Thoughts on reading "The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry"

The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School in Paris by Kathleen Flinn (published 2007) is the selection for my next culinary reading group discussion. I'm going to make notes on my impressions as I proceed through the book, since I know it's a feel-good book, a type the group has hardly ever chosen for our discussions, and definitely a type that normally does not at all appeal to me. (And yes, I know I'm pretty much alone in my views; the amazon reviews for example are highly adoring.)

After reading 20 pages: This author's problems would be a luxury even for most first-world ladies. Poor thing, she lost her very high-powered management job. Her mother says find another job. Her upstairs neighbor and her boyfriend tell her to go to Paris and spend tens of thousands of dollars going to the Cordon Bleu cooking school because she always said she wanted to. Yes, the one where Julia Child went: you saw it in the movie with Merrill Streep. Their message: "You should do exactly what your spoiled brat entitled snowflake personality tells you to do." (That's a quote from me, not from the book.)

The author doesn't want to be a chef, she just wants to have the experience. The first scene at the cooking school, she's excoriated in French (which she doesn't quite understand), runs away from the mean instructor and the classroom, and ends up crying uncontrollably in the bathroom. I always finish book club books if I possibly can. This will take some self-discipline.

After reading 100 pages: I have learned, for one thing, that the title about crying is actually a warning about how to chop onions properly... the sharper your knife, the less you cry because you won't release the tear gas in the onion cells. But I still suspect, based on how hard it was to force myself to keep reading, that my instinct is right: I should never read a book with the word "cry" in the title.

I'm sick of the author's perfect boyfriend, both before and after he joins her in Paris. Their nightlife adventures drinking in bars were probably overworked in literature by the time Hemingway got around to them (though he presented them vividly, never mind.) I've read too many accounts of the search for an apartment in Paris. I'm not impressed by references to Audrey Hepburn movies or feel-good French movies either.

The constant cliches about food are the most unlikeable feature of this book. Does anyone know so little about French cooking methods to find her descriptions interesting? Ho hum: rabbit heads with eyes, fish guts and scales, web-like caul fat, splatters of blood, sausages made of tripe, and other things that freak out her fellow students. Ho hum: instructors demanding conformity with the Cordon Bleu rules. Ho hum: after each chapter are very ordinary recipes that aren't necessarily from the Cordon Bleu but from her free association with the things they cook. Who needs a recipe for her mother's minestrone soup or for chicken cordon bleu which doesn't have anything to do with the school? Or a recipe for bog-standard Boeuf Bourguignon or a soufflé, recipes that might or might not come from her class?

Two quotes that make me say puh-LEEZE --

"The week makes me appreciate that love is a fragile thing. It can be as precarious as those steps on the Sacré Coeur or as unpredictable as the eggs in a cheese soufflé. And in love, there are no handrails or any safe recipes to keep your heart from falling." (p. 89) 

"That afternoon, I nurse my consommé and finish yet another round of disappointing puff pastry. As I do, I consider how wonderful it would be to toss some hamburger, egg whites, and tomatoes into the soup of life. Suddenly everything would be clear and the purpose of it all would be revealed." (p. 95)

After reading 200 pages: My reactions haven't changed. As the author's cooking lessons at Cordon Bleu continue, she seems to find less to say about them and more to say about her life in Paris, about her perfect boyfriend who becomes her fiancé and then husband, and about their travels. And it's pretty standard stuff. She mentions her emotions constantly, but without depth or convincing descriptions.

When she adds bits of history or culture -- say, about regional French cuisine or about learning a language -- it's usually pretty superficial and predictable. She continues to mention gross-out food preparation challenges -- dealing with lobster death, more fish guts, guinea fowl tendons, and watching as a baby lamb gets "hacked into bits." (p. 144) Frankly, I'm bored.

The recipes that follow each chapter continue to be only peripherally related to her cooking school lessons -- virtually no French haute cuisine. I suspect, moreover, that her recipes are not very good. For example, Flinn includes a recipe for grilled pizza that I am certain could not work well if followed as she wrote it, unless you were already experienced at open-fire grilling of pizza.  She says "Spray grill with cooking spray. Grill dough two or three minutes per side." She doesn't mention the challenge of flipping or sliding the floppy unbaked pizza dough onto the fire -- the tricky part! (We learned to do this from barbecue expert Steven Raichlen, who gives detailed instructions.) Otherwise it's a very unimaginative pizza recipe. Pathetic. (p. 156-157)

The rest of the book: Well, I guess I didn't hate the author enough to be sorry that she passed her final exam and received her Cordon Bleu diploma, which is the not-surprising end of the story. Trying to be positive: I did admire Flinn's description of the Cordon Bleu class trip to Rungis, the wholesale market outside Paris that after 1973 replaced the famous market at Les Halles. For once, she managed a relatively vivid description of the fish market which had already run out of fish, the busy meat market, the bounty of the produce markets, and "the world's largest cheese shop, where nearly one hundred thousand pounds of cheese are stacked in virtually every corner of the stalls." (p. 227)

But she can't resist a cliche when it comes to the recipe for the Rungis chapter: it's for French Onion Soup. As you no doubt know, onion soup was the traditional post-midnight supper for visitors to the old Les Halles. It was already a predictable part of any Les Halles story when it appeared in the film Irma La Douce in 1963, and was probably already inevitable in The Belly of Paris, Zola's classic Les Halles novel published in 1873. I suspect that Julia Child's onion soup recipe is better than hers.

