Artichoke ice cream and other surprises

In the 18th century, ice cream was a novelty. Not new -- even the Romans had frozen desserts, and the transition to ice cream was gradual. It's another thing Marco Polo might have seen in China (but he didn't seem to have mentioned it). Books about ice cream were definitely new in the 18th century, though, and they offered a variety of flavors that would shame modern chefs who think of themselves as so ingenious. "Almost from the beginning, confectioners have pushed the ice cream envelope," writes Jeri Quinzio in her book Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making. While her book includes many other subjects, I found her descriptions of ice cream flavors from the past to be the most fascinating part.

Artichoke ice cream -- neige d'artichaux in the original -- seems to me one of the most exotic. A French chef made it from "pistachios and candied orange, along with artichokes, and quite probably the finished product tasted less like artichokes than like pistachios and oranges," she says. (p. 39)

Another ice cream maker in France used truffles -- the fungus kind, not the chocolate kind. Vanilla at the time, however, was not yet a commonly used flavor -- favorites of the time included fruits, flowers, and spices like cinnamon, cloves, anise, saffron. Quinzio cites an author from that period who said no vegetable existed that couldn't be turned into ice cream. Slightly later flavors were pomegranate, jasmine, fennel with lemon, and nougat candy. Or a combination of cinnamon, lemon peel, and bay leaf. (p. 53, 142)

Parmesan cheese flavored ice cream is mentioned twice in Sugar and Snow. An author named Frederick Nutt mentioned it in a work called The Complete Confectioner in England in the late 18th or early 19th century. When talking of famous chefs of the late 20th century, Quinzio mentions miniature cornets filled with salmon tartare and crème fraîche but looking like ice cream cones -- part of a trend that includes desserts with new flavors that the chefs of the 18th century "would have recognized, such as Parmesan, artichoke, and truffle." (p. 207)

Even the creation of ice-cream-like savory dishes is not new. The Virginia House-Wife by Mary Randolph in 1824 had many recipes for dessert ices, but among them was "frozen oyster cream" which was oyster soup, strained and frozen; Quinzio says that Randolph gives no serving suggestion or explanation of this recipe. Similarly, she cites Fanny Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book's recipe for Clam Frappé: the liquid from steamed clams frozen "to a mush." Quisno gives the entire recipe for a Cucumber Sorbet, which actually sounds pretty refreshing to me. She also mentions rye-bread and brown-bread flavored ice creams. (p. 59, 79, 143, 151)

I enjoyed the historic material, for example, about the invention of the ice cream cone, which  did not originate at the St.Louis World's Fair/Louisiana Exposition in 1904, but was the first place that made street food from what had been a fancy, table-served dish. I was amused to hear of one "bombe" made of ice cream that was really supposed to remind people of anarchists, and of Seabees creating an improvised ice cream maker from airplane parts and Japanese shell cases on a Pacific Island in World War II (p. 71 & 195). I was delighted to learn more about marshmallows -- how they were melted and used for frozen desserts in early home freezers (my mother did this -- her specialty was coffee mallow, which didn't work when she got a freezer that maintained a truly cold temperature). And how Rocky Road ice cream with marshmallows in it was supposedly invented by William Dreyer in Oakland, California, in 1929. But I most loved the lists of exotic flavors.

Sunkist Oranges and Birds Eye Peas

Wednesday night I attended the regular meeting of the Culinary Book Club that I belong to. We read Birdseye by Mark Kurlansky, a biography of Clarence Birdseye. The subject of the bio developed processes for frozen food technology: how to freeze it quickly with a variety of huge devices, package it with new materials that survived freezing, and keep it frozen -- besides industrial freezing machines, he also developed less expensive refrigeration units for shipping and storing it in markets. Birdseye began with his own business, and then sold his idea to a company that could invest more in the project than he could raise. 

That company became General Foods, and Birdseye, whose name became synonymous with frozen food (especially peas) ran a food lab for them for a number of years. I found him interesting both for having changed American food, including ideas for distribution to grocers and inventing freezers where they could store the foods he froze, and for his amazingly adventurous attitude towards eating and trying exotic foods and small game animals that most of his peers would not have accepted.

Birdseye also invented a variety of other very practical things such as a reflector lightbulb. He traveled to a number of spots in the New World, like Labrador -- where he got the idea for frozen food, which in its time was a big improvement over canning. The discussion was fun; some of us talked about our memories of refrigerators, ice men, ice boxes, and home freezers. One woman described how she received an upright freezer for a wedding present when she had almost no money, but her family considered it essential. 

