Food and Other Stuff

 

Len is doing great cooking again.

This Week’s Mona Lisa

Did you say art? You must mean Mona Lisa.

Recent Reading

I lost interest in the middle of this thriller.

‘

The thirteen stories in this collection vary quite a lot, and several of them differ from the novels of Louise Erdrich that I have read. I enjoyed them all. I’ll pick one example, the story titled “Borsalino,” in reference to a particular type of hat that the narrator wears.

The hat: “a soft brown Borsalino, with a wide grosgrain ribbon band
and a generous brim.” It has a very special hat band made of snakeskin.

This story takes place in Venice during two trips that the narrator takes, quite a few years apart. On the first trip when she’s a student, the narrator is befriended by a local man named Enzo, who offers to be a guide…

“So I took the thief’s tour. In through cracks in walls, squeezing around or climbing through damaged gates, we wandered through ornate gardens and empty apartments. Enzo seemed to know everyone who was keeping the city going, from the bakers to the garbage collectors. He knew his way into shuttered shops, the secret areas of churches, cloisters, ancient palazzi. Servants let us sleep on couches hidden from sunlight, under sheets, or wander in the bishop’s residence. We ate bread and cheese in tiny private gardens, sipped from a bottle liberated from a merchant’s fabled wine cellar. Over the days we went to the islands. In Murano, he blew glass with the glass-blowers. In San Lazzaro degli Armeni, he greeted a monk who let us into the library. Enzo spoke, in a language I had never heard before, to a mummy, tranquil and stern, a neighbor of the monk. We went to Isola San Michele, the island of the dead, and wandered into the oldest part of the cemetery, filled with blackened angels and tilted vaults.” (p.99)

It’s clear that Enzo is very special and has a strange place in the world of the cemetery — especially in “ a cozy mausoleum” where he shows her an old mattress in a crypt. And seems to sleep there. “My hat rattled, as if the snakeskin in the hatband had come alive and moved.”

On the second trip, things are a little different. The author has her husband and children with her, and they start the day normally…

‘I went back to Venice another time. It was about sixteen years later, over a decade into my first marriage. We went with two of our children, both girls, seven and eight years old. I had them keep a travel diary for their younger sister, still at home, just a toddler. In the hotel where we stayed, near the Accademia Bridge, a lavish breakfast was served. The girls listed everything on one page, drew it on another. They were enthralled by the tall glasses of blood orange juice. They drew the arrays of folded meats and pallid cheeses, the puffy pastries, pots of jam, giving each a letter grade.” (p. 101)

But then things turn dark. Enzo, she learns, is not human. He’s a spirit that has lived in Venice for centuries. Further, the hat, which she’s brought with her on this trip too, turns out to be a kind of a magic hat, especially its snakeskin hat band. 

All the stories have something special in them.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

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Hanging in There

Two of the many self-tamed Sandhill Cranes in Kensington MetroPark.
This is an iPhone photo taken from a few feet away from the bird.

Len’s photo of a Wilson’s Snipe, a normally shy marsh bird that was out in the open in the late afternoon.
This photo was taken with a telephoto lens — the snipe aren’t as bold as the cranes!
And yes, snipe are real birds as well as the subject of 200 years of practical jokes.

Not much consolation for this week’s debacle, but beauties of nature are probably our best hope.

A Good Read by Louise Erdrich

The Mighty Red is a long book full of rich details, and typically of Louise Erdrich’s books, also full of historic and cultural background: just the right amount to make it interesting, though. The book’s focus is on farming, especially all the issues and challenges of raising sugar beets in North Dakota, and especially on the extreme dangers of pesticides. One of many lists in the minds of the farmers whose lives are being affected: “Dual Magnum. Roundup. Warrant. Outlook. Chloroacetamide. Betamix. Ethofumesate. UpBeet. Gramoxone.” (p. 220) At the end, two of the farmers (both having been harmed long ago by their work and exposure) are talking and one summarizes their lives: ‘Nobody ever said farming was easy.” (p. 369)

I enjoyed the food descriptions — one of my favorite parts about good books about ‘real” people. Here are three of them:

A favorite food of the mother and daughter, Crystal and Kismet, whose stories are at the center of the book: “Crystal put a pot of water on to boil and peeled some carrots. She’d boil the carrots in salt water, mash them up with fried garlic and onions, add some basil, oregano, a can of tomatoes, a few spoonfuls of tomato paste, red pepper flakes, a dash of cinnamon. Voilà. Sauce. They almost never ate meat because meat, even misery meat, cost more than carrots.” (p. 208)

