A Certain Slant of Light

One more round of the five questions meme! asakiyume didn’t want questions, but kindly took me up on my offer to give me questions, so here we are.

(1) "Revenge is a dish that's best served cold" --Okay, but what dessert should go with it? Yes, yes, probably poison (maybe poison?) but in what?

Well, personally I think that one should eat the dessert after the revenge, at which point poison is no longer necessary, the object of your revenge being dead/exiled/entombed next to a supposed cask of amontillado. Revenge is sweet, so perhaps it should be followed up by a rich dark chocolate mousse? Or, for the more refined palate, a little glass of an exquisite port, accompanied by a plate of sharp cheeses, perhaps a crumbly cheddar and a rich bleu.

(2) "Earl Grey--hot." --You are planning a midsummer's tea party. What tea(s) will you serve?

Since it’s midsummer and likely to be hot, I feel that I really ought to serve an iced tea, but I don’t particularly like iced tea so I probably won’t. Perhaps Lady Londonderry in a teapot imprinted with strawberries (one of those teapot designs where both the berries and the flowers are on the same plant at the same time), with piping hot scones and Devonshire clotted cream and fresh strawberries rather than jam.

We will of course have this tea party on a charming white wicker table out on the lawn, in the pleasant shade of a spreading oak tree.

(3) You have discovered a secret library. Where is it?

I actually have something close to a secret library in the children’s book annex of the university library about ten minutes from where I work. It isn’t actually secret, but it’s also far from well marked: you enter the periodical stacks, turn right past a series of empty and unlit shelves, and keep walking till you find the books. Each section of the stacks has a light switch at the end to turn on if you want to actually browse.

Occasionally I see a student using the study carrels in the periodical section, but I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone else using the children’s book annex. Whenever I visit I carefully put every book I touch on the reshelving cart so they’ll know someone is using it.

(4) Describe a building of your acquaintance that seems begging to be haunted.

The aforementioned children’s book annex certainly feels like it could support a ghost or two, although it’s a vexed question how a ghost would have ended up there. Maybe a young education student died a tragic death and her ghost attached herself to the annex, where she felt safe… Although the children’s books were moved to the annex within the last ten years or so, so either the ghost is not so much attached to the annex as to the books, or she died quite recently.

(5) Name a character from a book you read as a kid that kid you would really loved to have been friends with. What sorts of things would you and that character have done together?

Ahaha you know I have to answer this “Ivy Carson.” She just seemed like the ideal best friend, and I would have loved to go to Bent Oaks Grove and climb the trees (under Ivy’s tutelage, I would have become an expert tree climber) and act out the stories and sit high in the branches to tell each other our dreams.

My mother gave me Kathleen Flinn’s The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks because she knows I’m a fan of food and cooking memoirs, and indeed I gobbled this book right up.

For once, the subtitle of a nonfiction book is an accurate reflection of what’s inside: the book is about Flinn’s decision to give cooking lessons to nine volunteers who are reliant on ultra-processed package foods but want to be able to cook for themselves and their families. Over the course of just a few lessons, they learn how to cut apart a whole chicken, tell when meat is done, measure ingredients for baking, season their food to taste, and just generally cook dinner without having to slavishly follow a recipe.

A couple things struck me as I was reading. The first is that, culturally, there seems to be an assumption in America (perhaps other places?) that most skills are hard to learn, when in fact the basics are often quite easy. I found this myself when I began learning the dulcimer: I have the musical talent of a potato, but nonetheless within the month I could play a recognizable rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Similarly, a novice cook probably won’t jump straight to baked Alaska, but you can teach an eight-year-old to turn out passable chocolate chip cookies.

The other realization, which builds on the first, is that a lot of industries are built on convincing people that it would be sooooo hard to learn the skills to do the thing for themselves. The car industry has gone one better by making cars you literally cannot repair at home, which the food and garment industries can’t manage, but they do rely on the idea that cooking and garment repair are sooooo difficult and time-consuming and hard to learn.

I think AI is creating a similar dynamic with writing and art generally, where people come to see skills that are really pretty simple as completely beyond their grasp. I’m in a class to train advisors, and we had an assignment to write an advising philosophy, and the instructions went from “No AI” to “Well, maybe AI to brainstorm” to “Well, actually I ChatGPTed the whole philosophy! But I edited it myself, so that’s fine, right?” And indeed it was fine, apparently. I’m not sure, at this point, what wouldn’t be fine. ChatGPTing the thing and then not editing, one fondly imagines, but maybe that would have been okay too. Once you let the camel’s nose in the door, the whole camel is coming into the tent.

