balmagowry

Fair enough. There are curries that are Indian ethnic, of course, but evidently those aren't the ones you meant. Whether or not your average curry-eater considers them foreign in origin is a moot point, under the circumstances. I don't quite see where any of this speaks, either way, to the humors argument, but perhaps that's just because I haven't quite recovered yet from last night's excesses, the battle cry still ringing... ringing... ringing in my ears... You raise another interesting point, though - one that (so what else is new) doesn't belong on this thread, at least not in the depth to which I'd love to see it become accustomed: the universality of certain dishes/flavors/themes, among disparate or apparently unconnected cultures. The obvious biggies, like variations on a theme of pasta and bread; the impromptu food "package" consisting of a pancake (or tortilla or crèpe or mu shu pancake, etc.) wrapped around bits of meat and other things; then the more subtle coincidences of flavor like your example above. I'm endlessly fascinated by these parallels and recurring themes. With some of them it isn't terribly difficult to trace the probable historic/geographic path of their migration; with others, however, it certainly seems as though they sprang up independently from the well of some deep universal need. (There's some horrible neologism for this notion; mercifully it escapes me at this moment.)

If I had any shame at all, I'd let someone else get a post in edgewise here. At least I have the grace to suggest I oughta be ashamed. But I can't help it - I have to crow about the latest eccentric acquisition! Just a little.... (It has quite distracted me from the Kelly, which I owe it to myself - and several other people - to read toot-sweet.) The "first of the eBay haul" is in fact the Pictorial Review Standard Cook Book, sub-titled "A Guide for Every Bride." I must first showcase my ignorance by wondering why Pictorial, since there's nary a picture in it - except a few line drawings toward the end, in the section on Sewing Patterns... yes, it's that kind of book. (OK, OK, I do know why Pictorial, that being the name of the publisher, but I still think it's amusing.) It's the 1932 edition of a book that first came out in 1931, and the first thing to enthral me upon opening it are two reassuring announcements; one an affidavit to the effect that all of the recipes have been tested under home conditions in "an actual kitchen" (whew!); the other a comforting assurance that "The Cover of this Pictorial Review Book is WASHABLE," that you can safely wash it with a damp cloth and soap, and it will come out "as fresh and clean as when you took it from its wrapper." I'm in love. I lied, though. Those announcements weren't really the first thing to be seen or to enthral. That distinction belongs to the two small newspaper clippings carefully cut out and glued onto the first endpaper. "Molasses Egg Nog Makes Good PickUp," reads the headline on one. Yeah, I'll bet. At the back, starting 1/4" below the end of the index, several pages solidly covered with similar clippings, though many are longer and not all are recipes. But every one of them has something to grab me. Curiously, about half of them are in German, many of those in Altschrift. I'm having a little trouble deciphering some of those because the paper is so old and in places so smudged; I can already tell, though, that it's going to be worth the effort, because quite a few of them are lists of pithy little aphorisms with headings like (roughly) "Things to think about." The reason I say "curiously" is that the one clipping that indicates a date (from what might by the look of it have been the New York Times) is a column of "New Year's Resolutions for the American Housewife" that begins: A recipe for Bread Pudding begins: Then there's an earnest article about the benefits of offal, euphemised not even as "variety meats" but as "meat sundries." The joy! But enough of this gloating. I must get back to work. First, though... I'm off to wash the cover with a damp cloth and soap.

There is a tale that a French monk with extravagant gastronomic tastes was sent as punishment to an English monastery. His worst fears were realized. He wrote home in complaint (and this is how the story is known), ‘Their vegetables? They boil them! And serve them forth with nothing, straight from the water, like hay to horses!’ However, he did discover a wondrous thing that no one had told him about – the English custom of ending dinner with a hot pudding. He wrote about this with great delight and declared that it had made the whole experience worthwhile! Isn't that Misson de Valbourg? The one who tried to explain pudding to his countrymen but was finally stymied by the infinite different preparations and compositions, and finally contented himself with blessing it in all its varieties, saying

But do these things run in the family?

It was Tom Lehrer: "When Mozart was my age he'd been dead for three years." Really? How passing strange. I love Lehrer but am not all that intimately familiar with hiw work; what an unlikely thing for me to quote. Hmmmm, now you've got me suspicious - not that I doubt you but that in my mind's ear I can so clearly hear Borge saying it, now that I know it's someone else's. I wonder... "It is a sobering thought," as Lehrer said in preface to the Mozart remark, how very, very many people have borrowed it, and for how many purposes. Borge doesn't seem to be among them, though. Go figure. Then again, there's always (ooh, ooh, watch me mis-attribute this one too) Benchley's "I don't know which Mozart you're talking about...."

