balmagowry

There's an entire separate supplemental book about the food in that series. I bought it for my stepfather one Christmas but am blanking on the name. Lobscouse and Spotted Dog? I believe that's the name of it, yes. I had dinner, I think, with its authors a few years back. Really? May I ask when and where? Well, as one of the authors I am of course biased, but I can certainly assure you that it was indeed fun stuff, more fun than decent people oughta have. And yes, there are a few recipes that I can't imagine being to anyone's taste! [Oh, and - which recordings were you listening to? The unabridged Recorded Books ones, I hope, with Patrick Tull?]

It's basically a simple meat stew, food for the poor. See here. lobscouse Also made at sea, with ship's biscuit instead of potatoes. (At least it was in the C19th.) Lobscouse and Spotted Dog Thanks for the plug! But actually (as in Lobscouse & Spotted Dog), at sea it was made with ship's biscuit and potatoes - assuming the latter were available, that is. In fact, one of the figurative meanings of lobscouse is hodgepodge, miscellany - basically it's a mess of whatever you have on hand. Which after a few months at sea can be pretty damn aleatory....

More elbow room. My mother. Not necessarily in that order.

My mother and I always shared the pope's nose; whichever of us got it would eat exactly half, scrupulously nibbling along the bone, and hand over the rest. Gizzards - we all loved them, but I was low in the gizzard pecking order because for some reason I was the only one who loved the hearts and lungs, so that was the trade-off. Ah... chicken protocol....

Yes! My SO is Jack Sprat and I am Mrs. He will eat only what I grew up referring to as "Groozeless Excroosh," AKA perfectly lean skinless boneless tendonless meat, than which nothing, in my view, could be much duller. I OTOH can't properly enjoy any piece of meat that doesn't come with all its "naughty bits." A lovely edging of outside fat, a bit crisp and caramelized outside and meltingly tender inside and spreading flavor throughout; all those wonderful shifts of texture as you cross the membrane between one part of the cut and the next; the marvelous juiciness close to the bone; and at last the bone itself, whether hollow with actual marrow oozing forth or merely porous enough to surrender some under a determined jaw; bits of spinal cord; mmmmmmm, lovely. It's painful these days to shop for meat in the supermarkets where one can afford it; the quality is sometimes surprisingly good, but all those prepackaged cuts with the Best Part (i.e., in a chop or a shell steak or the like, the tail) removed! OK, so I'm getting more meat for my buck - but what fun is that if I have to sacrifice all the nice messy cave-man part? (Besides, I'm haunted by the image of some lucky stiff getting to feast on all those tails that should be mine by rights; worse yet, by the fear that they may be tossed in the garbage - what a waste.) And BTW, let's hear it for so-called "inferior" cuts. Some of the best beef flavor I've ever met with is found in the lowly chuck steak and its environs. So what if it's a little tough sometimes? Not that I object to tender meat, as such; but I do like a little texture, enough at least to remind me what it is I'm eating. SO likes his chicken skinless, boneless, damn near flavorless. Good - more skin and bones and pan-juices and gribenes for me! But we do "lick the platter clean," in the long run, I guess.

And, um, while you're at it, if you happen to run across the other three soul-destroyers...!

well, that's what my mother does, too, and so does my sister. or they used to. untill last christmas, when some of us thought the wine was corked, only it wasn't: some of wine glasses had picked up a bad fungus smell from sister's cupboard (not all of them, because she had not stored them all upside-down), or perhaps she hadn't dried them well enough. we had to pour out the wine in those glasses, and rinse them. a bad waste of a quite decent amarone. several lessons learned. Ha! I feel vindicated! Same here. And besides, the thread isn't about silly habits... just habits. Some habits actually do make an awful lot of sense; good thing, too, because otherwise we could all just consider ourselves wackos and be done with it.

Yes, that definitely falls under the heading of Forgive Them, Father, They Know Not What They Do! Not only that, but under the circumstances the substitution is at least a logical, intelligent one. I have the oppopsite problem - my SO keeps using my sacred tomato knife to slice rolls. I once tried to explain why I objected to the practice, but suddenly the argument sounded so lame in my ears.... Finally I just had to tell him to consider it one of my crazy foibles and just accept it without agreeing with it. Which he did. Trouble is... he's forgetful, so it hasn't made much difference. And in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really seem to make much difference to the tomato knife, either. So I save my breath for the battles that matter: forgetful though he may be, he *does* understand and remember that Dr. Paring's Prototype, the holy of holies among my knives, MUST be treated with reverence. You are wise. I must try to remember to emulate you. (I'm a bit forgetful myself, sometimes....)