Lo these many years ago, I signed up for a challenge to write a hundred posts about a topic of my choice – in my case, 100 Books That Influenced Me. After limping, years later, to the halfway mark, I decided that 50 Books That Influenced Me would simply have to be enough and called it a day.

Well, I’ve decided to try to finish the challenge after all, a decision brought to you by the fact that I spend much of yesterday evening removing every box of books from my closet – a side note here; I just moved in, I’m likely to be moving again in a few months, and I made an executive decision not to unpack all my books.

But here I was, taking out the boxes, (the cats kept climbing on the exact next box that I needed, of course), opening each box and checking its contents, until at the very bottom of the very last box in the bottom left hand corner of the closet, I found the book I’d been looking for: Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace.

Adler’s writing has as much economy and grace as her cooking. A lot of twenty-first century books are shaped, inevitably, by the way that one writes on the internet: short and pithy, not too many sentences in a paragraph, anything to avoid big blocks of text. Although An Everlasting Meal was published in 2011, the book feels somehow unmoored from time, old-fashioned in the best way, with the clarity and flow of the best mid-twentieth century essayists. Adler’s sentences expand and breathe.

“It is as wise to be prepared for an impractical meal as for a practical one. If something so good or so bad has happened that only buttered toast and cuttlefish, or delicately whipped liver, or goose neck, or pate are appropriate, as long as you keep your pantry stocked with a few lovely, uncommon things, you can open it and be as well set up to celebrate as to survive.”

The Everlasting Meal of the title is what you might call a theory of kitchen management: of seeing in yesterday’s leftovers the seed for today’s meal, and in today’s leftovers the beginning for tomorrow’s, and so forth, so that a bit of stale bread becomes breadcrumbs that you sprinkle on a pasta dish, and the leftovers get made into a pasta frittata, and the last of the pasta frittata becomes the filling for a sandwich, cut from a loaf which will, in time, yield more stale bread…

This is cooking as a rhythm, a braid, an ongoing practice where each meal feeds into the next. “I have always found that recipes make food preparation staccato,” Adler muses, and “cooking is best approached from wherever you find yourself when you are hungry, and should extend long past the end of the page.” Leftovers are not served again as a mere lesser version of their earlier selves, but viewed as ingredients that will become delicious again as they are incorporated into the next meal. And the age of those ingredients, “lovingly neglected by skilled hands,” will make that meal better than if all the ingredients had come to it shiny and new.

This attitude suffuses the book. Soups and stews, Adler notes, don’t come into their own till the second day. “Pots of beans have an admirable, long-term perspective on eating. It’s the same to them whether you eat them tonight or in three days. Beans get better over a few days’ sitting, gorged and swelled…” There is an entire chapter of recipes for stale bread. “(Thank heavens for the occasional, calculable superiority of old things)”, Adler writes, in a parenthetical note on the superiority of day-old rice for fried rice.

Adler has a gift for these parenthetical notes. “(No rules apply to beets. Beets have their own way of cooking and their own way of being.)” This is not merely a method of cooking, but a way of being in the world: an ethic of paying close attention, and working with what you have. And if what you have is beets, you bend to the beet way.

I must confess that the first time I read this book, back around when it came out, it was utterly beyond me. It felt impossible to manage my kitchen in this way. And did I really want to? Adler uses so many vegetables. Sure, she makes them sound delicious, but that just made me suspicious. And the more poetical passages struck me as suspicious, too. Beets have their own way of being? What does that mean?

So I gave the book away. Then a few years later I asked for another copy for Christmas, and read it again, and began to try; and then for various reasons gave it up in late 2021. But now that I’ve got my own kitchen, I’m ready to try again.

My Anne of Green Gables odyssey continues! On Wednesday I went to the Anne of Green Gables Museum, partly because the gift shop was far less tchotchke oriented and, indeed, had copies of many of Montgomery's books! Not to mention the Megan Follows' Anne of Green Gables miniseries on DVD! Which of course I bought, so now I have a copy of my very own, plus copies of Pat of Silver Bush and A Tangled Web, which are the two books that they had in the edition I wanted (a.k.a. the edition that I grew up with, and I foresee many happy hours in used bookstores as I track nice copies down).