Wantagh! Wantagh has changed so much since 1960, when I first knew it (as the nearest available shopping of any kind for us barrier beach denizens, which it still is) that I wouldn't recognize it at all if it weren't for the LIRR station. To be fair, not all the changes are for the worse; at least the incomparable Wantagh 5 & 10 still exists and is as infallible as ever; and some quite serious restaurants have come - and, alas, gone - in the past 15-20 years. This includes one of the four or five best and most understatedly sophisticated (food, decor, and service) Chinese restaurants I ever knew. Now I think of it, that might be another restaurant phenomenon to consider. Its applicability to this particular discussion is diluted by prevailing economic factors, but I still think high turnover is worth studying and trying to understand. I'm thinking about both NYC and the kind of suburban outpost in which I currently live most of the time. Seems like, in the course of the above-mentioned 15-20 years or so, we've been seeing a lot of this. In one camp, the closing of places that have been in the same spot forever and that don't seem to have noticeably lost business or popularity; in the other, the shiny new place that seems like such a fabulous success and then suddenly vanishes without a trace, which is another thing I don't remember noticing much 30-40 years ago. (Though that reminds me of a story... nah, it isn't mine, so I'll check it at the source before I go into it.) And that second camp, the short-lived one, seems to be about evenly divided between the daring-nouvelle-fusion-etc. type and the safe-reliable-cozy type., between the faux-swanky (or faux-grubby) and the truly elegant. So what gives? Aside from real estate being more expensive and investments riskier and audience attention spans shorter - not that I'm dismissing any of those as legitimate reasons - is there some tangible gastronomic explanation behind all this tremendous upheaval?

Confession #2: Several months ago, in a fit of delayed grieving for the two knives I sold, I picked up on eBay an unused 9" Dione Lucas slicer but with a Benihana of Tokyo logo. It's worse than that. I was confused. There's a 9" Dione Lucas one in my mother's kitchen; the ones I have here are of an even lower order. "Trapezoidal" was a bit off the mark - too much curve at the prow to qualify. The legend on the blade (I can't believe I'm admitting this, but I'm ready to be drummed out of the regiment) reads "Vanadium Japan" and underneath that, incongruously, is a tiny portrait (I swear I am not making this up - I couldn't) of George Washington. What ARE these knives? Never mind - if you know, for pity's sake don't tell me.

It was Tom Lehrer: "When Mozart was my age he'd been dead for three years." Really? How passing strange. I love Lehrer but am not all that intimately familiar with hiw work; what an unlikely thing for me to quote. Hmmmm, now you've got me suspicious - not that I doubt you but that in my mind's ear I can so clearly hear Borge saying it, now that I know it's someone else's. I wonder.... Yes, but there's always the risk of taking it too many steps farther. "So hat Joachim gekratzt." "Yes, but you should have heard how wonderfully he played 20 years ago."

Yes, well, that's been the fun thing about this argument all along - we never actually did disagree, especially as to the relative intrinsic and entertainment merits of Dods and Beeton. (Might have been a bit different if I'd bought the full half-hour....) Oooh, metaphysics and philosophy and stuff. I like it. I like it a lot. Oddly enough, just minutes ago I was expounding, in a different venue and context, on the modest and utterly unpretentious question, "what is truth?" - suggesting that what people believe (consciously or otherwise) is often more deeply true, or at any rate far more important to the course of history, than the plain unvarnished facts which either underlie or belie the belief. Why indeed should this not be the case with people's palates as well? To look at one really obvious example, there's the previous mention of acquired tastes. Some tastes take a lot of acquiring. Do I really love coffee? or did I just talk myself into loving it because it would have been uncool, when I first thought to demonstrate my grown-up-ness by drinking it, to admit honestly that it seemed to me foully bitter? And if I do now love it as much as I claim to, at what point did that stop being pretense and pretension and start being absolute cross-my-heart truth? And how hard did I have to push myself to make it so? I don't know the answer to this, but I do know it applies to an awful lot of flavor questions, most of them certainly a lot more subtle than this example. And you are certainly spot-on with the social snobbery involved, the peer pressure element (tobacco, anyone?), the... uh-oh, I just realized that might not be quite what you meant. Damn. Oh well, it's still an interesting phenomenon, she insisted lamely. True. OK, then I wasn't far off-base above after all. There is also another point to consider, which is that the term "curry" covers such a very broad multitude of sins - er, meanings. Even if you stipulate "authentic" (ha!). In the same London you can find both the gawdawful terrible-delicious glop you describe and also some perfectly serious and excellent faithful imports - and linguistically they are all lumped under that same heading of "curry." So it's probably important, in discussing a national propensity toward curry-eating, to specify which forme of cury is in play. I guess what I was trying to get at was simply that though what we now call "curry" may bear practically no resemblance to the "curry" we first encountered or even to the curries of the Raj (my favorite example of curry bastardization being the 1730 Charles Carter version, so smothered in butter that it's a wonder one can taste anything else), still in the mind of the curry eater it bodies forth that sequence of events from an ancestral past in which some intrepid soul tasted a foreign dish, liked it (or was politic enough to pretend to like it!), and forthwith took it unto his bosom and that of his compatriots. I still contend that whether they like it or just think they like it, the British adopters of curry gave nary a thought to its humor balance, 'cos it was "furrin" and exotic and that humor business was oh, just so last century. And WE are leading the revolution! Huzzah! Fly the Banner of Homogeneity from the battlements! An Apocalyptic Horseman to every Element! Down with the Main Ingredient Usurper! Up the humor-balanced masses! Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes! Let the-- :suddenly collapses in an ecstasy of over-enthusiasm and is bundled unceremoniously onto her shield, still mumbling unintelligibly and frothing at the mouth, and hurriedly carried off the field by embarrassed eGulletarians:

