balmagowry

Me too, me too! I have one like it, only cheesier-looking, and it must be of even worse quality, wouldn't you think, having been bought on sale at Macy's for a whopping five bucks. But for all the same reasons given above, I love it - and I use it far more than my big heavy first-class one and my even bigger even heavier first-class one. In fact, I use it for just about everything that doesn't require serious bone-hacking. As for lasting a lifetime - who knows? not that it'd matter much at that price. All I can say is that at 25 years and counting it's holding up just fine so far. Hmmmm - I was thinking of starting a new thread to confess my knife sins - but maybe this'll turn out to be the right venue for that. Only I seem to be losing my nerve....

How familiar they look. Lucky for me, I don't have 'em over the fridge, though, just everywhere else. If they had been there I'd just have taken them down, because in my kitchen the top of the fridge is the best, the only, place for the microwave to live. Edit to add: I don't understand how the front of anyone's fridge can possibly be so pristine!

Two down, two to go. And cheap. The interesting thing about buying weird and/or old cookbooks on eBay (again, curse you, whoever you are... ) is that no one else seems to be bidding on them. Sssssshhhhhhh.... So anyway, I am now the proud possessor (subject to the vagaries of shipping) of the Pictorial Review Standard Cook Book, 1932 edition, and of Rinaldi & Vicini's Buon Appetito, Your Holiness; Secrets of the Papal Table. The latter may be a bit spurious (the blurb, at any rate, is kind of fatuous about Alexander VI's relationship with Vanozza Catanei), but still looks like fun, and is at least based on some really interesting primary sources. Ironically, I just finished correcting proofs for an article called "Dinner with the Borgias." Counter-ironically (if I may coin such a phrase), the fact that I didn't acquire this book - potentially a highly apposite reference - until after the fact is less distressing than you might think, because the article has now been re-shaped to fit an editorial thrust that emphasizes scurrilous gossip and de-emphasizes (damn near eliminates) food. With the result that I now have several unused chunks of viable prose about food/dining during the Renaissance, all just waiting to be shoved into some future piece. So this new acquisition may yet pay for itself. Add 2 to the tally, please, Maggie - and I'll report again in... lessee now... 'bout 9 hours 22 minutes (but who's counting?).

A fascinating journey -- and another knot well and truly severed! I put out a query on the Guild of Food Writers Sparklist and no one came up with any further light on the subject. Oh - I loved a quote of yours that appeared in the search: Thank you, on all counts, but... I can't take credit for that last - it belongs to Groucho Marx. I think I know how it came to be attributed to me, but I can't imagine how it got to wherever you ran across it. Oh dear, and I thought I'd lived down that particular moment of someone else's étourderie. H'mph - I see we don't have a smiley for "rueful." Edited to add hasty on-topic update: since my last I've bid on four cookbooks on eBay. (Curse you, whoever made that suggestion! ) Shall enumerate and report if I win any of 'em.

Cool! I always loved Margaret Juntwait's show (which came in loud and clear out here on the Guyland). Yup, it's me, from another frame of the same shoot - and alas that little dark grey area on the left is actually a bit of my mother's back. (Didn't half-like cropping her out neither, I can tell you - but editor demanded new solo headshot in a hurry, so....) Damn, I don't know how to pull this back on topic - I'm afraid I'm just going to have to order more books. Oh! wait a minute, I just remembered - I have. Well, one more, and it's a duplicate of one I already have, and I'm planning to give it away. But that's still better than nothing, no? Actually, it's kind of appropriate to both ends of the topic spectrum, being (to my great amusement) a Spanish translation of a slim volume on traditional English puddings. Pudins, it is called, and (multiple thread convergence alert!) it gravely and attractively sets forth the methods for preparing "Pudin del Lago de Sussex," "Pudin de Navidad," and "Mousse de Eton," to name only a few. Now I have a dear friend who is an English ex-pat living on Mallorca these many years; he is also a Master Mariner and a passionate O'Brianite, and like PO'B himself he misses his suet puds "dreadfully." I can't imagine a more perfect gift - so much so that I'd have felt obliged to give him my own copy if it hadn't been inscribed to me by the giver - so I was fearfully excited to find another one on ABE. It doesn't add to our tally, I'm afraid, but in the process I spotted several other tempting items that probably will. I'll report when I succumb, I swear.

