writes and cooks both wonderfully, with the bonus that with her recipes you will be aiming towards being healthy rather than otherwise:
Onions in Three Flavors

Fabulous idea. Love made real, in those little bites of flavor!
…………………………………………………………………….

I need some poetry. Some onion-y poetry to prove my onion love.

Here is one from Sydney Smith (Lady Holland’s Memoir, I, 11, Recipe for Salad)

Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl
And, scarce suspected, animate the whole.

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Load Your Plate with Jingo-istic Sentiment – It’s TURKEY DAY!

November 21, 2008 at 12:33 pm (American Food, Food History, Seasonal Foods) (Authentic Food, Food History, Thanksgiving, Turkey)

The countdown has begun. The plans are being discussed. The larders (that means cupboards and refrigerators for those of you who prefer modern speech) are being filled and filled and filled.

It’s the Day to Be Thankful. Or (more commonly) the Day to Get Stuffed Till You Hurt. Add a pinch of the usual dissonances that happen when family (sorry, Family) must gather from all their own homes to the Gathering Place of Holiday and what you have is Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving Day used to be the start of the Holiday Season. It was the date on which one could expect to have to start worrying about gifts, money, food, people, other people, parties, diets, party clothes, decorations, credit card debt, wrapping paper, ribbons and tape, red tape, lines at the stores, malls with parking lots the size of small cities, office gatherings filled with charming lechery from the least charming people who’d slugged down a bit too much punch (make that wine – punch is ‘out’), plans for alliances and non-alliances, health club memberships for the New Year when one would get Skinny and Gorgeous, and what stuffing would be served and with what on what day. Ham, Turkey, Roast Beef. We need large ones. We need Heirloom ones. (I always think of the turkey-pluckers on these days, their fingers chilled as those pinfeathers continue to stick even after the boiling water dipping machine and the tossing around like a whirlwind feather-removing machine have done their industrial jobs yet not well enough, not well enough for whatever-price per pound these babies are costing their investor-eaters).

We need Brussel Sprouts, and God Only Knows Why.

Thanksgiving is not the start of the holiday season anymore – Halloween holds that place of honor as the plans grow more startlingly consumptive (yes, two meanings to that word!) and well-caramelized.

We have a lot to be thankful for. But let’s get real. Are we really celebrating an American Traditional Thanksgiving at our tables with this meal of choice and habit? Or . . . is it all a little trick played on us?

Could it be that a writer invented this holiday as we know it and celebrate it, and that somehow we have simply forgotten the real way of the holiday in an excess of the sort of jolly jingo-istic sentiment that seems to grab the masses by the throat heart, and with the soft prettiness of it all manages to serve up a paint-the-kitten-on-velvet-by-numbers kit for dinner?

One does like things to be nice nice. Nice nice is so nice.

Lets’ try this on for size, instead – for our Thanksgiving dinner:

First, wild turkey was never mentioned in Winslow’s account. It is probable that the large amounts of “fowl” brought back by four hunters were seasonal waterfowl such as duck or geese.

And if cranberries were served, they would have been used for their tartness or color, not the sweet sauce or relish so common today. In fact, it would be 50 more years before berries were boiled with sugar and used as an accompaniment to meat.

Potatoes weren’t part of the feast, either. Neither the sweet potato nor the white potato was yet available to colonists.

The presence of pumpkin pie appears to be a myth, too. The group may have eaten pumpkins and other squashes native to New England, but it is unlikely that they had the ingredients for pie crust – butter and wheat flour. Even if they had possessed butter and flour, the colonists hadn’t yet built an oven for baking.

“While we have been able to work out which modern dishes were not available in 1621, just what was served is a tougher nut to crack,” Ms. Curtin says.

A couple of guesses can be made from other passages in Winslow’s correspondence about the general diet at the time: lobsters, mussels, “sallet herbs,” white and red grapes, black and red plums, and flint corn.

That makes for a different sort of table, a bit.

Then how did this reality of a holiday which-is-not actually occur?

Until the early 1800s, Thanksgiving was considered to be a regional holiday celebrated solemnly through fasting and quiet reflection.

But the 19th century had its own Martha Stewart, and it didn’t take her long to turn New England fasting into national feasting. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the popular Godey’s Lady’s Book, stumbled upon Winslow’s passage and refused to let the historic day fade from the minds – or tables – of Americans. This established trendsetter filled her magazine with recipes and editorials about Thanksgiving.