Also, the museum itself is more book oriented: there's a glass case containing first editions of, I believe, every Montgomery novel (I didn't actually count), and another case containing novels that Montgomery inscribed to her cousins, the descendants of whom still own this house - which also means that there are some fun Montgomery artifacts here, like the crazy quilt she made. PLUS there is a museum cat! Her name is Jilly and she just showed up one day and she likes to sleep in a cradle in one of the rooms, and to my great delight she was sleeping in her usual spot when I passed through.

After the museum, I headed down to Dalvay-By-the-Sea. Miniseries aficionados will know this as the White Sands Hotel. I am so sorry I didn't book at least a night there, because it is so beautiful and also it is possessed of absolutely the perfect lounge, full of soft comfortable chairs and a fireplace with an actual wood fire which would be the perfect place to sit and read on a rainy day...

Of course the trick would be managing to book for a rainy day, now wouldn't it. When I came to PEI the forecast suggested rain every day of the week, and today is the first day that we had sustained rain of any kind, and even that was only for a bit in the afternoon! Which of course is great, I'm so glad that my vacation has been mostly non-rainy, but it does undermine one's belief in the forecast, now doesn't it.

Unable to stay at Dalvay-By-the-Sea, I did the next best thing: dinner in their round dining room overlooking the water, gazing out the window and reading The Blue Castle in between courses, as I ended up ordering a succession of appetizers and then dessert.

First, a bread basket with little strips of focaccia, perfectly salted. Then a single fresh Island oyster, with mignonette and horseradish. Smoked duck crostini, with goat cheese and caramelized onions. "Square" soup (no idea why it's called that), butternut squash & pear soup lashed with creme fraiche. And the piece de resistance, the Platonic ideal of a sticky date pudding, rich and yet light, with the rich layered caramel sweetness of toffee sauce and the softening influence of vanilla ice cream; and a pot of Earl Grey tea, a dangerous indulgence so late in the evening, but I drove back to my B&B and slept like a top.

Today I went to Charlottetown, grumpily prepared to spend all day reading in the library if it rained, but in fact the rain held off, so I visited the exhibit about the 1864 Conference of Confederation in Charlottetown, which eventually led four provinces (not including PEI) to confederate in 1867. (As it turns out, the conference occurred in Charlottetown because PEI was so uninterested in the whole idea that they refused to attend if they had to actually travel anywhere. PEI didn't join till 1873.)

And the rain still held off, so I drifted down to poke around St. Dunstan's Basilica. And the rain still held off, so I wandered through Confederation Landing, where I learned that the original Confederation Conference was completely upstaged by the fact that the circus was in town. Then up through the downtown area, and hit up three (!) bookstores all on one street - and then it did begin to rain a bit, so I repaired to the library to catch up on my correspondence, and by the time I was caught up the rain had stopped again, so I set out in search of Red Island Ciders, for I had been informed that they sold hand pies.

(Also, get a load of this Reader/Cider fic. "This Golden Russet cider will take you by the hand, walk you through an apple orchard in autumn, and when an unexpected rain shower appears, this cider will give you a warm hug.")

When I walked in, there were four chaps sitting at the bar, and they all looked up like the regulars of a pub in some show like Ballykissangel: not hostile at all, just astonished that an outsider should appear. Meekly I explained my yearning for a handpie, and the proprietor explained that they were mostly frozen but they had one warm, braised beef and mozzarella, would I like that? Yes I would, and could I buy this Golden Russet cider too, and the handpie popped out of the oven just as I was paying, which leads me to believe that I more or less took it out of the mouth of one of the regulars - but after all he would be there all evening, they could just heat him up another one.

And my god, it's the handpie of all handpies. A flaky crust, a melting filling, the beef tender and soft with the right amount of onion. A delicious warm thing to eat as you drift through the faintest spit of rain on a trail through Charlottetown, pausing at a sign that explains there is a round-the-island trail that takes a mere 32 days to walk, and sighing wistfully at the thought. (One envisions, of course, handpies at every stop.)

And now I am drinking my cider and catching up my DW on all these exciting happenings. Hoping to finish Pat of Silver Bush tonight. Finished Kilmeny of the Orchard a couple days ago; review perhaps forthcoming? I would like to write systematic reviews of Montgomery's work, as I did of Betsy-Tacy, but I'm afraid that a road trip is perhaps just not the time...

Greetings from New York! This is actually my last morning in the city (soon I will be on my way to visit skygiants and genarti!), but I'm making a leisurely morning of it to spend a little bit more time with my hostess's cat Bagels, so I thought I might also post about my NYC adventures.

