osprey_archer | Entries tagged with food

Recently I finished Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and have not yet been able to write about it, because I need time to digest it. But Kimmerer recently released a shorter companion book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, which is a distillation of certain ideas from Braiding Sweetgrass, and also easier to digest simply by virtue of being much shorter.

The Serviceberry’s basic idea is this: our current extractive industrial economies are rattling down the road straight toward ecological catastrophe. What other economic models could we follow instead?

And as a model, Kimmerer offers the serviceberry itself. As she notes, Western economics is founded on the idea of scarcity. But while scarcity is a condition that occurs in nature, it’s not a constant. In the natural world, abundance is just as common as scarcity. A serviceberry tree after a rainy spring has more than enough berries for birds and squirrels and humans.

Serviceberries are thus one model of a gift economy. They invite humans to understand “natural resources” not as a source to be exploited but as a gift from the earth, which like all gifts creates a reciprocal relationship between the giver and the receiver. We take, but also give. (In the case of the serviceberries, by spreading the seeds.)

And, furthermore, Kimmerer suggests, modern society could use traditional gift economies as a model for one possible way forward out of our current economic race toward climate catastrophe. There are already small-scale attempts in Little Free Libraries and free farm stands and Freecycle and the Buy Nothing movement, everything from the traditional mutual aid in churches to the new forms of digital gift economy exemplified in, for instance, fandom.

This last is not something Kimmerer discusses, but fandom is my own most extensive experience with a gift economy, where people write fic or draw fanart and post it with no expectation of direct payment behind perhaps a few comments - but also the more diffuse payment of helping create an environment where other people also post their fan creations for everyone to enjoy.

Now, at this point in my life, I’ve mostly moved over to selling stories for regular old money, because we have not (yet) learned how to leverage the gift economy so that it can pay for, let’s say, a two-month road trip. But, on the other hand, so many of the friends that I stayed with on that road trip were people I met through fandom, or through book reviews or nature photos on Dreamwidth or Livejournal. The road trip would not have been possible without the money, but it also would not have been possible without the web of relationships created by the gift economy.

***

While I was reading The Serviceberry, I discovered a couple of serviceberry trees on a street near my house, in a location that made it clear they had been planted by the city. Visions of serviceberry muffins dancing in my head, I went out to pick some berries - keeping a weather eye on the road, as picking berries from a public tree felt vaguely illicit.

But berry-picking is an absorbing occupation, and I didn’t notice the man walking his dog until he was almost upon me. “What are you doing?” he asked, curious, with some slight accent I didn’t recognize.

“Picking serviceberries,” I explained. “Would you like to try one?”

He would and he did. “It’s good,” he said, a little surprised. “Better than blueberries.”

And we said good evening, and I went back to picking serviceberries as he and his dog walked on.

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.

Another round of five questions meme! If you would like questions, say "Questions, please!"

Questions from

lucymonster.

1) For the next six months, your reading is restricted to a single genre of your choice. What do you pick?

Oh, this is cruel. Do “children’s books” count as a genre, or do I need to be more specific? It would probably be children’s fantasy or children’s historical fiction, and you would have to rip the ones that blur the lines between the two out of my cold dead hands.

2) What’s a once-embarrassing childhood memory that you’ve come to look back on more fondly?

Oh, gosh, so there was one time in high school that I vigorously accused my friends of STEALING my PEPPERMINT PATTY at lunch, only to realize to my horror that said peppermint patty was in my hand the whole time. At the time I had NO idea how to walk this back and simply sat there clutching my peppermint patty praying that no one would ask me to open my hands or I would have no choice but to die on the spot (thankfully no one thought to ask), but looking back, this is hilarious.

I can’t remember the ultimate fate of the peppermint patty. I assume that I clutched it in secret until I was alone, then gobbled the evidence.

3) Best dessert you’ve ever eaten?

No, I take it back. THIS is cruel. How can I pick just one dessert out of the galaxy of delicious desserts in my life?