:sheepishly scuffs toes on floor: Thanks, Maggie! I was sure you were going to kick us off to some other thread for getting OT. Just... can't... seem... to... help... it.... Oh well, at least it's not entirely unrelated. (BTW, Kelly bio of Carême has arrived, as has the first of the eBay haul. But I think they got tallied when I ordered them.) Not to mention marvelously and beguilingly written, in many cases, by superb writers. The perfect combination. I do occasionally get frustrated by the slight discrepancies as to which recipes appear in the big books and which in the accompanying recipe books (and Murphy's Law dictates that it's always the one thing you want that isn't where you want it). But that's a minor quibble in the face of the overall high quality. (Where do I go to sign up for the cult? Crackpots of the world, unite and... cook!)

No - no, you didn't, and indeed I had noticed that. But I do seem to remember you, somewhere up-thread, referring to the "oldest" cookbook in your collection as being 271 years old; thus exciting a certain amount of openly-expressed reverence for its antiquity which I don't believe you debunked. 271? Well if I said that then I lied, the MacIver is the oldest and it is only ~240 years old. Tsk. There, see? I knew you weren't to be trusted. (Actually, it's probably my memory that isn't to be trusted - I didn't bother to scan the thread and verify the number. Sorry!) Gad, shows you what happens when you indulge in tunnel vision; I wasn't even thinking of anything beyond the original 1861 edition (or facsimile reprint thereof), to which my remarks apply (and of course I stand by them). I've always steered clear of the subsequent editions, and... simply forgot that in that as in most things I occupy a tiny minority. :sigh: IAC, it troubles me to see the subsequent outrages that were perpetuated in her name laid at her door; she herself, poor corpse, had nothing to do with them. And I doubt she'd have approved any of them. As to the "not bad if plain" remark - again I think you have to take it in context and to consider the other virtues and innovations of the production, especially given its target audience. Compare its wealth of detail and explanation, its organized plan and layout, its informative essays on fish and fowl (so what if they were lifted verbatim from one of Sam Beeton's other serials), to Francatelli's Plain Shilling Cookery for the Working Classes or Soyer's comparable work of the same period. Sure - Beeton is not the most enthralling reading today or even necessarily the best source for the inspired cookery of her time; sure, her name has been taken in vain and cheapened accordingly since then; sure, as a culino-literary personality she isn't a patch on Meg or even on real people of the same period, like Eliza Acton - but I don't think any of that takes away from her achievement or her character. Sorry about the rant - can you tell I've been reading Beeton biographies lately? I keep wanting to paraphrase - was it Viktor Borge? - on Mozart: when Isabella Beeton was my age she had been dead for 20 years! That's for sure; and the recipes themselves are certainly top-hole. And I love the way she prides herself on all the French bits (take that, Hannah Glasse!). I thought the authorship question had been resolved, though. I seem to remember that the actual author was one verifiable Christine Johnstone; as for Scott's share, yes that's still uncertain but I sort of gathered that his chief contribution was the invention of Meg herself, along with the Cleikum Club and its denizens. (I can certainly see him writing the dialogue and scenarios, can't you? and having a merry time of it.) I suspect you are entirely right about this; but again, it is hardly fair to make such a metaphysical speculation without considering the other factors of the time. Isabella, producing her book some 36 years after Meg's, was responding to a demand generated in part by other industrial phenomena which predated it. As well blame the whole damn Industrial Revolution on her! Not to argue for a moment with your pear-shaped premise, I still think that putting it all on that one pair of slim shoulders is a bit over the top. Beeton was an effect, rather than a cause, of some of the mediocre values of the Victorian age. The results are still deplorable; but an eager bourgeois public and a responsive if predatory commercial operation (don't get me started about Ward Locke's exploitation and destruction of Sam Beeton!) are responsible for that. Was the Great British Public, mid-19th-century, of a calibre to appreciate and accept the marvel that was Meg? Apparently not. Or the Scott imprimatur would surely have been enough to secure her rightful place for posterity. I'm sorry to go on so long and (probably) so redundantly, but the structure of the original Beeton, the exactness of measurements and the primers on ingredients and the estimates of costs, was so obviously and so reassuringly the answer to a tremendous need on the part of a public newly awakened to such things. In a lot of ways it's the Joy of Cooking of its time: not the most exciting source, not always entirely accurate, but a generally reliable and sympathetic fallback for a wide range of basics, in a world where young housewives badly needed such because few of them were learning it at their mothers' (or anyone else's) knees. No argument. None. [Reluctantly snipped here: the whole bit about food being complicated like people; snipped because it's too enthralling a subject, and if you think I'm going on interminably now, I assure you that's nothing to what I could do on that topic. But Restraint 'R' Me. For now, anyway.] Neither, I suspect. (Uh-oh, we're touching on another of my hobby horses....) I think that from the 14th century to the 19th, the significance of the humors/elements model stayed in sync with the relationship between food and medicine. That is to say, as the latter became an art/science in & of itself, and gradually became distinct from the culinary art/science, the humors and elements went with it and fell on the health side, rather than the taste side, of the divide. Meanwhile, back in the culinary department, the more subjective concept of flavor was undergoing a natural evolution of its own. (N.B. none of this restricted to English cooking - it's equally true if not more so in French and Italian. German I can't speak to, but odds are it isn't dissimilar.) What I find fascinating in this progression is that, if you take a really broad look at French (and to a lesser degree English) writings on that subject from one century to the next, each one seems to decry the previous period's mish-mosh-of-flavors fashions and to pride itself on "inventing" the concept of having each dish taste recognizably of itself and of its main ingredient (or indeed, in extreme cases, of even having a main ingredient). Yet the recipes associated with such writings all appear, to the modern eye and palate, to be absolutely incomprehensible mish-moshes themselves! Of course, what's actually happening is a gradual and subtle evolution. No matter how overwrought and indistinguishable the mixtures in Carême's recipes may appear (I'm thinking of the Boston Culinary Friends' experiment in which Barbara Wheaton reported that all the dishes, disappointingly, tasted pretty much the same; compare this to Voltaire's similarly plaintive remarks in the 17th century!), they are at least a great deal less so than those of his predecessors; those of his successors, in turn, continue that progression... until gradually the statement actually becomes true. In the 18th century, English cooks complained vigorously about the over-the-top qualities of French cooking while at the same time quietly adopting many of them. During the 19th century, oddly, those French shackles were doing as much to refine and simplify English cooking as they were to complicate and obfuscate. Go figure. But all this applies to high-falutin' big-city cuisine. Meanwhile, back on the farm, things don't change much; cooking still bases itself on common sense and fresh local ingredients, hewing pretty close to the cut-off-the-joint-and-two-veg model. At what point and why the urban and rural models converged and homogenized and then re-branched along different social dividing lines - OK, on this my notions are much more vague, partly because it gets out of my period (i.e., dangerously close to my own lifetime, about which I've thought relatively little). There's an obvious historical logic to it, but one which (fortunately) I at least haven't explored in detail. But I think the point I'm driving at, in my incredibly long-winded way, is this: by the time the pendulum of your Average Brit family starts swinging from the straightforward joint back toward curry and its ilk, it's for completely different reasons. Where the spiced stews of May's time are prompted - or justified - by the laws of the balance of humors/elements, the curries of today are a collectively acquired taste. They came into play by way of empire, and they stayed there because people got used to eating them and learned to like them. Go back to the origins of curries and you get right back into eastern variations on the humors/elements business. But that has nothing to do with why the Average Brit eats them today. Today it's a matter of palate rather than health. (Ironically, today we have the science of nutrition and the pseudo-science of fashionable diet schemes taking us right back toward the convergence of food and health that was a hallmark of medieval and renaissance cuisine. But... oy, gevalt - stop me, someone, before I digress again! :whew - someone mercifully Gets The Hook:)