This week also, I read another book, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden by Douglas Cazaux Sackman. It's a more academic study but very well-written. It details the history of the orange industry in California -- and it was really an industry, allied with the Southern Pacific Railroad. Beginning around the turn of the 20th century, orange-grove owners figured out  how to mass-produce uniform fruits, which became a commodity. The growers' association united the rich owners of large groves, who marketed collectively under the still-well-known name Sunkist.

The industry pioneered ways of advertising to create demand, including medical studies commissioned to show how important oranges were to health. Sound familiar? It was done again, perhaps more dishonestly, this decade by pomegranate producers in California, though the author doesn't mention that.

The book answers one question I had wondered about in the past: when did oranges become common rather than a special treat to be eaten only at Christmas. I loved the description of a Sunkist ad where a woman asks a small grocer for oranges, and he says he stocks them only at Christmas -- but the point of the ad is that the bigger supermarkets, which were cooperating with the orange growers and railroads, were beginning to stock them all year. I believe this was in the 1920s, by which time piles of perfect oranges were on display in markets throughout the land, and people were becoming convinced to drink OJ for breakfast daily and feed it to babies.

Further, the book documents how mass orange-growing was an industry with political implications for labor and unions, use of pesticides and other poisons, immigration, racism, exploitation of land and workers by rich growers, water rights, and a number of other issues that started 100 years ago and haven't been resolved in America. One radical critic of the terrible labor practices and union-busting efforts referred to the oranges as Gunkist! The conflicts involved a number of very famous Americans and famous books like Grapes of Wrath of course, as well as a fascinating governor's race in which the author Upton Sinclair almost won on a very radical platform. (The growers and railroads used a negative campaign to defeat him in the last 6 weeks: makes me shudder!)

Most of the California groves have now been replaced by housing developments and urbanization; for example, Disneyland replaced orange groves. Both books are very very American stories that reveal interesting developments in American foodways.

Marshmallows

On one of the delightful reruns of Julia Child shows, she and Jacques Pepin make a turkey dinner with all the traditional side dishes. As she heaps sweet potatoes into a serving dish, she says something like this to the audience, "These are plain mashed sweet potatoes, but you could make candied sweet potatoes with marshmallows. I love candied sweet potatoes."

Pepin says "I don't like marshmallows," and she answers, "Of course not, you're French."

I've been aware for ages that French people generally don't like marshmallows -- I've probably already mentioned somewhere in this blog how a French friend trying a toasted marshmallow said "It's like a jellyfish."

But here's the odd thing: the French invented marshmallows as we know them today, which in French are called guimauves. According to "It's a Marshmallow World," in Smithsonian: "The modern marshmallow confection is a mid-19th century French invention and was a cross between medicinal lozenge and bonbon."

Like the English word marshmallow, the French guimauve is the name of a marsh plant whose root produces a sticky substance. An extract of this substance was originally used to provide the unique texture of marshmallows -- sticky but firm, I guess you could say. Gelatine was soon substituted for the extract of plant roots, and for a long time, the classic marshmallow or guimauve was made by confectioners. I'm curious how its popularity grew in the US while obviously declining or maybe never taking off in France.

Use of the marshmallow plant (illustration at right from Wikipedia -- scientific name Althaea officinalis) has a long history. Smithsonian: "Greek physician Dioscorides advised that marshmallow extracts be used in treating wounds and inflammations. During the Renaissance, extracts from the plant’s roots and leaves were used for medicinal purposes, namely as an anti-inflamatory and soothing agent for sore throats." Wikipedia says that the Romans considered them a delicacy.

Today's New York Times Magazine article "Who Made that Marshmallow?" contains the most recent history of how marshmallows are made. The 1950s saw the development of industrial processes to "jet puff" the marshmallows (note the words "Jet Puffed" on the marshmallow bag in the top photo). An invention created a series of machines that forced a "marshmallow slurry through tubes, subjected it to blasts of gas at 200 pounds per square inch, extruded it into long tails and then cut it into bite-size chunks."

The traditional mixture of sugar, egg white, and gelatine required a long and labor-intensive treatment to produce marshmallows, though marshmallows appear to have been mass produced early in the 20th century, when products like Mallomars were introduced. A brief history of Smores says that camping was growing in popularity and the ingredients -- marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate bars -- were quite portable. I remember carefully packed boxes of Campfire marshmallows with two layers of around 10 marshmallows each, probably when they were not quite as speedily and cheaply produced.