Another passage about Kismet and her mother-in-law: “Winnie and Kismet drove over late in the afternoon with two versions of potato salad. Winnie swore by her mother’s warm potato salad, made with red potatoes, a dressing of white vinegar, bacon fat, bacon bits, parsley, salt, pepper, sugar. Kismet swore by her mother’s recipe: golden potatoes, parsley, sliced boiled eggs, chopped onions, and a dressing of mayonnaise, oil, vinegar, yellow mustard, salt, pepper, and cayenne. Paprika to decorate. The bowls were covered with Saran wrap.” (p. 235)

And a description of lunch-making by a landlady in an oil-field area: “Janice did not prepare just any lunch. Cold pop swaddled in Ziplocs of ice when it was hot. Hot chocolate and coffee in a thermos when it was cold. Sandwiches with cheese, heavy on the meats, the lettuce kept separate and crisp. The bread thick and soft. Squares of cake in a Tupperware box, a dozen boiled eggs, cookies. Sliced apples with lemon squeezed over them and cinnamon sugar to dip them in. Peeled oranges, baby carrots, ranch dip. Home-canned pickles. Janice was a goddess.” (p. 269)

To me, these descriptions and many others are indicative of the author’s eye for the details of her characters lives, and the way she uses these details to show character. I also loved this description about a bookseller who is another key character:

“One of the best things about selling old books was going through them before they went onto the shelves. She tried not to buy marked-up or underlined books, but there were other ways books were personalized. People kept or left things in books—quotes, clippings, often about the author, letters that arrived while they were reading the book, bills they didn’t want to pay, foil gum wrappers, bookmarks from now-closed bookstores, funny drawings from their children, dry autumn leaves, grocery lists, complaints. She stored these scraps in a manila envelope marked Ephemera. From another time, another place, the bits had come into her hands. Some were personal. A bookmark made from dried yarrow flowers arranged between pieces of clear packing tape had kept the reader’s place in Rosemary’s Baby. Later, when she looked it up, she found that yarrow was a banishing herb against evil. In a copy of The Aspern Papers, she’d found a lock of dark brown hair.” (p. 319)

As usual, I  haven’t written a review of this book — lots of those have already been published. I’ve just tried to show you some reasons why I enjoyed the book.

A Murder Mystery

Everyone in my Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson is what I would call a meta-mystery. I view a book as meta when the text constantly talks about how it’s a text and self-consciously over-shares what the author is doing. In this example, Stevenson begins with a list of rules for writing a mystery, which originated with a writer named Knox, a member of a famous mystery writer’s club. (For nonfiction details and the original of these rules, which I looked up, see Ronald Knox: 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction.)

The fictitious narrator then comments throughout the book about his writing decisions, his writing methods, his choices about Knox’s rules, and the comparison of his mystery to those of other writers, like Agatha Christie. The narrator himself is deeply involved with the mystery at hand; that is, with several murders from the past and present, while telling the story. I assume that this is all fiction — and that all of Stevenson’s family members have not actually killed someone. Making things even more meta, the narrator also talks about the reader, specifically about how he’s sure you are reading an e-book, not a paper book.

All this digressive stuff works ok but gets tedious. It begins in the Prologue, when the narrator explains that he himself is a professional writer of advice to writers — and thus has his own rules about how to write a mystery, going back to the basics of Agatha Christie and all that. He promises to make it all come out correctly according to his rules, and lists the chapters where he describes various victims’ dead bodies: “I promise that’s the truth, unless your Kindle or whatever device you have mucks with the pages. There is only one plot hole you could drive a truck through. I tend to spoil things. There are no sex scenes.” (p. 2)

Here are a couple more meta passages, then I’m done:

“Police officers in these books, while being Last Resorts or Only Hopes, can also have character traits such as By The Book or Screw The Rules.” (p. 103)

 

“A lot has happened, so I thought I’d jump in here with a quick recap. I know: it’s a bit weird. But I want us all to be on the same page. (Figuratively: I know you bought the e-book.) If you’re confident in your cognitive abilities, you can skip ahead. Books like this generally tease out the backstory of an ensemble of reprobates, lock them in a singular location, and then present a body that can be linked to parts of each player’s backstory as possible motive. I’ll try that.” (p. 105)