It has been a glorious trip! Some highlights:

DINNER AT DELMONICO'S. This is the umpteenth reopening of the oldest restaurant in America, and my God was it delicious. They make their own butter, in house, lightly sprinkled with black salt, we were forced to request a second basket of bread to ensure that no butter was left behind. Then I had the short rib tortellini, the short rib filling so perfectly tender, and a brown butter foam for a sauce - so rich and yet so light! - and everything sprinkled with hazelnuts, which drew all the disparate delicious flavors into one grand symphony. And for dessert, baked Alaska made with walnut cake and banana gelato and sweet meringue, and a tart apricot jam on the side to cut all the sweetness... to be honest I would have switched out for a different gelato, a classic vanilla or perhaps (this was Elena's idea) a hazelnut, but it was still very good.

And then we walked back to Elena's place over the Brooklyn Bridge, which is all lit up in the night and oddly peaceful up above the cars.

The Cloisters. This is the Met's medieval art outpost, a small castle of a building set at the top of a park in Upper Manhattan. One of the most peaceful museums I've ever visited, built around four cloisters, each with its cloister garden (although one of the cloisters is enclosed to protect the limestone pillars, so that garden is some pots of ferns, haha) and its fountain and its fruit trees. I took a garden tour (I've gotten very into tours this trip; the docents are so fun), which included not only the gardens but a discussion of plants in medieval art, particular the Unicorn Tapestries with their flower-strewn backgrounds, so meticulously woven that art historians have managed to identity more than 80 species of flowers... and also a little tiny frog in the lower right quadrant of The Unicorn Rests in a Garden. Love all the animal details, too.

A talk by Jane Goodall! Elena nabbed the tickets for this, and it was fantastic, the audience so pumped that we surged to our feet in a standing ovation when Goodall walked on the stage. The talk had an interview format, and the questions were mostly about her life. How did she get into studying animals? "When I was ten, I was in love with Tarzan." How did scientists react to her work early on? "They said National Geographic wanted to photograph me for my legs. Nowadays this would result in a lawsuit, but at the time I thought, if National Geographic wants to fund my research for my legs, *smacks legs* go legs!"

And a trip to the Tenement Museum. In keeping with the general literary theme of this trip, I took the All-of-a-Kind Family tour. Okay, there is no All-of-a-Kind Family tour, it's just the tour of a Russian Jewish immigrant family's apartment in 1911, but still, thematically appropriate. This family had six children and three rooms - not three bedrooms, three rooms total. The parents slept in the bedroom, the girls in the kitchen, and the boys in the front room, where they also sometimes put up a boarder, although unless he hung from the ceiling like a bat I'm not sure how he'd fit! But the oldest girl married one of the boarders so presumably he slept in the normal way, as it would seem to be a bit of a red flag if your suitor sleeps hanging from the ceiling.

(I can see real advantages to marrying the boarder, tbh. You'd already know all about his domestic habits. Does he snore? Will he pick up a dish cloth once in a while to help out?)

All in all an excellent visit. And now onwards! Boston awaits!

Happy birthday to me! Today I am 35 years old, and to celebrate I went down to Starbucks to enjoy my free birthday drink and read Mary Stolz’s Frédou, an enchanting children’s book about a cat who owns a hotel in Paris. (His owner left it to him in her will.) Delightful to wander the streets of Paris with Frédou! And I loved this description of a cat’s nose, “black as a truffle.”

For lunch I have an everything croissant. Then a peaceful afternoon sipping tea and eating a pain au chocolate, and then dinner with friends tonight! A most relaxing birthday.

An excellent trip to Bloomington yesterday! I met up with friends, and we went to the farmers market and bought fresh seasonal strawberries and an almond frangipani tart (which we later ate together, with excellent results), and had brunch at our favorite brunch place where I had a waffle (I am not always in a waffle mood but yesterday I WAS in a waffle mood, and it was absolutely scrumptious), and then we strolled down the street for the homemade fair, which was tragically nearly devoid of notecards, but I DID get a sticker that said "Spend your life doing strange things with weird people" which is honestly my philosophy of life.

It was also an AMAZING day for used book hunting. I got to Bloomington earlier than expected, and spent the time happily trawling the children's books stacks at Goodwill, where I found Natalie Babbitt's Knee-Knock Rise, which cried out to me to be bought. I have learned that when a book cries for you, you should listen (particularly when it is ninety-nine cents), so I bought it and read it over a pot of apricot tea at Bloomingtea.