She gives us a few more superficial and hackneyed Paris stories as well: like her attempt to find designer-clothing bargains in Paris thrift shops, where she sees "an aging, rail-thin transvestite wearing a sequin-studded denim jacket and leopard miniskirt." (p. 206) I didn't like this snide stereotype. Similarly, I was somewhat uncomfortable with her stereotypes of her Asian fellow students at the Cordon Bleu.

She also adds several tales of difficult house guests who invade her various Parisian apartments and take advantage of her and her husband -- these tales appear throughout the entire book. This theme is at least familiar to me: when we lived in Paris we had houseguests almost every week, but we were lucky -- they were all lovely! However, I was sympathetic to her for being somewhat challenged in this area.

All in all, my low expectations for this book were completely fulfilled. I would not have chosen to read it, but nevertheless, I persisted, and I don't expect to get a medal. Or even an inspiration for something good to cook.

Oh yes, one more thing. How did she have the nerve to introduce one of the sections of her book with the Ernest Hemingway quote that Paris is a moveable feast? Puh-LEEZE.

What did Mona Lisa Eat?

Leonardo and Mona Lisa at the Table.

Here's a delightful book: Pass The Pandowny, Please: Chewing on History with Famous Folks and their Fabulous Foods by Abigail Ewing Zelz, illustrated by Eric Zelz.

If you often read this blog, you know that I love to explore what famous people ate. Most recently, I read two food-centered biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin, but I've had many more encounters with famous people and their food. If you have been following me forever, you know that one of my first such blog posts was:

Mona Lisa: By Request

Renaissance Pasta or, What Did Mona Lisa Eat?

Well, here is a book that follows up 13 famous men and 3 famous women, checking out what they ate. It looks like a children's book -- but really it was written just for me (and maybe you).

For a fantastic review, check this blog post by Jama: 

[review + recipe] Pass the Pandowdy, Please by 

Abigail Ewing Zelz and Eric Zelz

FEBRUARY 6, 2018 

I'm totally grateful to Jama for this post. I ordered a copy of the book for myself as soon as I read her
review. I might even make her pandowny recipe. If you don't know what pandowny is, that's another
good reason to read her post.

Baker's Words

An overnight-fermented poolish, also called pre-ferment or sponge, ready to use as an ingredient in bread dough.

"Biga and poolish are terms for pre-ferments used in Italian and French baking, respectively, for sponges made with domestic baker’s yeast. Poolish is a fairly wet sponge (typically made with a one-part-flour-to-one-part-water ratio by weight), while biga is usually drier. Bigas can be held longer at their peak than wetter sponges, while a poolish is one known technique to increase a dough’s extensibility." (source)

Technical words are fascinating. Baking bread is fascinating. In our family, experiments with bread are ongoing: my daughter in Virginia has been raising a couple of sourdough starters (blogged here) and my husband has been trying out various recipes for non-sourdough bread. Thus we've come across the two words biga and poolish.

While biga is an Italian method and Italian word, poolish is a French word, which is said to mean "Polish," because this particular bread-baking method originated in Poland. A credible history that supports this origin is elusive, but there's enough information to conclude that French bakers adopted the poolish method in the 1840s when baker's yeast first became available, and that they learned from Viennese bakers who were influenced by a method already in use in Poland. Prior to the introduction of baker's yeast, French bakers had used brewer's yeast or used the levain method; that is, sourdough starter, which uses wild yeasts. The poolish method was a dominant way to bake in Paris from the mid 19th through the early 20th century. More modern, automated, faster methods of baking French bread replaced this method during the 1920s.

The bread that Len made by the poolish method.

Here are a few references to the history of the poolish method and of the word itself.

Poilâne's book, which I bought at his
bakery on Rue du Cherche Midi in
Paris years ago.

In Lionel Poilâne's book Guide de l'Amateur de Pain (published 1981) the use of a poolish is recommended to home bakers as being easier than the use of levain -- which means sourdough starter. M. Poilâne doesn't have much confidence in home bakers, so he doesn't think they can manage to keep a sourdough starter alive. He says that bakers (presumably meaning French bakers) commonly used the method during the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. (p. 32)

The Atlantic ran a story by Betty Suyker about Poilâne in 1972, which contrasted his very retro baking method with modern French methods and also with the poolish method. She credits an Austrian army officer named Zang, who founded a bread-baking business in Paris in 1840 ("A la Recherche du Pain Perdu" by Betty Suyker, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1972, p. 90. A wonderful article with many other facts about the history of bread in France.)

The Taste of Bread by Raymond Calvel offers additional detail about the origin of the poolish method in Poland in the 1840s. He points out the use of baker's yeast in poolish in the 19th century, though says it was less common than the levain method. Starting in the 1920s, he says, direct use of baker's yeast as the main fermenting agent became the method of French bakers. (p. 45. This book, translated from French, provides a great deal of information about the chemical processes of making bread.)

Many of the online references state that the word poolish means Polish. Some French sources name Marie Antoinette or Marie de Medici in association with the introduction of this method, but this doesn't hold up to other known historic facts, especially the fact that baker's yeast, used in a poolish, wasn't available until the 19th century. These writers are apparently confused because the use of brewer's yeast, which had been known in ancient times, was reintroduced to France in 1665 -- a date not relevant to either of the two French queens. There's also been an effort to find a Yiddish origin of the word, but there's no evidence for that either (source).

From a web search: a "Viennoiserie."

More knowledgable writers narrow down the introduction of the poolish method to post-Napoleonic Paris. Views differ about Zang, whose Paris bakery and large staff of bakers introduced the method in the 1840s, and whose history explains why many French bakeries were called Viennese.