“In a mystery like this one, there are clues in every word—hell, in every piece of punctuation. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, think about the device in your hands. If a killer is ever revealed and your ‘percentage read’ isn’t at least in the high eighties, they cannot be the real killer; there is simply too much of the book still to be read.” (p. 231 or 62%)

“On the other hand, suspicious as I was of Gavin, it’s simply unfair to introduce the killer this far past the midpoint. Knox would have me drawn and quartered—that’s his first rule. And, reader, your ‘percentage read’ should tell you there is just too much to go.” (p. 282) 

The only classic mystery trope Stevenson seems to miss is describing food, but I guess he’s afraid of being accused of coziness. He does mention instances when the characters eat. The sequence of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners contributes to the passage of time as is usual in classic detective fiction. Here’s a sort of anti-food breakfast description as an example of his writing: “I joined the line, shuffling past the bain-maries, and filled my plate. The bacon was untouched, assumedly because people were confronting their own mortality and avoiding saturated fats.” (p. 60)

If you like this sort of wink-wink-nudge-nudge writing, I recommend this book. Although the actual suspense and plotting are pretty good, it’s too precious for my taste. 

On TV

Watched the first two episodes of The Marlow Murder Club, Season 2.
It’s ok, not great, but we’ll keep watching.

New York Times Cooking

We have been using many recipes from the New York Times cooking archives. I believe between the two of us, Len and I have tried something like 50 of the recipes, which number over 22,000, they say. We figure we have a few hundred years left to get through the ones that appeal to us. Here are some of the recipes that we have liked:

 

Blog post and original photos © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Deb’s Sunday Salon and Eileen’s Saturday Critters

Recent Reading

All the time, I’m thinking about the war. I’m looking at news sites to see if there’s anything new (there isn’t). I’m feeling terrible for the suffering of the victims of Putin and his willing executioners. But I have to do something else, and that’s reading. As it stands here, I don’t really have the energy to review the last few books, so here’s a simple summary of what I’ve read. Every book is by an author that I already know and have read several of their books.

Julie Otsuka, The Swimmers.

The Swimmers is a hard book to read, because it's a remarkably penetrating portrayal of dementia, which I don't want to think about. There are some good memory parts, though, like memories of odors -- "She remembers the smell of incense and pickled cabbage in the kitchen." (p. 63).  Julie Otsuka is a wonderful writer, so her masterful prose makes up for her depressing subject matter, but if you want to read one of her books, I suggest that you start with The Buddha in the Attic or When the Emperor was Divine.

Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman.

Louise Erdrich's characters, mainly native Americans, are really a pleasure to read about. I loved every individual in The Night Watchman, which takes place in the early 1950s. The locale is mainly on the reservation where the tribe's treaty rights are about to be revoked. The main plot line is how the members of the tribe, led by the main character named Thomas, peacefully challenge the government threat against them. The sub-plots are equally fascinating, about the struggles of very poor but proud and imaginative people against a variety of challenges. As I have with every one of Erdrich's books that I've read, I also loved the descriptions of the food the people cook and eat, and I love the occasional humor.

Arnaldur Indridason, Voices.

Although I enjoyed the local color of the Icelandic hotel in mid-winter where most of this novel takes place, the characters and events -- especially the murder at the center -- are all a bit too sordid and ugly for me to really like it. The previous two books in the series are also similarly extreme.

Elly Griffiths, The Woman in Blue.

Slowly, I'm working my way through the many books in the Ruth Galloway series by Elly Griffiths, watching the lives of the characters as they solve one murder mystery after another. I think I was more enthusiastic about the earlier ones, but they are a tempting distraction from reality, so I'll probably read more (and more).

Reviews © 2022 mae sander.

 

Louise Erdrich: 'The Sentence"

"It was thrilling to be carried along the streets, scant notion where I was going, into neighborhoods inhabited by surprising people. Women in billowing fuchsia robes and purple head scarves roamed the sidewalks. I saw Hmong people, Eritrean people. Mexican. Vietnamese. Ecuadorian. Somali. Laotian. And a gratifying number of Black American people and my fellow Indigenes. Store signs in languages with flowing script and then mansion after mansion—spruced up, decaying, chopped up, gated under floating canopies of trees. Then abandoned areas—train yards, acres of paved fields, dystopic malls. Sometimes I’d see a tiny restaurant I liked the look of so I’d get off at the next stop and go inside, order soup. I took a tour of world soups. Avgolemono. Sambar. Menudo. Egusi with fufu. Ajiaco. Borscht. Leberknödel suppe. Gazpacho. Tom yam. Solyanka. Nässelsoppa. Gumbo. Gamjaguk. Miso. Pho ga. Samgyetang. I kept a list in my diary, with the price of the soup next to each name. All were satisfyingly cheap and very filling." Louise Erdrich. The Sentence (pp. 29-30).   