Very much enjoyed the visit to Bloomingtea, but the book less so. Perhaps Babbitt and I are just not meant to be. I know lots of people who love Tuck Everlasting and I was never big on that one, either... Anyway, in this one our hero Egan goes to visit his aunt and uncle at the foot of Knee-Knock Rise, which has an annual fair on account of the howling of the Megrimum, a monster that lives on top of the rise... or does it? "I bet the howling is the result of air currents whistling through a rock formation," I said, and I was not quite right, but nonetheless it seems pretty clear there is no monster and the people continue to believe in it because it is fun and also draws in crowds of people who spend money on the fair.

I also found Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Season of Ponies, which I've read before and apparently found underwhelming, I guess because I was just not in the mood for joy that week? I've been rereading it, and it is about a girl who meets a herd of magical ponies in all colors (the ordinary white and black, but also pink and blue and gold...), as beautiful as the blown glass horses on her book case, and with the ponies and their accompanying human (called Ponyboy, as he doesn't like to answer questions, including questions about his name), Pamela rides around the countryside having adventures. I believe the joy and freedom of these rides will give Pamela the strength to stand up to her strict, stern aunt, but We Shall See.

And then later we stopped at the library bookstore, where I couldn't resist The Friendly Young Ladies, I guess because I love to have suffering always at my fingertips? It was in support of the library! It is the same edition of my copy of The Charioteer and they look very nice together. I regret nothing.

My New Year’s Resolution for 2020 was “try something new each month,” and I am happy to say that I fulfilled it! Although not quite the way my January 2020 self expected, as I intended to try things like “try Ethiopian food” and “visit New York City,” and after February (“paint-your-own pottery”) I was instead doing exciting new things like “experience a global pandemic.”

On a cheerier note, I also tried a lot of new recipes. I’m particularly proud of the progress I’ve made learning to bake yeast bread: not only have I tried a bunch of new recipes (particularly delighted that I can now make myself fresh soft pretzels whenever I want), but I’ve started baking my own bread on the regular. At first this was because it was the only way to get my grocery store visits down to the recommended once every two weeks, but I’ve found that I like having fresh home-baked bread so much that I intend to keep baking it even once we can go to the grocery store with giddy abandon.

(I’ve also found that I like these widely spaced grocery store visits: it makes going to the grocery feel like a treat rather than a chore. Possibly because I always buy myself a treat. But when you’re only going every two-three weeks, that is a perfectly reasonable amount of treats.)

So the resolution didn’t work out quite the way I expected, but nonetheless it worked well, and because my options for fulfilling it were so limited by the exigencies of 2020, I think I’m just going to roll it over for 2021. Maybe I can finally go to an Ethiopian restaurant! Not to mention make good on that trip to New York City… I’ve been faithfully saving my Honeytrap royalties, and I think I have enough for a real blowout trip, and maybe a side jaunt to Massachusetts too.

My New Year's Resolution for 2020 was "try one new thing every month," which has taken a strange turn: the whole global pandemic thing has rendered many of my ideas for New Things moot. Should have gone to the cat cafe back in February when I had the chance!

(On the other hand, "global pandemic" was in fact one of my entries for March. It certainly was new, even though I suppose it might be stretching things to say I tried it, given none of had a choice in the matter...)

The resolution has taken a cooking-centric direction. In March (for the aforementioned reasons, I didn't like "global pandemic" to be my only March entry), I attempted to bake bread, using a recipe from my friend Micky, who usually sends excellent recipes, so I was a bit puzzled why the bread seemed so solid. Edibly so, I should add! We ate it all! But it was fairly dense.

In April, I discovered why! That first recipe calls for instant yeast, which you just mix in with the other dry ingredients; the yeast in my fridge is active dry yeast, which needs to be activated in lukewarm water for best results. (Although clearly it got some rise even though I mixed it in with the dry ingredients for that first loaf.)

Armed with this knowledge, I tackled the next recipe Micky sent: hot buttered soft pretzels. Verdict: delicious. (They are literally brushed with butter at the end.) A bit of a pain to make, because it takes a while to get the dough long enough (the recipe says thirty inches; I ended up going "as long as my arm," which is shorter than that, but long enough that you can get a good pretzel shape out of it.) A good piece for a hearty tea party if we can ever have tea parties again. (Alternatively: side dish next time we have bratwurst.)

