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Carrot Top

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  1. And rightfully so! As inventor, you must know that many great inventions were discovered by Mistake. I wonder, actually, what the percentage of inventions discovered by mistake actually are. . . as opposed to those found by sitting and sternly (with visage set, of course) analyzing. Mistakes. A Way of Life to Invention. ............................................ You passed by Naughty. You were only mildly naughty in doing so. I suspect you can be much naughtier, given the chance. I'll talk naughtily, instead. N is for naughty which in food means two things. It means children and it means sex. Separately, of course, though I've heard that one can lead to the other and that one at times can prevent the other from happening. Children can and do show horrible naughtiness with intent through food. What else does a young child have to show it with? Food is a basic, it is something that *will* appear each day in some form before them from Those Big People Who Think They Can Tell Me What To Do, and therefore is an active participant in any plans toward naughtiness. Some ideas for any young children reading this, to aggrevate those caring for you: *Refuse to breast feed, or alternately, bite so damn hard when you do it that one believes you have been born with dinosaur teeth. *Drink an entire bottle of milk then purposely projectile vomit the entire thing onto your mother. Try to do this right as she has finished dressing for work. *Cereal is an excellent tool for naughtiness. Dry, it can be found in its box and poured all over the floor as art medium, to sit in and throw all over the place, making lovely designs as you go along. That yucky wet cereal stuff, of course, is best thrown directly onto the ceiling. Accomplish this by smacking the spoon approaching you upwards, with a sudden unexpected motion. Then quickly, while all eyes are staring at the lumps of yucky wet stuff hanging from the ceiling, upend the rest of the bowl onto their laps with a loud happy cry. *Fresh vegetables can be stuck up your nose or in your ears to try to look like an alien or walrus. If you push hard enough, this can even warrant a trip to the emergency room. Beans stuck up the nose are a classic naughtiness through the ages. *Meat, fish, and poultry can be refused on any grounds whatsoever, worrying Those Big People into thinking that indeed, you will starve, lacking protein. *Try to develop a hunger for soda and junk food. It is not hard, actually, for most children to do this. This will worry not only your parents but society at large, giving you a much larger scope within your naughtiness. There are so many more ways to be naughty with food as a child. Do try them all. Add Obstinacy to your naughty food ways, and indeed you will be quite fearsome. ......................................................... More on the other sort of naughtiness later, perhaps. There is pizza sauce on my couch that I must go clean. Naughty children.
  2. For anyone who does like the sort of writing about food that MFK Fisher represents, I highly suggest a subscription to Alimentum. There is more in the print publication than there is in this online version, much more, and to my knowledge is the only focused journal of this specific type, that is, "food writing" that is fiction not cooking class, food writing that is poetry not standardized recipe, food writing that is creative nonfiction not a report on the state of our oranges or a fawning admiration of a chef who will put food in our mouths for money (the haute and snob value of the food dependent of the $$ handed over). It is a nicely bound little journal with art that warms and interests within, too, line drawings and illustrations.
  3. Here's the first post in this topic for anyone who cares to refocus on it:
  4. You've got me there, Rachel. So I googled it and came up with this: It's from this site. They sell nice stuff like canned Turducken for the dog in your life.
