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Sometimes you need a little fanfare, a little flourish, and sometimes you need to dispense with the baroque and resort to plain-spokenness.  This is a time for plain speaking:  Thank you, Karen.  Karen, for new friends of PTMYB, is my Boss Lady at LuthorCorp, a fellow fighter of the good fight on behalf of box factory customers everywhere.  Karen is freshly returned to LuthorCorp from a summer-long maternity leave, which she spent with her new baby son, the most blissed-out child I've ever had the pleasure to hear on the phone, and her three-year-old daughter, who is not only the smartiest and prettiest and funniest three-year-old in New York City, but who was also considerate enough to be born on Lloyd's birthday, thus saving me the confusion of adding another date to the mental Rolodex.  Karen could have spent the week in a foul mood, having to eschew the company of these cuties for the box factory, but instead she returned bearing gifts, including a gift card for yours truly from one of my favorite places in the world, as a thank-you for keeping things running while she was out.  Yesterday I found myself in Bridge, on the heels of a disastrous clothes-shopping trip in which I tried in vain to find a scoop-necked blouse that would not make me look like a sausage.  I knew that poking around a room full of Silpats and double-boilers and cake pans and bean pots and carbon-steel melon ballers would be an instant mood elevator.  I glanced up at the copper cookware hanging on the wall, the pieces I never bother to look at because I can't afford them.  Out of curiosity, I asked the nice woman behind the counter what the prices were on the preserving pans.  You could have knocked me over with a feather when she gave me the price.  Not only was there enough money on the card for me to pick up the larger of the two pans, but there was enough left over for me to buy a 2-quart Sitram saucepan.  (If you are not a kitchen-tools nerd, trust me when I say that this is exciting stuff.)   I never ever thought I would have one of these kettles to call my own, but after 10 years of making jam and jelly in a T-Fal dutch oven and various stainless steel spaghetti pots that were just a little too small, a little too tall, a little too narrow, I now have something tailor-made for the task:  Copper makes it conductive, able to heat evenly and fast; the wide, shallow structure allows for fast cooking and evaporation; the generous volume (15.5 liters!  15.5 liters!) means that I can let sugar syrups boil and rise without racing to turn down the flame before the whole thing boils over.  Did I say thank you, Karen?  Thank you, Karen.

Of course, one of the dangers of this sort of purchase is that my depth perception and sense of spatial relationships really, really suck, and thus I didn't realize just how big this thing was until I got it home:

This would be Exhibit A:  the relative size of the new preserving pan to my trusty hob.  (If you're wondering:  yes, those are stains and burn marks on the walls, requiring bleach to remove them, and yes, those are baked-on stains on the stovetop, requiring  a healthy dose of oven cleaner to remove them.  I'm getting right on it.  Thank you in advance for not pointing, laughing, fainting or screaming like a cheerleader.)  To quote Marge Gunderson, he's a big fella.  It will be a challenge, if not an outright impossibility, to have the preserving kettle and the boiling-water canner on the stove at the same time.  But I have never been one to back down from a challenge.  I was going to just keep this on the hob for a week or so, ooh and ahh over it, and then make a nice big batch of paradise jelly as soon as the quinces came in.  Then I went to meet Bunni at the farmer's market yesterday, and discovered that crabapples had just come into season, which meant that I had to buy five pounds right away.

Look, look at all the room left in the pan!  No more full Dutch ovens!  No more nervous glances at a boiling pot!  What do you mean that I could have got around this by not buying so damn many apples?  What a silly notion.

Now if only I could find a Very Large Jelly Bag to go with the Very Large Preserving Kettle, I'd be laughing.