It was also about this time – in 1854, to be exact – that Bradford’s history book of Plymouth Plantation resurfaced. The book increased interest in the Pilgrims, and Mrs. Hale and others latched onto the fact he mentioned that the colonists had killed wild turkeys during the autumn.

In her magazine Hale wrote appealing articles about roasted turkeys, savory stuffing, and pumpkin pies – all the foods that today’s holiday meals are likely to contain.

In the process, she created holiday “traditions” that share few similarities with the original feast in 1621.

In 1858, Hale petitioned the president of the United States to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday. She wrote: “Let this day, from this time forth, as long as our Banner of Stars floats on the breeze, be the grand Thanksgiving holiday of our nation, when the noise and tumult of worldliness may be exchanged for the length of the laugh of happy children, the glad greetings of family reunion, and the humble gratitude of the Christian heart.”

Five years later, Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday of November “as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

“[Hale's] depiction is wrong much more often than it’s right,” says Nancy Brennan, president of Plimoth Plantation.

So. Is it Turkey Day or is it not? I’d say it definitely is Turkey Day in some ways. In more ways than one.

In the final analysis one must gather one’s turkeys where they may, as they batten the hatches momentarily against the onslaught of the rest of the ravaging hoolidays holidays to come along on the rampage in short shrift.

One of my favorite questions in the whole wide world is raised by all this. The question is: What is real?

When it looks really pretty and nice, it’s worth poking at to be sure it is true. Or even real.

Enjoy your bird no matter the feather! Even if you are quietly thankful, and choose to not stuff yourself or any bird, fish or fowl whatsoever. Eat what you like, for the day belongs to you – not to some dead editor of a ladies magazine who lived a long time ago.

And if the bird pecks you, peck right back. It’s the holiday season, after all. And listen up, all you groaning-table and screaming football fans:

‘fasting and quiet reflection’

appears to be quite American after all.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Source of quoted material: The First Thanksgiving CS Monitor November 2002
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

From a different Thanksgiving day:

A Modern Woman’s Thanksgiving

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Being a Movie Star Yet Always Cooking the Family Meal

September 24, 2008 at 8:34 am (Food Culture, Food Media, Foodie) (Celebrity Chef, Food Media, Foodie, Kitchen Work, Moira Tuscanaro, Personal Chefs)

Moira Tuscanaro

Catty Corner with Moira Tuscanaro

As a cat I must say I admire Gwyneth Paltrow. She is cool, elegant, sleek, and can even smile like one of us – which we cats do like to see. And she can act, which is so very much like us too!

Today I learned there is more to Gwyneth than only these things to admire, though. People Magazine just bellowed out at me from its pages the headline below with a thorough article to follow

Gwyneth Paltrow Just Says ‘No’ to Personal Chefs

I have nothing against personal chefs myself. I’ve even known a few and they have been kindly sort of people, always carrying food about here and there. But to “Just Say No to Personal Chefs” is a lifestyle choice ( of course we cats do not have lifestyles we merely have lives and nine of them to boot) and lifestyle choices must be respected.

Then I happened across even more current news about Gwyneth! News on her life (and lifestyle!) is everywhere – and honestly I can see why. The New York Times reports that not only does Gwyneth now have a job talking about food while driving all over Spain but that she even got to be on the Oprah show to let everyone know about this fun activity!

Ms. Paltrow, the 35-year-old star of films like “Shakespeare in Love,” was admitted to the group, and the show, “Spain … on the Road Again,” is already a game-changer for public television in terms of attention. Even Ken Burns, PBS’s biggest star, didn’t get a segment on “Oprah” for his epic World War II documentary series last year; Ms. Paltrow and Mr. Batali, however, nabbed an entire hour of exercise talk and Spanish cooking on Wednesday.

All this may not be understandable to some of you women reading.

You may be asking “How does she do all the cooking for the family as she tells us in the first story (and all without a personal chef!) yet also travel around the world at the exact same time doing television shows and talk show performances?”

You may even be saying to yourself “Why is it that I struggle with finding the time to even do the grocery shopping and make the family meal each day when I am not even traipsing across Europe with a couple of old bald guys getting paid good money for them to film us talking laughing and eating things?“

You may be wondering how this all is.

As a cat, I do not wonder.