  5. Oh yes. All true, what you say, and I can agree. My stomach churns at the immensity of all this (if, as you say, the details are true, but even if they are not exactly true her plate was filled with more than enough for one woman - particularly one who stood quite alone often - to deal with). But here is my question: (I find that no longer can I avoid asking it for fear those who have not read the biographies will happily be able to avoid thinking of these things.) Did she sleep with married men? For *that* is where I think the crux of disappointment with her might lay, with women who have heard this or read this. Not that she was just "mean" or "bitchy" or even someone who had many lovers. This is something that many women will not forgive in a woman they felt they had placed trust in. It is a form of meanness that is difficult to accept or forgive, particularly when one realizes the chaos that can follow in the lives of those whom the action envelops. It is hard to forgive a meanness that can involve not only adults but by extension, their children, those times when this action leads to more trouble within that difficult and delicate balancing act called "marriage". I don't really know whether this is true or not - I discarded the one biography I owned because I did not want to read it again, and the contents of the second biography are only hearsay to me, so that is rather moot. At this point I don't even really want to know the answer, really. It's a shame it had to be asked. It's a shame, maybe, that we have to know the people we read are sometimes very far from what we would wish them to be. But I guess it's better to go through the fire rather than around it, in terms of dealing with these things, once the wind has started to blow. There is really no escape. (And I'm also pretty sure that if I had to analyze the ethics and morals of every writer I ever read before I read them, or do the same before buying groceries at the store, or anything else, then act upon my own feelings of outrage or disappointment in what I found out about the people I was dealing with every day, probably the best bet would be to become a hermit and do nothing but whittle a piece of wood into sailboats all day long.) .................................. Again, I note - obviously, what one does in bed, and whether it is considered to be "mainstream" enough to be considered acceptable or moral at the time. . . is not something that *should* be linked to an author's writerly prowess. But then again, the shape these writings took made many of her readers feel that she was leading them somewhere. . .that she was a leader. In particular it seems that women have had this sense with MFK (from "anecdotal" information). When one acts as leader, one can be challenged to act as one hopes a leader would act, in ways large and small in "real life". Of course she may never have intended to be considered in this way, as a "leader". The writings may have done it by themselves without her consent, so the linking of expectations to MFK herself as a person may be just a will-o-the-wisp created by stories loved and therefore made real in ways they never were expected to by the author. And actually, in final analysis, that is what I think. That perhaps she never expected to be read or loved as deeply as she finally proved to be. Hoped for it, maybe. Knew it would happen, no. So I can not link the life and the writing any more. The writing stands alone, separate.
  6. I'm always interested in everyone's sex life.
  7. I would agree with you there, completely. But then again, the women that wrote of feeling betrayed in a sense by MFK may have read her differently, may have read her more personally, may have read her as someone who spoke in her readings of how to live. I can see how you read her as a person, but can also see quite clearly (as a woman) of how she could be read as a woman, and can guess at how she might be read as a woman by a man (all in a general sense, setting aside for the moment the specifics of personality in all the readers cases). To each one their own sort of reading, as well as to each one their own sort of take on other things. I can (and am, this time) reading her in a different way than I did in the times before, and that there is this depth to read at all, in very different ways over the years, says much to me about the writing. As to the rest of it, I would like to be able to read her free and clear of the personal life attached. We'll see if I finally manage it. On the other hand, "scholarly" reading, the sort that is done in academic circles, demands that one take into account as much as one possibly can not only about the writer themself and how they lived their life up to and including the culture they live(d) within, in order to "fully" understand for purposes of critique, the writing, no?
  8. Have you had the opportunity to read the two biographies of her? It likely is not from her writings that women might consider her a bitch if they do, but rather from biographic reports of specific incidents in her own "real" life that would infer the personal traits that would make other women call her that. One can have a profoundly generous sympathy for tortured human creatures and yet. . . . still be capable of inflicting torture upon other human creatures through personal actions taken. . . Some might be thinking of the old adage "Actions speak louder than words." I guess on these things each individual must finally choose the side to take that suits them best, then be ready to live with the consequences of that philosophic choice should the same reality ever pop up in their own life. . . realizing that to excuse actions undertaken by someone who knowingly will dole out pain to others should be of equal import as excusing those actions taken if they were directly and explicitly aimed at you.
  9. I think a lot of the "food writing" that exists falls more under the aegis of "journalism" than "creative writing". That it might be so due to market demand is plausible. But naturally, all plausabilities, to my mind, exist simply to be poked at. Anais Nin just came to mind as a writer who MFK reminds me of in ways, or the other way around, whatever. With the general body of their writings, in ways. Though its been a long while since I read Nin, so I'll have to take a closer look to be sure. (Just imagine. . .if MFK had written a book of erotica, as Nin did.)
  10. Yeah. I get you. But then again, it can be looked at the other way, too. It may have been her "personal baggage" used well that made her who she was as a writer. Unless that is what you meant but said upside down. I guess one would have to decide whether personal baggage is something that "belongs" in food writing. Or if it should remain hidden, covered by the food entirely. Blanketed by the food. Untasteable.