So I wonder, what were the French doing in 1927 when the Girl Scout Handbook published the first recipe for S'Mores? In 1919 when "a booklet from the Barrett Company on Sweet Potato and Yams ... suggests adding marshmallows to candied yams"? (Referenced here) In 1913 when Nabisco made the first Mallomars? What about Whippets, moon pies, Peeps, and those jellyfish-like toasted marshmallows? I guess they were eating mousse au chocolate, grilling steaks, and maybe avoiding the yams as well as the candied part.

And the French still hand-make their marshmallows -- for a photo see this blog post.

Manifold Cooking

At today's Old Car Festival in Greenfield Village, I learned about a cookbox that was made, back in the day, to fit over the exhaust manifold of a Ford Model T. You can see the metal box just behind the headlamp here:



At the demo in front of the reviewing stand the beautifully dressed passenger in the car got out, lifted the side of the hood (the Model T had a sort of fold-up hood on either side of the engine), and spooned up some soup to show the crowd -- note the spoon in the Flapper's hand:



Cooking under the hood of a Model T involved understanding the very high heat that could result from the operation of the engine, and gauging how far to go and at what speed you should travel in order to get the best result from your recipe. The announcer noted that in fact, some recipes suggested going up hills to increase the temperature. Evidently this was a popular part of the entertaining new sport of driving around in a Model T around 100 years or so ago. The car in the photo is a 1927 model.

Here is a sample of a couple of modern recipes for this cooker, from a website I found (maybe it's even the website of the people in the photo):

Rhubarb Ice cream topping
Line the cooker with foil ..., slice fresh rhubarb into small pieces, add a handful or two of sugar, drive to an ice cream store at least 20 miles away, buy a dish of ice cream, put the topping on it and enjoy the best topping yet cooked on a Model T manifold.

Meat Loaf
(this is the most popular recipe we have made on the manifold)
Note this is also known as ‘Greasy Fan Belt Goulash’
Mix one pound of lean ground beef with one package of frozen Potatoes O’Brian, one package of frozen Mexicorn and a jar of Salsa (you choose mild, medium, hot, or acetylene torch-like).  I always dump all the ingredients in a big zip lock bag to mix them…..since my hands are always greasy.
Anyway, mix well and then dump it all into a big piece of wide Aluminum foil and wrap it into a loaf that will fit into the cooker.  Drive about 40 miles or so and it will be done. 
This recipe is so good that dogs and people will follow you.

Here is another view of the car at the reviewing stand and the Flapper, spoon still in hand:

Food in Poetry

I often write about food in novels or other books I have read. I have just found a Poetry Magazine collection of poems that feature food. Other than the famous one about plums by William Carlos Williams ("This is just to say"), or the Ogden Nash short poems published in the book depicted at right like the one about the parsnip, I couldn't easily think of any food poems. I'm not that much of a poetry reader, as it  happens; however, several of these poems appealed to me.

Being a fan of Gertrude Stein, I enjoyed the poem titled "Christian Bérard." I already know quite a bit about what Gertrude Stein liked to eat, because of the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. Here are the first lines of the poem:

Christian Bérard

BY GERTRUDE STEIN

Eating is her subject.
While eating is her subject.
Where eating is her subject.
Withdraw whether it is eating which is her subject. Literally while she ate eating is her subject. Afterwards too and in between. This is an introduction to what she ate.
She ate a pigeon and a soufflé.
That was on one day.
She ate a thin ham and its sauce.
That was on another day.
She ate desserts.
That had been on one day.
She had fish grouse and little cakes that was before that day.
She had breaded veal and grapes that was on that day.
After that she ate every day.
Very little but very good.
She ate very well that day.
What is the difference between steaming and roasting, she ate it cold because of Saturday.
Remembering potatoes because of preparation for part of the day.
There is a difference in preparation of cray-fish which makes a change in their fish for instance.
What was it besides bread.
Why is eating her subject. There are reasons why eating is her subject.
...

Two other poems that I liked are by poets I was previously unfamiliar with: Paul Blackburn and Victor Hernandez Cruz. And there are so many more!

The beginnings of these poems:

The Café Filtre

BY PAUL BLACKBURN

Slowly and with persistence
he eats away at the big steak,
gobbles up the asparagus, its
butter & salt &  root taste,
drinks at a glass of red wine, and carefully
taking his time, mops up
the gravy with bread—
The top of the café filtre is
copper, passively shines back, & between
mouthfuls of steak, sips of wine,
he remembers
at intervals to
with the flat of his hand
the top removed,
bang
at the apparatus,
create the suction that
the water will
fall through
more quickly
Across the tiles of the floor, the
cat comes to the table : again.
“I’ve already given you one piece of steak,
what do you want from me now? Love?”
...