I've spent a good bit of time working in one friend's kitchen - staying with her as I help her prepare to sell her house and move closer to where I live than the current 4-hour+ drive. In the process I have had ample opportunity to plan housewarming presents that will ensure *my* future comfort in her kitchen! She's OK for bowls and gadgets, for the most part (as previously noted she has the only Colony Cup I've ever seen, other than mine), but she is definitely one of the reasons I am hoping to find a source of wooden spatulas. Also high on the list for her is a proper wok, a good big heavy one like my favorite, with a long handle. And a couple of decent knives. And... hmmm, on second thought maybe it'd be simpler to just make her come over to my house when I want to cook.

Really???? The good flat ones? Damn, I just came back from Target, and didn't think to look there - had never found them there before. I wonder how consistent their inventory is from one part of the country to another. Note to self: go back there ASAP and pay attention!

Oh dear, I suppose I should feel guilty about instigating all this introspection; frankly, though, I'm just glad to know that other people are as strange and compulsive about these things as I am. Never thought about cooking as a particularly superstitious activity before, but the compulsion to repeat little rituals does smack of superstition, doesn't it. I'm sure that's how a lot of them come into being, at any rate. If anyone innocently uses my tomato knife or my omelette pan for anything other than their approved purposes (in the second case that does include making mu shu pancakes, as long as *I* am the one doing it...! and as long as it is properly re-seasoned afterward), it seems like the most terrible sacrilege. I've gotten over the feeling I used to get that the article in question has been so desecrated that it has to be replaced. But just barely.

I do the same thing. Since I learned to use a knife, the food processor is pretty much useless. Oh, I dunno. I'll use a knife for most things, granted, but the processor comes in handy for large quantities. One or two onions, slice/chop by hand, *of course*. Several *pounds* of onions - ah, suddenly I become less meticulous. And for grinding and grating and pureeing in quantity - processor, every time. I just haven't got the biceps.... And the answer to the washing-up problem is simple: hoodwink someone else into taking charge of it.

Fifi - this must be some kind of an all-time record in the payoff department! Puts puny little individual cases of soup and such all to shame. From a corporate relations standpoint, I'm particularly impressed with the VP showing up with cold 6-pack in hand. Did they *know* about your FDA background? Either way, what a great build-up. Can't say I have; usually I am careful to save foreign objects (a piece of glass, a lump of bone) that turn up where they shouldn't, but I'm afraid I tend to space out and/or run out of momentum before I get around to profiting by them. Then again - there's always the cockroach-in-the-salad scene from Victor/Victoria....

Yes! Why on earth do they think that you will ever, EVER want their product again? Same thing happened when I was a kid; fortunately in our case the foreign object was comparatively benign - a large lump of powdered red pepper lurking in a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup. Not something one expects to find - but on the other hand not gross enough to prevent one enjoying - and taking full advantage of - the "reward." As I remember, they didn't bother with coupons; a case of the actual CofM soup was delivered to our door. Useful stuff, and we never found pepper in another can. My mother was kind of a legend at this sort of thing, the Campbell's Soup caper being only the least of her achievements. There was the can of cat food which contained no foreign objects, indeed no objects whatever, having been sealed without ever being filled; ironically it ended up feeding the felines of the household for many weeks. Don't remember the details of the others, but there was one infuriating correspondence (with Macy's? I think) which culminated in her taking a form which they had impersonally cautioned her "not to fold, spindle or mutilate," folding it repeatedly, stabbing it viciously with a skewer, and running it several times through the sewing machine. It worked - at any rate, it got a response from an actual human being, for the first time in the whole series of transactions. (And I'm sure it ultimately netted her some sort of valuable compensation for whatever injury she was protesting - nothing more precious, however, than the sense of victory over the system.)