"...and it's a thing I dreadfully miss in France - I live in France - and they haven't a notion of pudding." --Patrick O'Brian, 1994 interview, waxing nostalgic about suet

Yow - makes my neck hurt just thinking about it. Yes, I know you said you mostly just listen, but you must want to glance at it sometimes. Of course I've already stated my convection conviction - um, sorry, actually I mean my microwave manifesto, i.e. that the top of the fridge and the microwave were simply meant for each other (talk about saving counter space!), and I guess there's no point in belaboring that, can't help it if the rest of you fail to grasp its sublime perfection... but anyway, in the space-saving TV dept I have to confess that what I lust after is one of those silly under-cupboard fold-down LCD jobbies. Then again, ain't much point in spending the money for that unless I break down first and get :delicate shudder:.. cable. Depends. Halloween of which year? 2002 is a pretty good vintage. Or to put it another way - yes. Of course. Halloween candy is always good. (Or if not always, at least - thread convergence alert! - a few days a month.)

I took the other route and trashed all the magnets! Eeek! That seems a bit drastic. At best it's a waste of potentially useful temporary billboard space. At worst, where would I keep things like my lovely little Polder timer? Actually, I can't give up magnets for quite another reason: a friend of mine makes comemmorative magnets for all sorts of occasions - very often featuring his own likeness morphed onto the shoulders of some incongruous portrait or other; and I have an impressive collection of these. They are purely decorative, so it's sort of like an off-the-wall art gallery. Not only off-the-wall but off-the-fridge-door, in fact. The magnets on my fridge are of a more utilitarian kind, for the most part - the collection of masterpieces resides on the front of my one metal cabinet, whence it wreaks havoc on nearby navigation systems. This reminds me of a cartoon - now, alas, long lost - which once graced my fridge: the caption was "Refrigerator Magnet Abuse," and the picture was of a fridge door with only one item magneted to its surface; that one item, however, being a copy of War and Peace.