Red Beans

BY VICTOR HERNÁNDEZ CRUZ

Next to white rice
it looks like coral
sitting next to snow

Hills of starch
border
The burnt sienna
of irony

Azusenas being chased by
the terra cotta feathers
of a rooster
...

Tarte au Citron

My project: to master a recipe for French-style Tarte au Citron. Above: my first effort. The crust and sugared lemons on top were based on this: How to cook perfect tarte au citron. I used a Julia Child recipe for the filling. The crust, especially, needs work, but the result was quite delicious.

Patty-Pan Squash

For dinner: stuffed little patty-pan squash. Inspired by the Shakespeare cookbook, I spiced the breadcrumb, onion, and insides-of-squash filling with fresh thyme (also from the market), nutmeg, lemon zest, and raisins. It wasn't a Shakespeare recipe, though, just an improvisation.

Ann Arbor: The Farmers Market

The farmers market  here is a bit sad this year because so much of the tree fruit was destroyed by an early warming period in March followed by bad frosts last April. Moreover, the drought is serious; some farmers have been able to water their crops, but others are suffering.

I talked to one farmer who said that throughout July, he drove 5 miles to a city water supply and brought a 3000 gallon tank of water back to irrigate his tomatoes, peppers, and other field crops, supplementing his well. I have no idea of the cost tradeoffs or efforts this implies. In sum, the weather of all sorts, mostly bad, has also caused prices to increase.









This was my first trip to the market for the year. The plums, peaches, tomatoes, peppers, and herbs I bought were delicious for lunch; we'll also be eating eggplant, patty-pan squash, early apples, and a few other items this week.

What did Shakespeare eat?

What did Shakespeare eat?

Definitive answers here: The Shakespeare Cookbook by Andrew Dalby and Maureen Dalby, published by the British Museum Press this year. Andrew Dalby is a culinary historian, so this is a work of scholarship, using contemporary cookbooks and dietary advice books that were in print during Shakespeare's lifetime. I had no idea how many such works existed!

Another surprise: many recipes are simple and close to modern cooking. For example, chicken fricassee described on page 54 is almost exactly the way I sometimes use up leftover chicken, though the modern version often includes pimentos (a variety of capsicum peppers, which Dalby says hadn't reached England from the New World yet) and the Shakespeare-era version uses the spice mace, which isn't on my spice shelf.

A variety of pies of all sizes combine meat, fruit, suet, and spice into a preparation that predates our mince pies. The small ones are called "chewets" and contain saffron and ground ginger along with cooked meat. If I could find suet, I would be interested to try pies or chewets, as I have always liked that funny packaged mincemeat that is featured at Christmas and Thanksgiving, and I would like to meet its ancestor. (If I could find a swan, there's another recipe in the book I might try too.)

Similarly there are recipes for a sort of meatball including meat-egg-dried fruit and flavored with mace. Large ones were called Farts, small ones were called Fysts. I definitely plan to try these, as the modernized recipe doesn't require suet at all. And the name is so amusing! Dalby doesn't offer any word history on this. Although there are many references on the Web to the original recipe, a quick look didn't offer me any insight into why this word meant little meatballs in Elizabethan times.

The explanation of what the word "cake" meant to Shakespeare is very interesting. "A cake, to Shakespeare, was a concept that overlapped with the modern English cake but didn't coincide with it." (page 70)

So, the authors point out, cakes could sweet or savory in the famous line

"Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, that there shall be no more cakes and ale?" 

The word cake could refer to a loaf cake, a tea-cake, or a waffle. It could mean a biscuit. (I think this is the British biscuit, which in America we call a cookie -- the problem of terminology didn't stop in Shakespeare's time.) The book's cake recipe is for Barm Brak, made from white-bread dough, sugar, lard, eggs, raisins, and sweet spices.

Every section of the book has a discussion of a food reference in a particular Shakespeare play, with elaborations from the literature of Shakespeare's contemporaries as well as contemporary food sources. Almost every page includes an illustration, also contemporary to Shakespeare. And every section offers a wide range of interesting references and information, as well as at least one recipe quoted directly from the sources and then a modernized version. A fantastic book, for which I'm grateful to my friend Sheila!

Julia Child Recipes

More spinoff from thinking about Julia Child's 100th birthday ...

August 17: Champignons a la Grecque, served with tomato, cucumber, and cilantro.

Tonight: a clafoutis made with huge black cherries. I think I last made this in 1965, though I suspect I have made clafoutis with other fruit once or twice in the intervening years. My guest in 1965 quipped, "What about clafou-coffee?"