Technically, I don't qualify for this thread, except insofar as I can quote the reminiscences of older friends and of my parents (actually, it occurs to me that some of these might actually be of some value; I'll see what more I can harvest as opportunity arises, and report back if there's anything good). Anyway, the above, along with other remarks about changes over time in restaurants' use of chicken and customers' attitudes toward same, irresistibly reminds me of a favorite anecdote of my father's. He was born in 1926, the oldest of three boys; the family was a moderately prosperous Jewish one living in the Bronx, and from the time the three kids got old enough to have dinner "out," one of their great treats, a rare and a darkly exotic adventure, was to be taken "downtown" to eat... Chinese! Of course, New York Chinese in those benighted days (early-mid-1930s, roughly) consisted of chow mein and not a whole lot else, so that is what they looked forward to and that is what they ordered. Invariably, when it came to the table, my grandmother would subject it to elaborate scrutiny before allowing anyone else to touch it. When at last she gave the go-ahead and they all piled into it, she would always say, "Well, it's OK this time, but you can never be too careful, children, so you should always look closely. I don't trust these people - you never know when they might try to cheat you and serve you" (here her face would assume an expression of utter disdain) "veal, instead of real chicken!" (Apologies to any Chinese personnel present, not to mention any calves - I do assure you we are all, individually and collectively, one hell of a lot more enlightened these days about both people and food; but things were different back then and this attitude was considered perfectly natural. And a revisionist I ain't.) I don't know how prevalent this concern was in society at large, but I bet it was pretty typical of the conscientious Jewish mother of the time. Kind of a poignant contrast to the tale of the Bronx Chop, don't you think?

I can't really take credit for the results of a Google search (though many do!). I became curious about the word, which sounded like a Scotch whisky, and Google led me to your book (and nowhere else). Your comments on sailing, obscure British recipes and illustrious grandfather all jibed. Actually, I only meant I thought I remembered you having been active on one of the threads where I'd mentioned it. Which I guess only goes to support what I said about my inability to keep track of which things I've said to whom . (Ah, and pardon me if I pause for a sec to bask in the recognition of my grandfather - a tender point with me, especially right now. Not many remember him, these days; and not all of those would be likely to call him illustrious. And how wrong they are.) It does, doesn't it. I think I mentioned recently (though the Dear knows on which thread...) that PO'B had a marvelous ear for language; when he set out to invent a word to fit an idiom he made a first-class job of it. Did he invent this one? He never actually admitted as much, but both he and his wife dropped mischievous hints to that effect in their letters to us: I could just picture them giggling over it together like a pair of naughty children, taking bets as to the likelihood of our being sly enough to catch them at it. I suppose there may be some stone we didn't turn, but I've spent many years unsuccessfully trying to prove otherwise. We looked high and we looked low; we pored over centuries' worth of cookbooks; we asked all our friends in Scotland and every culinary resource we could think of who was even remotely connected to things Scottish. Neither Catherine Brown nor Clarissa Dickson-Wright could shed any light - and not for lack of trying, either. It wasn't until we had exhausted every one of these resources that we applied to the O'Brians for guidance, and PO'B came awfully close to blowing the gaff altogether in his reply: "I believe Burns uses the word," he wrote, "and my Scotch friends tell me that it is sometimes eaten with grits in some southern state whose name escapes me; my Scotch friends, however, are of a somewhat facetious disposition." Indeed they were; though even then I didn't go so far as to ascribe that facetiousness to PO'B himself until after I had subjected southern cuisine to the same thorough scrutiny as Scottish, not to mention reading and re-reading every blasted word Robbie Burns ever writ! Well, at last we were reluctantly forced to conclude that the Master had indeed been having his little game with a credulous public, and had made the thing up out of whole cloth; screwing our courage to the sticking-place, we therefore revisited the meagre description he had provided in his letter ("a kind of cream, sour but not too sour"), and boldly followed suit. In the headnote to the recipe we kept just barely to windward of calling his bluff; but I don't think anyone could have spotted it who didn't already know. (I would bet - at least I dearly hope - that the O'Brians picked up on it and enjoyed the joke! but if they did they discreetly kept mum, and now we'll never know.) Of course we were quite sure that the moment the book came off the press some obscure authority would crawl out of the woodwork and call our bluff by revealing the true and authentic Balmagowry; hoping to forestall such an eventuality, we never entirely gave up the search ourselves. I'm superstitious enough about it that I'd never say never - still, there's no getting around the fact that seven years and two more editions have now gone by without any sign of disaster. And of course you know yourself what Google has to offer on the subject. Whether he invented it or not, I am eternally grateful to him for the gift of the word. We had a lovely time with it during research and testing: it serves equally well as a greeting ("Balmagowry, all!"), an expression of skepticism ("I'm sorry, but that all sounds like pure Balmagowry to me"), and an expletive ("Oh, Balmagowry, I've cut my finger!"). And of course it comes in uncommon handy as a user-name when my other favorite - gordian - is pre-empted. I may not be the only gordian in town, but by hell I don't think you'll often encounter anyone else called balmagowry, no matter how World-Wide your Web. 'Sides, it's way more culinary than gordian, which makes it truly my mot juste for this venue.

