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Dear friends,

This should not go unremarked.  James MacGuire is a good friend of a friend of mine, a brilliant chef and an encyclopedic authority on bread baking.  I guess that considering what a tough business climate this is for restaurants and bakeries, we should count ourselves blessed that Le Passe-Partout lived as long as it did.  Still, I can’t deny that this news breaks my heart.  The last sentence in the article, it damn near killed me.

If you are in a newsstand or bookstore that carries Ed Behr’s brilliant foodletter The Art of Eating, snap up a copy.  James MacGuire has been writing essays and book reviews, and he is an unvarnished pleasure to read.

I can’t mince words, dear friends.  Tonight is a wash.  Except for one very bright, very shiny spot, today was just a useless farrago of a day, a day which I spent discovering anew, hour by hour, just how useless my work is, and just how useless I feel while I do it.  It was a day for hearing Condoleeza Rice say, “well, there was really nothing we could have done to stop it” (it being the 9/11/01 attacks), and for hearing Bill Clinton say “well, we should have done something to stop it, but didn’t” (it being the literally unspeakable Tutsi massacre in Rwanda, which began on this week 10 years ago).  When I thought I had heard all I could take from national and international news, I put on the local news instead, only to discover just how mean life can be, particularly if you live in a housing project.  (I will spare you my tirade on these two events, mainly because they involve a lot of tears and spluttering, but the short version is that I am aching to find who was responsible for both events, the death of Constance Lloyd and the release of the surveillance video that captured Paris Lane’s suicide.  If a responsible party ever comes to light, the first thing I will do is hire a good lawyer.  The second thing I will do is find those guilty parties and dislocate their thumbs.)

Even on the mindless entertainment front, the glass-teat opiate that is supposed to dull my synapses enough to take the painful edge off the above, today was a bad day.  Even though I knew, just knew, from the beginning, that this would happen, it still cheeses me that Fox has decided to replace this with this.

So what kept today from being a dead loss? It was that one very bright, very shiny spot, otherwise known as Lunch with the Famous and Not-At-All-Evil http://www.bakerina.com/prepare_to_meet_your_bake/2003/12/faulkners_folly.html>Walt.  In a just universe, Walt and I would be having lunch together at least twice a week, but considering that I live in Noo Yawk City and Walt lives in Phoenix, we must resign ourselves to our unjust circumstances, save lunch for when Walt makes the Big Trek East, and spend the rest of our free time goofing off and riffing off each other on snarky websites.  (For those of you who have not visited this particular snarky website, I encourage you heartily to do so, as Walt and I keep company with some truly brilliant writers there.)

Not only was I lucky enough to have lunch with Walt, I was also lucky enough to receive the news that he has collected close to ten years’ worth of his writings on one handy website.  Run, do not walk, to Walt’s site.  He is a transcendent writer, and that is a word I don’t bandy about lightly.  His observations on the Pennsylvania Turnpike are spot-on.  His descriptions of the Los Angeles Public Library and the Cholla Branch of the Phoenix Public Library make me want to move into both buildings.  And I was utterly unable to resist a travel essay called “Bentonsport and the Sexy Part of Southeastern Iowa”.  He’s right.  Southeastern Iowa is sexy.

Seriously.  You should not be here anymore.  You should be there.  Go there now.

Dear friends,

Apologies and sighs, sighs and apologies.  It has been a tricky week for playing with y’all.  I wouldn’t blame you for shaking your head in disgust.  Prepare to Meet Your Bakerina?  Prepare to Meet Your Slackerina, more like! You’re right, of course, but all I can do is beg your indulgence just one more time.

I am on my way to the library, to once again do battle with the Rare Book room.  I have found some amazing things in the catalogue, such as a manuscript copy of The Form of Cury, one of the earliest (if not the earliest) extant cookbooks in English, a collection of recipes by the cooks at the court of Richard II, edited by Samuel Pegge.  (Cury means “cooking” in Middle English, and is pronounced “kewry.") I am dying to get my hands on this, to sit in an overheated room and actually touch history, but the catalog notation contains that dreaded appendix:  PERMIT REQUIRED.  As I told a friend, I’m hoping that the process to get that permit does not mirror that of Jane Juska, author of A Round-Heeled Woman, who had to plead her case to a pair of snotty misogynists before she was allowed access to the Berg Collection to look at the Anthony Trollope manuscripts.  True, I do have the Egg Board watching my back, and I have a nice reference in the form of Andy Smith, who taught my New School class, but I still fear it may take more than that.

Dear friends, I knew that I would not emerge from this fellowship, this month in Arkansas, with a fully-formed book, but the more I read, the more I understand how a project can snowball.  (Hi, Snowball.) I could easily see giving up five years of my life to pursue the history of the egg.  Anne Mendelson, the author of Stand Facing the Stove, the biography of Joy of Cooking authors Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, said that she had anticipated taking a year to research and write her book.  She took ten.  And my ne plus ultra culinary heroine, Karen Hess, has apparently been working on a book about Thomas Jefferson for close to ten years, and has produced a text that would make Clarissa look like Life’s Little Instruction Book. When Andy Smith told us this story in class, everyone laughed, but I knew.