Happy Birthday Julia Child and Evelyn

Julia Child would be 100  years old today -- as every food blogger and food writer knows. I first encountered her work and TV show in the fall of 1964, when I was newly married and learning to cook. Marcy, the secretary of the office where I was working was a member of Book of the Month Club, and purchased Mastering the Art of French Cooking for me at a reduced price. I loved it immediately!

In gratitude, we invited Marcy to dinner, though in fact we didn't have much in common with her. I made the recipe on page 246: "Roast squab Chickens with Chicken Liver Canapes and Mushrooms" -- I used Rock Cornish Hens. I have never made that recipe again, though I've tried dozens of others in that book. Why I remember that one, I can't imagine. I served it on a beautiful Danish Modern wood tray that had been a wedding present. Forever after it faintly smelled of liver.

Over time, I've memorized many of the recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and now make them without looking. A few of these favorites: onion soup, carbonnades a la Flamande, casserole roasted veal, gratin Dauphinoise, salade Nicoise. I once roasted a goose according to her recipe (memorable, but it's hard to find another goose), and once made Riz a l'Imperatrice (disappointing). I made clafoutis a few times. I use her recipes for crepes, ratatouille, daube de Provence, and chicken with tarragon, and quite a few others. Despite my love of artichokes, I don't recall having tried her method of trimming them down to the artichoke bottoms and then stuffing them. And I admit that I've never had the patience to try the most challenging desserts, those with puff pastry.

Over the years, I have acquired other Julia Child books, beginning with the second volume of Mastering..., which was published a few years later. Compared to my original copy of Volume I, full of stains, splashes, and dog-ears, my Volume II is pristine. I'm not sure I've ever made a single recipe from it, though Lenny did make the French bread recipe for a while. It's full of things I would be afraid to try, like roast suckling pig.

Julia Child & Company, published in 1978, turned out to be a real favorite. My copy is full of notes about when I cooked various dishes or even whole meals. For example, the "Indoor Outdoor Barbecue" gave us the idea of cooking a butterflied leg of lamb on the barbecue. It's fantastic -- we have done it often. My handwritten notes on page 193 record that I made the entire dinner on May 6, 1984 (including the Topinambours, or Jerusalem artichokes), and repeated all or part of it in 1992, 2004, and 2010. Here's the photo of that meal from the book:

I have loved all her books that I own -- shown at the top of this post. The one I bought most recently was My Life In France, her wonderful autobiography. And I have also enjoyed her kitchen in the Smithsonian, which I wrote up here.

Happy Birthday, Julia. And also happy birthday Evelyn, who shares her birthday.

Salad Number 4

Favorite salad flavor for Miriam and Alice: the spice blend Maggi Number 4, available only in Germany. They unselfishly gave me a jar of it, which you can see I have all ready to make a salad. Last night, I mixed some of this blend with olive oil and red-wine vinegar and sprinkled it on skewers of mushrooms, onions, and red/orange bell peppers. I kept this separate from meat, so after cooking we used the remaining marinade as a dressing for the vegetables. It's really a wonderful flavor blend.

Jackson Lodge, Grand Teton National Park

Jackson Lodge in Grand Teton National Park overlooks a broad meadow wetland near Jackson Lake. Just beyond, the mountains rise spectacularly on the near horizon. They look like a child's drawing of mountains: steep, craggy, each separate from the others.

The hotel dining room has huge windows facing the view as well as interesting murals of nostalgic conceptual images of the Old West. In the evening they lower screens that dim the very bright light, but still allow diners to enjoy the scenery. The food surprised us: the chef follows the practices of molecular gastronomy (though the waiters don't seem entirely unfazed by the choices they recite).

Below, you can see Len's appetizer: tomato, little balls of mozzarella, and "powdered" olive oil that had been treated with an enzyme to make it into a new substance. He says it did taste faintly like olive oil.

   



My main course: Idaho trout with baby brussels sprouts and chopped vegetables -- all illuminated by the rays of the early evening sun.



After dinner, we sat on the benches behind the lodge and enjoyed the view.

Santa Barbara Scenery

We're getting ready to leave Santa Barbara and drive home, so I've taken pictures of a few of the scenes that I enjoyed during my stay, and picked a few to illustrate how beautiful this place is.

Near my yoga studio is Alice Keck Park Memorial Gardens (which I think of as Park Park). In one city block, inventive landscape designers have created a number of tiny climate regions -- wetlands, collections of dry-climate plants, flowering trees, ground covers, and a duck pond, shown above.