Pedestrian, schmedestrian. Need a waitress for that second seating? Or a fly on the wall? I'll apply for either.

Fred Rogers is another person in that category - whoever it was that invited him chose an exceedingly generous-spirited and charming guest. I'd also recommend trying to get him to stick around after the party, especially if you've done the cooking yourself and are feeling the effects of your effort: among his many other virtues, the man gave an unparalleled shoulder massage.

OH NO! I have these same knives! But I didn't buy them - they were given to me and I keep two of them handy because I can put an edge on them with my ceramic "steel" and I don't really care what happens to them so they are used for "rough cuts" -- anything I think might damage a better knife. They are strange knives and yet.......... I think I have the knock-off of the knock-off of them - the so-called Dione Lucas version (which I can't believe ever had even nodding acquaintance with the lady herself); trapezoidal shape, molybdenum composition. And I use and use and use and use them, and they hold an edge better than I deserve. They aren't for everything or everyone, but they are indispensable for all those miscellaneous items, all those unclassifiable odds and ends, all those unauthorized pass-through-the-kitchen-and-grab-a-hunk-of-cheese-on-the-fly moments. It can't always be haute cuisine!

No - no, you didn't, and indeed I had noticed that. But I do seem to remember you, somewhere up-thread, referring to the "oldest" cookbook in your collection as being 271 years old; thus exciting a certain amount of openly-expressed reverence for its antiquity which I don't believe you debunked. Amazing, yes, and a marvelous source and a wonderful read - but more deserving? I'd hesitate to call it that - not to mention that it's hardly fair when you consider that Mrs. Beeton was an actual person (and one whose unprecedented achievement is made the more extraordinary by her having died at 26!) whereas Meg Dods was a fictitious one, and her book in essence a form of historical fiction. That doesn't make it any less valuable or delicious (though oh! how I wish that even the modern edition were indexed in a more practical fashion), but I think it does make the comparison one of apples and oranges. Not to mention that the two are 40 eventful years apart, and that they reflect very very different periods and mores. I love them both, and wouldn't want to be without either one. Aha! Should have known. Yes, I've long considered Prospect a personal benefactor. But I'm a bit out of touch, and didn't realize they'd got so far afield as to do Anthimus. Looks like I'll be buying at least one more book in the near future.... And bless the net for it. I have quite a few of those downloaded but didn't include them in my tally. It's a nice question, to go along with the other discussions of criteria. Should a free download of such count as part of one's collection? If so, why? If not, why not? Discuss. (No, never mind, don't discuss.) Given that the overall tally was inspired by physical size one would assume not; OTOH, I've printed a couple of them for easier reference and they reside in imposing binders, which certainly take up as much space as any other oversized book. Could not agree more! And to take that notion to the next level, in a lot of cases one can only fully appreciate what they ate if one knows how it was made and procured. Meg Dods gives a poetic description of the virtues of raised pies that is exciting enough to begin with, but once you've actually spent most of a day raising one you come away with a humbling understanding of just how and why it constitutes "a larder in itself." It's enough to change one's perspective on life. Equally thrilling is the relationship between those discoveries and their illustrations in nursery rhymes and folklore. The plum in Little Jack Horner's Christmas Pie is probably my favorite example of that, given what the nature of the plum says about the way the pie was actually constructed; a close second in the food-related department is the identity of Little Miss Muffett. What's not to love? In my earlier digression from a digression I probably should have clarified what I meant about buying these books for use: I rarely (if ever) coook directly from them, but I use them constantly for research into just such questions. Most of them show signs of what I call the Chrysanthemum Effect; a taboo instilled in my early years forbids me from actually writing in any of them, but they all bristle with little post-it notes, some color-coded and some annotated, but most confusingly random, each marking some wonderful bit that I will undoubtedly want to refer to again though I probably will never be able to track it down from amongst its neighbors when I really need it. Old cookbooks are my dictionary, my encyclopedia, my window into history and belief, recurring theme and myth. And they prove that everything old really is new again: look at cuisine in the renaissance and cuisine in the early 19th century and it becomes obvious that it's only a matter of time before we're due for another round of neo-clacissism or neo-something. Hell, if verjuice is coming back into fashion, can omentum be far behind?

Damn, now I feel my protested-too-much principles wavering. Where's that green smiley? Again, I have Dods in modern edition and May in reprint. But... grrrr. Hang on a sec, though. I own (and adore) a copy of Fettiplace too, but there is no "original" edition of that - not, I mean, from the time of Fettiplace herself. Hillary Spurling discovered the MS in (don't quote me, I'm too rushed to run upstairs and double-check the date) the 1960s, if memory serves, and before that it wasn't a book, as such, just a notebook stored in a family attic. It's like the Martha Washington cookery book, of which I own two completely different 20th-century interpretations, because there were no previous published versions. Come clean, Adam! How many of these marvelous "period" acquisitions are actually modern reworkings and reprints? (Not to worry, we still will all be envious of your collection.)