what is the title of your own book? I'm going to make a guess that it's Lobscouse and Spotted Dog Good - educated - guess. Oops - sorry! didn't mean to be obscure, or coy either, for that matter. I've posted about it recently on a couple of other threads, and I'm afraid I sometimes have a hard time keeping track of which things I've said to whom. (Not to mention that eGullet is so much bigger than my other virtual haunts, grubby little hole-in-the-wall e-joints where it's generally safe to assume that every member has seen every post. I guess size does matter after all.... ) Oh, lovely! Thank you for that - I didn't know it. ("Wish I'd said that!" "You will, Oscar, you will." Yup... I will.)

Emma would kill him, and rightfully so. He resembles nothing so much as a human fungus, or the offspring of the Elephant Man, or a reptile with pink skin. I can't believe for an instant she would enjoy a dinner with him. Hard to imagine that anyone would; at table he is rude, boorish, self-important, arrogant, condescending, loudly and insistently ignorant about food and wine - doesn't even know which fork to use. Goes out of his way to generate maximum inconvenience for everyone around him - delays courses, argues with arrangements, blocks doorways (while conversing on cell phone in audible if incoherent Spanish) - anything to draw attention to himself. Treats his hostess like the hired help and his fellow-guests like pathetic wannabes. At a dinner in honor of someone else whom he professes to admire, takes it upon himself to make an Official Toast, which function he then proceeds to execute by making long rambling self-congratulatory speech all about how wonderful Mr. W.F. Buckley is, just for being Mr. W.F. Buckley. OK, so the guy knows from sailing - maybe he'd be a little less insufferable if he didn't think he had a monopoly on that knowledge. It's an embarrassment to be in the same room with him. An embarrassment of which he himself is happily unaware, since as far as he is concerned no one else ever is in the same room with him. Oh gosh, I wouldn't want to give the impression that I don't like him. But... well, there it is - I don't. Not enough to put him on a guest list of my own choosing. Call me peculiar - but I kinda like people with manners and taste and a sense of their surroundings. Like, for instance, these: My grandfather. Nancy Mitford. Osbert Sitwell. The Marquis de Cussy. Now there's a dinner party. Another table, another night, this time all foody and French-accented. I was torn between Grimod and Brillat-Savarin, but I think B-S wins for congeniality's sake, as long as we can have Grimod to provide the entertainment. Wouldn't invite B-S without his pretty cousin Mme. R****, so that leaves two places. Hmmmm. Dumas, definitely. And either Julia Child or Lady Morgan. Hang on a minute, this game is addictive - I want another table, please. Trollope. Richardson. Mrs. Gaskell. Ouida. Damn - that leaves me with no place to seat Elizabeth Zimmermann. Wonder how she'd get along with George Herriman and Milt Gross and... and... Alan Sherman? It'd be worth a try.