I like the tiny artificial streams that criss cross the park and flow down its slightly sloping grounds. Children often play near the duck pond. They seem to love to feed the ducks, the few white geese, and the turtles that live in the pond. I imagine that they think the park is much larger than it really is.



Arroyo Burro beach is around 10 minutes from our temporary apartment. Above, the beach on the sunniest and warmest day we enjoyed, which was earlier this week. The little girl with the parasol kept twirling it, holding it over her companion, and otherwise playing with it.



The day after sunshine -- heavy fog. The ocean is barely visible behind these beachgoers at Goleta Beach near the UCSB campus. The Goleta Pier almost disappeared into the fog.





Finally, for the first time this morning, I walked on the headland above Arroyo Burro Beach. It's called the Douglas Preserve. A friend showed me how to get there, as I had never figured it out in all our visits to Santa Barbara. We walked around with her little dog Willie. The sunny beach in the prior photo is at the left.

The Night Circus

Hot cocoa, spiced cider, popcorn with caramel, chocolate mice with licorice tails, pastry dipped in cinnamon-sugar... these are the tastes and smells of the magic Circus in Erin Morgenstern's delightful novel The Night Circus. The author seems to have intuited and absorbed the conclusions also being studied by the emerging science of neurogastronomy, that is, the exploration of a kind of synesthesia between taste and smell. The novel presents profound reactions and memories based on these senses.*

Several of the recurring events and experiences in The Night Circus are intensified by aromas and flavors. Food is vividly described (as well as interactions between the eccentric host and guests) at exotic Midnight Dinners held by one of the founders of the circus.

"Dish after dish is brought to the table, some easily identifiable as quail or rabbit or lamb, served on banana leaves or baked in apples or garnished with brandy-soaked cherries. Other courses are more enigmatic, concealed in sweet sauces or spiced soups, unidentifiable meats hidden in pastries and glazes. 

"Should a diner inquire as to the nature of a particular dish, question the origin of a bite or a seasoning, a flavor she cannot put her finger on (for even those with the most refined of palates can never identify each and every flavor), she will not be met with a satisfying answer. ... 

"The desserts are always astonishing. Confections deliriously executed in chocolate and butterscotch, berries bursting with creams and liqueurs. Cakes layered to impossible heights, pastries lighter than air. Figs that drip with honey, sugar blown into curls and flowers." (p. 70-71) 

And 

"Dessert consists mainly of a gargantuan tiered cake shaped to resemble circus tents and frosted in stripes, the filling within a bright shock of raspberry cream. There are also miniature chocolate leopards, and strawberries coated in looping patterns of dark and white chocolates." (p. 301-302)

 In the circus itself, caramel and smoke smells and unimaginably delicious food and beverages like the cider and cocoa trigger both real and magical responses. The intensity of the story, which is multi-layered and sensual in many other ways, is constantly amplified by descriptions of both identifiable and mysterious aromas.

The power of aromas is especially captured in one particular scene in the novel. Little bottles and jars in one of the many magic circus tents hold aromas that trigger the memory of stories for Widget, one of the keepers of the circus tale. When a character opens it, one bottle behaves like this: 

"A small wisp of smoke escapes, but other than that it is empty. As he peers inside he smells the smoke of a roaring fire, and a hint of snow and roasting chestnuts, Curious, he inhales deeply. There is the aroma of mulled wine and sugared candy, peppermint and pipe smoke. The crisp pine scent of a fir tree. The wax of dripping candles. He can almost feel the snow, the excitement, and the anticipation, the sugary taste of a striped candy. It is dizzying and wonderful and disturbing. After a few moments, he replaces the lid and puts the jar carefully back on the table." (p. 314)

This character, Bailey, who is being brought into the circus to make it last forever, experiences Widget's little bottles, especially one that preserves the memory of an oak tree on his family farm:

"He pulls out the minuscule stopper, relieved that it remains attached to the bottle with a curl of wire. 

"The sensation inside is so familiar, so comforting and recognizable and real that Bailey can feel the roughness of the bark, the smell of the acorns, even the chattering of the squirrels."(p. 359)

The book has a wealth of other magical aspects, relating to the two central characters Celia (who wears a deeply personal perfume!) and Marco. Celia's father Prospero, one of the magicians who sets the events going, is especially fascinated by Shakespeare, and he would have liked to name her Miranda, but she answered only to Celia, perhaps because he had nothing like the control of Shakespeare's Prospero over his little island realm.