One of the most memorable desserts of my life occurred when my parents and I visited Sydney when I was seventeen. We walked down to Cabbage Tree Point, where we ate at a restaurant called Le Kiosk, and for dessert I had what must have been a flourless chocolate cake - I believe my first ever flourless chocolate cake - with a luscious fruit compote. I loved it so much that I immortalized it in my scrapbook as “THE LOVE OF MY LIFE!”

4) What’s the first movie you can remember seeing in a cinema?

The first movie I know for sure that I saw in a cinema was The Lion King, and I was deeply scarred when Simba’s daddy died. He died. HE DIED!

I also felt that the sudden appearance of Timon and Pumba and all the fart jokes lowered the tone of the movie, although I didn’t find them quite as annoying as Mushu in Mulan a few years later. You’re going to make a perfectly good movie about a cross-dressing soldier and ruin it with a TINY IRRITATING DRAGON?

5) How often do you write by hand, and are you proud of your penmanship?

I actually write by hand pretty often, as one of my hobbies is penpalling. The best that can be said of my penmanship is that it’s mostly legible, but to be honest I think most people these days are so pleased to get a handwritten note that they don’t mind if it’s a bit messy.

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.

Although this series of posts is entitled 100 Books That Influenced Me, some of the posts are definitely a bit sketchy on the whole question of influence. (In fact, you can really see a progression in my book review skills over the course of this series.) I don’t think it’s that the books in question didn’t influence me, but that I sometimes struggled to articulate just what influence, for instance, The Perilous Gard exerted on me.

(In retrospect, of course, Kate and Christopher’s romance-through-bickering was formative, as was the book’s picture of the fairy folk – the alienness of the fairy folk, even though in The Perilous Gard the fairy folk are in fact human.)

However, there is nothing difficult to define about the influence of Elaine Corn’s Now You’re Cooking: Everything a Beginner Needs to Know to Start Cooking Today. I read it as a baby cook, sighing over the vision of independence implied by the book’s assumption that one had one’s own pantry, which one needed to stock, and many of the habits it suggested became my own. In particular, Corn advocates that cleaning up as you go, so that there are only a few dirty dishes at the end of the meal rather than a dispiriting mountain. So helpful.

But I didn’t just pick up a few specific tips: the book affected my attitudes more generally. “Instead of cooking, it seems we’re filtering the essence out of our food in an attempt to save time, fat, and calories,” Corn muses, and throughout the book, she gently but insistently returns to the theme that your ultimate aim in cooking is to make something that you would like to eat, even if that demands five extra minutes and a tablespoon of butter.

“I use salt. I use butter. I use cream. Olive oil shows up. So do eggs,” Corn says, breezily invoking all the nutritional bogeymen of 1994. I found this attitude deliciously bracing, and although the bogeymen have changed since then (are carbs still evil, or have we moved on from that too?), the basic insouciance has held me in good stead. Fat is not evil, carbs are not evil, food is not your enemy. Go into the kitchen and make a mess (and clean it up as you go!) and make something. If you start with good ingredients that you like, probably you’ll end up with something tasty. Dig in!

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.

Greetings from Philadelphia! This is the final major stop of the trip, for

skygiants and

genarti's wedding. Then back to Indiana, although not quite back to real life as I am tacking on the brief stops in Indianapolis and Bloomington that I had to cancel earlier because I was sick.

On my final day visiting

asakiyume it rained, although politely not until we had returned from our long forest walk, during which we discovered (a) beautiful horses (there is a sign along the road near

asakiyume's house that says "horse lessons," and I believe these are the horses), (b) delicious mushrooms, and (c) a tasty fruit that grows on a specific variety of ornamental dogwood tree. So despite the lateness of the season we got to forage a bit after all!

And then we returned to

asakiyume's house and baked our croissants! We began work on this recipe on the first morning of my visit, and finished it up on my last, as the croissant dough needs to rise and rise and rise again; and they were very creditable for a first attempt! Delicious, soft, buttery, perhaps not as flaky as a croissant made by a true professional, but after all one does not wish to achieve perfection on the first go. There are mountains still to climb!