Emboldened by this success, I made peasant bread, which is PERFECT. Good right out of the oven! Keeps well! Good for toast! Stays soft enough for sandwiches! But firm enough to provide a strong base for oven-broiled cheesy toasts. And so easy to make! NO KNEADING!

I've seen very similar recipes before (rachelmanija, I think you baked one), and always pined over them because I didn't have the right-size oven-proof bowls (or indeed any oven-proof bowls) that the recipe calls for. This time I bit the bullet and baked a half recipe in my deep corningware (about two quarts), and it turned out beautifully! The corningware gives it a square shape, which is less cute and peasant-y than a bowl, but also more convenient for sandwiches.

I like the recipe so much that, after eating the last piece as my breakfast toast this morning, I instantly mixed a new batch of dough. (It took less than five minutes. There are only five ingredients, and it's easy to stir together because there's a lot of water. And, again: NO KNEADING.) I never need to buy bread again!!

Even though I've found the perfect everyday loaf, I've already got my sights on two more specialty breads. First, pane bianco, a cheesy-garlic-tomato-basil bread that looks like a meal it itself: look how beautiful it is! Wouldn't that be a beautiful centerpiece for a summery get-together with friends? And second, Japanese milk bread, once I've settled on a recipe. I've found a lot of variation in the recipes, including... a recipe that doesn't have milk?? Is it still milk bread if...?

I've meant to try baking bread for years, and it's so exciting to finally be wading in!

I had the impression, picked up from I know not where, that the great standardization of American food set in sometime during the 1950s, but if Ilf and Petrov are to be believed, the rot had already set in by 1935. They complain:

“During the month and a half that we had lived in the States we had become so sick of American cooking that we were agreeable to any other kinds of edibles - Italian, Chinese, Jewish - anything but Breakfast No. 2 or Dinner No. 1, anything but this numbered, standardized, and centralized food. In fact, if it is possible to speak of bad taste in food, then Anglo-American cooking undoubtedly is the expression of a bad, silly, and eccentric taste that has brought forth such hybrids as sweet and sour pickles, bacon fried to the consistency of plywood, or blindingly white and utterly tasteless (no, having the taste of cotton!) bread.”

Directly following this tirade, they decide to have dinner at a Mexican restaurant, at which time they discover the Russian palate is not equal to the heat of Mexican cooking: “the very first spoon knocked everything out of our heads except the desire to seize a fire extinguisher and to put out the bonfire that broke out in the mouth. As for the enchilada, they proved to be long, appetizing blintzes filled with red pepper and gunpowder, thinly cut, and covered with nitroglycerin. It is simply impossible to sit down to such a dinner without wearing a fireman’s helmet. We ran out of the Original Mexican Restaurant, hungry, angry, dying of thirst. Five minutes later we sat in a drugstore, the most ordinary American drugstore, and ate (oh, humiliation!) centralized, standardized, and numbered food, which he had cursed only half an hour before, drinking beforehand ten bottles of Coca-Cola apiece to quiet our disturbed nervous system.”

Speaking of Coca-Cola, one of the things they find most fascinating about America (and which I, in turn, find most fascinating about the Soviet perspective on America) is the absolute ubiquity of advertising. Coca-Cola in particular advertised absolutely everywhere, but it’s hardly the only brand that is impossible to escape.

“Here [in Chicago], as in New York, electricity was trained. It extolled the same gods: Coca-Cola, Johnnie Walker Whisky, Camel Cigarettes. Here, too, were the infants that had annoyed us all through the week: the thin infant who did not drink orange juice, and his prospering antipode - the fat, good infant who, appreciating the efforts of the juice manufacturer, consumed it in horse-sized doses.”

I also enjoyed their description of that exotic snack, popcorn: “a roasted corn which bursts open in the form of white boutonnieres. On the counter glowed a gasoline flare with three bright wicks. We tried to guess what popcorn was made of.”

The seller - a Russian expat, surprisingly enough! - enlightens them: it’s just corn heated to the bursting point.

And one last description, of a New York automat: “The walls of the automats are occupied throughout with little glass closets. Near each one of them is a slit for dropping a ‘nickel’ (a five-cent coin). Behind the glass stands a dour sandwich or a glass of juice or a piece of pie. Despite the shining glass and metal, the sausages and cutlets deprived of liberty somehow produce a strange impression. One pities them, like cats in a show.”

Might come in handy for a Captain America or an Agent Carter fic.