Secrets and stories -- like the ones Widget collects -- are an intimate part of magic. One of Widget's stories is often mentioned by the magical circus people -- it's the tale told of a wizard who revealed his secrets and was imprisoned in a tree by one of the enchantments he himself disclosed. Like the Shakespeare theme, it's totally absorbing, but I'll limit myself to what I've said about aromas and tastes, rather than trying to review the book as a whole.

*The science of taste and smell as I refer to it, is described in the book Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why it Matters by Gordon M. Shepherd, and other sources. Shepherd provides strong arguments against the old belief that the human brain is deficient in processing aromas and flavors, and he describes in detail how the brain creates flavor-smell images. It's not necessary to be scientific to read The Night Circus, but the connection is fascinating. The author does credit a perfumery called Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, though not that I noticed any scientific writing!

A Beautiful Restaurant

Our friend Roberta took us to Flea Street, a beautiful restaurant in Menlo Park while we were spending the weekend there with her (also visiting relatives). Flea Street was on the cutting edge a couple of decades ago, when a few pioneers invented the idea of restaurants and local producers partnering to develop local cuisines. It's still a lovely place, especially the patio where we ate. Roberta's dish (above) was the Summer Organic Vegetarian Tasting. We shared a bottle of white wine.

Len had Ricotta and Chive Gnocchi with mushrooms, fava beans, and pancetta.

I had the salad titled Little Gem Lettuces with Half Moon Bay Crispy Sardine, which was totally delicious. Fresh sardines are a rare treat! And for an appetizer, we shared a dozen oysters from Tomales Bay/Point Reyes. The restaurant makes its own buttermilk biscuits, which are also wonderful. All the vegetables are from local farms, which are listed on the menu, along with other suppliers of cheese, fruit, meat, eggs, bakery goods, and so on.

We shared a fruit tart -- blueberries and small cubes of nectarine with ricotta under the fruit and a semi-sour cream on top. Also a slice of crisped nectarine. Very original. And of course coffee:

Another visit to the Farmers' Market

I'm a very faithful customer of the Santa Barbara Farmers' Market, which meets at different places on different days. The biggest market is on Saturday morning in a commuter parking lot downtown. The Tuesday market is set up on State Street, the main commercial downtown street (just a few blocks from the Saturday market). Other days, the market meets in a shopping-center parking lot in Goleta, in Montecito, in Carpinteria, and in Solvang, all smaller towns in the county. I've been to Goleta and Carpinteria, which don't have as many vendors as the downtown markets.

The organizing body is made up of the farmers and others who sell at these markets, so you see the same faces rotating through all the different markets. The range of produce is amazing, because these growers come from so many different climate zones. Farms within Santa Barbara and quite nearby grow strawberries, avocados, and a few other crops. There are pistachio, walnut, and almond growers inland in locations like Ojai. Dates are brought in from the desert. Olive oil comes from olives growing not far from here. Yesterday I saw the first ripe figs from the Central Valley, which also produces conventional produce like raspberries, broccoli, onions, radishes, leeks, herbs, corn, garlic, tomatoes, and so on. Elsewhere, orchards produce apricots, peaches, plums, and more exotic fruits. Vendors come as far as several hours to these markets each week.

A few photos from yesterday in downtown Santa Barbara:

Henry James Refinement

I have been reading two complementary books:

The Ambassadors by Henry James 

Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick 

I'm kind of a fan of Ozick, and when I learned that this recent work of hers was in some way based on The Ambassadors, I decided to read both. Indeed, thematically they have much in common, and there's a lot I could say about them, but for the moment, I'm just going to talk about the way that the two authors use food in their narratives. I think it helps to pinpoint why I like Ozick but I'm infuriated by James.

Unsympathetic, self-absorbed, idly rich, status-conscious, easily impressed (by European pretensions), egocentric characters abound in The Ambassadors. I'm really not sure if James saw them that way, or if he just admired people who were self-absorbed, idly rich, egocentric, and gullible about European pretensions. I'm sure he didn't view them as shallow, but that's how they seem to me when all is said and done. Mostly James's characters talk and talk and talk, though occasionally they go out into the countryside or stop for a meal, continuing to be self-absorbed etc. all the time.

At one meal, a character named Madame de Vionnet -- whose own background is unclear, but who is married into a vaguely identified titled family -- sits opposite Strether, the novel's central character (who is the most extremely self-absorbed, idle, status-conscious, and easily impressed of them all). She looks at him "over their intensely white table-linen, their omelette aux tomates, their bottle of straw-colored Chablis."