Then the rains came, and we had a nice quiet afternoon, reading, writing, recovering from our perhaps over-indulgence in croissants (but WHEN will we have another chance to eat fresh-baked croissants hot out of the oven?), and in my case gathering strength for a weekend of wedding festivities.

Said festivities began yesterday with a cupcake-decorating party! I have met many people that I hitherto knew only online, sometimes through Zoom theater and sometimes only as a username, and many more people that I had not even known in that capacity! Also Freya Marske, who introduced herself simply as Freya, and murmured that she wrote fanfic... Hannibal, Captive Prince, nothing recently though... and it was only half an hour later when she mentioned she was here for a book release that the dominoes fell and I yelled "You're Freya Marske!"

Also I've met a lot of people who have read my books! People who read my books long before they met me, I should say. Which has been nice! Although I'm still working out what one says in response to this, as presumably "oh God I hope you liked it" is not the Author Vibe I wish to project.

This morning, I have visions of the Rodin Museum: it's a lovely sunny day, perfect weather to stroll around the sculpture garden. Then wedding! Then dancing?! Wish me luck!

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...

My last evening in Boston! The last few days with

genarti and

skygiants have been jam-packed. We went canoeing on the Charles, and saw geese and ducks and two blue herons and a cormorant and a kingfisher. Then apple-picking, at a hillside apple orchard girt round with forest, where they not only allow but all but demand that you climb the apple trees: there are ladders provided, and spreading branches which all but cry out to be climbed.

We suspect that the place is under the protection of the fae - a suspicion that rose to a near certainty when we found a grassy lane of dotted with golden apples like will-o-the-wisps leading you up the hill toward the dark hopeful trees - but the fae were merciful, or sated, and took none of us, but let us go away with a golden apple plucked from the top bough of a tree.

Also we returned to the Boston Public Library to make use of their Reading Room, a beautiful vaulted space with classic green-shaded reading lamps, where I worked a bit on Sage and also a bit on titles that might be a bit more likely to bring readers to the yard. My favorite right now is Diary of a Cranky Bookworm.

And we had an afternoon tea in Lexington, a three-tiered plate bearing little sandwiches, and scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream, and tiny pastries: eclairs and macarons and the littlest fruit tarts, and tart little lemon squares. Afterward we walked two blocks to the Lexington battlefield, where we had the good luck to catch a tour that had just begun, and the tour guide showed us where the militia gathered on the green, and how close the redcoats stood, shouting for the militia to disperse, when an errant shot started the shooting war.

(I think I've mentioned before my hazy childhood vision of battles as something akin to a soccer match? This is very off-base for the Civil War, and probably for any number of Revolutionary War battles too, but this actually is about the size of the battlefield at Lexington, although the British team unsportingly brought about a hundred players to the militia's forty or so.)

We also very much enjoyed a commemorative plaque erected in 1799 and written in the full glory of 18th century prose. It begins, and I reproduce the capitalization and punctuation verbatim, “Sacred to Liberty & the Rights of mankind!!!”

This is not the only place on the plaque featuring multiple exclamation points. I love it. If you tried to punctuate a plaque like this today, everyone would think you had run mad.

***

A couple of mini-reviews of things that we watched:

A Spy Among Friends, a six-episode miniseries based on Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. I believe someone read the book and said "What if we really lean into the bad break-up vibes of this story?", and the mini-series focuses tightly on Nicholas Elliot's friendship with Kim Philby, which is of course shattered by the realization that his dear friend and long-time spy colleague has in fact been a Soviet double agent ever since the day they met. (Here is an excellent in-depth review by

skygiants.)