In the very exhaustive Handbook of Dough Fermentation, Ronald L. Wirtz writes: "Austrian bakers who emigrated to Paris around 1840 initiated the production of Vienna breads and other luxury products. A Polish nobleman, the Baron Zang, introduced the use of the poolish, a multistage fermentation method based on the use of prepared yeast that is still practiced by specialists today." (Ronald L. Wirtz, "Grain, Baking, and Sourdough Bread: A Brief Historical Panorama")

Many currently-popular baking books now use the terms biga and poolish, and have very detailed explanations of how to use both of these methods, including Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish, whose recipe, "White Bread with Poolish" was used for the bread I pictured. American sources began to use the term some time in the late 20th century.

Ordinary English and French dictionaries that I've looked in have no entry for the word poolish. This includes the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Petit Larousse, the Robert (French), and other online English dictionaries. It's a purely technical word, I guess.

Happy Valentine's Day and Happy Wordy Wednesday!

Chinese Food in the US: A More Nuanced View

Haiming Liu's book From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express: A History of Chinese Food in the United States (published 2015) is unusual because it looks not only at the US, but at the Chinese cultural background and food ways of several waves of immigrants to the US. It thus goes deeper into Chinese-American history than two other books that I have enjoyed: The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8 Lee, and Chop Suey. A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States by Andrew Coe.

John Sloan, "Chinese Restaurant," 1909. One of the art works that Liu cites
to illustrate the development of Chinese restaurants in the early 1900s.

By using both English-language and Chinese-language sources, the author provides a fascinating history of Chinese food and its global history -- beginning with a Chinese restaurant tradition dating back to the Song Dynasty which lasted from 960 to 1279. This provides a much more nuanced appreciation of social and economic history of American Chinese communities, as well as of the restaurants they have founded and the various inventions of food to please both themselves and their American customers. The descriptive information about Chinese restaurants in the US from the 19th to the 21st century is fascinating, though I will not try to reproduce it here.

These words from the beginning of the book capture one of the main themes that the author explores:

"In the shadow of its success, we ponder the question of who owns culture. Culture seems hereditary or primordial and is often considered as a genetic soft power of a community or an ethnic group. In reality, culture, especially restaurant culture, is a 'public domain' in which every participating agent, organization, or corporation could have access to or even own it. Chinese Americans have no controlling power or patent rights to their own food in the American restaurant market. When food becomes a commodity, it is no longer an inherited culture. Corporate America could easily appropriate it. Food is both a culture and a commodity." (p. 5)

A very important theme of Liu's book is the major racial prejudice and discrimination that Chinese immigrants faced during the 19th century. He explains the ways that they dealt with it and the ways that it affected their choices of how to make a living. Chinese restaurants run by immigrants first appeared in California during the 1840s gold rush, when numerous Chinese businessmen and ambitious workers came -- "they were a different kind of pioneer in California. They were interested in making money through trade rather than digging gold. (p. 10).

Imogen Cunningham: "Chinatown, New York City" --
another art work discussed in From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express.

Although Chinese immigrants were hard-working model citizens by any reasonable standards, racism and legal limits on what they were allowed to do meant that a majority of the immigrants worked either in restaurants or laundries. Prejudice was so strong that the U.S. Congress voted in 1882 to ban all Chinese immigration -- The Chinese Exclusion Act, which was not rescinded until 1965.

Despite prejudice and exclusion, many of the original Chinese immigrants remained in the US, most notably in the China Towns of New York City and San Francisco. In the late 19th century, Chinese restaurateurs introduced Chinese-style food, notably chop suey, to Americans. It became more and more popular for at least a century. Liu refers to the introduction of this dish as "creative assimilation" as it was exotic, very popular, but not really a Chinese dish. By World War II, "Chop suey was also used as a food for American soldiers. Joining spaghetti and tamales as 'ethnic' dishes listed in the 1942 edition of the U.S. Army cookbook, chop suey and chow mein were staples of the military mess hall. The biggest fan of chop suey in the army was Dwight D. Eisenhower." (p. 63).

Several chapters of From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express deal with special topics which are very interesting, such as the chapters titled "Chop Suey and Racial America: The Origin of Chop Suey" (p. 49) and "Kung Pao Kosher: American Jews and Chinese Food An Unlikely Ethnic Romance" (p. 71). Liu really packs a lot of information into a relatively short book!

"The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was another turning point in Chinese migration to the United States. When the law was passed, the annual immigration quota for the Chinese jumped from 105 to 20,000." (p. 90). This new wave of immigrants created another major change for both the Chinese culture in the US and for the introduction of an entirely new American attitude towards Chinese food, thanks to the vastly broader range of cuisine brought by these immigrants.

Late 20th century Chinese immigrants, who at first were primarily from Taiwan, represented a vast range of Chinese ethnicities and regional cuisines because the population of Taiwan actually had come from all over China as the Nationalists fled from the victorious Communists in the 1950s. One restaurant dish that epitomizes the way Chinese food has moved from Mainland China to Taiwan to the US is General Tso's Chicken, which was invented in Taiwan by a Hunan-native cook who adapted it once for Taiwan and again when he brought it to New York. Liu writes: "This contradictory character of General Tso’s chicken or other Hunan dishes made in Taiwan helps us understand the nature of Diaspora Chineseness. Chinese food does not exist in a social vacuum. Authenticity in food culture is often a flexible concept."  (p. 101).

Liu's conclusion:

"Contemporary Chinese immigrants and their families are a new generation of Asian Americans. Congregated Chinese restaurants, grocery stores, and other retail and service businesses in the San Gabriel Valley, in Southern California, or in Flushing and Queens, in New York, are visible examples of their transnational lifestyle, which does not prevent them from making America their home. Across the country, thriving Chinese restaurant businesses have considerably enriched American food culture. The rapid growth of P. F. Chang’s as a full-service Chinese restaurant and Panda Express as a fast-food Chinese restaurant reflects Americans’ constantly changing and often multiethnically blended eating habits. Chinese food is an indispensable part of the American restaurant market today." (p. 158). 