Thank you kindly! I have been gradually working my way through some older threads and articles, BTW (the sort of thing designed to make one wish one had known and joined a whole lot sooner), and have just become an ardent admirer of your writing on PMS and similarly cyclical matters. Several items under that heading are about to become required reading in my, er, circle; so don't be too surprised if you find yourself fielding a sudden influx of praise for pieces and posts long-forgotten. I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't ever gotten around to reading Simenon - a really horrifying confession for someone who is both a francophone and an O'Brianite. Oh well (contorts impossibly to pat self on back) - I won't be the first person to launch into someone's oeuvre by way of the cookbook it has inspired. I've known Mme. M by reputation for many years and long desired her closer aquaintance; it was just a matter of the right copy coming along at the right time. Second the motion - though they don't sound all that recent . Seriously, though, as is my usual practice I own several of the above in facsimile reprints*, and love them dearly, Sir Kenelme Digby and Lady Clark of T being particular favorites. But I am very jealous of that Anthimus. To my lasting disappointment, even the Academy of Medicine doesn't have him. We need a green smiley to denote severe envy. *Sour grapes? Making a virtue of necessity? No, I think as a rule I really would rather own working copies than collectible ones, just as I'd rather buy an older car than a brand new one. The fact that I can't afford either new cars or old cookbooks is not that big a factor, I think. (Fact is, I can't see myself ever wanting a new car - too impractical.) Not that I wouldn't love to own original editions of some of these culinary marvels; not that I'm above enjoying the sensual rewards of such ownership, not to mention the thrill of reverence. But there's no point in owning them for their resale value, because I'd never part with them; and a book that is too fragile to be opened and consulted freely and frequently is nothing if not frustrating. I'm reminded of a favorite line from Katherine Mansfield: "Why have a baby at all if you have to keep it in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?" Sorry, where is this diatribe going? Not OT, really - I think the point is, what is it that makes people collect cookbooks (or yes, anything else, but let's not go there). Why do we want to own the ones we own and not others? What are the characteristics that make a particular book, or type of book, lust-worthy? In my case most of the newer productions - unless they reflect a historical/philosophical/cultural perspective - don't appeal all that much; not that I don't enjoy them, but I don't feel the need to make them my own. (Why? Am I being reasonable about the limits of my storage capacity and intellectual ditto? Sheesh, I hope not. No, I think it's only because in my own kitchen I tend either to stick to old favorites or to invent new stuff of my own that may be inspired by some new thing I've read but will rarely hew close to it. I'm not much cop at following recipes exactly; in cooking as in posting I'm too prone to following tangents of my own. ) Marvelous old books, obscure pamphlets, the direct window into the thinking and workings of cooks from another time - ah, those I simply can't resist. But thrilled though I may be to own an original, I won't be happy unless I also have a facsimile or a modern reprint or even a microfilm - something I can handle and use without that constant fear that I might damage or defile it. Not that I'm hard on my books. I just have a heallthy respect for Murphy's Law.

OK, got it. That's one more for the tally, and one more oddity for my esoteric little Ren/Ref pile: Lorna Sass's Elizabethan collection To the Queen's Taste. Thank you eBay. Bidding ran a bit higher on this one, which is apparently pretty rare; but the average for the day's haul ain't bad - ain't bad at all. Cool.

Uh-oh. Knew I shoulda kept my mouth shut. I guess we are. Yes! Actually, I don't even know what make my favorite boning knife is (though I think it does fall under the category known as "Been Good Once") because it's so old that any identifying marks are long gone. I'm pretty sure I posted somewhere around here recently about the trauma of having my indispensable paring knife (so precious and irreplaceable that my SO has dubbed it "Dr. Paring's Prototype") suffer precisely the same fate. (Two such knives and two such stories, in fact - one involving a compost heap, the other a NYC garbage compactor - both with happy endings.) The good thing about a kinife finding its way into the compost is that sooner or later you turn and screen and it finds its way out again. Which I guess brings me to my own knife sins, by way of this question: how much the worse for wear is the knife after its ordeal? This is the problem. I am not good at sharpening knives, just don't seem to have any instinct for it, and so I neglect all hell out of them. Most of mine are not superior instruments to begin with - that is, some of them have wonderful and even lovable qualities, but I don't own any serious big-name grown-up knives because I don't deserve to: I simply will never learn to treat them in the manner to which they are entitled to be accustomed. Oh, I know I could educate myself, to some degree. But the worst thing of all is that... I'm actually pretty happy being a knife clod. I'm deft enough at a lot of other things that my lack of knife-savvy is not going to give me some kind of complex; that being the case, I figure I'm not going to go out of my way to look for a lot of extra stress and pressure. Don't get me wrong: I can appreciate all hell out of a well-balanced knife, and/or a blade that is the perfect size and shape for the task at hand. I am also capable of distinguishing the difference between a really sharp knife and a really dull one, and given a choice I will always prefer the former. But though I draw the line at anything that makes ruinously jagged tears (or anything that doesn't cut at all), I can also tolerate an intermediate degree of dulness that makes most of my friends gasp in horror and disgust; the only reason this embarrasses me is that my friends seem to expect better of me and are therefore embarrassed for me. Of course, there's a silver lining when that particular cloud looms: I simply point them to the steel and/or the Chef's Choice thingy and let them sharpen to their hearts' content; and usually they are so mortified for my sake that by the time they leave they have brought all my knives into line with their expectations. I thank them politely and go on my way rejoicing. And I genuinely appreciate the improvement in my knives for as long as it lasts. But then as they gradually become duller, so do my perceptions. Eventually, without suffering and without even noticing it, I slither gently back into the insensitive gutter of knife cluelessness, and there I contentedly remain until someone notices and stages another intervention. Is there a 12-step program for this? Do I want one?