I know how to be in two places at the same time. My mistress will vouch for me on this one. I can be laying my decorative fur all over her clothes if they happen to be in any spot I can jump to while at the same exact time not be found at all if she is looking for me. It is a talent.

And I am even willing, as Gwyneth is, to travel across Europe being the singularly attractive one wherever I go. As we cats so often are.

For I am a Cat and this is our way of things.

Gwyneth apparently has discovered our way of things. I admire that.

Really though . . . I am not sure whether to purr to meow.

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As Luck Would Have It: Beans and Taters

September 21, 2008 at 10:25 am (American Food, Food Culture, Recipes, Seasonal Foods) (Appalachian Food, Beans and Taters, Food, Luck, Recipes, Seasonal Foods)

Some foods or recipes have hints of luck about them. There are many different varieties of luck, of course.

Beans and Taters is a dish that is steeped in luck. It’s a dish that is also surrounded by lore.

Though it is known all over the South, you won’t find a recipe for it in most of the usual suspects of cookbooks where “native Southern recipes” abide. And though the phrase “beans and taters” is one immediately recognizable and known to most Southerners (particularly those with rural roots) you won’t find it listed in slang dictionaries or in regular dictionaries or in the larger (Oxford on food, Cambridge on food, Southern Culture) encyclopedia sets. There is a newly released (this year) Encyclopedia of Southern Culture which has an entire volume on food and food culture. I’m hoping to see if it is listed there!

You hear about beans and taters through luck if you’ve not grown up knowing it. My piece of luck happened when a neighbor of mine in an area of the rural South called me one day asking for a ride into town. Her car (pronounce that as that ve-hi-cle please, and with no self-consciousness either) had broken down. Luck had run out for her, in that moment.

During the ride to town, her young son was talking about food. He wanted some special thing for supper that night. My friend’s response was “Way things are going we just might be eating beans and taters for some time!” Because fixing vehicles sometimes cost money that sometimes was not to be found in that particular rural area - in that particular rural area, if there were horses they were not run to the hounds.

The thing is that “beans and taters” was said with a musical lilt when she said it. And there was no sadness in her voice. Apparently beans and taters (yes, very musical the phrase is) is a dish born of bad luck but one that has good luck inside it. It is filled with pleasure, gladness, and gratitude. It is loved.

Luck also touches beans and taters in its inception: the lithe green beans or sturdy other sorts are ready to pluck from their vines in the garden at the same time the tiny new potatoes are ready to start digging up. Just look at any farmer’s market right now if you don’t have a garden, and see them sitting there on the same table. The two are silent partners.

Luck being what it is, beans and taters is not one recipe. They are many, and from an oral tradition. Two stand out as the most common examples: A green bean and bacon stew topped with little shiny new potatoes steamed on top. And a pinto and saltback or bacon stew sided by fried potatoes. These make the meal – there’s not any need for too much else aside from cornbread, unless there is more there to have . . . if the luck is running strong beans and taters can move themselves quietly from the center of the table to a side to serve with one of those huge picnic spreads of fried chicken, chow chow, sliced tomatoes, the endless variety of things from the fields and garden that crow from the rural end-of-summer table.

I’ve noticed a few blog-posts showing up on beans and taters lately. That’s lucky. I’ve noticed that a topic thread filled with the most wonderful commentary on beans and taters has disappeared from the pages of an online food forum. That’s unlucky.

But they say one chooses their own luck, and I still feel lucky to have heard the words “beans and taters” and to have tasted them made by my own hands afterwards in my own home kitchen.

It’s lucky that there’s a guy called Shane Adkins who wrote a song called “Beans and Taters” – and lucky that he’s been kind enough to post it on his website where we can sample it. I love this song. It’s full of joy.

The only print resource I’ve found with a recipe for beans and taters is in a book by Loretta Lynn titled “You’re Cookin’ It Country”. Her recipe is made with pork jowl, sugar, salt and pepper, fresh green beans and new potatoes – and when she writes of beans and taters the luck emerges again. The hunger of poverty, the pride of finding something to hold on to when nothing seemed to be there, and the joy of taste and comfort those lucky beans and taters hold within them.

I’m thinking of that saying: “If it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all”. This guy’s got it wrong. He’s just got to find himself some beans and taters.