Yeah, OK - I got a little carried away there, I grant you - and of course the memoir-ish style of writing doesn't lend itself quite as well to an area like restaurant criticism where you have a certain number of hard topical facts that must be put across. But I can't quite buy your argument about relevance. Sure, not everything in the more personal kind of food writing will resonate the same way with everyone, but does that really mean you're not going to read it, or enjoy it, if it doesn't speak directly to your own experience? That seems rather a limited perspective. The thing I find most enthralling about a memoir, foody or otherwise, is that it introduces me to scenes and perspectives that are *not* familiar to me, that I could never have achieved on my own. One food writer I admire (OK, OK, I'm talking Carter again in this case, but she's a good example, what can I say) grew up on a farm in the midwest, and much of what first attracted her to food writing is what she learned there as a child; about cooking, from her grandmother and her mother; about fresh ingredients, about harvesting, about milking, about storing, about the social uses and rituals pertaining to food in that kind of community. All this informs her writing and her point of view - sometimes overtly, sometimes subliminally. Culturally, most of it is entirely foreign to me; I can learn from it, and I find it fascinating. And the farther removed it gets from my own experience. or my own century, the more fascinating I find it. Seems to me that the whole point of reading other people's writing is to broaden one's knowledge and understanding; conversely, much of the point of writing is to entertain as well as inform. Of course there is an onus on the writer to tell the story skilfully, and to make it relevant to the matter at hand, if such matter there be; that's the whole point. But there's a reason that writers - even writers at a comparable level of skill - are not interchangeable.

Hardly! I'd say your remarks are very much to the point. Couldn't agree with you more about the hazards of editing. Actually, I've been incredibly lucky in that regard - have managed to win all the battles that mattered most to me, which ultimately is what really counts, I guess - but the blood runneth cold at the thought of certain suggested edits that clearly betrayed the copy-readers' inexperience. (When did that function get relegated to the underpaid and undereducated apprentice level, I wonder. Maybe I don't want to know.) And I realize full well that one reason I've gotten off easy is that I've only written for formats with relatively slow turnaround. Uncle who was writing for a daily at the time tells nightmare tale of a music review wherein his editor carefully changed his mention of a "Savile Row suit" to "Seville Row suit" - without talking to him about it, of course (who has time for such niceties on a daily?), until after the fact. Editor confronts him with printed edition, shows him the "correction" and says something like "you're just lucky I caught this in time and kept you from embarrassing yourself." With support like that, who needs enemies?

Busted! That'll larn me to shoot off my mouth every time a smart-ass answer comes into my head. (Actually - nah, it probably won't, at that.) Just at the moment, I guess the answer is "remains to be seen." WWNorton has first refusal on my next book, but that and a coupla bucks'll get you on the subway. More to the point, there's no knowing whether or not they'll go for it (much has changed since the last one, both for them and for me) until I get my act together to finish the proposal and sell it, is there. Meanwhile, I write the occasional whimsically foody piece for Tin House; have one coming out in the next (spring) issue, but by the time we finished re-casting it to suit the theme for the issue it ended up being only loosely food-related. At least the title ("Dinner with the Borgias") still harks back to its earlier gastronomic intent.... In galleys now; not sure when it actually hits the stands - next month, I guess.

<simper> Modesty forbids.

And this from Bach, who was himself the music of the spheres! (Don't argue, just read Douglas Adams: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Explains it all.) Chefs, I dunno, though I assume so. Certainly there are *cooks* of whom it is true. And cooks of whom it ain't. With cooking as with music (uh-oh, she's getting on her hobby-horse): there are those who have a fabulous ear, there are those who have perfect pitch, there are those who are reasonably competent but not scintillating; there are those who are tone-deaf. Oh gosh, we *are* getting a bit OT here... sorry. But it's like what we were saying over on the Jar Opening thread - at one end of the spectrum there are those to whom it comes naturally and from whom it flows felicitously; at the other, those who will *never* feel at home with it no matter how hard they work at it. (I consider myself incredibly fortunate to be somewhere in the first category.) And then there's everyone in-between.

GG and Pan, thank you both - I love catching a compliment I've fished for. Yeah, Jenny's a hot number and she knows it.

I know - I vas dere, Cholly. But though he practiced diligently and put enormous thought and energy into musical interpretation, there was still an element of the idiot-savant there, in the sense that the physical intricacies of the instrument came so naturally to him that he couldn't quite connect with the idea that other people didn't, *couldn't*, have the same facility. He didn't have to *worry* about being able to play the fiddle; but he could lose sleep over a ping-pong match.