What did Benjamin Franklin Eat?

"In 1718, twelve-year-old Benjamin had been working for his father for two years and was well versed in all aspects of the candle business," writes Rae Katherine Eighmey in her recent book Stirring the Pot with Benjamin Franklin. To show the reader how Franklin and his father Josiah worked, she imagines a vignette where they bring a heavy handcart full of suet from Boston's Butcher's Wharf to their combined home and candle-making business. Besides the suet, which was to be rendered and made into dipped candles, she suggests that the Franklins could have purchased two ox cheeks to be made into a soup or stew for their dinner. Eighmey continues with a description of the way that Benjamin's mother Abiah and his sister Jane may have prepared an Ox Cheek Stew:

"Abiah hangs one of her brass kettles on the bottom trammel hook, directly over the coals, drops in a bit of butter, or salt pork, to melt, then adds the meat to brown. Next she pulls a couple of 'middling' carrots from the root cellar, each about a foot long and two inches in diameter, and chops them into chunks. In like manner she cuts up other root vegetables -- onions, parsnips, beets -- and celery and adds all to the pot. She gives it a quick stir, raises the pot to the middle hook, and leaves them to 'roast' along with a small chunk of ham for seasoning. ...  

"Abiah has the help of youngest daughter Jane.  She is six years old. Abiah will keep an especially watchful eye over her youngest children in the kitchen area. Fifteen years earlier, the family lost a son, Ebenezer, who fell into the tub of washing suds and drowned at the age of three.  By the time Abiah has finished cleaning up the porridge dishes from breakfast, set the kitchen area to rights, and made up the beds, the soup will be ready for the next step. She returns to the hearth, raises the kettle to the top hook, and adds ten quarts of water brought from the backyard well. Now it can simmer away all day, with an occasional check and stir." (pp. 21-22)

Colonial soup pot.

This quote illustrates the methods that Eighmey uses to create a detailed and vivid picture of Franklin's era to modern readers who probably have little knowledge of cooking over a hearth fire in an early colonial kitchen. She explains that the cooking technique described here is based on a contemporary household management book from 1717, and for the benefit of really curious readers, offers a recipe for Ox Cheek Stew -- the image of a large cooking pot is an illustration from the recipe. She suggests using beef shanks in case you can't find ox cheeks. (I once did try to find them, and it's difficult; the butcher at Whole Foods pointed out to me that each animal only has two cheeks!)

Stirring the Pot with Benjamin Franklin follows him throughout his 84 years and his several careers. Eighmey explores what he ate at each stage of the way -- including his brief time as a candle-making helper, his training as a printer, his development as a businessman and publisher in Philadelphia, his marriage, his fame (especially for creating "Poor Richard" and his famous sayings), his second career as an experimenter with electricity, his third career as a politician and diplomat in London and Paris, and finally his participation in the Constitutional Convention that gave us our current system of government. What a life!

Another illustration
from the book.

I especially enjoyed reading about Franklin's dining experiences during his very long diplomatic stays overseas. Eighmey shows that he enjoyed London and Paris dining experiences, but also that he very much missed the American foods of his early life, especially the American varieties of apples and the many types of products made with corn. His wife Deborah, who never accompanied him, was often asked in letters to send food; for example, in one letter from London he mentioned that he seldom saw roasting apples: "I wish you had sent me some... Newtown Pippins would have been the most acceptable." Deborah did send him food, including apples, cranberries, and ham; in 1760 he wrote her: "The apples are a great comfort to me." (p. 161) Later, she also sent dried venison, smoked beef, specially prepared cornmeal called nocake, and other American products. (p. 187)

During the American Revolution, Franklin was extremely important in his mission to Paris, where he arranged crucial military and financial support for the American cause. He ran a large household, which eventually became the US Embassy. For this reason, he employed a professional cook; thus Eighmey was able to find ledgers of food purchases for his kitchens and details of meals prepared during that time. His chef, named Finck, in his employment application, provided a list of simple daily fare and also more elegant dinners that he agreed to prepare for the household and guests:

"He agreed to supply a lunch, a dinner -- the main meal of the day served in the middle of the afternoon -- and an evening supper. The early meal consisted of porridge, bread and butter; sugar and honey, with coffee and unsweetened chocolate as beverages. For dinner, ... Finck  specified hors d'oeuvres of butter, radishes, and cornichons -- pickles; a large entrée of beef, veal, or mutton; followed by a poultry course; a small 'in between' course, two 'plats d'entrements'; then two vegetable dishes. For dessert the menu suggested two plates of fresh fruit in the winter, four in the summer; two compotes -- cooked fruit frequently served warm in a sugar syrup; a selection of cheeses, cookie-like biscuits, and bonbons. Finally, a frozen dessert was to be served twice a week in the summer and once in the winter. So it appears that Benjamin Franklin ate ice cream, a popular eighteenth-century Parisian treat, less well-known in America or England." (p. 225)

Some specific foods in Finck's repertoire: "soup and porridges, fat hens, roast pigeons, baby peas, fried artichokes, small pâtés, and chops, along with fruit -- peaches, plums and apricots." Also mentioned: turkey, the American native bird which Franklin was backing as a national symbol rather than the bald eagle.

Recently, I also read Eighmey's earlier book about what Lincoln ate (blogged here: What did Abraham Lincoln Eat?) The Lincoln book to me was slightly more lively and vivid, but I find both to be very valuable food and history books.

