Carrot Top

I went to my first "Panera". You know, that chain that advertises such wonderful bread and coffee and on and on. I picked up a "baguette" and thought I was back in olden times where grains were thinned with sawdust and possibly metal shavings. The thing should have been light, but it felt as if it weighed three pounds. Then I got some coffee, and sat down to drink the coffee and have some of the dreaded ancient baguette. They must have put sawdust in the coffee also. Blech. Blech. I tore off a piece of baguette - difficult to do, as it seemed pliable rather than tearable. One bite assured me that indeed, sawdust must have been used in the recipe. My mouth attempted to chew to little avail. Somehow I swallowed it, then stood up and dumped both the entire baguette and coffee in the trash. Stomped out of the place in quite a little mood. How can one ruin simple bread and coffee so completely? I ask you.

I just came across an old (Gourmet) magazine (1969) with an article on Portugese Egg Yolk Sweets. The two most interesting to me were the fios de ovos (thread eggs) where a "tiny hole is pierced in an eggshell half, and egg yolks are strained through the hole in a long thread into a pot of bubbling sugar syrup" and the trouxas de ovos (packs of eggs): "sheets of sweetened eggs yolks rolled into cylindrically shaped "packs" and served in a clear sugar syrup. [. . .] A spoonful of strained egg yolk is dropped into a boiling sugar syrup and cooked until it sheets and sets. The sheet is then rolled up into a little bundle." I also adored the name of yet another pastry - toucinho de cue. "Bacon from Heaven".

There once was a girl from Saigon Who only ate sweets and wontons Boys who ate pickles She thought were quite fickle And immediately sallied "So long!" .................................................. There once was a lawyer from Nimes Who ate ventricles pork fat and spleens Though admired for his head He was terrible in bed And could barely fit into his jeans. .................................................. There once was a lass from Pawtucket Whose attitude hinted she'd suck it But when it was time To pick up that lime In her fingers merely she stuck it. ..................................................... December requires limericks, to my mind.

Lawyers Breath Hot Sauce

That was in the last issue of Alimentum, wasn't it? I lent my issue to a friend, so can not check, but do remember the poem. Fantastic journal for "food lit".

This was probably. . .ouch. . .thirty years ago, Rachel - my first home with my first husband. No, I don't have them any more. I don't tend to save material things or even to take photographs of things, though I admire those that have the ability to do that. They are there firmly, in my memory, though. And that, is good. ....................................... The idea actually could be done in a more professional looking manner with either aprons or linens, old linens, or even old wooden spoons and things, matted and framed.

I echo Anne's sentiments, jgm. If I sounded cranky in my questions before, it was from wanting to be sure that paths were clear enough in all ways so that this *would* work in good ways for you both. Anne's chicken base recipe above might also be used wrapped inside crepes for a lovely and still inexpensive presentation. Instead of broccoli, mushrooms are also a tasty co-lingerer. Chicken crepes sided with a steaming mound of white fluffy rice. . .(!) Yum.

The nicest kitchen food art I ever had was aprons. Old aprons, from the thrift store, from the 1940's through the 1960's. Some were pink and polka-dotted with prints of poodles smiling with red bows tied on their little heads. Some were white sheer voile, fluffy and ruffly, with big bow pockets. Others were equally individual and equally charming. One year, I took them and stapled them directly onto the kitchen walls, angled here and there as if they were flying through the room with merriment. It was as if the spirits and joys of the cooks that wore them shone from the walls, smiling with pleasure at every good thing that was made there.

Yes, it certainly will be! It's interesting to watch the progression of "styles" both in the ads and in the articles presented. The older magazines seem to have much less of a focus on desserts or pastries than in recent years. I remember reading somewere that the original magazine audience focus was male, during the 1940's post-war period. Kind of a high-life, hunting with the hounds with beef wellington and brandy afterward sort of crowd. "Editor and Publisher: Earle R. MacAusland" - For years those words on the top of the first page enticed me. It always made me think of images of fishing for salmon with a Scottish hat, a walking stick, and a dog by my side, the mansion house in the far distance that I could just barely see where of course the maids were making shortbread and ironing linen sheets. . . .