Eventually those five pounds of dry, sour, hard little apples, so unpromising if you bite into them, will turn into several jars of the one of the nicest and simplest jellies I know how to make.  It clarifies to a truly beautiful pale rose shade, soothing to just look at.  But don't just look at it.  If you ever find yourself with a jar of crabapple jelly in your possession, go ahead and eat it, especially if you like your jellies on the tart side.   Lloyd once came up with a great snack idea, which I have since appropriated for breakfast:  a slice of this focaccia, a layer (thin or thick, as you like it; I like the former) of creme fraiche, a layer of crabapple jelly.  I am cursing my bad planning right about now, as I have neither creme fraiche nor focaccia at hand.  Feh.

(Did I say thank you, Karen?)

Plum Tucker Recipes, Part One:  Damson jam.  It only took me a few zillion weeks, but here is the methodology for damson jam.  (Many thanks to everyone who found the original damson jam post via various and sundry search engines, and who offered such excellent advice, encouragement, thoughtful questions and captivating memories.  I have been sorely delinquent in acknowledging your kind correspondence, and I apologize for that.)  You can scale this up or down according to the amount of fruit you have on hand, but I've never had much luck with small batches of jam.  Two pounds is about as small as I've ever made, but if all you have is a pound of fruit, by all means try it.  Or you can make damson crumble instead, which I've been telling myself for years that I need to make.

Put something compelling on your stereo.  (I like The Carl Stalling Project, Vol. 1, not only because I am a toonhead but also because it takes me about the length of this album to stone five pounds of damsons.)  Wash and dry 5 pounds damson plums and cut the fruit from the pits.  (I have been advised by Grace in the UK that stoning the fruit is not necessary; she recommends highly a jam made by a farm that doesn't remove the pits, and she makes an elegant case for playing Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy with the stones one finds in one's damson crumble.  I will admit that I like cherry tarts and olive bread better when the cherries and olives are unstoned; spitting the pits out is a small tradeoff.  However, not everyone shares my enthusiasm for pit-spitting, so I will reluctantly err on the side of convenience here.  But Grace, you and I are of like minds on this.   Put the cut fruit into a preserving pan or a large Dutch oven, add about 1/2 cup (4 fluid ounces) water -- just enough to keep the fruit from sticking to the pan -- and put over a medium-high flame.  The plums will begin to let out their juice; once the juice comes to a boil, add 2 1/2 - 3 1/2 pounds granulated sugar and the juice of one lime.  (The lesser amount of sugar will make a looser, more tart jam; the greater amount will make a sweeter jam, and will also make a jam with a firmer set.)  Skim any scum that rises to the surface.  Let the jam boil, skimming as necessary and stirring occasionally so that the jam doesn't burn on the bottom of the pan.  Cook until it is of the consistency you like.  The easiest way to do this is to throw a saucer into the freezer; after 10 minutes of cooking, place a drop of jam on the cold plate.  If it wrinkles when you push it with your finger, it's done, but again, if you like a firmer set, you can cook it a bit longer.  Sterilize your jars (I find that 5 pounds of fruit yields 10 half-pint jars, with a bit extra for instant consumption), boil your lids, fill and seal the jars, process in the boiling water canner for 10 minutes, take them out and listen for that satisfying ping that tells you that the seal has taken.

Plum Tucker Recipes, Part Two:  Plum Cake.  This is another one of those dishes that I can only make in the summertime (although once the plums are gone and the the apples arrive, this turns into apple cake, which is very different texturally, but no less lovely), and thus make about once every three days until the last of the prune plums are gone.  This recipe comes from Cooking on the Edge, the best food zine that ever was; the cake was a creation of the editor/publisher Jill Cornfield's grandmother, and was a fixture at her family gatherings.  It is buttery, sugary,custardy and luscious, and you don't have to butter and flour the pan.  That does mean that you have to serve the cake out of the pan, but if you're not serving this for a special occasion,there's no harm in that.  (If you do want to serve this for a special occasion, then by all means, butter and flour the pan, and turn the cake out after letting it rest for 10 minutes out of the oven.)