  11. What are your own thoughts on this, Max? Would you care to elucidate further?
  12. Yeah. Well I must have been channeling Erica Jong last night. What can I say. .................................................. Next on Janet's list is Lazy. I understand this word, and actually adore it in ways. L is for Lazy and the best way to show the true meaning of this word is merely to repeat the words of others in place of my own. Yesterday I bought a book called "The Little Giant Encyclopedia of Outrageous Excuses". Thinking that sooner of later, you know, I might have a chance to use each and every one, in support of laziness as opposed to the dreaded self-discipline. Here are some listed under the category of "food and drink": On chocolate: On what to say to fend off vegetarians as you chow down: .................................................................................................... L is also for loquatious, which is a habit of mine. I don't mean to hog the space, but will merrily prattle on just waiting for others to post.
  13. Happy happy joy joy happy happy joy! Alimentum has lauched its online journal.
  14. All above, writers that are so very different, each from the other, and all and each from MFK. There are writers of older traditional cookbooks that have a bit of the story-telling essence in tiny parts, but never with a full story-line developed that I know of (though I am sure there may be some that I don't know of). Elizabeth David - I think of someone who *taught* about food. Recipes, lots of recipes (though not codified) from "different places", with prose attached. Mostly I put her in place as one of the Beau Monde of that time and place, the literati glitterati that inhabited parts of Europe as ex-pats from here or there. James Beard had a strong American voice. He wrote not of Europe all the time, but about "us", in his here and now. There was an essence of a man who loved to eat and who loved to cook, and who *did* cook. I think of him actually physically cooking, much more than I think of Elizabeth David cooking, for example. Again, I think of him as a teacher. Lots of recipes, and very well codified for the "modern" cooks use. Ruth Reichl I think of as a modern Renaissance woman. Not specifically or solely a "food writer" but a professional and a businesswoman who wears many capable and creative hats, able to move from hat to hat unblinkingly. The hat of restaurant reviewer was one that she wore for an extended time, so that one wins out for me in a certain defining way. . . (so far, who knows what else she might do in the future). Jane Grigson had a formalcy to her writings - they were very categorical and amazingly detailed. I don't think of her in the form of "storyteller" as much as "Professor JG". AJ Liebling to me wrote of food as a secondary interest. Again, I think of him as part of a different "Beau Monde" the one that existed here, the literary set, the sporting set, and that is a thing in itself to be. I don't think of him as primarily a "food writer", but much more a journalist who happened to write about food sometimes. I still do not think that MFK (with this reading, this time, that I am doing of her) is writing primarily about food. She also primarily seems to me to be of the Beau Monde set of that time, to have sprung from those social advantages and certain pressures and ways of being, which puts a certain form upon most writers that inhabit those worlds. I think she chose to try to write about large themes and used the device of food to do it. I am also not completely sure that all the stories (and not only the personal parts) are "true", even the stories about eating and food and how the story played. She writes like a fiction writer, like a story teller. She is boldly romantic. There also seems to me to be a large portion of sexuality (besides the quieter sensuality) scooped right into her writing, which is quite different than the other "food writers" (I'm not sure about Dumas, there may be some there, but of a different shape or taste. . .?). Is the sexuality also being used as literary device? An injection of that, well done, into her works, is not uncommon. And it works, for her. With bold knife and fork, it works. The recipes she includes in the book are almost as desultory follow-up to her stories/essays, in many cases. . .and in others, they are phrased and handled so that the teaching of cooking food still does not take precedence over the Story. She was different, yes. And those who are loyal to her have a deep and intense loyalty, for she is not just talking about how to cook food in her writing - she's talking about other things, life things. And that, also, is where some are beginning to question their trust in her writing. She wrote not just about food, or even mostly in some ways. She wrote about deeper (forgive me, is there such a thing?!) things than food. Perhaps her story-telling ways affected "food-writing" in that it pushed it forward into something that could freely move into different genres, and made writing about food more appealing to those who might not have an intense interest in food itself, or recipes themselves, or how to cook themselves, but who certainly were ready to be charmed by a story that could sing, in many many ways. To me, she is a story teller who tells stories that have food as defined focus, food as literary device. The other writers mentioned about, focus on food first. . .and not as literary device for the most part, but with the story to follow. But I don't think of them as having "descended" from her in any way, though she is much publicly lauded as our "first food writer".