OK, never mind my stupid questions - I think I get the gist. Add about 370 for me. This includes: - 1 just ordered; - 3 issues of PPC; - quite a few essay collections and biographies of cooks, etc.; - roughly 70 recently inherited and not yet handy for precise tallying; - probably a small amount of duplication (multiple editions of Joy of, etc.); - an estimated 15-20 on microfilm (complete works of Carême, but there are also several other cookbooks on the same 3 reels, I'm not sure how many - thank you Schlesinger Library). It does not include: - a heap of off-the-wall booklet-type things that I'm too lazy to sort through; - many cases of remaindered copies of my own book (ineligible, I assume, but if they're acceptable for sheer volume I'll try to come up with an accurate tally); - shelves and shelves of magazines (also just inherited, soon to be disposed of); - a few old works in digital form (I should count these, but it didn't occur to me until just now). BTW, in spite of the warning delivered to FG, I am also including a couple of sets of bound galleys - because they are not my own and I never got around to buying the published versions. By far the majority of mine are old and/or historic, but I don't think I can beat Adam's record because I collect reading copies rather than originals, and have therefore been almost more pleased to have facsimile reproductions than the genuine article. Less terrifying responsibility, don't you know - easier to work with. Still, I've got a Miss Parloa from 1880 or so, and a Mrs. Beeton from the late 1860s, plus a few antique pamphlets, some maddeningly undated.

OK, I give up - I'll count tonight and report. I haven't yet gone over this thread with a fine-tooth comb, so please forgive me if these questions have already been asked: 1) Are you counting food books that aren't actually compilations of recipes, or that are hybrids? i.e., books on food history/philosophy/literature, either with or without sample recipes. 2) How are you counting sequels and multi-volume sets (e.g., vol. II of Mastering the Art of French Cooking - or the 12 volumes of Mary Margaret McBride's Encyclopedia)? Since you're measuring width and distance, I'm betting each volume counts, but I just want to make sure I'm playing by the rules. 3) Have you by any chance correlated the running tally with the number of posters to the thread? If not, it might be an amusing exercise, so we could calculate the average and do whatever other things people do with statistics....

Thank you. If anyone enjoys reading/using it anywhere near as much as we did writing it, it's the best kind of success we could have hoped for. Yes, PO'B was that way not only about food but about most things. I don't suppose he was literally transplanted forward from that era, though that's a theory I love to posit with tongue only partly in cheek; but at some level he was far more a creature of his chosen period than of that in which he lived. He was so steeped in its literature and mores that they constituted his natural environment. He certainly didn't belong in the 20th century, let alone the 21st. One of the great pleasures for us was fleshing out recipes for the dishes which he had obviously invented, like Mrs. Pullings's pie. Partly because it was just such fun as an intellectual and culinary exercise, but also because it revealed the depth of his understanding of, and comfort with, the culinary language of the time. Funny, because he was certainly no cook himself, nor had he read much on the subject in particular. But he had very clearly caught the drift of how a natural cook might express herself - both through language and through food - and might use the kind of ingredients which were handy and which came naturally to her. He had a marvelous ear for that sort of thing, and very very rarely put a foot wrong. Which isn't to say that Homer didn't nod on occasion! We caught a small handful of minor but glaring errors... and quietly looked the other way. (This, for instance, is why the book makes no mention of Orangeado.) We also caught him in the occasional deliberate fabrication (as borne out by a sort of mischievous twinkle in his letters to us - in regard among other things to the apocryphal foodstuff from which I take my eGullet name...), and did our best to emulate his brazenness. Sorry, this is getting kind of OT; by way of justification, though, it's worth considering the proposition that the above-mentioned pie is in its way a good informal example of a local signature dish. Not the famous kind identified with a major city, obviously, but definitely a representation of food as regional culture, and of how a characteristic cuisine bourgeoise might naturally evolve around the best of indigenous produce and provender.