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F (Gas Mark 4).  Beat together 1 stick (4 ounces) unsalted butter, 1 cup (7 ounces) granulated sugar and 1/2 tsp. salt until the butter is white and fluffy.  Beat in 2 large eggs, one at a time, scraping the bowl after each addition.  Beat in 1 tsp. vanilla extract.  (I often omit the vanilla and use Fiori di Sicilia, a mix of citrus oil and vanillin -- the only way I will ever countenance the use of vanillin chez PTMYB -- that I order from the King Arthur Flour Baker's Catalogue.) Add 1 dip-and-sweep cup (5 oz.) all-purpose flour with 1 tsp. baking powder mixed into it.  Mix gently until all flour is absorbed.  Scrape the batter into an ungreased 8"x 2" round pan.  Cut up 1/2 pound (about 5 to 7) Italian prune plums into fourths and embed them, cut side down, into the surface of the cake.  Bake for 45- 50 minutes, until the top of the cake is a deep golden brown and the plums have almost vanished beneath the surface.  (This is a very moist cake, so the standard insert-a-toothpick test doesn't always work.  Basically, once the surface is golden-brown and dry to the touch, it's done.)  This is fabulous fresh out of the oven for dessert, but I like it even better for breakfast the next morning.

Let us begin by giving credit where credit must be given: In 1983, Drs. Astri Riddervold and Andreas Ropeid contributed two papers on the influence of the natural sciences on the 19th century Norwegian diet to the Fifth Ethnological Food Conference in Hungary. Dr. Riddervold turned the information in the papers into a longer essay for Ethnologia Scandinavica in 1984. Among the material covered in these papers, and the subsequent Ethnologia Scandinavica article, was the tale of the Norwegian Porridge Feud, which caught the eye of the editor of Petits Propos Culinaires, the late (and much-missed) Alan Davidson, who convinced Drs. Riddervold and Ropeid to allow PPC's editors to adapt and abridge their work into an article suitable for PPC. "The Norwegian Porridge Feud" ran in PPC 32 and was subsequently anthologized in The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy: 20 Years of the Best Food Writing from the Journal Petits Propos Culinaires, which was snapped up and devoured by yours truly, which brings us to our thrilling conclusion...

At first glance, it sounds like much ado about nothing, with a silly name to boot -- the Norwegian Porridge Feud, indeed! -- but once upon a time in Norway, the preparation of a simple bowl of porridge became a nexus for deeply-held, passionately-argued views about the natural sciences, nutrition, economy, the role of women in Norwegian society, education, tradition, nationalism, progressivism and enlightenment. These issues had been discussed through much of the 19th century, but it was the publication of a cookbook, Fornuftig Madstel (Sensible Cookery) in 1864, that triggered the most heated debates on proper cookery and the nature of women's education and domestic roles, and gave rise to the Norwegian Porridge Feud.

The seed that grew into a nearly-two-year feud was a simple cookery question: to flour or not to flour? It was the custom of Norwegian farmers' wives to prepare porridge by throwing a quantity of flour into the porridge as soon as it was ready to eat. One might see such a practice -- adding uncooked grain to cooked -- as a redundancy, but the author of Fornuftig Madstel, Peter Christen Asbjornsen (writing under the pseudonym Clemens Bonifacius) attacked this practice as worse than redundant: he argued that it was in fact a loss to the eater, as the flour would pass unabsorbed through the body, and it was a loss to the Norwegian economy, as all of this unused flour could be put to better use. He argued further that the only way to reverse this chronic waste, and the resultant weakening of the Norwegian population, was to revise the known methods of cookery and optimal consumption of foods to adhere to the principles of natural sciences; since women were the primary cooks for their families, they were responsible for the deleterious effects of bad cookery, and they should be retaught everything they knew from scratch, in accordance with natural science. Asbjornsen was a famous and well-loved author, and his views drew considerable attention.