What indeed - at any rate, that's exactly how he felt about it. Was always a bit puzzled by all the fuss, always more interested in working at things like carpentry or ping-pong which actually held a challenge for him. Re food writing in newspapers, I'd like to put in a good word for some of the people doing the job at our local paper, Newsday. While I certainly concur with what's been said about the declining quality of newspaper writing in general (not to mention the teeth-gnashingly infuriating lack of intelligent or even competent copy-editing), there are a few bright stars in the local firmament, and Newsday's food editor Sylvia Carter is among them. (Yes, she's a friend, but I admired her writing for years before we met.) OK, so what makes her stuff (and that of the other admirable writers mentioned above) so good? Not unlike a good stew, it has all the requisite ingredients and comes out greater than the sum of its parts. Start with fundamental competence in writing - no problems at the building-block levels of grammar and syntax. Next level up: a graceful turn of phrase, an ear for the rhythm of words and sentences, a sense of structure and direction. A sense of humor is also pretty crucial, as is a feel for nuance and irony. Next level up: knowledge of the subject - not necessarily encyclopedic, but intelligent and well-researched where necessary. Next level up: a great instinct for what constitutes A Story. Sylvia's case is a good example because, as editor for the section, she isn't limited to any particular form (i.e. restaurant criticism, etc.); she has free rein and she knows how to use it, and every week her short feature is a little personal think-piece, or a sense-memory, or a story about some marvelous character, some off-the-beaten-track discovery that has caught her fancy - and whatever it is, the subject itself is always engaging or indeed compelling; the treatment ranging between the down-home and the poetic. (Last week's was about the self-perpetuaing collection of plastic containers - is there anyone here who doesn't feel a little thrill of recognition at that topic? She's writing about ME, I always think.) Overall, it's freedom, knowledge, passion and humor, layered over a solid technical foundation, and that is true of every truly readable [food] writer I can think of, from Brillat-Savarin to Dumas to MFK Fisher to Elizabeth David to Ruth Reichl to... better stop there or I might run into chapters. But for some reason I'm reminded of Elizabeth Zimmermann calling herself The Opnionated Knitter; and indeed she was to knitting - and to writing about it - what some of the above are to food: passionate and whimsical and confident and utterly convincing. And those qualities, I think, are the difference between good [food] writing and really great, compelling [food] writing. (The word "food" being in brackets there because of course, as others have already remarked, there's nothing here that doesn't apply equally to any other discipline.) It occurs to me that there is one thing that may set food writing apart from other areas. I'm talking through my hat here - haven't thought this through and am interested in doing so and testing it - but it seems to me that food writing lends itself more than most other categories to a use of the writer's personal thoughts and feelings and experience. Why? Maybe because food is so universal; there's no one who isn't touched by it, there's no one who doesn't have important and visceral memories and feelings connected to it; no one can be truly indifferent to it. Food writing doesn't *require* the personal element, but as I think about it I find that the writers who charm and engage me most (partial list in previous graf...) are those who do inject something of themselves into their work. Who *give* of themselves; great food writing is, above all, generous. I love to feel that I'm comparing notes with them about something that affects us both, or that I'm being given a glimpse of someone else's life, an insight into a memory that really matters to someone. Food writing is - or at any rate can be - more *intimate* than most other forms. And to do it that way requires a special kind of openness and courage on the part of the writer. At what point does one draw the boundary line between food writing and memoir? Maybe one doesn't.

Thanks - not that I had much choice...! Does she remember it? It's an awfully long time ago, and I haven't mentioned it to her in quite some time - nor, oddly enough, has she raised the subject - so I don't know. I'm quite sure she doesn't remember anything after that first mouthful of soused fruit. Ain't it always the way - I'm the one who was abruptly sobered up that night. She certainly is not a big drinker now, though one of her more amusing off-the-record rants as a wine columnist is about the taboo on mentioning the buzz factor of any given wine. She writes an amusing, anti-pretentious column - it appears weekly in the Rocky Mountain News and can be read online at Wine and Rosen. (If you go there, do admire her headshot - I took it.)

Oh - Passover, of course. Age about 7. None of your Man-o-Manischewitz, though - not that I'd have known this at the time, but knowing my family it has to have been a pretty decent burgundy. I don't imagine I really had much of it; but at that age it doesn't take much to, um, make you feel kinda funny.... Actually, they tell me that at 2or 3 I was fond of guzzling from a grandparent's beer glass if opportunity arose. Hmmmmm - funny, I don't seem to remember anything about it. Then once you got to be 13, you were allowed to join in "The Game" on New Year's Eve, which meant you had access to the Bola. A powerful but innocuous-tasting punch, not sweet, based on fruit which had been macerated in brandy for several days (during which process you could get a nice buzz just from taking a whiff). I, having been warned, got off fairly easy with this stuff, but my cousin was not so lucky; she wasn't crazy about the drink but she *loved* the fruit, and kept going back for more of it. No one noticed until she keeled over. She ended up staying the night. Most of it in my bathtub, as I kept having to haul her in there and clean her up. So maybe I didn't get off so easy after all. She is now a wine writer.

Mmmmmmm.... steak and kidney pud...!