Since I am in a Karen Hess mood, I’ll leave you with a passage from her introduction to Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery (Columbia University Press, 1981), transcribed and annotated by Mrs. Hess.  This passage, about the bounty of fish available in Atlantic waters in the seventeenth century, is a distillation of everything I love about Mrs. Hess’s writing:  her meticulous sense of scholarship, her amazing palate, her respect of sound kitchen technique, her love of beautiful produce (meant here in the broadest sense of ingredients, not just fruit and veg), her anger at the degradation of our food supply and our palates, and her desire to memorialize what we have lost forever.  If you wonder why I piss and moan about my own writing so much, it is because Mrs. Hess set the bar very, very highly for me, and even though we have never met, I am loathe to disappoint her.

The fish recipes are of exceptional interest.  You may not be tempted to try the virtually medieval way to boyle a Carpe in its Blood (C 187), but you surely will not be able to resist reading about it.  Most of the recipes are perfectly suitable for today, or would be if one could but find the fish.  It is not so much the problem of the varieties available.  It is true that we have neither true sole nor turbot, and that our oysters are quite different, but that is hardly serious compared to the problem of quality.  Some of the finest fish of the great Atlantic swam within sight of English shores and, for the rest the English were intrepid seafarers, and fishing boats were often equipped with ingenious sea water flow-through “keeps.” There were fine streams everywhere and all estates had large ponds where lake fish were kept.  It beat refrigeration.  What fish had to be kept was pickled (there are delightful recipes in our manuscript), dried, or salted.  Again, it beat refrigeration.  And there was no pollution to speak of—no oil spills, no insecticides, no chemical wastes, no atomic fallout.  All salt and fresh water creatures must have had a fine clean taste that none of us has ever tasted, nor ever shall. 

As soon as I finished typing that paragraph, I found an even clearer distillation of Mrs. Hess’s talents, at the end of a paragraph on game cookery, one that speaks volumes to me:  “Not one of the sauces is sludged up with a grain of flour.” Testify.

What a friend I have in goliard.  She is true-blue, stalwart, a bit of all right and a pearl of a girl.  I had mentioned to her, in passing, that the much-vaunted chocolate orgasm I was planning to have last weekend never came to pass.  Lest you start wondering just what I get up to on the weekends, let me assure you that the c.o. is a totally innocent endeavor involving a pilgrimage to Bomboy’s Candy in Havre de Grace, MD.  Havre de Grace is a sweetheart of a town in Harford County, on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, one of the prettiest spots in the world.  My paternal parents (dad and stepmom) live in Havre de Grace, where they just bought a splendid new house, and last weekend I went to their housewarming party.  Since I am a Girl Scout by nature, I spent the weekend playing bakerina, or, more accurately, caterina, grilling chicken, keeping plates of horse doovers nice and full, opening wine bottles, directing people to the deck/restrooms/cooler where the ice is kept, and making pleasant conversation with 60 of my folks’ closest friends.  Unfortunately, this left no time for going to Bomboy’s.  Oh, well, I thought, there’s always Father’s Day weekend.

Father’s Day, nuthin’.  Guess what my friendly UPS guy brought me yesterday, nestled in packing peanuts, wrapped snugly in a crisp white set box with gold hot stamping.  I think I actually hummed as I opened the box.  Bomboy’s caramels are as close to perfect as you will ever have in your life, but my favorite is the “sponge”, or honeycomb toffee.  When you bite into it, you can see that the toffee forms a grid, candy and air in a crosshatch pattern.  I’m still trying to figure out how they do this, but I never get very far because I get too distracted by that lovely toffee and that fine chocolate melting between tongue and palate.  Even the nut clusters, normally the wallflowers of the chocolate box, are terrific, thanks to the spanking-fresh nuts Bomboy’s always uses.  And I’m still kicking myself for turning over the chocolate-covered marshmallow to Lloyd so quickly.  I was never a fan of those “jet-puffed” marshmallows that Kraft sells in big bags, so I always eschew the marshmallows in any set.  This time, though, Lloyd bit into it and said, “oh, this tastes really fresh.” It was better than fresh.  It was homemade.  If you have only had those Kraft marshmallows, you are in for a treat when you first try the real thing.  A small-batch marshmallow is less gummy, softer, less sweet, more buttery (even though butter is not used in their preparation).  Damn.  Next time I’ll know better.