I love that image of you and the sofa, Zoe (those things were so slippery, weren't they?!) . . .I wonder, too, if your Great Aunt made recipes from those stacks. . .or if she was a "reader" only, which is a fine thing to be. These were actually not the annual "books" I found but individual magazines, which were then carefully placed between the silver holder inside these thick black binders (which one used to be able to buy separately). Like jewels in a quiet black leather case. Yes, it certainly could have been a farm wife that spent her "egg money" on these. I'll always wonder. And here I thought you just sat around eating bon-bons all day, Lori. My image is dashed, dashed. Isn't it amazing that this sense can happen just through anticipation of the good things within the pages? Did it make the potatoes taste better at the time or worse in comparison, I wonder. Sometimes when I read things about fantastic things to eat the very words and images sort of "wear off" onto whatever it is that I am eating, sort of like standing in front of the window of Bendels, the mirror reflection of oneself pictured as being dressed exactly like the mannequins.

I have a confession. I used to be in love with a magazine. Gourmet Magazine, to be exact. It was a love affair that lasted some years. Today, I don't feel exactly the same about the magazine, but it could be that I am jaded. It is still a consequential magazine, to be sure. I'd like to share my story about this love affair, in hopes that my confession will lead you to confess in turn your own secret feelings about this magazine, both then and now. They say that confession is good for the soul, and certainly thinking of love is! The Gourmet Under the Table .................................................... The bright red, black and white roosters twitched their waddles, nodded and danced in the blaring sun that drove down upon the cages stacked in neat rows. There was nothing at all on the horizon but this small white house. You might really call it a shack. Its hand-lettered sign dangling from the grimy front window announced in broad yawning handpainted letters : “Beer. . . Cigarettes. . . Soda. . . Milk. . .” Nothing on the horizon but cornfields, wide hazy blue skies above, nothing but fine smooth black tar roads quartered together in insistent silence but for the rare bark of a dog in the distance, nothing but heat in the air and whatever was in that store. What was in that store was a man, always a man. Women did not come to this store, ever. Men came here, once in a blue moon. Sometimes they brought boys, boys that seemed even at tender ages of eight or ten to be younger versions of grown men, all of them quiet, watchful, all of them moving carefully out of their pickups into the store. The men chewed tobacco, the boys chewed gum alongtimes, in rhythm with their fathers. The roosters in their cages became anxious as I approached. I lived down the road a bit, in this rural paradise, and was curious about what this corner store could be. I’d never lived in this particular part of the agricultural South before, and was naïve about many things. We’d explored the fields around our house together, my children and I – the grounds so solidly damp from the humid air, the frogs of all varieties honking and hooting and crying each night from the small stream that trickled along next to the tobacco field that aligned itself to our back yard. The smell the tobacco gave off after baking in the sun all day, when the blue dusk fell, was mesmerizing and delicious. I walked out through the door of the sun room each evening and looked into the distance that held only the moon and dim tops of tobacco plants, and breathed deeply, as deeply as I could. I wondered how on earth this sweet fragrant enticing aroma could actually become a cigarette, with an aroma so different. Feathers fluffed and rose, shrieks and raucous cackles came from the cages. A man came out from the store. He didn’t say a word. Just looked at me. No expression crossed his face – the stubble of his beard looked like a gravestone. “Lookin’ for somethin’, ma’am?” he finally asked. I was trying to decide whether to smile or to run. The yankee lady (that was me) smiled. “Nice roosters,” came from her mouth, with what might have been a slight squawk herself. “Cocks,” he said. “Fighting cocks. I sell ‘em to folks round here.” …………………………………………………………………………… That was life in this small town. Sharecropping tobacco, growing field corn, maybe a factory job an hour down the road if you were real lucky, going to church (Baptist, please – move into town if you cared to be Methodist or Episcopalian) each and every Sunday with the family dressed up Sunday best, the preacher coming to do home visits of his parishioners once in a while, accepting a glass of spirits and a bit of cake (which might be home-made or might not) betting on cock-fights and dog-fights to make ends meet, deer hunting from the side of the long straight roads in fall, standing beside your pickup truck and watching the fields closely with binoculars – (lots of beer in battered coolers set inside the truck cabs) - just about the time the cornfields were burned to the ground to prepare for next season’s crop. Bear-baiting was a haute sport, not done by all but by the “best”, with huntin’ dogs, some cherished and sold at high prices, others dumped down by where the creek rose under the bridge at the edge of town, if they didn’t do as well as one might hope. A dog’s life was dependent on his performance, and sometimes, so were his master’s fortunes. Life had a hard edge in this small town in the South. “Gourmet” was not a word one would expect to hear here. There were two small restaurants in town itself, a Cracker Barrel up near the highway half an hour out in the always-stretching distance up