Also Night Witches in the Sky, a 1981 Soviet film directed by Yevgeniya Zhigulenko. In her youth, Zhigulenko was one of these "night witches" who flew fighter planes for the Soviet Union in World War II; I don't know if the film is based directly on her own experiences, but it surely draws on them for, say, the hijinks of the young pilots as they skylark like schoolgirls, sneaking out of hospitals, stealing goats, frolicking in the water when they're sent to a plum landing field near the beach.

None of us have watched many Soviet war movies, but if this is at all representative, they must be built on a very different set of rules than American ones, which usually signal clearly if this is a boys' own frolic or Very Serious war movie where any character foolish enough to show off a photo of a sweetheart will certainly be gunned down soon.

And possibly Night Witches did indeed have those signals, in a Soviet context. But we don't know how to read them, and were fascinated to realize that it's a little bit of both. The film doesn't have a plot exactly, it's a series of vignettes, and some of them are beach frolics and some of them are "these pilots have left behind their parachutes so they could fit in more bombs, and now their plane is going down in flames and they cannot jump."

***

Tomorrow will be a long driving day, ending on Prince Edward Island, where I will spend a week basking in the land of Anne of Green Gables. I am hoping to buy many L. M. Montgomery novels in the various Anne-themed museums, but just in case my quest proves futile, I've loaded my Kindle with a stack of Montgomery's novels.

Obviously I have to reread Anne of Green Gables, but otherwise I'll follow my whims. Will they lead to a complete Anne reread? A return visit to the Emily Trilogy or Pat duology? Might I branch out in new directions, and finally read Kilmeny of the Orchard and A Tangled Web? Heck, I might even read a non-LMM book! Ah, well, we shall see.

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!

The B&B in Mankato promised a gourmet four-course Sunday brunch, so I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed yesterday morning, ready for a delicious brunch to set me up for the long drive home. Savory smells came from the kitchen… a cutting board full of fruit reposed on the counter…

And then the power went out!

Fortunately, the brunch was delicious anyway - and very atmospheric for Betsy-Tacy, as I pointed out to my table companions, for Betsy would have eaten breakfast in the sunlight through the windows just like us. And, as the house was built in the 1880s (it belonged to Winona Root’s uncle, who co-edited the local paper with her father, for Betsy-Tacy fans), the windows let in plenty of light for the purpose.

And brunch was delicious! A fruit course, including honeydew fresh from the garden (not usually a big honeydew fan, but who turns down garden-fresh fruit?). Thick slices of blueberry loaf with rhubarb compote. A stovetop course created on the fly by the B&B owner when the power outage forced a change of plans: cheesy polenta, sausage, and scrambled eggs with cherry tomatoes and basil, also fresh from the garden. And to top it off, a tiny desert course of ice cream bonbons with almond cookies. Delicious!

Fortified by this excellent brunch, I drove back to Indiana, where I am visiting my parents and taking a brief breather after the western leg of the trip!

I have of course a backlog of books that I want to write about, so I thought I’d start with a couple quick reviews of books that I actually finished before the trip began. (One always ought to clear one’s plate of book reviews before the trip, but to be fair I wrote MANY book reviews in that last week as it was!)

The cover copy describes Monica Dickens’s Mariana as a read-alike to I Capture the Castle, but although both books are coming-of-age stories about young girls in interwar Britain, Mariana is a sharper book, without the charm and whimsy of I Capture the Castle, which was written during the war and already views the interwar period with a wistful nostalgia.

Sarah Tolmie’s All the Horses of Iceland is historical fantasy, or rather more of a historical fairy tale or folktale, an origin story for the horses of Iceland. A man heads out from Iceland on a trading voyage through Europe and Central Asia, and through strange and ghostly happenings (which give him a pain in the neck: he doesn’t want to get entangled with magic! Way too much trouble!) he comes home with a herd of horses.

I did also finish E. F. Benson’s David Blaize of King’s, but it’s going to get its own post.

***

Later this week, I’ll be heading off on a camping trip in the Indiana Dunes, followed by a visit to my friend Micky in Michigan, which will at long last include a visit to the massive Detroit bookstore John K. King books!