Funny you should mention that! It ties in exactly with something I've been thinking about this thread. And here you all thought we were doing something fun and frivolous... yes, I'm afraid there's actually a seriously "thinky" side to it. The reasons behind my having been constrained to invite "Wrong Fork" Buckley to dinner are too complicated to go into here (though I do assure you I did so most unwillingly!). But weirdly enough it happens that I know (or, depending on time-frame, my parents and/or grandparents knew) a surprising number of the people at some of these imaginary dinner tables, and thinking about what they were like, and what their hypothetical interactions might have been, set me to wondering about the criteria for invitations. Here's the question: in putting together these lists (and indeed in conceiving this thread), how much weight should be given to the question of whether or not the guests are likely to be agreeable companions to each other and to the host? And in planning such a table, how clearly should one envision one's own role as host? IOW, how should the result measure up, not only as game/gimmick, but as social occasion? For instance, take Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker, who have appeared a couple of times. Both fascinating and glittering and witty... but both rather intimidating and capable of a certain nastiness. Are we really ready to sit at table with them? I have a feeling I'd rather be in the audience and watch them dine, verbally flaying each other and everyone else present, than risk becoming one of their targets myself! And in some other cases (Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt spring to mind) I might be cautiously willing to participate, but as a debate moderator rather than a dinner host. Still another scenario is that of the incongruous mix (NB I am excluding from this category those combinations obviously chosen because their incongruities would be so comical!): people who are individually fascinating but who might have difficulty sustaining a reasonable level of table-talk, or whose pairing might even be actively dangerous - like, say, Henry VIII and Mary Stuart. Obviously a lot of the entries have taken this sort of thing into account, but equally obviously some haven't, perhaps deliberately. Am I taking this too seriously? Yes, of course I am, but only because I think it's kind of fun. I guess what got me going was in fact the Buckley bit - remembering how extraordinarily unpleasant he was made me suddenly realize that what I really wanted to do with my own fantasy tables was to try to ensure, just as I would with a real dinner party, that no matter how anachronistically improbable they would still be congenial groupings, people who could enjoy being at table together, people whom it would be not only fascinating but really fun to welcome into my dining room. No matter how much best behavior you stipulate, it only takes one nasty or dull or shy or overconfident guest to ruin the evening for the others. So that's me, idly wondering how much of this sort of thought lies behind the choices people make in this game, and whether - if it didn't when you posted - you'd be likely to change your choices in light of such considerations. OK, never mind. 'Scuse me, I think I'll go Get A Life now.

An essay on the Pope's appetites is in order, with an appropriate nudging ambiguity. The Borgia's meats do coldly serve the Papal feast.True indeed - those Borgia baked meats did coldly furnish forth any number of dodgy occasions. But I've already said a good bit about the Pope's appetites in the article just finished - his reputed appetites for money and power and women, that is (at table he was actually rather abstemious, I'm afraid, though his portraits appear to belie the fact); also frequent references to the less wholesome contents of the dishes on his table, and their effects on his enemies. What I actually had in mind for future use (indeed what I've already partly written but then had to excise) was something broader about the period and its customs, with a good bit of emphasis on one of my favorite recurring themes, i.e. the parallels between the cuisine of any given period and the same period's other characteristic forms of artistic/literary/political expression. I first started riding that hobby-horse when I was familiarizing myself with Carême, but to my surprise I haven't had to dismount once when I've ventured into different periods. Much to my delight, it seems to play across the ages. Oooh, a thought. Back to the did-they-or-didn't-they poisoning ways of the Borgias and their peers. One fascinating phenomenon of the widespread fear of putative poisoning (and where the suspicions are so prevalent and the stakes so high, it really doesn't much matter whether or not the rumors are true) is this by-product of having tasters: one had to wait so long to determine whether or not the taster was going to survive the exercise that never did one get to partake of a dish while it was still even lukewarm, let alone hot. I wonder... I wonder, given the cause of Hamlet Senior's death... whether that circumstance bears any connection at all, even a subliminal one, to his son's use of that turn of phrase "did coldly furnish forth..." Oh, it's a stretch, I know. But I like it.