They also drew strong criticism from Eilert Sundt, the founder of sociology and ethnology in Norway, and the publisher of the journal Folkevennen. Sundt used his journal to attack Asbjornsen's views, claiming that the addition of flour to porridge was a thousand-year-old tradition, that women had learned over the course of 1,000 years what was best to feed their families, and that Asbjornsen's belief in cookery according to natural science was nonsense. Following this attack, Sundt found himself attacked once again, by Asbjornsen, who accused Sundt of not being qualified to discuss porridge-making, and of denying the people of Norway a chance at a better life through science. Stung, Sundt fought back, calling Fornuftig Madstel, in Riddervold and Ropeid's words, "a great insult to the people of Norway."

Thus was born the Norwegian Porridge Feud, in which both Asbjornsen and Sundt, under the banner of "Enlightenment of the People," lined up panels of experts to argue over just what was the best way to bring that enlightenment. Asbjornsen called on the preeminent natural scientists of the day to bolster his case; most of his experts were German, which brought up issues of Western European progressivism vs. Norwegian nationalism and insularity. The mid-19th century saw the discovery of bacteria as a source of disease, and of hygienic practices as a weapon against disease; it also saw a new understanding of chemical properties of foods, and chemical reactions in the human body, which gave rise to a theory of "like replacing like"; as certain nutrients and compounds were shed or excreted by the body, so must they be replaced in the foods containing them. This led to some fascinating but often spurious advice, some of which sounds outright shocking to 21st century ears: Whole grains, the darlings of 20th and 21st-century nutritionists, were seen by Asbjornsen as imperfect foods, difficult to digest; it was the digestible, finely ground, finely sifted white flour that put wheat's nutrients to best use. Coffee was seen as a blood tonic due to its nitrogen content. The heavy consumption of sugar and sugary syrups was encouraged as a means of eking out the diets of the poor; alcohol consumption was encouraged for the same reason.

Although Asbjornsen was considered a progressive, at least in comparison to Norwegian traditionalists like Sundt, the treatment of women in Fornuftig Madstel is similarly jarring to 21st-century ears. To Asbjornsen and his allies (particularly the German Dr. Klencke, who wrote a "chemical cookery book" translated into Norwegian in 1859), it was women who were primarily responsible for the Norwegian diet; it was women who persisted in "unhealthy" ways of cookery; it was women who needed a complete re-education in the kitchen; it was women who should be taught natural science principles in an organized domestic science curriculum; and it was women who were born for domestic living. For these reasons, they argued, the education of women should be confined to a purely domestic sphere. Any study of philosophy, natural science outside of cookery, languages or music was nothing but lost time and energy, a waste, like uncooked flour on porridge. Furthermore, the learning that women had already acquired at their mothers' and grandmothers' sides, and at their own hands in the kitchen, was outdated, outmoded and a further drain on the Norwegian population. It was thus important for women to devote their energies to scientific cookery, since their own experience was manifestly untrustworthy. This is what passed for progressive thought in mid-19th century Western Europe and Scandinavia.

Asbjornsen's book proved to be long-influential, and was used as a reference guide by contemporary female authors of cookbooks. It also did introduce positive changes into the Norwegian diet, such as increased consumption of fruit and vegetables. Yet the less-than-positive effects of Fornuftig Madstel's advice (heavy consumption of sugars and finely-sifted flour, overconsumption of coffee and the eschewing of both fermented and unfermented dairy for margarine) lasted nearly 100 years, until the supply of sugar and coffee was interrupted by World War II. The tenacity of Asbjornsen's ideas is all the more remarkable when we learn that the argument that started the Norwegian Porridge Feud -- uncooked flour, added to cooked porridge, passes unused through the body -- was disproved two years after the publication of Fornuftig Madstel, when a Norwegian doctor put it to the test; acting as test subjects, he and his assistant ate an exclusive diet of floured porridge. A study of stool samples (I probably should have started this with a disclaimer: "Warning! Contains references to stool samples! Sorry, folks!" showed no trace of undigested starch, proving that the flour *was* actually being used by the body. Over the next 20 years, more of Asbjornsen's theories were overturned, and in 1884, the Norwegian Professor Lochmann attacked Asbjornsen once more as touting pernicious nonsense under the guise of scientific certainty. Yet, such was Asbjornsen's popularity in Norway that long after his theories were debunked, Fornuftig Madstel enjoyed continued popularity, and coffee, sugar, white bread and margarine continued to be consumed with abandon.