Retro Baking: Velvet Spice Cake from the "Joy of Cooking"

Just out of the oven!

My copy of The Joy of Cooking is dog-eared, broken-spined, and full of splatters from past cooking experiences. I also own the Joy of Cooking iPad app, which I actually used to make this spice cake. Baking from scratch is kind of a retro thing to do involving beaten egg whites and many steps to completion. Not at all like a cake mix!

My also-antique bundt pan is coated with Teflon, but it still works. (Note that Teflon is not considered harmful, that's kind of a myth.) The printed book I used is so old that the recipe version there only mentions a tube pan. Bundt pans became popular in 1966, which is probably when I received mine as a gift from my Aunt Bernadine, though she may have given it to me even before that. The app -- being entirely twenty-first century -- says to use a bundt pan, which I did.

Here's the cake after it cooled a bit, shown in front of my very-not-retro stand mixer.
The spices I used were ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves: a bit more than the recipe suggested.
Also, I used Kefir in place of the buttermilk specified in the recipe, as I often do these days.

I greased the pan with my secret hoard of original Crisco. I use it only for greasing baking pans, so I don't think it will harm us too much even though it's trans fat. I used butter as the shortening in the cake itself -- butter, the great and wonderful and vindicated fat that isn't anywhere near as dangerous as they once told us. Greasing the pan with Crisco does make a very crisp and brown exterior on a cake!

Insulting Words for Wordy Wednesday

The Chronicle of Higher Education hosts a blog called "Lingua Franca," dedicated to language and written by a number of professional linguists. As a lover of words, and one who is fascinated by how language works, I read it often.

Lingua Franca's February 4 post by Ben Yagoda, a professor at the University of Delaware, begins with a fairly lengthy analysis of the limited language skills of the current US President compared to previous holders of that office.

Then we get to the good wordy stuff: Yagoda continues with a delightfully colorful discussion of the many and varied words with which the President has been insulted (along with a few other politicians). The post, "Passels of Popinjays," is named in reference to British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson's tweet, "We will not allow US-UK relations to be endangered by some puffed up pompous popinjay in City Hall."

Of course there's also reference to this famous old tweet:

More and more wonderful insulting words follow, for example, the epithet snollygoster, "a word originating in the 19th-century American South and meaning 'a shrewd and unprincipled person, and especially an unprincipled politician.'" I was surprised that Yagoda didn't mention dotard, which was used by North Korea's president, Kim Jong Un last fall, but I guess it's too ordinary a word for this context.

Keep reading, and you'll be treated with this wondrous collection from various sources:

• wazzock
• varlet
• poltroon
• quisling
• fopdoodle
• throttlebottom
• scalliwag
• lickspittle
• blackguard
• mountebank dabbling in laudanum
• ultramaroon
• gulla-bull
• nin-cow-poop

If you want to know more about these words, check the original article or look in the dictionary! Especially note the last three which Yagoda identifies as "from a 1938 Bugs Bunny cartoon."

Word lovers will also be interested in 1000 "new words" added by the Oxford English Dictionary, as summarized in this article in the L.A. Times: "Oxford English Dictionary adds new words for mansplainers and snowflakes alike" That's a lot of words for my Wordy Wednesday -- tomorrow, back to food blogging.

"The Bad Food Bible" by Aaron Carroll, MD

"Eating is one of the great joys of life. Don't let people use misinformation or bad science to deprive you of the pleasure of good food." -- The Bad Food Bible, p. 198.

Aaron Carroll writes essays in the New York Times that debunk commonly held misconceptions about food. He calls out the perpetrators of misinformation, and tries to help people think more clearly about conflicting claims. His columns have interested me for a while, so I was happy to learn that he recently published a book along the same lines: The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully.

Most of the chapters of Carroll's book deal with foods that valid research has shown aren't nearly as bad as their reputations make them out to be. Carroll has a great sense of humor and irony, and doesn't tolerate fools gladly, which makes it a very readable book as well as enlightening. He effectively cites his own experience as a father, a physician, and a human being in explaining what motivated him to explore food myths and science.

I was especially interested in what Carroll disclosed about diet sodas and the artificial sweeteners in them, MSG, coffee, and alcohol. The overwhelming result of research studies about each on is that they aren't nearly as bad as people believe they are -- and in fact, consuming them in reasonable quantities probably offers health benefits. 

Carroll debunks the widespread confidence in gluten-free diets, except for properly diagnosed celiac and allergy sufferers, and he summarizes the risks of adopting gluten-free substitutes for things like bagels or cereal. He discusses research about topics like GMOs and organic foods. He puts the risks and rewards of eating meat, butter, and eggs into perspective -- and concludes that you can eat them in reasonable quantities without incurring the dangers that are often attributed to them. It's a very useful set of information: but you have to be open to learning about the scientific results, not to trusting in journalists, popularizers, and even quacks.

The value of Carroll's book is in the details. He explains how to identify scientific studies that are valid and valuable, and to recognize when writers have cherry-picked studies that confirm what people want to believe. He reviews the literature on each topic, explaining why studies that use human subjects are considerably more useful than those that use rats (which, he reveals, are particularly susceptible to bladder cancer, making the scare value of many studies less important). And he is never afraid to call out bias or bad science. Above all, he asks his readers to consider the real evidence, not the prevalent demonizations of foods like gluten, eggs, or GMOs. The one food that he doesn't defend is sugar.