  15. K is for knowledgeable (a word it takes some knowledge to know how to spell). What is knowledge? In food, of course, as we are talking and thinking of food. Is it knowing how to cook? Is it knowing how to read and perhaps adjust a recipe? Is it knowing how to cook without a recipe placed in front of one? Sometimes you hear "That guy sure knows a lot about food!" or. . ."That woman has such little knowledge in the kitchen it is amazing her family doesn't starve!" (Gender definitions and irony intended here.) In the past if you didn't know how to pluck a chicken, you might not be considered knowledgeable about food. . .or how to milk the cow, or make butter, or bread, or grow a garden. But that has changed, and new things have taken the place of the collection of facts now needed to be considered "knowledgeable". Does this mean we are now stupider in not knowing? Perhaps. . .perhaps not. My theory of knowledge is that facts are not enough. Facts (or what pass for them, sometimes, in an increasingly information-driven world) are like flies at a summer picnic - they are everywhere. They drone on at one from television commercials, they hearken from newspapers, they come and sit on your arm where you have to swat them off in zillions of cookbooks in gazillions of flavors. More and more and more. Facts take you as far as your nose and no further, in cooking (as in all other things - love, war, or play). You can pile them on like sausages on a platter. Tell me where they take you. Perhaps they can take one to a recitation of them, a bowing to them, a smiling nodding of "knowing", from one to another or from one at another. And where do they take you. Whack! Smack! Back and forth the facts fly, just being facts. Knowledge means taking the facts and kneading them into a different loaf. Make the loaf yours, if you can. Why not? Let the facts swirl around your fine loaf, dancing and prodding at it, as they live in the air of facts. Perhaps take a fact and paint it onto your loaf - but don't do it according to any other fact. Make it your own way. Why not? What is there to lose? A fact or two? What is there to gain? Something you've cooked that is just yours, done just your way, as you like it maybe? Make a knowledgeable chowder, a mousse, a pickled pig's foot, a deep dark sauce of your facts. Toss a pizza of your facts into the air and see what comes down. Don't let the facts pile up on the tip of your nose. Cook them, bite them, lick them and digest them if possible. Cook them into something your own. Only you know what that is, true? Only you.
  16. Thank goodness you posted that, Jack. Now I'll be able to make myself understood next time I go to a Cockney Pie and Mash Evening, or a Cockney Pie and Mash Function.. Now my tastebuds are all a'quiver for some jellied eels! Must go put on my Pickwick Papers cap and set out to find some, armed with my new vocabulary. Wish me luck.
  17. I wish you best of luck, Janet, but do not think you really need it for if you are decisive enough it is possible that you might not *have* to whistle for luck to come. Organized (or even organised) won't happen here tonight, with two children, two evening activities in different directions they need to be taken to and home from, and two different desires for what they like for their dinners. I can decisively say that.
  18. Where is the drooling smilie face? Yikes, that sounds good! The only time I've ever indulged in all the morels I wanted was in Battle Creek, Michigan of all places. There was this fantastic huge old fancy grocers right downtown in the middle of the rest of downtown, which was rather depressed. An enormous place, thirty foot high or so ceilings, food stuffed in everywhere, elegant food but not elegant tables for it. Everything was sort of wearing out in the place, though there was still a big black grand piano near the entrance where on Saturdays there was actually a man in black tie who would come play (!). I remember the meat department which had a separate cold room. . .startling. It was freezing in there. Then there was the produce. Every. single. thing. you could possibly want, laid out just funky-like. I think it was in the Fall that one day morels suddenly appeared, huge boxes of them toppling over, mounded high. I thought I was hallucinating. No, it was morels. And though they were not cheap, they were *not* expensive, either. Three pounds I bought. They disappeared very quickly. I think they were there for about three weeks, in that incredible store. An astonishing find, just like yours was. Thanks for reminding me of that time.
  19. I see that you skipped "I" for "indecisive". Not sure whether that was through exteme good manners in avoiding using "I" too much or whether you are never indecisive. Or whether you just couldn't decide whether you wanted to be indecisive or not. Decisions, decisions. P.S. Puff pastry is not something everyone has to master, just as being calm is something not everyone has to master either. Personally I haven't made puff paste in years.