It's a lot of baggage for a little bowl of porridge. Myself, I prefer to keep my porridge free of controversy, which is why mine never sees a speck of flour. Actually, mine never sees a speck of flour because I find the idea of adding flour to cereal to be more than a little nasty. I find it best to keep it simple. Dried fruit, yes. Brown sugar or maple syrup, sometimes. Cream, occasionally. A glug or two of Macallan 12, absolutely. But no flour, not ever. I don't need that kind of trouble.

One of my coworkers, a Funky Little Company lifer who used to sell me folding cartons back when I was a lowly purchasing assistant at Big Cosmetics Co., has identified a genre of literature that he has dubbed "Only You, McAllister." It is what he said when he saw me sitting in the cafeteria one lunch hour, my nose in the pages of Curry in the Crown, Shrabani Basu's study of curry houses and ready-chilled Indian meals as a cultural signifier in Britain. (It is a fun book to read, even though I was a bit taken aback by Basu's repeated assurances that most of the workers at the food companies profiled therein were happy to be working in non-union factories. But I have a soft spot for any book that states its thesis by quoting from "Vindaloo" by Fat Les.) It is what he said when I told him about the egg book. Granted, he didn't say it when I was reading Geek Love or Mrs. Caliban, but that was only because we had not yet met each other. And he missed his big chance to really let me have it with double-barrelled sarcasm when he and my boss-at-the-time found me on another lunch hour, nose-deep in The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy: 20 Years of the Best Food Writing from the Journal Petits Propos Culinaires. "What'cha reading, Fin?" asked Boss Fella. I showed him the book. "Is it any good?" he asked. "It's brilliant," I answered. "There's an essay in here about the Norwegian Porridge Feud of 1864-66." I didn't even think about what these words would sound like until they had already left my mouth, turned into sound waves bound for infinite deep space. I waited for the inevitable "only you, McAllister", but Boss Fella beat him to the punch. "The problem, Fin," said Boss Fella, "is that I can never tell when you're kidding."

As if I would kid about the Norwegian Porridge Feud.

The past three months have been a summer of mewling and puking, in which very little bread was baked, very few pies emerged bubbling and shining from the oven, very few words of any consequence were written chez PTMYB. Every Friday, I would slouch, rough-beast-like, out of the LuthorCorp office and onto the N train, vowing that this was going to be the weekend that books would be cracked, notecards filled, fabulous new insights gleaned. Every Sunday night, I would slide into bed, full of aromatherapeutic devices meant to calm my nerves, but somehow they didn't do a thing to stop the cartoon-like noise of my eyes blinking. (Yes, I make xylophone-like tones when I blink, just like Bugs Bunny, or the Powerpuff Girls.) Now, though, summer is over, in a cultural if not temporal sense, and I am suddenly finding myself itching to take notes, make citations and read through 50 years' worth of grocery trade magazines and farm commodity reports. I want to call complete strangers and ask them if chicken-bone fossils have ever been found that would help end the controversy over exactly what sort of chickens were the first to arrive in the Americas, and when. I want to read about Chinese seapower in the 15th century. I want to read about the creation of brioche and kugelhupf. I want to tell everyone I know that Mesopotamian Egyptians hatched chicks on a massive scale, a scale that was not matched until the mid-20th century. Whether anyone wants to hear any of these things is beside the point to me, for I am a woman in love. If my newfound focus and desire for study has not yet translated into a peaceful night's sleep, if my dreams are still cluttered and confusing and vaguely anxiety-producing, I can, as always, turn to the movies for comfort. I had forgotten about an exchange between Robert Burke and Martin Donovan (a/k/a Yet Another One of My Boyfriends) in Simple Men, in which they are discussing the tough, nervy Kate (played by Karen Sillas); Robert Burke says "I like her, but she seems kind of jumpy," and Martin Donovan replies, "Jumpy women are great." I have decided to add that to the list of t-shirts that bunni and I want to have made for ourselves. I want this one on a baseball jersey, bright blue with bright red sleeves and print, so that everything looks like it's vibrating.