This trip has already featured many bookstores. The gorgeous public library in St. Cloud has a used bookstore on the first floor, where I found Phyllis Fenner’s The Proof of the Pudding: What Children Read, an enchanting book from 1957 full of book recommendations. Fenner was a school librarian, and each chapter offers a list of books that children have enjoyed about mythology, or adventure, or biography, or what have you.

She also includes a list of classics and books that she believes will become classics. Many of her guesses are spot on, and it’s also fascinating to see which books have fallen off the shelf in the years since, like Lucinda P. Hale’s 1880 The Peterkin Papers. These comic stories were evidently still popular with children in 1957, but I hadn’t heard of them till this year. In fact, I had started reading The Peterkin Papers just before I got The Proof of the Pudding, so it was a delightful moment of synchronicity when they showed up here!

However, the true find occurred in the middle of Wisconsin. I was driving through the cornfields along quiet little US-10 when from the corner of my eye I caught sight of KG’s Unique, Rare, and Antique Books. Already I was flying past, but at the next crossroads I executed a U-turn and went back…

Only to find that the store was closed! But as I was turning back to my car, the door opened: the owner was there, and he invited me in, and so in I went. I trawled the children’s books; I considered the shelves of leatherbounds; I sat on the floor to sort through a stack of books with that distinctive look of the first half of the twentieth century…

And there I found William Heyliger’s The Spirit of the Leader! I’ve never seen a Heyliger book in the flesh before, and this is one of my favorites, the book that got me started on Heyliger in the first place when I read an excerpt in an old reading textbook.

So of course I bought it. That was why I turned back, after all. The book was calling for me.

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.

A lovely birthday this year! I had a chocolate croissant for breakfast (discovered with some dismay that if you put a croissant in a tupperware, it loses its crispness; oh well, will remember this for next time) and a ham and cheese croissant for lunch and two macarons for snack (one pistachio and the other Earl Gray), and dinner at Petite Chou, where I attempted but did not succeed in winning over my compatriots to “appetizer smorgasbord for dinner.” Oh well. Someday I WILL get to try the gougere and the mushroom duxelle and the beef tartare.

I’ve gotten into the habit of saving a short book that I expect I will like to read on my birthday, and this year’s was Kenneth Grahame’s The Reluctant Dragon, an enchanting children’s fantasy illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard of Winne the Pooh fame. It’s really a short story published in book form. A boy befriends a lazy sonnet-writing dragon, only for St. George to ride into town, so the boy has to mediate so St. George won’t slay his dragon friend…

”Haven’t got an enemy in the world,” said the dragon, cheerfully. “Too lazy to make ‘em, to begin with. And if I do read other fellows my poetry, I’m always ready to listen to theirs!”

“Oh, dear!” cried the Boy, “I wish you’d try and grasp the situation properly. When the other people find you out, they’ll come after you with spears and swords and all sorts of things. You’ll have to be exterminated, according to their way of looking at it! You’re a scourge, and a pest, and a baneful monster!”

St. George and the dragon agree to stage a dramatic sham fight before the cheering townsfolk, ending when St. George spears the dragon in a theatrical yet harmless manner, and then dragon and St. George and townsfolk all traipse back to town and have a feast and the dragon gets just a little bit drunk, and sings as St. George and the boy see him home.

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.

You know how it is with modern daughters and mothers who think we are modern. And it is even more delicate with a mother and a daughter, both having had mixed experiences of eating, cooking, speaking, and writing. Now that we have not neglected to do the making-up with each other after our last recipe, it is safe for me to claim that all the credit for the good points of the book are mine and all the blame for the bad points is Rulan’s.