A few paragraphs later we hear 

"If all the accidents were to fight on her side ... he could only give himself up. This was what he had done in privately deciding then and there to propose she should breakfast with him. What did the success of his proposal in fact resemble but the smash in which a regular runaway properly ends? The smash was their walk, their dejeuner, their omelette, the Chablis, the place, the view, their present talk and his present pleasure in it -- to say nothing, wonder of wonders, of her own." (Kindle location 4188, Cambridge Edition)

As the novel winds up, Strether goes to see a young man named Chad, another self-absorbed and easily manipulated character. Upon entering Chad's rooms, he finds a table where Chad has recently eaten. It contained 

"a supper of light cold clever French things, which one could see the remains of there in the circle of the lamp, pretty and ultra-Parisian, he had come into the air again for a smoke, was occupied at the moment of Strether's approach in what might have been called taking up his life afresh. His life, his life!..." (Kindle location 8061)

The last sections of The Ambassadors consist of Strether's endless final interactions with various women who have influence over either Chad or Strether himself. At a critical one, Strether meets with Maria Gostrey, a character who seems to provide him with some sort of link to reality (perhaps):

"He came back to his breakfast; he partook presently of the charming melon, which she liberally cut for him; and it was only after this that he met her question.... She waited, she watched, she served him and amused him ... "  (Kindle location 8258)

This little detail leads up to a critical interchange between them, where he tells her he will leave her instead of making a commitment to her that she had been angling for.

Excuse me if these quotes seem long-winded. Henry James IS long-winded. As I see it, highly refined bits of food sustain the characters in long bouts of navel-gazing and constantly worrying about commitment that in fact are sort of maddening. Strether is 55 years old, for crying out loud!

The level of detail that's allusive but very unspecific is characteristic of the novel as a whole. It's why I can't believe I ever read anything by Henry James.

AND IN CONTRAST...
Cynthia Ozick's characters are more human and sympathetic than those of James (not one of whom I like at all!) The thematic similarity of the novels is not in my view based on a similarity of characters' temperament or personality or values, but on the way that one character becomes an "ambassador" between others. In a way, Ozick's commentary makes James's exploration of the topic of ambassadorship have a wider meaning, borrowing the most interesting of his ideas.

Ozick does not go for the extreme subtlety that James gives this thought -- especially as he makes all the events and conversations take place in Paris, and never directly describes or quotes the woman behind all the machinations. Her depiction of all the characters (the sender of "messages," the "ambassador," and the recipients of the "messages") in my opinion gives her book more depth, but I'm sure lots of critics and James-lovers would disagree.

Food also isn't seen the same etherial way. It's pretty down-to-earth. One big reason is that many of the characters in Ozick's novel live in middle class America or in not-even-genteel poverty as exiles or displaced persons in Europe. (The events take place in 1952: one character is literally a D.P. whose former life and family were destroyed by time in concentration camps.) So right at the beginning, when the central character, Bea Nightingale, searches Paris for her renegade nephew, she finds a cafe with "odors of eggs and coffee all around." (p. 6)

Many more flashback memories occur in Ozick's novel than in James's. This is another way I think the novel is more rooted in real life, not just some sort of rich person's imaginary world.

Bea remembers a wedding of her best friend where she had been with her future (now ex) husband:

"They were standing side by side near an ice sculpture -- twin mermaids embracing -- at the base of which lay wide oval platters of sliced melon, layer upon layer of pink, orange, green, studded with swollen strawberries still attached to their leafy stems. The strawberries resembled surgically removed organs freshly lifted from the gash in an anaesthetized belly." (p. 27)

Maybe Ozick's characters are portrayed as a bit vulgar, in contrast to the excessively refined James characters. But she knows what they are. She doesn't admire them for everything, though she communicates a level of sympathy that I as a reader can share.

Ozick says the young man who is to be "rescued" by the ambassador from home is "a luftmentch" which she defines as "an inconsequential person, an impracticality made of air." (p. 96) This would be a good epithet for the young man in the James book, too -- in fact for several of them.

Winetasting

It's still early in the growing season for the 2012 vintage, but we saw vines spreading their tendrils and also very green bunches of tiny grapes in the vineyards we visited today. I believe the vines pictured here will produce the grapes for several types of white wine.

 

We returned to the Santa Barbara wine country to try the wines from some new wineries. We wanted to buy a few bottles for the remainder of our stay here. Two wineries that we liked: Firestone and Gainey. The tasting rooms at Gainey are especially picturesque, as they are also the storage rooms for large and small casks of wine and huge shelves of bottles.

 



At the end of the day, just as the sun was dropping behind the cliffs, we spent a moment at Arroyo Burro beach as we often do. It's only a few minutes from our apartment.