the black tar roads, and a barbecue shack that served just barbecue, on the edge of town. Straight up. Pork barbecue. Vinegar-y sauce on the table. Buns that seemed as densely humid as the air, though sweet and soft, too. A side of long-cooked bacon-dubbed green beans or coleslaw, thick heavy hushpuppies with soda (“pop” in the vernacular) to drink with it all, or sweet tea. No, you would not expect to hear “gourmet” round these parts. ……………………………………………………………………… One day there was a book sale at the old dark-red brick library set to the center of town. The library was always rather strangely lit and often deserted. But a library book sale is a library book sale, so off we went to see what we could see, myself with a toddler on each outstretched arm. Long tables of dusty books. Many titles that one would never think to call one’s own, sad books that had hoped for better. The children found something each, of course – there is never a time when a child can not find some sort of book, a momentary treasure found to clasp to themselves with hopeful ardor of discovering a new world within. My hand ran drearily along the dusty hopeless spines of lines and piles of books that I sadly had no heart for. Then, from below the table, a gleam of gold lettering caught my eye. On black leatherette. A collection. A collection of old Gourmet magazines, hiding in the even deeper dust under the table. One set, two. Another? Yes, and another. All in all, six bound annual volumes of Gourmet. The years ranged from 1969 to 1975, with 1970 missing, oddly. Where did it go? Did the person who donated these keep the 1970 volume because that had been a particularly good year for them? And who was this mysterious person, living here in the midst of cornfields and tobacco farms, Baptist casseroles and fighting cocks, flat black tar roads that led only to more flat black tar roads – who read Gourmet magazine religiously enough in those years past to have gathered and carefully bound this collection of gastronomic ephemera? The volumes sit before me now. They’ve traveled with me through three different states, and yet more homes. The two little toddlers that held my hands have both grown now, each to be taller than me, yet these slightly faded volumes remain the same as the day I pulled them out choked with dust from under the table, a needle in a haystack, already aged volumes, out in a place where life does not resemble in any aspects easily discerned by the general observer, the smiling glossy ads for the “high life” pictured in the photographs on these pages. In Gourmet magazine, the year 1969 has no hint at all in it of muddy hay-strewn pickup trucks toting beer, guns, and deer meat. Opening to a page, Paris a Table appears, written by Naomi Barry. She tells of Dr. Johnson in his chophouse; Proust; Alexander Woollcott; and the Algonquin’s famous Round Table. It is a review of Drouant , the restaurant where the Academie Goncourt gathers to meet. The pages delight with the tastes of gigot de sept heures; chicken wrapped in pie crust; duck with peaches; the civet of baby boar with chestnut puree; a pate of woodcock en croute. The smells and colors fill the imagination, and we learn also that the bookshelf set in the far corner of the restaurant contains not only copies of all the Goncourt winners (since 1905) but also the works of Colette, a former president of the Goncourt Society. The evening quiet rises to fill my mind, the quiet perhaps that engulfed whomever it was first read this review in 1969, as they sat with the rich smell of fresh tobacco leaf right outside their backdoor, sitting in a comfortable chair right next to the yellow-orange beam of the reading lamp, their eyes and thoughts focused intently on images of Parisian night life of not only that singular year, but also of many sparkling years of the past, all spread deliciously out on the pages. Having to miss out on 1970 saddens me, but there is 1971 to discover. The page opens this time to “Fritters”. Fritters. They will tell us how to make fritters, and oh what fritters. Hushpuppies are fritters too, a familiar thing where the crows dive onto the bared cornfields. But the recipes in Gourmet do a wild dance indeed, through so many forms, with ingredients perhaps rare to behold at the local Piggly-Wiggly market: fritters of whitebait (would catfish work?); stuffed lobster; almond sole; fritto misto (daring to include both calves brains and sweetbreads in the mix); hard-boiled egg; shrimp and vegetable; sweet potato (wonder if that might be good with barbecue!); onion; cheese; savory cocktail fritters (maybe good for the town meeting next week. . .); Indonesian peanut; apple; flower fritters (goodness gracious is there anything these folk don’t try to eat?!); apricot salpicon; souffled fritters (daresay Mawmaw might take to that!); pineapple with frangipane custard; calas; and even oliebollen. Like marching soldiers or angels on wing, they follow along one right after the other, these recipes, leading one to line dance right along with them in time and place. The preacher might be knocking at the door unexpectedly as our imaginary reader‘s eye first traveled over the issues of 1972. A quick leafing leads to “Cooking with James Beard” where the master tells us about kebobs with his usual leisurely, informative style. The pages are dotted with bits of history dropped in a by-and-by manner (“Mrs. Ruffald, in the 1799 edition of The English Housekeeper, included a recipe for mutton kebobs. . .”) then we’re off for a whirlwind world tour as he instructs us all on how to make Turkish kebobs; souvlakia; Iranian kebobs; kofta; Moroccan kebobs; shashlik; shami kebobs; Moglai kebobs; venison kebobs (“serve the kebobs with a puree of chestnuts and drink a Burgundy” he advises); brochette Villeneuve; lamb chops en