Here are a few of his conclusions: if you want to critique these results, you really need to read the details before you fall back on what you think you know:

• "You have to bend the truth -- or at least do some pretty selective reasoning -- to make a scientific case that meat is bad for you." (p. 21)
• "If I have to choose between diet drinks and those with added sugar, I'll go with the diet. There's a potential -- and likely very real -- harm from consuming added sugar. There is none from artificial sweeteners." (p. 153)
• "Experimental research into MSG has revealed that it has few, if any, effects on humans." (p. 167)
• "There's no evidence that coffee is bad for the average person. The data do not support the idea that we, collectively, are drinking too much of it, nor that coffee is associated with poor health outcomes. In fact, the opposite appears to be true." (p. 127)
• Evidence points to these conclusions about alcohol: 
• "First, the majority of the research suggests that moderate alcohol consumption is associated with decreased rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and death." (p. 100) 
• "Second, it also seems to be associated with increased rates of some cancers (especially breast cancer), cirrhosis, chronic pancreatitis, and accidents, although this negative impact from alcohol seems to be smaller than its positive impact on cardiovascular health." (p. 100)
• "Drinking too much alcohol is bad for you, and you shouldn't do it. Period." (p. 104)

If you think you already know why butter, eggs, diet drinks, coffee, salt, and so on are bad for you, it might be useful for you to read this book.

Evelyn's Sourdough

Evelyn has been experimenting with sourdough. This loaf was a real success! She said I could post her photos here.

These are Evelyn's sourdough starters. One is named Lois, from wild yeast.
The other is named Arthur, and was purchased from King Arthur himself a few weeks ago.
Lois the starter dates to last fall, when Evelyn decided to try making sourdough.  

The starters grow rapidly!

Yesterday we heard a story about a sourdough starter from someone who went to culinary school. Her bread instructor's starter was around 20 years old, and he was quite proud that he'd been feeding and nurturing it for that long. One day, a novice student who didn't understand much about anything used up the whole starter in a batch of bread. Evidently he was distraught!

Evelyn's sourdough breakfast: pancakes and waffles -- I wish I were in Fairfax to try them too. Miriam was enjoying them!

Alice made beautiful waffle arrangements.

Sourdough pizza.

Strata made from extra sourdough bread, onions, ham, and more.

Alice with sourdough!

"Hippie Food" by Jonathan Kauffman

This morning I read a brief article by Jonathan Kauffman in the New Yorker: "How Carob Traumatized a Generation." It was very amusing, so I immediately bought a Kindle edition of his new book Hippie Food. I was reading it all day, and I'm done.

The book starts with background about food fads and theories before the sixties. The chapters about the sixties and seventies were pretty good, describing the individuals who developed various trends like tofu and granola and who wrote cookbooks like The Tassajara Bread Book, the Moosewood books, Diet for a Small Planet, and others, many of them still fairly well-known and even popular. It's very much a book about people first, and their accomplishments seem at times almost incidental, which I think is a flaw. There's quite a lot about macrobiotic theory and its founder George Ohsawa. Here's a description of some macrobiotic ideas of "yin" and "yang":

"A carrot was more yang than an onion by a few degrees, but it wasn’t merely yang: each root had a yin end and a yang end. When you cut the carrot, you had to take that into account, as well as what you were going to cook the carrot with, to ensure you balanced yin and yang in the meal. In addition, you shouldn’t peel the carrot, for fear of wasting vital nutrients, and when you cooked the carrot, you should do it with a calm, happy spirit, understanding that you were broadcasting your mood to your dining companions through the food." (Kindle Locations 1344-1349). 

The growing influence of world cuisines on the natural foods and organic foods trends was an interesting trend, which is also covered at length -- as in this passage:

"Despite its global inspiration, the vegetarian food that was emerging in the 1970s did not— could not— replicate the flavors of the cuisines it was appropriating. Dishes were stripped down, adapted, bastardized, often denuded of spice. 

"A few dishes that became iconic in the 1970s may, perhaps, have benefited from this waving off of tradition: both crepes and quiche— soigné in the 1960s, ubiquitous in vegetarian restaurants in the 1970s— were liberated from their classic forms to become containers for thousands of variations. Other dishes didn’t fare as well. Sometimes taking out the meat meant removing the one ingredient that gave a particular dish any flavor. Some of the world’s culinary glories were reduced to puddles of melted cheese." (Kindle Locations 3673-3679). 

I was amused at his many lists of hippie restaurants and co-ops here in Ann Arbor: of course I remember most of them, some of which still exist.

However, as the book went on, it didn't sustain my interest. At first it was really about food history, even if it over-emphasized the life stories of the people who developed the various trends. Then it degenerated into descriptions of the infighting among various alternative markets and co-ops in Austin, Texas; Minneapolis; and a few other places. It got more and more tedious. The culmination of all this, according to the author was the founding of Whole Foods. Sort of a cross between economic history and just gossip.

I'm disappointed.

In My Kitchen: Planning and Listing

New in my kitchen this month: my resolve to label things as I store them in the freezer. For this, I bought freezer tape!

In the past, I didn't label these containers, and just had to guess what the contents were. Now I know. Freezer tape rules!

This gets me to a topic that I've been wondering about: how do people decide what's for dinner? Sometimes my own "planning" is just to pull out one of those boxes. With my new labels, I have a better idea of what to expect when I warm up the contents!

Reading blogs and online kitchen advice inspired me to examine the way I figure out what we're having for meals. Mostly I prepare food from scratch using what's on hand -- but starting at the last minute. Meals include breakfast, almost daily lunch, and dinner every night: we eat in most of the time. Sure, I sometimes identify recipes that I've been meaning to try, and buy the ingredients and get my act together for experiments. But not every day. Mostly I don't know what we are going to eat until we are almost ready to set the table. I'm beginning to think this is eccentric.