I was going to rabbit on a little more about what a mood elevator chocolate is; about how I woke up this morning with a nasty cough, the latest iteration of the viral cloud that’s been hovering around here for the past six weeks; how I decided to heat up a little maple syrup for our waffles and, in a moment of distraction, let it overboil and could only watch in dismay as syrup cascaded over the pan; how despite all this I was happy because I had my Bomboy’s choc, but that would be wrong, wrong, wrong.  I was happy because there is a silly girl in my life, and she, dear friends, is a mood elevator.

A postscript:  As if the chocolates were not enough, she also sent me a link to the quiz below.  I really can’t say I’m surprised by the results, although you will have to decide for yourself if I’m a goth, a satanist or a Mormon. 

I’m a Heretic!



Which Enemy of the Christian Church Are You?

Take More of Robert & Tim’s Quizzes
Watch Robert & Tim’s Cartoons

Begging your indulgence, dear friends...the vague malaise that was prodding at me a couple of weeks ago seems to be returning with a vengeance. I spent most of the weekend trying to determine whether the sore throat I’d picked up was an incipient head cold, another mysterious industrial pollutant in the neighborhood or a sign from the Fates that it’s time to freakin’ dust, already. I decided to sweat it out on the treadmill at lunch and was rewarded with a wave of exhaustion and what feels like a low-grade fever. Well, at least it will keep me warm when the blizzard rolls in.

Belated thanks and applause to nakedjen, Snowball and Kenneth, who answered my Five Questions so sweetly and thoughtfully. (Kenneth’s description of Reading Terminal Market is worth the price of whatever you’re paying for your ISP. For those of you who have never been to Philadelphia, trust us: Reading Terminal Market is the most wonderful place in the world, and he nailed it in four paragraphs.) Additional thanks and a round of lemon-drop shots to Alicia and goliard, who did not let me twist in the wind, but posted their own zingy replies to orionoir’s Five Questions. No thanks to orionoir for putting us through that. Dude, one of these days your luck is going to run out. 

When I was on my sabbatical the week before last, feeling lonely, fractious and bumpy, the fabulous, sexy and not-at-all-evil Walt rode to my rescue by mailing me a pair of books that he knew would cheer me up. Indeed they did. (Walt is a genius at knowing when I’m down and in need of old Hollywood gossip and trivia: last summer he mailed me a copy of Louella Parsons’ Tell it to Louella, which I received on August 14, the day of the blackout.)

One of them is Otto Friedrich’s City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s. I haven’t started it yet because I picked up the other one first, but Walt says that there are good stories abounding in it, including some about Charles Laughton massaging his own genitals with stage fright. Friends, I don’t ask more from my Hollywood trivia than that. The other one, the one I am deep into now, is Alexander King’s May This House Be Safe From Tigers. I don’t know how I got this far in life without hearing of Alexander King (although the fact that both of his books are out of print; Tigers was published in 1961), but now that I’ve got him, I’m never letting him go. I asked Walt if Alexander King was famous for anything besides being a “poet, painter, cartoonist, raconteur and frequent guest on the Jack Paar show.” He has graciously given me permission to quote from his letter:

Alexander King is one of the stars of an unwritten book about the celebrities who rotated in and out of the Addiction Research Center of the US Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. They specialized in morphine and heroin and would take anybody, but there was a regular bus from NYC. If I remember right, Chet Baker for sure, Sonny Rollins, God knows who else, were his classmates. Wm Burroughs [Jr] wrote ‘Kentucky Ham’ about it. They used to dole out free drugs in exchange for permission to experiment on ‘em. To top that, they were experimented on by Dr. Harris Isbell, who was on the CIA payroll, and gave some of these poor guys LSD for 75 consecutive days.

He includes this informative, scary link.

But back to King. There are great, great stories in here, including a chapter on his trip down to Lexington, a polemic on the corrosive effect of advertising on the content of television shows, and some truly funny and inspired cartoons/slice of life vignettes. (A caveat:  one thing that is less than great in here is King’s condescending and dismissive attitude toward gay people.  It is not atypical of the prevailing mores of the day; in fact, it is probably much more tolerant than most of the prevailing mores of the day, but I’m still sorry to see it.  I would like to think that if King had been born 30 years later, his attitude would have been different—but then again, if he had been born 30 years later, he would not be nearly the character that he was, shaped as he was by his time and place.)

There is not a single page that is not full of sublime, silly, profane, obscene, outraged, giddy language, and I’m afraid that given half the chance, I would quote the whole book right here. So instead I will try my damndest to not do so, and to leave you with this excerpt, which functions as an introduction to a tale of Alexander King watching a pair of seasoned, work-proud garbagemen and the sugarfoot trainee assigned to work with them:

These days I no longer keep any animals around the house, but once, quite a while ago, I was for some reason or another pretty deeply involved in raising hundreds and hundreds of tropical fish, andImust say I derived a great deal offun and even satisfaction out of this expensive pastime.

Remember in my time I have known whimsical hod carriers, dignified sewer inspectors and even poetic chimney sweeps. Hey! I knew chimney sweeps...