Next, I must blame my husband for all the negative contributions he has made toward the making of the book. In many places he has changed Rulan’s good English into bad, which he thinks Americans like better…

Like Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, Buwei Yang Chao’s How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was translated into English by a family member: in this case, her daughter Rulan, with occasional footnotes by Yuenren Chao (who once has dueling footnotes with Rulan). The book is part traditional cookbook, with recipes, but also partly a description of Chinese food culture in the early to mid twentieth century. (The book was published in 1945. For obvious reasons, the Chaos had been stuck in America for a few years at that point.)

Chao mentions, for instance, that although it’s common in China to serve tea throughout the day, no tea is served at meals. In fact, often the only liquid at meals is soup, and people will take spoonfuls of soup to refresh themselves between courses. There’s no dessert at the end of the meal, but at a banquet, sweets may appear at intervals between other courses; the other main use of sweets in Chinese cuisine is as tien-hsin, “dot-hearts,” (tim-sam in Cantonese), which are little meals/snacks eaten with tea - although these are just as likely to be savory, “flour things which are baked, fried, or boiled and may be made sweet or salty.”

I loved the translation “dot-hearts” and wish it had caught on in English; it sounds so much more elegant than “snack.” I also loved the phrase Chao mentions as a description of fine food, “mountain rarities and sea flavors.” Isn’t that so evocative?

In many cases Buwei and Rulan are not just translating from Chinese into English but actually making up an English word or phrase to correspond to the original Chinese. Some of these caught on, like stir-fry (defined as “a big-fire-shallow-fat-continual-stirring-quick-frying of cut-up material with wet seasoning”); others didn’t, like wraplings for what I believe, based on the description and the line-drawings, English-speakers now call dumplings.

She does have a dumpling recipe - for a New Year Dumpling that is made by concocting a nut stuffing (ground walnut & almond, & sesame), sprinkling the balls of stuffing with water, and then rolling them till coated in glutinous rice flour and then sprinkling then coating etc etc until there are four or five layers of rice flour, and then you boil the whole thing up. If you google New Year Dumpling today, something completely different comes up! Is this because New Year Dumplings have completely changed direction in China, or because the dish Chao describes now goes by a different name in English?

As it’s a cookbook rather than a memoir, it has less forward motion than Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, so I found it a little harder to get into - but the process of translating from one language into another that doesn’t yet have a word or set phrase for the things you’re describing really intrigued me. And the food descriptions kept making me hungry!

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.

As tomorrow (Wednesday) is Honeytrap release day, I’m doing the Wednesday Reading Meme a day early this week.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

George MacDonald’s The Light Princess is a delightful fairy tale about a princess who is cursed by… well, lightness: she’s both unaffected by gravity, liable to float away on the lightest breeze, and terminally light in spirit, unable to feel any emotions with any degree of gravity.

This being MacDonald, there is of course a moral/philosophical underpinning here, but the main feeling of the book is one of, well, lightness: it’s frolicsome and fun and full of puns. There’s a wonderful scene where her parents bat terms to do with light back and forth. Her father, determined to make the best of the curse, comments that it’s good to be light-footed, lighthearted! - while her mother, more realistic, sighs that it is good neither to be light-fingered nor light-headed.

On the other end of the nineteenth-century fantasy spectrum, I also read William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings, which is an excellent book to read if you loved Lord of the Rings but thought that it was just too bad that the characters, while capable of reciting poetry at the drop of a hat, did not actually speak their lines in verse. Morris has you covered! As his Goths head out to face the Romans, they declaim, sometimes for multiple pages!

Suffice it to say I found The House of the Wolfings a bit of a slog. But at the same time the book is just so very much itself that I can’t help but feel a certain admiration for it. It may not be what I want in a fantasy novel, but by God it’s what Morris wanted and he did it to the very utmost. (And if you are a Tolkien fan, there’s an added interest in that this is a book he read and liked. It may be the source for the name of the forest Mirkwood in The Hobbit.)

