Gary Allen's Blog, page 16

The Carrot Quest

A guest post by Joel S. Denker:


The familiar orange carrot was once an oddity. It is just a little more than four hundred years old. The purple carrot, originally domesticated in Afghanistan in 900 A.D., was dominant until the orange root was bred by Dutch gardeners in the 1600s. As surprising as this tale is, its uncovering is equally intriguing. Scouring paintings in the Louvre and other museums during the 1950s, an unsung Dutch agronomist made a stunning discovery about the change in the carrot’s color. By the seventeenth century, he observed, the orange carrot was becoming more prominent in the still life paintings of his homeland. The story of the carrot is just one of the hidden tales my book, The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, recounts. Like the carrot, most of the foods we eat have reached us only after traveling a long, intricate path, with many twists and turns along the way. I explore how a wide range of ingredients, from artichokes to strawberries, were in different locations invested with new meaning. They acquired not only culinary significance but also ceremonial, medicinal, and economic importance. Foods were variously relished, revered, and reviled.I took many foods, common and unusual, for granted. Determined to overcome my complacency, I began the quest out of which this book was created. The carrot was one of my early subjects. When my wife, Peggy, urged me to dig into its story, I first resisted, wondering how such an ordinary vegetable could be of any interest. As I delved into its history, I was surprised to learn of the carrot’s beginnings as a purple root. When I shared my discovery with friends, they were also tantalized. I presented the results of my investigation to an annual meeting of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. The audience of historians, cooks, gardeners, and culinary amateurs reacted with enthusiasm. I was spurred to continue.It is easy to forget that commonplace foods were once mystifying. Fernandez de Oviedo, the sixteenth century Spanish traveler, groped for ways to describe the alien avocado. “In the center of a fruit is a seed like a peeled chestnut.” Its paste, he observed, was “similar to butter.” Since the avocado resembled a pear, the Spaniard recommended enjoying it with a pear.The tomato, a recent import to Italy from Spain, puzzled the Italian physician Pietro Andrea Mattioli. It is another “species of eggplant,” he reported. In the Middle East, the banana, which was probably carried there from India by Arab traders, piqued the curiosity of Crusaders in the Holy Land. “There is also another fruit called apples of Paradise,” wrote Burchard of Mt. Zion in 1282. “It grows like a bunch of grapes, having many grains (fruits)…. These grains are oblong in shape, sometimes six fingers and thick as a hen’s egg.”Before strange foods became ordinary and commonplace, people had to overcome their visceral distaste for them. One of those reviled was the cucumber. “Raw cucumber makes the churchyards prosperous.” As this sixteenth century English saying suggests, the cucumber once raised the specter of death. Scientific opinion and popular prejudice combined to give the gourd a fearsome quality. “It has been a common saying of physicians in England that a cucumber should be well sliced and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing,” Samuel Johnson wrote. Culinary authorities would also be dismissive. Isabella Beeton, the Victorian food writer, wrote that a “cucumber is a cold food and difficult of digestion when eaten raw.” She added that “delicate stomachs should avoid the plant, for it is cold and indigestible.” Some herbs and spices, now in fashion, only slowly came into vogue when distaste for them faded. Coriander, whose leaves perk up Mexican, Indian, and Thai cooking, was once dubbed the “stinking herbe.” Older commentators compared its scent to that of the stink bug. Modern food opinion was also initially disdainful. Food anthropologist Margaret Visser suggests that the “green leaves of the plant are said to smell like squashed bed-bugs.”Foods were also surrounded by superstitions and taboos. The eggplant was viewed suspiciously from its earliest days. In Spain, it was not only viewed as a “semitic” food but also as a carrier of ills. Wherever the eggplant migrated, feelings of dread followed. The Moors in Spain, the story went, planted the poisonous vegetable in order to kill Christians. In Italy, where it was transported by Arab traders, the eggplant was called melanzane, from the Latin mala insana, or mad apple. A host of maladies were imputed to it. Castore Durante, the sixteenth century physician, blamed melancholy, cancer, leprosy, and headaches on eating eggplant.Even in the Middle East, where it would be passionately embraced, it was originally disdained. In his book on poisons, Ibn Washiya, an Arab toxicologist, declared the raw vegetable poisonous. “Its color is like the scorpion’s belly and its taste is like the scorpion’s sting,” according to an eleventh century Bedouin saying, cited by food scholar Charles Perry.Conversely, foods, especially those invested with sacred symbolism, could also inspire wonder and awe. In ritual, ceremony, and primal rites, they gave a larger meaning to life. The crimson pomegranate was a symbol of holiness, fertility, and abundance. Both the Jews and the early Christians were devoted to the fruit. Renaissance painters who linked the pomegranate to the Christ child made it a religious motif.Just as food plants could be sacramental, they could also be denounced by the religious