[unseemly Gloat...] I am glad to hear it. I do assure you you will be the happier for it, heh heh. [/unseemly Gloat...]

Yes, I love Seven Centuries - it's a handy overview full of intriguing nuggets. And for someone going into the same racket its great usefulness lies in its bibliography: it was a wonderful introduction to her primary sources - most of which now grace my shelves as well, in one form or another. (Oddly, another great bibliography for the same purpose is that of the original edition of the Williamsburg cookbook: though designed to look and feel like an 18th-century American production, it actually draws most of its material from English classics of the time, like Hannah Glasse et al.) And I bless whatever force it was that led to the proliferation of facsimile reprints during the past 15 years or so! Those original editions are a bit too rich and fragile for my blood. The possible downside of all this historical background is a propensity to become a bit of an authenticity-snob. Suet puds with baking powder to lighten them? Heaven forfend! I make a pretty mean spotted dog, ditto jam roly-poly, not to mention a very serious steak-and-kidney pud, etc.; by today's standards, however, they're a trifle dense, as... well, as I feel they were meant to be. Innovation doesn't always necessarily constitute improvement, saith the bigoted culinary historian....

In part because the food that was in vogue at time wasn't looking to English food for inspiration, but in general more to the French style. I quick look at most mid-late 19th century cook books shows a large amount of Frenchified names, even if the dishes are not. Has a lot to do with the fact that an awful lot of French cooks from royal and royalist houses found themselves out of work as a result of the Terror; quite a few of those fled to England, and quite a few stayed there and became chefs for gentlemen's clubs and the like. Louis Eustache Ude was one of the leaders of that crew - as well he might be, having been chef to Louis XVI - and was a big success in his adopted country, even writing a popular cookbook in English (heavily larded with French). Then in less desperate times (1816) you had Carême himself cooking for the Prince Regent (and incidentally contributing greatly to the revolutionary design of the kitchen in the Royal Pavilion at Brighton) - followed by his "student" Francatelli who was eventually to cook for Queen Victoria. By mid-century these guys and their ilk were very thoroughly in fashion; amazing the cachet one can acquire when vouched for by the reigning monarch.

Ha! you beat me to it. Do you make it with or without the lemon? Both, but mostly without (butter, brown sugar, lemon zest as replacement) as the lemons scare the guests and it is difficult to make the individual portion puddings using a whole lemon. Lemon zest? Oh dear. I hadn't considered the problem of individual-sized puds, and I suppose I see the point, but still - seems a sad substitute for the opulent juiciness of the whole lemon harmonizing with the butter and sugar. Individual SP pud - sheesh. Not for me, thanks. Make a whole one and share it around, or don't bother. (I was curious, though, about the version with no lemon at all, because I'd never even imagined such a thing until I stumbled across it in an early 19th-c recipe. I can see why, since lemons would have been so much less common/available, but it didn't seem right for both versions to carry the same name, given how completely different they are.)

Primary sources? Hmmmm. Hartley is certainly very engaging, but not particularly accurate (it's been a few years, so I can't produce chapter and verse, but I do remember her explanation of raised pies being wildly off-base). And if memory serves she has a propensity for inventing terms and presenting them as quaint old traditions. I enjoy her, but I don't really trust her. I notice no one has mentioned C. Anne Wilson on this subject - has she gone out of style?