Elaborate meal-planning advice like this abounds on sites like this example at thekitchn.com and lots of blogs,
but I never do anything like a weekly plan. 

In particular, I can't believe the suggestions I see about printing out complicated shopping-list templates and laboriously filling them out by hand. It's 2018 and most people carry a smart phone with great listing capabilities with them all the time. For the last few years, thanks to Evelyn's example, I've been using the iPhone for my shopping list.

Screen shot of iPhone
Reminder app.

Milk low? Oatmeal used up? Cereal boxes mostly down to dust? (Yes, we eat boxed cereal -- sorry, not sorry.) Only one stick of butter left in the freezer? Peanut butter or jam jars almost scraped clean? Spice jars emptied? Exotic recipe requires chicken, eggplant, okra, and small hot peppers, as in the exotic stew I made earlier this week? Craving cookies or ice cream? When we need things, they go on the iPhone Reminder app.

The iPhone list is shared, so when my husband uses up an item he can add it to the very same list with his iPhone. And if he does the shopping, he can automatically check off the items and my iPhone knows it too. I guess it's in the cloud. Over time this list has also come to include specifications of unusual light bulb types, furnace filter size, battery requirements, and other stuff that's so easy to lose track of -- when things run out, they just get checked back on the list. True, there's no way to sort the list, which rearranges itself mysteriously as things are checked off and put back on, but I've gotten used to this challenge. However, I digress.

Let's get back to the original question, What's for dinner? Around 5 PM most days, I ask myself what I feel like eating, and what I feel like cooking. (Obviously if we have invited guests, I'll already have things well in hand by 5 PM -- I mean days when it's just the two of us.)

Dinner depends on these questions and answers:

• Is anything approaching its final use-up-by-now date on the store packaging? Obviously, the presence of 2-day-old meat or ready-to-wilt lettuce is an overwhelming factor in what we'll eat.
• No urgent choices? Well, what's in the freezer? When I cook meatballs or stew I usually make extra for the freezer. I buy frozen salmon in packages from Trader Joe's or Whole Foods. I foil wrap Costco lamb chops or steaks in dinner-sized quantities and freeze them. I rely on frozen peas and corn or canned red, white, or black beans to add to many dishes. Recently, as I noted, I've been doing better with labels so there aren't quite as many mystery dinners.
• Another question: did we have a large or a small lunch? What was it?  If we had egg salad for lunch, we aren't having omelets for dinner. If we had hot dogs or chili for lunch maybe a lighter salad would be good for dinner. And so on. Other side of the coin: if I do know what's for dinner, that helps me decide about lunch.
• Above all: do I feel lazy or ambitious? Always a good question, which is a reason to keep nice bread in the freezer and sliced cheese, deli meat, or leftover roast in the fridge, ingredients for a quick soup or tuna for salad in the pantry, and salad vegetables ready to use. Yes, I keep boxed soup on the shelf, but usually add veggies when I make it. Yes, I use salsa out of a jar. No, I don't make my own tortillas. I'm not a fanatic about from-scratch cooking, just prefer it.

My lettuce storage box: empty right now because I'm
waiting for the lettuce supply to be safer.

A note on salad: recent publicity about the contamination of romaine lettuce with e-coli has been a real challenge, since I usually buy leaf lettuce, wash it in advance, and store it in a purpose-made crisper box to make salad prep less of an obstacle. I also sometimes cut up veggies in advance, to facilitate last-minute prep. We have salad for lunch or dinner just about every day, so this is an important issue.

I don't use bagged lettuce, but I understand why busier people do use it. I detest bottled salad dressings, but don't mind if I'm offered a salad where someone else used them -- I love using oil, vinegar, and mustard or making a yogurt-based salad dressing. So having ingredients ready to make a salad is one of my best planning devices.

A few more new toys in my January kitchen

My new kitchen torch -- which I've documented in two posts
 this month -- has now been joined by ramekins for crème brûlée.
The torch (upper right) is shown the caramelizing sugar topping.

Shiny flakes of caramelized sugar on top of smooth crème pâtissière!

Why am I interested in meal planning?

Two groups of food bloggers gave me the idea to write about meal planning and organization, and I will be sharing this post with them:

Sherry at the blog Sherry's Pickings hosts a monthly blogging event called "In My Kitchen." Bloggers from around the world write posts about new food products and gadgets in their kitchens, and link their posts on Sherry's blog. A number of these bloggers have been participating in this event for a long time. Meal planning is an occasional topic of their posts, as well as related subjects like how to preserve what's growing in their gardens. It's fun to see what these bloggers are cooking each month because some of them are in the Northern Hemisphere like me, and others are in Australia and other places and thus using fruits and vegetables of a totally different season.

"Beth Fish" is the pseudonym of an editor and writer who blogs at Beth Fish Reads. Each Saturday she reviews cookbooks or writes about her own food-related activities and also hosts "Weekend Cooking" where a group of bloggers link to their posts about food or about anything they consider related to food. She's written quite a few reviews of books that discuss how to plan meals, shop, and organize your cooking life, and the bloggers in the group also return to the subject from time to time. They've thus made me aware of a number of questions on how to organize.

Not an Exotic Dinner

You may think I cook in a very exotic way. I didn’t want to give the wrong impression, so I decided to post a photo of tonight’s dinner: Shepherd’s Pie. That is, mashed potatoes baked on top of a casserole of ground lamb with vegetables and very classic seasonings. Not at all exotic!

NOTE: recipe here: https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/shepherds-pie-240224 -- used bell pepper instead of carrot. Sauteed vegetables separately, not in lamb fat.