brochette; anticuchos; chicken hearts and livers en brochette; duck kebobs; Malaysian sates of pork and of chicken; sosaties; kabayaki; fruits de mer en brochette and brochettes Saint-Jacques. “Mornin’, Preacher,” says our reader from so long ago, opening the front door with a flourish, humidity rushing into the room with the usual glimpse of the endless black tar road outside. “Would you like some anticuchos?” The land is dark and blank, vistas edged by scrub, the closest neighbors’ Christmas tree lights barely visible a mile down the road as our reader tears December 1973 from its thick brown paper wrapper, fresh from the mailbox, cold fingers eagerly slipping round it, hurrying to get back into the warmth of the solitary house. And once torn eagerly open, there within is Lillian Langseth-Christiansen to entertain and entice on the subject of “Swedish Yuletide Baking”. Lillian informs us that “Sweden’s baking reflects her history and rejects her geography, and it combines flavors that come from the east with the light touch of France.” The beautiful story of the Feast of Santa Lucia is told, the recipes to make a candle-lit Swedish Christmas are amply provided – pastries rich with the scent of cardamom, colored like the sunshine with saffron, all rich with good butter and endowed with good names like drommar (dream cookies). The final page of December 1973 has “The Last Touch”, which this month comprises “Game Sauces”. Oh, just a few of those. Sauces made from chestnuts, their richly colored shells reminding one of that bay mare down the road a piece; a sour cream and mustard sauce; piquant sauce; lingonberry (wonder if those mulberries set down would do? Maybe add some crabapples, maybe. . .) sauce; fruited curry sauce with pine nuts; chasseur sauce; red-wine sauce. Game sauces might be not only useful but a way to bring variation in the days of these cold months when life reduces itself to labors done indoors - no tobacco to cut, no hay to bale, no land to till, even the woodpile cut and placidly waiting. Sophistication and elegance mark the June 1974 centerfold “Bachelor Dinners” in June 1974. It might have been a tough choice for our reader between the weeding that needed doing quick before it took right over the garden or between this suave entry. The bachelors that peopled Gourmet back then were advised in no uncertain terms to prepare dinners such as the following: Mackerel in white wine to start, double lamb chops with mustard butter accompanied by potatoes Savonnette as entree, chicory salad to cleanse the palate after, then a fine wedge of Brie as finish. Served with a Chateau Talbot ’64, of course. Guess those guys didn’t remain bachelors for long. Or maybe they did, cooking elegant dinners for themselves and their bachelorette companions, as they years rolled merrily on, well served by good food and even better wine. Could our reader have been this sort of man, ensconsed in a rural life, hearing the cocks crow at dawn as he diced rich ingredients for a Cognac-soused pate, knowing without even a hint of wonder that those same birds, this afternoon would fight to the death as bettor’s device? There were many other writers I knew in these pages - these people were the ones that taught me to cook, in times close to “way back then”. Married to a man who loved food, I adored and consumed the ways of cookery like potato chips, never being able to “eat just one”! Gourmet Magazine was the light of sustenance. In years to come, when I became a chef, there were other writings, other books, heavy tomes, that became my food for thought – but these words and stories written in Gourmet were the ones that first set my soul alight in ways that cooking, finally, as a professional, never really could touch in the same ways. The question still hums through my mind though: How did one get from “here”, this tiny quiet southern farming town where the soil was always present and palpable, the sun something that one relied upon to grow age-old traditional crops, to “there”, the pages of Gourmet that lauded the haute society and the histories of every civilized land and then some? Who had owned these volumes, who had read them and dreamed of foreign lands and worlds that held astonishments and treasures of food and culture? I don’t know. Serendipity left its touch when these volumes were so quietly given to that dank somewhat crumbling red brick library, in a town where (as a foreigner myself) never did I expect to find such a thing, never did I think to know someone was there, up the black tar road, maybe round the corner near where the dogs were dumped in late Fall, someone that loved these volumes and the worlds they essayed with as much intent and ardor as I did. The last image, the last year of volumes. 1975. Elizabeth Andoh relates with vibrancy her knowledge of the ways of the “The Seasonal Japanese Kitchen –Picnic Lunches”. I like to think of my imagined friend turning the magazine pages slowly, in the kitchen, the warm breeze moving slowly through the window, the frogs humming their seasonal melodies while the tobacco plants push up from the sienna soil, corn shoots nearby starting their even lines upward. He ponders at length the very serious question of where to find the dried hijiki and abura age needed to make a fine Hijiki no Nimono. Lifting the telephone receiver, he dials the number of the one person in the entire world he knows he can count on to hop in the car with him at a moment’s notice, crank up the AM radio, and make that long drive down the black tar roads to the far distant city, where he might find some of these ingredients that just don’t make their way out here. “Yep, sure – I’ll be right over. Let me just get someone to watch over these birds for me,” the man at the corner store smiles as he answers his brother. “It’ll be fun.”