But I digress. I am in the mood for nerdy, poindextery pleasures, and right now nothing satisfies that mood, nothing gives me such pleasure, like considering the Norwegian Porridge Feud. You would think that I would be a sport and answer your questions such as "Gee, Jen, just what was the Norwegian Porridge Feud, anyway?", "Gee, Jen, how many times can you say "Norwegian Porridge Feud in a single post?" and "Gee, Jen, you're not going to tease us by rabbitting on about this Norwegian Porridge Feud without telling us what it is, are you?" I'm afraid so, dear friends. It is late here in beautiful uptown Astoria, so late that I can actually hear the crickets chirping in the backyard. (Yes, we do have crickets in New York City. Squirrels, too, although both the crickets and the squirrels tend to disappear when the feral cats are in heat.) It is only in the interest of beauty sleep, and in maintaining functionality at the box factory tomorrow, that keeps me from telling the whole story now. It's certainly not because I want to leave you on a cliffhanger note, coming back to see what happens next, the way those bastards Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins used to do. Heavens, no.

Until such time as I can tell the story, and tell it properly, I recommend that you take three more stops on your pass through the World Wide Internets:

• Snowball has 2 1/2 hours (Mountain Daylight time, her local time zone) of birthday left. Go say happy birthday to one of the best women on the 'net, if not the planet. (This will explain why I love her so.
• Every time I think I cannot be any more amazed by the white-hot brilliant beauty that is Grace Davis, she gives me another reason to be amazed. Grace is doing some truly outstanding work on behalf of Hurricane Katrina survivors. Go visit her, look upon her works, ye mighty, and please help in any way you can.
• Last Thursday, my kind and excellent pal Bunni finally had her Howard Beale moment: she got mad as hell and is not going to take it anymore. She will always be Professor Bunni, but not for the unnamed private New York Higher Education Monolith that took her considerable teaching skills for granted for far too long. Adventure is afoot. Go see.

A final nonsequitur before bed:  When I was adding the links to this post, I happened to click on the "memorable quotes" link on the imdb page for Simple Men.  There is another fine moment in which Robert Burke's character, Bill, gives his new friend Ned a medallion of the Blessed Virgin.  Ned observes that the Blessed Virgin is pretty, and Bill answers, "Not only is she pretty, but she's got a nice personality, and she's the mother of God."  I do like a man with a finely-tuned sense of scale.

Spared by a car- or airplane-crash or

In my silly little world, there are three standards of goodness in men:  There are good men, there are great men, and there is Lloyd.

A good man will notice that the sink is getting a bit dish-heavy, and will do a bit of washing-up.

A great man will notice the sink is getting a bit dish-heavy, also notice that you are doing a bit of puttering around in the kitchen and baking cakes and whatnot, ask "will I be in your way if I do some dishes?", and do some washing-up.

Lloyd will notice that the sink is get dish-heavy, also notice that I am doing a bit of puttering around in the kitchen and baking cakes and whatnot, ask "will I be in your way if I do some dishes?", do some washing-up, return to the living room and announce in a matter-of-fact, not-at-all-self-congratulatory tone of voice: "Well, I have maintained my dominion over the sink.  I have not achieved complete dominance over the sink, but I have maintained my dominion", and then put on the new New Pornographers album for our listening pleasure.

I'm still asking myself what I did in a past life to get him in this one, because I surely never did anything in this life to warrant such a prize.

(Lloyd, if you're reading this, I can already tell what you're thinking.  Just take the compliment, already, and please get that look off your face before it freezes that way.)