An Exotic Dinner

Cuisine de Côte d'Ivoire et d'Afrique de l'Oeust is a very exotic cookbook that I bought on my most recent trip to Paris.
In English the title is "The Cuisine of Ivory Coast and West Africa." I have never had West African food, but I'm curious
and we were ready to experiment -- finally since we've had the book for over a year.

We picked a recipe with obtainable ingredients: chicken, onions, tomatoes, peanut butter, okra, eggplant, chicken broth,
small hot peppers, thyme, and bay leaf, to be served over rice. There were some very startling recipes in the book,
especially the ones that called for "smoked agouti" which is a rodent-like wild animal -- the greater cane rat in English.

According to the recipe, I browned the chicken and onions and added the tomatoes. Then I prepped the eggplant which
you can see at left. I readied the okra, which was frozen, and the peanut butter.

I used two jalapeños and one serrano pepper.

After cooking the chicken and tomatoes for half an hour, I added
the rest of the vegetables. Then, as directed, I cooked it another half hour.

A bowl of chicken and peanut sauce with rice. It was extremely delicious and we both really liked it.

Ursula Le Guin

To honor the memory of Ursula Le Guin (1929-2018), who died a few days ago, I decided to read one of her books that I've never read before. I chose The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia because Paul Krugman tweeted: 

I enjoyed reading this book, which was published in 1974, but which takes place thousands of years from now, on a pair of twin planets 11 light years from earth. Of course I liked the fact that the most important person in the story was a brilliant and original physicist, a man named Shevek. I also enjoyed Le Guin's depiction of a utopian society on the planet where he was born. It was a utopia of many sorts, especially a utopia of equality between the sexes, while the planet's twin, where Shevek visits, was a model of inequality between the sexes, as well as of general inequality between classes of people. Both fictional societies in the book offer insights into idealism and reality as applied to our own society, and offer thought experiments about things often taken for granted. Obviously, skillful plot and character development make this a readable and enjoyable work of fiction, not a diatribe or theoretical description.

As always, I watch for ways that food highlights social issues and other themes in novels that I read. Here's an example of food ways on Le Guin's utopian planet, where all meals were served in central canteens called refectories. The food in the refectories was supposed to be equal for all members of the population, whatever their contribution to society. Realizing that the ideal was undermined by special treatment of scientists thus affected Shevek:

"There was always a dessert at the Institute refectory at dinner. Shevek enjoyed it very much, and when there were extras he took them. And his conscience, his organic-societal conscience, got indigestion. Didn’t everybody at every refectory, from Abbenay to Uttermost, get the same, share and share alike? He had always been told so and had always found it so. Of course there were local variations: regional specialities, shortages, surpluses, makeshifts in situations such as Project Camps, poor cooks, good cooks, in fact an endless variety within the unchanging framework. But no cook was so talented that he could make a dessert without the makings. Most refectories served dessert once or twice a decad. Here it was served nightly. Why? Were the members of the Central Institute of the Sciences better than other people?" (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, p. 111). 

In the past I've read other novels by Le Guin, and I agree with the generally held view that she was an imaginative creator of literature and that classifying her work as genre fiction disrespected her accomplishments. However there are many many obituaries and older appreciations of her work that do justice to the past and to her oeuvre so I don't have to.

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.

Cromulent and Esculent: Wordy Wednesday

Words that sound good or funny often catch my attention. Two words I like for this reason are cromulent and esculent. Runners up include corpulent, malevolent, indolent, redolent, virulent, violent, continent, prurient, and heaven-sent, but I won't say any more about them. Just that it's Wordy Wednesday and time for some fun with words. Here goes:

My Oxford English Dictionary.

Esculent means edible or suitable for food. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first use known to them: a quote from Bacon in 1626 -- "A number of herbs are not esculent at all." In my recent reading, I noticed esculent in several quotes in the book Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen. (Link to my review of the book.) Here is the word in use by one of the men that served in a militia with Lincoln in 1832:

"The meat we could boil -- when we could get a pot -- broil, roast, or fry ... The bread we could bake or fry, the latter mode was generally practiced, for it was the less trouble and the less time of the two modes; the former mode we usually practiced by wrapping the stiff, shortened dough in a spiral manner around our ramrods... where it would bake into a most esculent bread." (p. 78)

Gardening manuals and catalogues from the early 19th century were also quoted in the book; these used esculent to distinguish edible growing vegetables from flowers that were decorative rather than edible. I believe that the word is used less frequently now than it was in the 19th century.

Cromulent is a totally new word for our time, quite often used in pop sources. It was invented for a 1996 episode of "The Simpsons" -- as you no doubt know if you are a fan. It's now pretty widely used as a kind of random positive adjective, so it could be defined as meaning "just fine." Or something like that. It's also defined as "Appearing legitimate but actually being spurious." (Dictionary of American Slang).

The Merriam-Webster dictionary, which doesn't actually include it as a "word," discusses cromulent at some length, including this summary of the first instance of the word:

"The schoolchildren of Springfield are watching a film about the founding father of Springfield, Jebediah Springfield. The film ends with Jebediah intoning, 'A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.' One teacher at the back of the room leans over to another and says that she’d never heard the word embiggen before she moved to Springfield. 'I don't know why,' the other teacher replies. 'It's a perfectly cromulent word.'"

The writers of The Simpsons had evidently been challenged to invent two plausible but not-real words, and came up with both "embiggen" and "cromulent." (Though there are a few earlier, more obscure citations for "embiggen.") Both are now rather widely used! Merriam-Webster concludes:

"While we don’t yet enter cromulent into our dictionaries, it’s a perfectly cromulent candidate for future entry."