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Shakespearean Foodisms

August 26, 2008 at 10:08 am (Food Literature) (Barry Fig, Shakespeare, Silliness)

It’s a Guy Thing with Barry Fig

Dudes. Listen there’s the coolest thing I figured out. Well I didn’t really figure it all out myself because foodvox was there but I was there too and even though she actually did the thing I figure I was a part of it. If you know what I mean. It’s gotta be my influence.

It’s Shakespearean foodisms, man.

Look – here’s the one foodvox wrote the other day when someone asked her about whether she wanted pulp in her orange juice:

To pulp, or not to pulp, that is the Question:
Whether ’tis Nobler in the minde to suffer
The Tummy Aches and Growlings of outragious Undigested Fruit Chunks,
Or to take Armes against a Sea of Acidulous Juices,
And by opposing end them: to swallow, to drink
No more; and by use of a good cheesecloth and strainer, to say we end
The Heart-Burn, and the thousand Naturall Fartings
That Flesh is heyre too? ‘Tis a consummation
Deuoutly to be wish’d. To swallow to drink,
To taste, perchance to digest; I, there’s the rub,
For in that swallow of orange chunk, what dreams may come,
When we haue tossed off this entire glassful,
Must giue vs pawse. There’s the endless chewing of chunk stuck in tooth
That makes Calamity of so long life:
For who would beare the Muffins and Scones of time,
The Chefs wrong, the poore mans Contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d Cooking, the Waiters delay,
The insolence of the Maitre’d’, and the unsated hunger
That patient merit of the Foodie takes,
When he himselfe might his Quietus make
With a strained orange juice?

It’s like, you know, the answers to anything can be found in the things this dude wrote, dudes. It’s like, you know – playing a Beatles song backwards. Awesome. Awe-f’ing-some.

Check it out. Here’s one I wrote:

The quality of porkfat is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the hot pan beneath: it is twice stirred;
It stirs him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis meatyest in the meatyest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His scepter shows the fat of immediate frying,
The attribute to butter and majesty,
Wherein doth saute the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy, and evoo, is above this sceptered fry-up,
It is enthroned in the hearts of chefs,
It is an attribute to Top Chef himself.

Merchant of Venice, dudes. Mer Chant of Venice. Old Will rocks. And ya gotta admit he knows his food.

Gotta run. More of these to do. If you happen to do one yourself, let me know guys. Share it with me. Just post it here.

So much to do – so little time.
Ciao.

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The nuts were important to people living in the southern Appalachian mountains and, as in Europe, they were especially important to the poorer residents. When the nuts matured and fell from the trees in September and October, the ground often was covered inches deep with them. People gathered them and either ate them immediately or stored them after setting the nuts in the sun to dry. When dry nuts were stored, steps had to be taken to prevent weevil damage, because their larvae commonly infested the nuts. The nuts might be heated in boiling water, or preserved with salt.¹⁴ They were eaten fresh, boiled, roasted, baked, or ground into flour.¹⁵ Partially dried nuts were particularly appreciated, because of their increased sweetness.	15
The task of collecting the nuts was often a delight to children, who remembered it fondly in their elder years. A Grayson County, Virginia, woman remembered: On a windy night, we’d fall asleep dreaming of the ground covered with chestnuts which wind-shaken trees had let go. The next morning, breakfast was gulped down as we hurriedly put on old coats, caps and everyday shoes, grabbed buckets or baskets and headed for the closest big chestnut trees, calling back to remind our father to be sure to write an excuse for tardiness at school. Many of the nuts had already fallen out of open burrs and were hiding under masses of brown frostbitten leaves. Some were still inside of very prickly outside burrs but partly open revealing the velvet inside lining. Sometimes we had to use a foot to squash a burr to give up its fruit.¹⁶	16
To get the nuts, people often had to compete with animals, including domestic animals. “There was another chore that had to be taken care of on the farm,” wrote a Floyd County, Virginia, resident, “the picking up of chestnuts. You gathered the chestnuts, every one that you could get. If you didn’t have turkeys, you could get a pretty good supply. But you had to beat the turkeys to the chestnut tree in the morning if you were to get very many.” Another Blue Ridge resident recalled his impoverished childhood: “There was a time of year when we had food. That was in late fall after the gusty winds of a chestnut storm left the ground strewed with nuts. Pa and Ma would take us out by lantern light to beat the hogs to them.”¹⁷	17

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