Stylin' Aslan's Mane

In her review of the new Narnia illustrations, I'd say Jessica Crispin gets it right.

Finally! Paris photos

Kitchen Tech.

In preparation for my older sister’s baby shower this Sunday, I’ve been envisioning possible dishes and recipes: a fruit salad of blackberries and fresh pepper, mini-lemon cakes and smoked salmon canapes, and even a fussy, flaky biscuit recipe I once made that calls for frozen, stamp-sized pieces of butter to be pressed one by one between thumb and forefinger.

Food has also been figuring into my research lately. (It's a rough life, I tell ya.) I’m preparing a paper on 19th century American mourning rituals for a conference this fall, and I've let the cultural net lazily drift to include Victorian shopping, reading, eating and just about every other ritualized 19th century activity I can think of. Everything I've read this summer about early American cooking discusses the changes mass production brought to the kitchen. The marketplace of the late 1800’s was flooded with more home goods than any cook really knew what to do with. Housewives of the previous century would have ordered select iron utensils from the local blacksmith, but a new wealth of factory-made shiny peelers, trimmers, and graters promised to simplify the Victorian woman's work and make her kitchen sassy and modern.

Some of these products came with names that just beg to be read aloud:

Heads and eyes, shakers’ swifts, beefsteak pounders, faucets and bungstarts, bootjacks and leg-resters, salt and spit-boxes, Chinese swings, Chinese punk in boxes, sillabub-sticks, oven peels, allblaze-pans, ice cream pagodas, paste jaggers and cutters. (The World of Antiques of Victorian America).

I don't know what they are either, but I want them.


My own grandmother, like her Victorian mother before her, was concerned with culinary correctness and the use of appropriate dishes and utensils. Her cabinets boasted cups for soft boiled eggs and fine china cups for our milky, sweet Earl Grey. At the end of dinner she'd open a rectangular box of Borden’s Neapolitan ice cream, overturn the brick onto a gilded platter and slice off servings for her rows of impatient grandchildren). When I was little, I saw this refinement as a natural expression of her gentle and decorous love for us. In studying Victorian culture I better see the threads that connect this way of life to one that thrived in dining rooms a century before.

Now a word about Victorian food molds. As someone who has never really seen the point of jello, I was fascinated to discover the Victorian rage for these odd metal structures. At the height of their vogue, they were regularly stuffed with jellied veggies, meats, and fruit and overturned onto serving plates (the ancestor of my grandmother's ice cream brick). Cooks embraced these food-contouring devices so zealously that a fancy dinner may well have featured all three courses— appetizer, entree, and dessert—served in molds. While Victorian etiquette manuals warned against such basely sensual displays as remarking on the tastiness of the meal, it was thought perfectly acceptable to marvel at the sculptural heights of the dessert jelly (or, for that matter, the appetizer, the salad, or the entree jellies).

Writing this, it occurs to me that by reducing many different foods to a single texture, the mold represented a very specific way of flaunting abundance. The diet of frontiersmen and early American pioneers rested on one key task— deriving as many recipes as possible from a single food: corn. Corn cakes, popped corn, corn bread, etc. The mold goes in the other direction, flaunting plenitude by homogenizing it into smooth, wobbly uniform shapes.

What would 19th century cooks have thought about this great old American recipe?

“Indian Pudding”
From The Plimouth Colony Cookbook (1964), a collection of 17th and 18th century cooking lore

Take the mornings milk and throw into it as much corn meal as you hold in the palm of your hand. Let the molasses drip in as you sing “Nearer My God to Thee,’ but sing two verses in cold weather.

I have no access to “mornings milk," but I like the idea of timing recipes by song. The closest I can recall to this is singing all the verses of “American Pie” while doing dishes with Em back in the day!