  20. E is for Envious which is what I have been sometimes, when viewing the large, well endowed, shiny expensive kitchen that belongs to someone else. My kitchens have been all sorts of shapes, and never yet a perfect one. Is there such a thing as a perfect kitchen? Does anyone know? How could there be such a thing as a perfect kitchen if the cooking done in it is always progressing, growing, changing, as cooking will do sometimes. The thing is, that most of the perfect kitchens I've seen are unused. When asked, their owners will smirk a bit, with some little pride, and say. . ."Well. . .I really haven't the time to cook. . ." or " I had it done this way to improve the value of the house." Really, though I can smile dimly in response to these things, mostly both ideas strike me as rather obnoxious. Not the people. . .but the ideas. Obnoxious ideas. A kitchen is to be used, whether there is time for it or not. A kitchen built for monetary value gives that, and that only. And what is that?! The Emperor may hoard his gold, but sooner or later he will find he has no clothes. And he will be not only naked but hungry too. And what will be there, with its little smirk? The large, well-endowed, shiny expensive kitchen that holds nothing to eat, nothing at all. Well. . .maybe a Frito or two. But no more. Envious? No, no longer, not after understanding the reality of the perfect kitchen that is not.
  21. So the pasta machine has better hands than you? It can baby a thing better? Karen (who prefers real to steel and something with a brain attached rather than not, any day ) (Please be sure to loudly sing opera as you roll the dough through the rollers. . . .)
  22. Not for Nothin', SB, but that was beautiful. Previous to this, my belief was that where beauty exists, there can not be Nothingness. But you've turned that concept upside down now, haven't you. I'm going to continue on with Janet's list, because I liked it and it gives a form to the very vagueness of life. ................................................................ "C" is for Calm Calm is one thing in food. It is puff pastry. Puff pastry can not be made well unless there is a calm enough atmosphere surrounding it, and unless it is handled calmly. It can be made competently if calm is not there, but not really well. The cool flour feels like silk in the bowl. Run your fingers through it - smooth, soft, light, and somehow enchanting. If it does not feel this way, if it feels coarse, sticky at all, warm, or heavy. . .there is something wrong already. The dough must be handled in a calm manner or it will become angry. "Be swift and deft!" are the instructions I remember reading in an old cookbook, a regular cookbook, not a fancy one, one written sometime in the 1940's for housewives. . .and each time since then when approaching making a pastry dough, the words slip into my mind. "Be swift and deft!" Some hands are more attuned to pastry than others. The test is always a short crust, one will always discover innate potential or not, with the making of a short crust. Yet with puff pastry the test goes further. It must be babied a bit, though not indulgently, but calmly. It must rest. It must be folded just so, again and again. Inbetween the folds a measure must be taken, a sense of whether the dough is ready to fold, whether it wants to be folded just yet over the chilled dense molded butter that will fill it with air and height and a towering magnificence that almost reeks of deity invoked when done perfectly, or whether it is resisting the forward movement into becoming what you intend it to be. Any urgency during this time will tilt the progress sideways a bit, edging the final product into a slightly different shape and taste, texture and look. The butter itself is calm, or should be. It should not be hot or weepy, stiff or cranky. It must be ready and willing, desirous even, of being wrapped within the arms of the soft yet strong dough that encloses it. "Be swift and deft! Have a light hand!", exhorted the old battered cookbook. How else to retain a calm dispostion in the face of struggles toward things larger than we think we can become, just as the homey untried ingredients of flour, water and butter meld together in inspired concert to become not just one's daily bread, but instead a castle of edible dreams.
  23. Here's some info, Sandy: New England Cheese Companies The last information surprised me until I realized the focus was on the word "factory". Interesting. . .
  24. Right you are, markk. I'm not sure who should get most of the credit, but I should have mentioned him. I guess the picture was in my mind of him cooking away there, being endlessly entertaining, while she wrote all about it. Probably she came to mind first because when I think of food books, I usually don't think of Alan King. But that could be a lack on my part.
  25. Salami and Eggs might be considered the Jewish cultural equivalent to the Saturday afternoon Burgers on the Grill by the WASPS (here in the US, anyway). Both, traditions that have special masculine components endowed within them. Don't ask me what, but they do. Mimi Sheraton wrote a book called Salami and Eggs: Better than Sex?. . . .
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