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich is a magnificent book with a vivid character at the center. Her personality and that of Minneapolis, where the book takes place, are linked in many ways, as illustrated in the above quotation. I read this book in less than 24 hours because I couldn't stop. Five things I loved about the novel: 

1. The incredible portraits of Tookie, the central character, and her husband Pollux. Erdrich deeply explores the Indigenous identity of Tookie and other characters with native-American backgrounds and experiences. In addition, there's family life, especially the description of the first year of life of Pollux's grandson Jarvis.
2. The depiction of the 2020 pandemic: the author shows the impact of the pandemic on Tookie, her friends, her family, and her community, making this a very relatable book.
3. The impact of George Floyd's death: the characters' first-hand accounts bring to life the Minneapolis demonstrations over police violence in the summer of 2020.
4. A believable ghost story: a real ghost appears in the bookstore where Tookie works. Plus the ghosts of pandemic victims: "The world was filling with ghosts. We were a haunted country in a haunted world." (p. 364). 
5. Food: the food and food prep descriptions show how food and love combine in the characters' lives. Food integrates with identity, beyond just specific ethnic food choices. For example, wild rice, being native to the Indigenous people in the novel, has many meanings. Even the ghost is involved in culinaria: Tookie sees her "messing around in the Cookbook section—I was pretty sure ghosts missed the taste of food." (p. 354). 

These themes all combine into a great story about a family, a community, a bookstore, the pandemic, and cataclysmic events in Minneapolis. We all know the events in Minneapolis from reading newspapers, but that the novel turns them into a story about individual experiences. 

George Floyd as later portrayed at the site of his death, Cup Foods in Minneapolis.
In the novel, Tookie described her first reaction on learning of the event: 
"Then I watched it too, the video of a police officer with his knee on the neck
of a Black man who cried out and cried out for his mother and then went quiet and then
was silent. This happened at Cup Foods in South Minneapolis. Pollux often stopped there
to pick up a thing or two on his way back from working on the universe.
You can get anything there, and I mean anything, he said about Cup." (p. 235).

Erdrich's masterful writing also includes a huge number of food and cooking passages: my favorite type of description. While Tookie bakes cookies and cooks fish, the most memorable food passages tell how Pollux cooks for her, and how food expresses their affection and closeness. Pollux prepares both original recipes and native dishes, such as a special potato salad recipe made with bacon and hot pickles. 

Here are a few examples of how Pollux cooks for Tookie:

"He sat me down, and told me not to move until he made me a fried egg sandwich with green chilis. He would make it on an oversized toasted English muffin. ...

"‘What’s crazy is how good this sandwich was,’ I said, staring at my empty plate. 

"‘Split another?’ 

"‘It would be my honor. Let me help you by talking to you while you make it.’" (p. 94-95). 

***

"Pollux called out. ‘I’m making your scorched corn soup recipe, remember?’" ...

"For the past year, Pollux has been perfecting my favorite soup ...—it is a corn soup. First he caramelizes fresh-cut sweetcorn, toasting it slowly in a heavy pan, adding onions. Then cubed potatoes tossed lightly in butter, to set a crisp. He adds all of this to a garlicky chicken broth with shaved carrots, cannellini beans, fresh dill, parsley, a dash of cayenne, and heavy cream. The scent was making me delirious." (p. 105-106)

***

"There was a delicious scent. Pollux was browning chunks of squash with onions and garlic. Maybe he would make some sort of spicy curry." (p. 121).

***

"Turtle Mountainers are big on New Year’s and we were having open house at Louise’s. The day would be celebrated with a meatball soup called boulettes or bullets, and small bites of frybread called bangs. If the night was warm, we’d sit around an outside fire. Pollux made the bangs because he knows how to work with hot grease, while I’m an expert on cold grease. I brought Old Dutch potato chips." (p. 127).