Funny Little House in the Big Woods




I decided a month ago or so that I needed to hide out in the woods for a few days. Not to escape the law, do yoga, or anything like that. I just felt, like my fellow poseur Thoreau, that I’d gone too long without laying eyes on a woodland trail. But sifting through dozens of Adirondack rental websites just left me faintly depressed. It’s an unfortunate truth that people who own vacation properties tend to be very aware of their value (either that, or they considerably overestimate them). It’s a rare thing to find an owner who thinks, “You know, I could charge market rate for my amazing mountaintop bungalo, but you know what? I’ll just ask $12 a night. No, I like the sound of $10 better. It’s a nice, tidy, round sort of number. Let’s go with that.” Maybe there are people like that, but they don’t live in the state of New York.

But it’s more than just the prices. The presentation at most hotels, and even budget B&B’s and cottage rentals feel too self-conscious. The websites promise and purr about serenity. From the potpourri to the towels, you are guaranteed to love it. And while you are there, you obligingly gush about how great the place is, and usually that gushing is in direct proportion to how much you're forking over.

Then I discovered this cool cabin. The website made no extravagant promises. It didn’t call to me by my given name or sing out in velvety tones. In fact, with its manic fonts, it reminded me of the side of a Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle. So of course we had to take it.





It’s up in the Adirondacks Mountains, five hours north, where the time between towns starts to stretch. There aren't many cars passing, and the mountains perform that slow dance with the highway, rising directly ahead and then stepping aside just in time to let you pass. With the windows down, we exclaimed several times about how good the air smelled. I do this without fail whenever I set foot outside New York. I even started to do it in Newark recently before I caught myself! We ate pistachios and and listened to a reggae mix that Steve gave us for our Jamaica trip last year. The music clashed with the geography, but I kind of liked that. Hey, Adirondacks. Meet Bob Marley.

When we were nearing our destination, I dug out the detailed directions that had been provided for “checking in” to our cabin. We were to turn off the quiet highway onto the owner’s property—a swath of land about as big as Central Park and home to two mountains, a handful of rental cabins, including the one where he resides with his dog and the one that would be ours for a few days. We were then to pull up to a small, rusty trailer by the roadside where we would locate a telephone, which we would use to call the owner and receive further instructions. Finally, we were to drop off our bags at our cabin and then head over to the owner’s place to check-in. It was fun—like wilderness espionage.



When we were too slow to perform that last step (heading over to the owner's cabin), he came to us. He was somehow just what I had expected—a man who had transcended the pettiness of mirrors and sworn off the society of shampoo. With one sleeve rolled up and other down and bellowing for his sociable golden retriever to get back in the car, he squinted into a small stack of 3X5 card and proceeded to grumble the instructions for lighting the gas lights, locating the outhouse (no!), and otherwise laying to rest our city slicker ways for a few days. Then he eyed us doubtfully and demanded whether we had any questions. We didn't.

Later that day, Justin was looking over the bookshelves in our cabin (there were several) and noticed a narrow yellow spine bearing the owner’s name. It was a book of his own poetry, dedicated to his two daughters, who were depicted in a photo on the first page as two grinning teenagers. I steeled myself for the poems, but they turned out to be good— melancholy and prosy. They revealed that the owner had spent his early years in Manhattan. There was also a blunt publisher’s note on the flap explaining that the book was priced at just $5 because readers shouldn’t be expected to pay $12 for a book by someone they aren’t sure about. Deeply impressed by this logic (and pretty sure it was written by the author himself), I resolved to leave a five dollar bill on the kitchen table the next day and take the book when we left.

But for some reason, which I can’t seem to pinpoint, I didn’t end up doing this. Maybe I was embarrassed to claim I had been reading the man’s poems, even though he was so obviously inviting us to do just that. Or maybe I was afraid that they wouldn’t stand up if I brought them back into my world and put the book side by side with my other books. Or maybe—I swear this will be the last maybe—I was disappointed to learn that the owner is an ex-New Yorker. I had expected his poems to be folksy knock-offs of “Mending Wall” and “Apple Picking.” Instead, they suggested that he was someone who had led different lives, who had ended up in the woods not simply by birth or romantic accident, but by choice.

