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1.  It starts with a welcome letter at the top of the year, an e-mail from a dear friend and kind soul, the author of one of my favorite baking books, who first wrote me when I wrote about her cookbook in this space, and who stuck around to answer my various baking questions like the good and patient soul she is.  Happy 2006, she says, and incidentally, did you know that the topic of this year's Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery will be eggs?  Aren't you writing something about eggs?  You will be coming to Oxford this year, won't you?  Why, of course!, I reply, with only a little nervous laughter, and then head directly to my home away from home, which sells published collections of papers from previous symposia.  After consulting with the wise and excellent store manager, I pick up a copy of Milk: Beyond the Dairy, the collection from the 1999 symposium, and start reading.  This is the writing that I love best:  smart, meticulous, scrupulous but not at all boring.  There are essays on everything from buffalo-milk desserts in the Philippines to the construction of a springhouse in Pennsylvania (springhouses were used to keep milk cool in pre-refrigeration days), from the use of almond milk in Lenten dishes to the degradation of bechamel sauce from a rich white sauce based on meat stock and cream to the basic flour-fat-and-milk mix that comprises too many bechamel sauces today, from ancient Persian cheeses to modern Greek dairy advertising.  If I were just reading for pleasure, I would be curled up happily in the lumpy uncomfortable armchair, or sitting up straight happily in the coffee hut of my choice, reading and rereading for hours, but because I am reading to understand what will be expected of me when I sit down to write my own paper, I lose my nerve instantly.  These are smart people, seasoned scholars, grownups.  I cannot play with these people.  I am way out of my depth.

2.  Days later, I am still reading Milk:  Beyond the Dairy, and I am still making mewling, puking, I-can't-do-it noises when I sit down to watch The Simpsons after a long day of box factory adventures.  It's the umpteenth showing of The Secret War of Lisa Simpson, in which Bart is sent to military school and Lisa decides to join him, as she is hungry for a challenge.  After a semester of hazing and ostracism, Lisa learns that to pass second grade, she will have to master The Eliminator, "a 150-foot hand-over-hand crawl across a sixty-gauge hemp-jute line with a blister factor of twelve.  The rope is suspended a full forty feet over a solid British acre of old-growth Connecticut Valleythorn bushes."   During a training session with Bart, she falls repeatedly and finally cries, "I can't do this, Bart.  I'm not strong enough."  Bart chides her with "I thought you came here looking for a challenge!," and she replies, "Duh!  A challenge I could do!"  After I laugh, I think about a particularly bad day I had in culinary school, when I came home and announced to Lloyd, "You know, learning from your mistakes is brilliant in theory, but it really, really sucks in practice."  That's me in a nutshell, looking for a challenge I can do.  I decide that maybe I'm being too much of a drama queen, and I should just cease the histrionics and go to Oxford already.

3.  At least I decide to cease the histrionics until I pick up my copy of The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy: 20 Years of the Best Food Writing from the Journal Petits Propos Culinaires.  (The late Alan Davidson, who was the editor of PPC, was also the co-founder of the Oxford Symposium and chaired the proceedings from 1983 until 2001, and many contributors to PPC have also presented at past symposia.)  Some of the liveliest discussion I have ever witnessed in food writing takes place in the "Notes and Queries" section of PPC, and some of the best N&Q's have been collected in Wilder Shores.  I light upon a discussion spanning three issues from the earliest years of PPC, a discussion of the etymology of the fish known as huss, among the Kent-based scholars Dawn and Douglas Nelson, the late foodwriter/scholar Jane Grigson and the PPC editors.  In a letter published under the heading "Why Huss? Or Uss?," the Nelsons note that huss is a name for a particular breed of dogfish that, due to its method of viviparous reproduction, was often referred to as a "nurse dog," which was shortened to "nurse," which, in turn, was pronounced "nuss" in Kentish fish markets.  Some merchants, hearing the phrase "an uss" rather than "a nuss," would thus label the fish as "uss" on their signage.  When the fish were in turn sold in the Billingsgate markets, those merchants assumed that the Kentish fishermen had dropped an "h," and once again our friend the nurse dog was renamed as "huss."

The Nelsons' thesis was challenged -- politely -- by Jane Grigson two issues later.  Mrs. Grigson noted that the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary identifies "husse" in use as far back as 1530, with an older, obsolete form ("huske" in use a hundred years earlier.  She posited that this was the origin of the word huss, and that nursing habits of the fish had nothing to do with it.  It's a remarkable letter, but even more remarkable was the Nelsons' reply, which takes issue with the OED definition.  They mention that the word "huss" is not used in Kent, and that the evolution of "huske" to "huss" is improbable:

The OED definition of huss...is: 'The dogfish, the skin of which was much used by fletchers for smoothing and polishing arrows.' The OED adds:  "Also attrib. as huss skin (huskyn, hurse-skin).'  Our information is that the production of archery implements was not an industry of coastal Kent, and that the use of fish skin in it was not likely to influence a fish name.  It would also be a backward type of derivation.  That a fletcher might be called an usser would be the right way round, if there was a right way round, which we dispute.

Some years ago we had exchanges with the OED on the derivation of the Kentish (and other counties) word 'gratton' and its various spellings.  We ended with the impression that their authority for what they said was usually their own earlier editions which were presumably delivered personally by Moses!

But at least we agree with Jane Grigson that the fish authorities have done well to retain the name 'huss' for this fish instead of insisting that it be officially dubbed 'dogfish'.

I read this exchange and I am astonished.  From my earliest days mired in 100-level composition classes to my current creeping entry into food scholarship, laced generously with conversations with my pals who, unlike me, went the distance and earned their Ph.D's, I have understood that if you want to know the depth and breadth and scope and all-out history of the English language, you go to the OED.  It is more than a key text, it is *the* key text, the closest thing to an answer key that an etymologist can have.  At the risk of sounding like a wide-eyed naif, I didn't know that you could take issue with the OED, and yet here is a couple who did just that.  How thorough must your research be, how well-read and intelligent and possessed of the capacity for deep thought must you be, to have the kind of confidence to say "I know what the OED has to say on the issue, and I think that the OED is wrong?"  Are these the kind of people who will be at the symposium in the fall?

I share all of this over drinks with Bunni. She listens in that particularly Bunni-like way, quietly and attentively, but in a way in which you can tell that the cylinders in her mind are firing like mad, and then replies, sweetly, "Bitch, you're going to Oxford."  Well, yes, I guess I am.

(to be continued, with further longwindedness on learning to cook, learning to knit and trying to watch Food Network and discuss it without resorting to shooting-fish-in-a-barrel tactics)