My thought was that it is very possible that whomever this is that wants to learn to cook, does know the basics of nutrition, but simply does not know how to manage home cooking within the budget that is available. The category of population that one might define as being "fall through the crack" sort, who have *not* had the opportunity to learn even the basics of nutrition, generally *would* be able to being able to qualify for foodstamps, usually (or at least, from what I've seen, but of course I have not seen everything in the world). And the WIC programs are as "teaching-nutrition" focused as they are anything else. What I have noticed as a growing population is young married couples who *do* own homes and car(s) and nice clothes and who have had access to good educations who simply do not know how to manage money in our credit-focused society. This group can get into trouble in most basic ways - such as having so many bills to pay each month that when it comes to putting food on the table in a basic sort of manner (which they do not lack the education about as many have college-level educations) they simply have never had to do it, so they flounder. My reason for thinking that jgm's student did have enough basic education to know basic nutrition (which is so prevalently taught in most of of our "middle-class" society) is the fact that food stamps were not an option in this situation. But nothing was really specified about the exact situation beyond this, so it was just a guess on my part. I do admit to being curious, though. .................................................. Edited to correct spelling of the word "month" which somehow I must have gotten snotty and spelled "monthe".

The answers to these questions will help, possibly: *Does she enjoy grocery shopping? *Is she able to travel to different stores for different items when she shops? There may be transportation issues (besides the fact of a pregnant woman managing her other child while she shops). *What are her most successful dishes "now"? Which ones work time after time? This ties into the "build upon success" theories. *Are there things that she or her husband do not like to eat? *How much time does she spend now cooking? Does she like to linger over cooking or get it done as quickly as possible? Is she mostly a homebody who will putter away at cooking, or is she an out-and-about person whose activities are mostly out of the house? *Is she or her husband an inveterate "snacker"? *Is a portion of the food budget going to beer or wine and if so can this be focused in on to improve costs? *If they dine out frequently, is it because of the social aspects of restaurant dining or is it simply from the wanting to have someone else do the cooking? If it is the social aspect, this could be addressed by hosting pot-luck dinners, perhaps.

I'd also ask her if she tends to cook "what her husband likes to eat" because this knowledge could lead to a more finessed learning plan. So to speak. What I'm trying to say here is that what you teach her needs to be what she wants to learn, not what one might think she *needs* to learn from anyone's viewpoint but her own. A lot of things bear weight upon this, if what she learns will, finally, be used in her everyday life, or if they just are things that she learns then does not really care to use for one reason or another. Was that clear? I won't, I promise, try to say it again.

No ideas, strategies, or comments, but a couple of questions. What are her "beginning-level cooking skills" composed of, in reality? What does she cook now? Where did she learn these skills? Is it the economic factor that is urging her in the direction of wanting to learn about cooking, or a sincere interest in actually doing cooking? It seems to me that both these questions will bear weight upon whatever plan the two of you come up with that will "work". For the best lesson plans in the world will not work unless one knows the student's basic impetus for wanting to learn. If there is a true love of cooking, then almost anything you choose to teach her will be taken in and used well. If this is being done mostly from a sense of duty, the task will be more difficult, and the "lessons" would have to be tailored to that knowledge.