Later when the owner told us that the land on which our cabins stood was the size of Central Park, I was pulled again into that inevitable comparison of Home and Away. I imagined the mountainous Adirondacks property going head-to-head with that orderly park in the middle of Manhattan. I don't have to tell you who'd win.

Once

You should see this perfect little delight of a film.

Seriously, put your shoes on and go.

Look Ma, I edited Wikipedia!

I knocked boldly at the gates of the Wiki gods, and they let me in. Or, more accurately, I exercised my democratic right to make stuff up, take stuff out and potentially alter the research papers of legions of undergraduates (more another day on how freshmen looove to quote Wikipedia and assume their professors are incapable of using google).

Anyway, I changed an entry. And it felt very good. You should try it sometime.

I was checking out a page on the little known 19th century journalist Nelly Bly and noticed that preceding a section on Bly's career were three mystifying sentences: "Doughnuts were popular in Bly's day. She was a reporter. So she reported about doughnuts." Despite their compelling, syllogistic reasoning, the sentences had no relationship to the paragraph that followed, nor to anything I know about Bly's career (as a journalist she went undercover to expose conditions at a mental hospital, and was not, to the best of my knowledge, a doughnut reporter. But it gives me shivers of happiness even to imagine that such a career might exist).

Because the sentences were so obviously a prank, I clicked the edit button and deleted them. It was very satisfying and took all of ten seconds. Now I'm a little sad that they're gone, but I'm not about to put them back in. Take a look at the entry. The sentences used to appear directly under the section head, "Asylum expose." That section (now freshly delivered of doughnut references) still needs work. It appears to be missing a transition sentence or two; more than likely they were deleted by The Vandal.


What kind of doughnuts did Bly investigate?


This morning I was still wondering why anyone would bother to "doughnut bomb" an obscure Wikipedia page, and I just so happened to click over to my favorite food blog and discovered that Friday was--drum roll--National Doughnut Day!

Of course! What better way to celebrate the day than by sprinkling (I can't help it-- I'm picturing rainbow sprinkles) random doughnut references all over Wikipedia.

Actually, I can think of one way, and it usually sets you back 50 cents and 300 odd calories. Yum.

I'm done my semester!

So: apropos of nothing (since when does anything on a blog need to be apropos of anything?)-- how about a little post about music?

1. Here are the songs that saw me through a marathon of paper writing. Each one deserves special thanks, and if you haven't met them yet, you should. Thanks, friends.

Gravity, The Handsome Family
So Much Wine, The Handsome Family
Loves Comes to Me, Bonnie Prince Billy
By My Car, My Morning Jacket
Monster Ballads, Josh Ritter
Belle Star, Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris
Black Wave/ Bad Vibrations, The Arcade Fire
Hard to Find, American Analog Set
Low, Cracker
Cold Cold Water, Mirah
She's a Jar, Wilco
Baby in Two, Pernice Brothers
Our Anniversary, Smog
Moonshiner, Cat Power
Heart of Gold, Cash

2. Here are the far cooler songs that will be the soundtrack of my summer:

Brother John
Good King Wenceslas
Tisket, a Tasket
Mexican Hat Dance
Cockles and Mussles
On Top of Old Smoky
A Friend Like You!
Thumbs on C!
Rockin' Intervals

That's right. I'm teaching myself to play piano using this book. Look past the aristocratic cover-- it's kind, welcoming and encouraging, and the first lesson even contains a diagram with arrows explaining--were you aware of this?-- that keys on the right side of the keyboard create progressively higher sounds and notes on the left produce lower sounds. Wild!

3. Check this enlightening article at the Times about musicians and blogging. I heard a radio interview not long ago with the chap who's discussed at the top of the piece. His music isn't exactly my cup of tea, but he does have a very funny song about zombies.

4. Do u any music recommendations for me?