Your modesty is becoming. Do a Google search on your own name and up comes this.Oh dear, how incredibly embarrassing. Modesty! I only wish it were. I spose I'd better come clean, because really and truly it isn't mine, originally; the perpetuated attribution is an indirect result of my early naïveté about other people's diligence in checking their sources. Here, then, is my cautionary tale. (And I'll do something below to justify the OT digression, I promise, by reporting on another eBay win.) Come, children, come gather 'round. Once upon a time there was a young woman who made her living running a tiny computer consulting company. Most of her work involved helping other people with relatively mundane problems - installation, training, troubleshooting, and the like. Opportunities for "real" programming were few and far between, and this she found frustrating, because though she hadn't yet realized that she had been designed and built expressly for the purpose of writing prose and verse, she had at least recognized that what she liked best to do was to play with style and syntax and phrasing and language... any language. So to amuse herself in her Copious Free Time she occasionally wrote silly little programs in C, a computer language which provides considerable scope for personal style and expression. Among these programs was a completely inconsequential fortune-cookie utility; drawing on a small database of pithy and/or amusing quotations, this program on being invoked would generate a pseudo-random number, based on which it would select a "fortune" from the database and display it on the screen. Now, all this took place in the High and Far-Off times of DOS, when life was simple and commands were complicated and screens were character-based. Since the young woman had created the program - and selected the quotations - for her own private amusement and that of her own private friends, she did not choose to expend a great deal of effort and screen real-estate on displaying attributions for every fortune. The finished program was primitive but effective, and the programmer and her friends derived much amusement from its use in an old-fashioned process known by the quaint name of autoexec.bat. So all was well and everyone involved was living happily ever after, when one day the programmer's evil genius perched on her keyboard (this, O best beloveds, was so long ago that Real Programmers Didn't Use Mice) and tempted her with a Bright Idea. "Your Ex-Cousin-Once-Removed-In-Law," it whispered suavely, "edits and publishes compilations of pithy remarks like these, under titles like The 437 Best Things Anyone Ever Said. Write to him; send him a copy of the program; and suggest a collaboration to bring his books into the Computer Age." Alas, the programmer was dazzled by this vision of form following function; as one in a trance she obeyed her evil genius. The letter was sent, the disk enclosed. (Not in that order.) On receiving it the Removed Kinsman expressed himself amused by the program and intrigued by the proposal. He also, however, suggested modifications to the software (such as a hopelessly mundane facility for retrieving... attributions) which the programmer was not eager to make, and the potential collaboration gradually died a quiet and natural death. And everyone lived happily ever af -- no! No, they did not! They thought they would, but their sins of omission came back to bite them in the butt, as such sins always do, my children! Many months later, the programmer received a package in the mail from her Ex-Relative-By-Marriage, containing a courtesy copy of his latest compilation of witticisms, inscribed to her by the editor. Much pleased, she immediately placed it in her bathroom where such things belong, and proceeded in the course of the ensuing days to dip into it when opportunity arose. But not for long her complacent enjoyment. One fateful day, having as usual opened the volume at random, what was her dismay on discovering that the Former-Family-Member had considered one of the fortunes in her database - one which happened to be quoted from a celebrated sage of an earlier epoch - worthy of inclusion, and had published it under her name! At first the young woman was torn. On the one hand, she bitterly blamed herself for having failed to identify the material in the program; on the other, in her more rational moments she told herself that to have expected the omission to produce such a result would have been tantamount to warning her No-Longer-Remotely-Consanguine-Acquaintance not to put beans up his nose, since [A] the quotation and its true author were (so she thought) sufficiently famous to require no explanation, and the Briefly-Semi-Related-One had obviously believed himself to be making use of her work for publication without first obtaining her permission. In a sudden flash of blinding insight it came to her that he had embarrassed himself more than her and that it served him right! - especially since he was an Experienced Journalist, not unseasoned in the importance of fact-checking, whereas she was just innocent and a bit of a thoughtless young idiot. Nevertheless, the error was now on bookshelves everywhere and continued for many years to be promulgated and perpetuated as the compilations evolved into anthologies and spread farther and wider than ever. So every once in a while the silly circumstance came back to haunt her, and has continued to do so periodically from that day to this. At least she learned her lesson. Or no, actually, she didn't, because the lesson to be learned from this ridiculous sequence of events was so abstruse, so inapplicable to any other set of circumstances, that she never quite managed to figure out how to articulate it. So the moral, if such it be, is that even now she probably isn't really any the wiser... and neither are you. The End. And now, by way of lagniappe, I offer the promised ha'penn'orth of topic to this interminable deal of tangent. (I should be ashamed of myself. In fact, I am. Sigh.) I have just scored another eBay triumph, another oddity to add to my haphazard collection of literary cookbooks: Madame Maigret's Recipes; first edition ('course, for all I know it may well be the only edition), preface by Simenon. So if Maggie has managed to stay awake through the above screed, the big payoff is one (1) more measly cookbook to add to the tally.