When I was a child, I never read the Babysitters Little Sister books; I was, in fact, invincibly opposed to them, in the way that children sometimes are opposed to things that are aimed at children ever so slightly younger than they are. (I also disdained Barney.) But piggybacking on the success of the Babysitters Club graphic novels, two Little Sister books (Karen’s Witch and Karen’s Roller Skates) have also been adapted into graphic novel form, so I decided that I had to check them out, and…

Well, to be honest, I still find Karen Brewer annoying. I guess some things never change!

But also sometimes things do, because as I mentioned last week, I didn’t get on with Willa Cather when I was in college (one of my friends had become a Cather fangirl and I just Did Not Get It), but over time I’ve grown to appreciate her, and quite liked O Pioneers!, especially from a sociological standpoint; it was interesting to see Cather’s viewpoint on all these disparate immigrant groups meeting in the Nebraska plains: Swedes, Bohemians, the French, etc.

What I’m Reading Now

Tamar Adler has had a new book out for two years and I didn’t even notice, WHY, HOW, anyway, I am making up for lost time by reading Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Revisited, a work of minor culinary archaeology (I believe the recipes are mostly from within the last two hundred years, not like this Atlantic article about recreating ancient Egyptian bread, which sounds amazing but NOT a project for my home kitchen). The only thing I love more than history is history that is EDIBLE.

I’m also reading James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, about which more anon, but for now I just want to leave you with this quote from a review of Carmen Jones, a 1950s black cast musical based loosely on the opera Carmen. The actors, Baldwin notes wearily, “appear to undergo a tiny, strangling death before resolutely substituting ‘de’ for ‘the.’”

What I Plan to Read Next

Did you know that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a sequel to Kidnapped, called various Catriona (UK) or David Balfour (USA)? Like The Light Princess and The House of the Wolfings and even O Pioneers!, this is research for the boarding-school-friends-reconnect-after-World-War-I book, let’s just call it David & Robert for now so I don’t have to recapitulate the book every Wednesday Reading Meme, as it may affect my reading for quite some time.

Perhaps I ought to read more early twentieth century boarding school books. You know, for research. Maybe I ought to take another run at Mike & Psmith. (Actually, it looks like Mike & Psmith is the sequel to Mike, so really I ought to start there.)

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!

Under the circumstances it seems not quite right to say “Happy St. Patrick’s Day!”, but despite everything we are observing it in a small way. We will be having potato cakes and Guinness stew, as is my St. Patrick’s Day tradition (also traditional: I didn’t salt it enough the first go round, so I added a bit more salt to the remaining stew after dinner last night, so it should be perfect tonight), and perhaps also lime curd, which may not be particularly Irish but does at any rate come out of my Irish cookbook. And it’s green! So there.

We’re also watching Derry Girls, which of course I’ve seen, but Julie hadn’t and of course I had to spread the love. “What’s it about?” she asked.

“It’s a comedy about ordinary people just trying to live their lives during an ongoing crisis,” I said.

She looked at me wearily. “Well, that’s on point.”

(She has a work-from-home laptop now, so we’ll both be at home for the next few weeks. This is a weight off my mind.)

We watched the first two episodes yesterday, and we are in agreement that Sister Michael is the very very best, although honestly I love all the characters so much that it pains me slightly to display even this little bit of favoritism. Julie has not yet warmed to Michelle (to be fair, Michelle is probably the roughest around the edges. And quite mean to her cousin James, I feel bad for him) but perhaps that will come over time.

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.

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with food

Book Review: The Serviceberry

Five Question Meme, round three

Five Questions meme

Book Review: The Kitchen Counter Cooking School

100 Books That Influenced Me, 53: Now You’re Cooking

100 Books that Influenced Me, #51: An Everlasting Meal

Greetings from Philadelphia!

More PEI

Boston Tidbits

Greetings from New York!

Taking a Breather & Reviewing Some Books

Happy Birthday to Me!

Birthday + Reluctant Dragon

Bloomington

Book Review: How to Cook and Eat in Chinese

2021 New Year’s Resolution

Wednesday Reading Meme on a Tuesday

Bread!

St. Patrick's Day

Ilf & Petrov on American Food