Wild rice, or manoomin, is very important to Tookie and Pollux, and to their friends, who have arguments about which types are best. But it's agreed that: "Real wild rice is grown wild, harvested by Native people, and tastes of the lake it comes from.  ... Native people around here have a specific ferocity about wild rice. I’ve seen faces harden when tame paddy rice, the uniformly brown commercially grown rice, is mentioned, called wild rice, or served under false pretenses." (pp. 105-106). 

The only feature of Erdrich's book that doesn't appeal to me is her long list of her favorite books. Tookie recommends books while doing her job in the bookstore, and in this context, the books help create little portraits of the quirky customers. But Erdrich appends an entire multi-page book list in a chapter at the end (it's not really part of the novel, so this isn't a spoiler). I'm really in favor of loving books as Tookie and her colleagues in the bookstore do, but I found the repeated recommendations to be a little over done: the demand that readers patronize independent bookstores doesn't fit well into a novel, in my opinion. Too much like religion!

Review © 2022 mae sander for mae food dot blogspot dot com.

Louise Erdrich: "Future Home of the Living God"

Nothing is happy in Louise Erdrich's recent book Future Home of the Living God. It might be one of the most depressing books I have ever read. I don't want to talk about it much, but here are a few thoughts.

Minnesota, and maybe the rest of the USA, has become a desperate dystopia in this novel. The decent Minnesota people in the novel don't have a chance to live the decent life they've always experienced. For most of the novel the narrator and many others are trying to escape a newly created Orwellian government, including surveillance of everybody all the time. Computers -- even when not attached to any internet -- suddenly start showing images of "Mother," who seems to be a version of Big Brother in Orwell's 1984. Cell phones report everything to the mysterious police state, so most people have destroyed theirs. Fear reigns.

The whole world until just before the start of the novel was evidently pretty much as we know it ourselves in 2018 America. It's in the near future, with just a bit more climate change. Even fairly young characters remember when there used to be a Minnesota winter, though that was lost by the time the novel opens. Suddenly, as the inhabitants of this sad future see it, evolution has started running backwards. Maybe the explanation is that suddenly mutations are causing abnormal throwback-seeming creatures and plants to be generated instead of what's expected. No one understands exactly what's going on, and mass communication has essentially ceased. Darkness has descended. Everything that was predictable disappears -- accountable government, reliable news sources, trustworthy neighbors, and so on.

The thing is, the characters are incredibly vivid in their distress especially the young woman who is recording the narrative in real time, while it's happening to her and her family. Some of the main characters in her narrative are Native Americans living on a reservation and some are urban residents of Minneapolis. Everything about them seems so real it's scary. Good people help each other, bad ones turn each other in to the evil authorities, and it's hard for the sympathetic characters at the center of the plot to know who is who. I'm not going to try to do a plot summary, just to say that the most real thing is the horrendous fear they experience in trying to escape from the totalitarian society that has inexplicably and suddenly emerged.

Food becomes a kind of indicator of the circumstances. Early on, food made by family can make the bad times seem more normal. But conditions are deteriorating and hoarders begin to buy all the food, booze, and cigarettes from supermarkets. When the narrator is imprisoned, bad institutional food underscores the horrors of her experiences. She writes:

• "I must stay ready for the sign, remain alert, prepare myself, stay strong. So I drink the powdered OJ and eat the rancid eggs, the strange bread, the curdled milk, and the coffee-type beverage so acidic it brings tears to my eyes. I eat the bean paste and slimy orange slices, the wads of wet Kleenex that are supposed to be mashed potatoes, and I walk up and down the one corridor, observing the routine, looking for a hole in the day." (p. 133)
• "We eat every bite -- a mushy spaghetti with indeterminate meat in the sauce. Powdered milk. Congealed cornstarch pudding, butterscotch or maybe just scorched." (p. 158)

Comfort food after an escape and attempt to flee, creates a moment of peace, but not for long:

• "Shawn stalks over to the stove, uses a can opener to neatly remove the top from a can of baked beans. He puts the can on top of the woodstove with a pair of tongs.... I can smell the rich sauce and the little white gobs of pork before the stuff is even warm. ... The beans heating in their tin bean can exude a summery hot-dog fragrance. Shawn spoons out half a can each of bubbling and hissing beans, into steel bowls." (p. 167-168)
• "... sandwiches -- real bread, real sliced turkey, even mayo. And canned milk heated up with cinnamon and chocolate. ... 'So tasty I could cry.'" (p. 171)

A very very sad book. Unredeemed sadness, I think. Unredeemed by the narrator's efforts to find hope in religion, unredeemed by any other hope.