Yes! That's exactly what it is. I remember one year when disaster struck: someone had ordered (or supplied) the wrong kind of peppermint sticks, the non-porous kind. Thousands of people walking around the fairgrounds. sucking for dear life and not getting a drop. The disappointment! I can't have been older than 4, but even at this remove it seems like a crisis of the first water. And I seem to have heard since then that no one makes appropriately porous peppermint sticks any more, which if true means that I'll never taste a lemon stick again. Damn, now I want one, too.

Ha! you beat me to it. Do you make it with or without the lemon?

Nah. Just cool. Cool as, in fact, a cucumber - to mix similes. Speaking of which, this isn't one really, but it was the first thing that came to mind, and it amuses me - it's from G.B. Stern's dog story The Dark Gentleman: This isn't a simile either - it was intended far too literally for that - but it's a great mot anyway, I think: Marie-Antoine Carême's assertion that "cuisine is the spearhead of French diplomacy." As, in his hands, it certainly was.

Haw! A pasty is a meat-pie; comes in a lot of different forms - or used to - but these days it's usually understood to mean the Cornish variety, which is constructed rather like a turnover. The pastry is heavier and denser, so the pasty can withstand some abuse - which is pretty useful given that your average miner (or shepherd or...) will carry one in his pocket on way to day's work and leave it there till lunchtime, when he expects to retrieve it more or less intact and still warm. Typical filling: ground meat (beef or mutton), often mixed with some chopped onion and perhaps potato as well.

Technically, I suppose they are. But I've never quite bought the what's-in-a-name thing. The name, to me, makes a big difference - it seems to convey something of local atmosphere and culture. Either that, or... maybe they really are different. All I can say is, a Pittsburgh hoagie tastes - to me, at any rate - quite different from an apparently identically-constructed sub. Go figure.

Or if it is, at least we can all be nice and abnormal together.

Yeah, but Carcassonne and Castelnaudary come by it honestly, whereas Toulouse is just a hanger-on on that list, a johnny-come-lately, a wannabe. Cassoulet came about as a triumph of alliteration during the early 16th century, when Catherine de' Medici arrived in France with haricot beans in her saddle-bags. The two towns in question were part of her marriage settlement, and they apparently got first crack at dem beans dem beans; inevitably then it was the combination of Catherine, Carcassonne, and Castelnaudary that ultimately produced Cassoulet.

Yes, but isn't cioppino originally Portuguese? When I started making it (some 30 years ago, so this may not apply now), I seem to remember reading that in SF they call it Portuguese bouillabaisse, but in Portugal they call it Italian bouillabaisse (which does at least fit with its very Italian name), whereas in Italy they call it... oy, I don't remember what, but I remember thinking it's kind of like the good old STD of a couple of centuries ago: the English called it the French pox, the French called it the Spanish pox, the Spanish called it the English pox, everyone wanted to pass the buck. IAC, cioppino may be a signature dish in SF now, but there's some doubt that it originated there. Course, I'm not sure that matters on this thread.... Hmmmmm. It suddenly occurs to me that the recipe for that first cioppino probably came from Sunset magazine, which would certainly support the West-Coastishness of it. We lived in SF for a year when I was a kid, and my mother became so enamored of Sunset that she kept up her subscription for the rest of her life, even though we've been back on Long Island (where we belong) ever since. BTW, has anyone mentioned hoagies for Pittsburgh? Lived there for a year as a kid, too. I know there are regional variations (hero, sub, grinder, etc.) all over the map, but I've never met a hoagie outside Pittsburgh unless it's been smuggled out. And hey, while I'm thinking of places where we lived for brief periods when I was little - how about lemon sticks for Baltimore? And ooh, ooh, ooh! New York - Dave's Original Egg Cream!