Arabesque by Claudia Roden

The date does creep up on one. Today I was trying to think of something the kids could make. The idea of rag-wreaths came to mind, with the added touch of little cellophane-wrapped bags of homemade cookies or candies. The wreaths are easy to make - just get styrofoam wreaths then cut colorful fabric strips into rectangular pieces that can be pushed (with a pencil point or even a lobster pick ) in the middle into the foam, leaving the two ends sticking out. Use an assortment of fabric, and push the pieces in closely so that none of the base shows. If I was really smart, I'd cut up some of these tons of boxes of outgrown kid's clothes into strips for the fabric. But probably they will make their way to the Salvation Army as usual. The prettily wrapped packages of cookies or candies could be then tied onto to the finished wreath with ribbon or gold elastic cord.

I. need. oysters. now. And, Need dog, too. (She looks like a Blue-Heeled Hound I used to know. Good cattle dogs. Charmers, too. )

Pablo Neruda's Elementary Odes. Some bits and pieces: From Ode to Tomatoes: we pour oil, essential child of the olive, onto its halved hemispheres, pepper adds its fragrance, salt, its magnetism; it is the wedding of the day, parsley hoists its flag, potatoes bubble vigorously, the aroma of the roast knocks at the door, it's time! come on! From Ode to an Artichoke: The sedulous cabbage arranges its petticoats; He sings, Neruda.

And from bread itself comes bread sauce. Bread sauce is a quiet nonchalant sort of thing, generally most self-deprecating the year round as it awaits its seasonal turn to appear with an arrogant burst of self-confidence as it brims from fine china gravy tureens at holiday time. Yet bread sauce holds in memory a long past, with paths meandering far and wide into other manners and means, perhaps related, perhaps simply co-existing. Yet each relation or close ally is made from the base form of bread, dashed into crumbs then set to gay dalliance with other good and warming things. Bread sauce was known in Ancient Rome, and from there it travels on forward through time, taking different forms of style. In this essay on a 1545 Remove for a Dinner Party we find that the breadsauce has become green with herbs, similar to what we now might call salsa verde. A hop skip and a jump brings us to the equitable joys of skordalia from Greece; gazpacho (which of course is a soup, but still we might include it for the familiarity of the humble stale bread crumb base, blended with liquids to make a fine dish); and ajo blanco, which is called the "original" gazpacho, showing a Moorish influence. During the Civil War in the US, roast partridge with breadsauce must have been a treat, the hunters carrying home braces of partridge to roast over the coals of the fireplace or stove, the stale bread generously endowed with flavor and spice to enrichen and blend together the strong flavors of the game and the creamy sauce. Fanny Farmer offers a recipe for bread sauce in her 1918 classic Boston Cooking School Cookbook, and our interest and curiosity in finding ways to use bread as sauce today is shown in a rustic, delightfully mouth-watering sauce povera for pasta from Italy - little cubed bread sauce and in a lovely minted bread sauce from the Naked Chef, Jamie Oliver. The classic bread sauce served today at many Christmas dinner-tables is soft, filled with scent of nutmeg and a gentle waft of onion, as in this traditional bread sauce. Indeed, we might need to call this recipe (as Henry James would have it) - "the time honored bread sauce of the happy ending" - though surely more shapes and surprises have yet to come. .......................................................................................................................................... Edited to sweep up crumbs of loosened grammar.

Here is something on food culture from an anthropological view: Food and Eating

Here is something I enjoyed reading about food culture from an anthrolopolgical perspective: Food and Eating. Most discussions of "food culture" *are* geographically based, but it seems to me that even within these groupings, it is important to know the similarities that *all* cultures share. This possibly can offer one a deeper understanding of the "hows and whys" of the individual geographic cultural groupings rather than the simpler "this is how and what it is". P.S. My own geography is off - I meant to post this in the Food Culture thread. Will do so now.

You know I've had the good fortune to have read in full that poem of yours before, Rachel. Yet each time my eyes (and my heart) take it in, I am astonished anew at the power it holds. Yes, I do, ma'am. (Though I must admit to a terrible impulse rising within me to poke that Poacher quite sharply in his behind several times with a sharp sewing pin before he's allowed free from the pot. ) Thank you for sharing your magic with us this week.

If you're going to be Lucullus, you will need many slaves.

In comparison to that guy, I feel rather sane. Darn it.