establishment. Coffee, which had become a popular drink in the Islamic coffeehouses, threatened clerics. Fearful that these new venues would lure their flocks away from the mosque, the imams tried to stamp them out.Even in Christian Europe, coffee was greeted warily. Catholic priests attacked the “hellish black brew,” a drink they considered only fit for Muslims. They failed to persuade Pope Clement VII, who, in the early 1600s rejected their entreaties: “We shall cheat Satan by baptizing it,” he declared.Food was also the raw material for myths and legends. Treasured by many as an auspicious fruit, the pomegranate took on darker tones in Greek myth. The goddess Persephone, who was spirited away to the underworld by Hades, the lord of the lower depths, was tempted to eat a “honey sweet” pomegranate seed. As a consequence, she was condemned to stay underground during the winter months and only ascend to earth in the spring. Many plants were esteemed as much for their curative powers as for their culinary attractions. Before it was transformed into an everyday food, celery, for example, was valued for its restorative seeds and leaves. Its bitterness and pungent fragrance, which have been largely bred out of the modern vegetable, made “water parsley” a popular medicine. The plant was hung in the rooms of ancient Greeks suffering severe illnesses. Years later in England, the herbalist Nicholas Culpepper praised celery as a tonic: The plant was “one of the herbs which is eaten in the spring to sweeten and purify the blood.”Celery never completely lost its medicinal aura. In Kalamazoo, Michigan, a center of vegetable cultivation in the late nineteenth century, companies marketed celery palliatives. Kalamazoo Celery and Sarsparilla Compound was promoted as a cure for “fever … all forms of nervousness, headache, and neuralgia … and female complaints.” Food played another important role, as a symbol of social distinction. The wealthy, for example, ostentatiously displayed exotic fruits as signs of status. The regal pineapple was a centerpiece at dinner tables on English estates and depicted on Wedgewood china, sugar bowls, and teapots. The gentry grew luxurious pineapples in “pineries” (hot houses) during the cold months. Similarly, French royals prominently housed evergreen trees bearing oranges in fancy enclosures called orangeries.On the other hand, in many cultures, some foods were assigned a lower status. Lentils, the “poor man’s meat,” may be fashionable today, but in the past were often associated with the plebeian classes. This was the image of the common legume in ancient Greece: “When you cook lentil soup, don’t add perfume,” Jocasta says in the play Phoenician Women. A rich man should shun lentils, Aristophanes counsels. “Now that he is rich he will no longer eat lentils; formerly when he was poor, he ate what he could get.” The Middle Eastern food writer Claudia Roden tells of occasions when her aunt offered guests a special lentil dish pleading, “Excuse the food of the poor!”Food could also serve as an engine of economic growth. The common white potato often had a vulgar reputation. “The potato is criticized with reason for being windy, but what matters windiness for the vigorous organisms of peasants and laborers,” the French philosopher Diderot sneered. But potatoes paid economic dividends. Feeding the commoners of northern Europe, the tuber promoted a surge in population. As the historian William McNeill, who did his dissertation on the potato, pointed out, “[T]he spread of potatoes undergirded the nineteenth century industrialization by expanding local food supply, sometimes as much as four times over the caloric yield obtainable from grain harvests of the same fields.” The potato, the scholar argues, sped northern Europe’s rise to “world dominion.”Other transplants sustained masses of people and met their nutritional needs. The peanut, a Latin American native carried to West Africa by the Portuguese, filled a major gap in the diet. Converted into spicy soups or stews, it provided critical protein.In the modern era, ingenious marketing was often required to persuade shoppers to try novel foods. The banana, which some feared would upset their stomachs, was such an item. United Fruit experimented in its test kitchens, searching for a breakfast dish that the banana could accompany. Cornflakes with milk and bananas was the company’s candidate. Cereal boxes in the 1920s contained coupons offering free bananas.Broccoli, which once had a predominantly ethnic market among Italians, was transformed into a national brand by the D’Arrigo Brothers Company. The company advertised the vegetable on the radio and labeled it “Andy Boy,” after the son of one of the company’s founders. The new brand had a dramatic impact on the mother of Charles S. Vizzini, a friend of mine. “It’s not broccoli. It’s Andy Boy,” she enthused.The odyssey of foods will doubtless continue. There are more hurdles for even the oldest of foods to surmount. When will we be as conversant with the ancient fig as we are now with the once-unfamiliar pomegranate?______
Adapted from the Introduction to The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, available from Rowman & Littlefield (or 1-800-243-0495) or through Amazon.com and other online vendors.The contents of this post are Copyright Joel S. Denker, 2015.

Food Sites for October 2015

It’s canning season: spiced seckel pears, tangy mid-winter companions to rich meals.

October is fast approaching & already the nights are cooler and the prospect of long slow-cooked meals is looking more attractive. This week, boeuf bourguignon... can cassoulet and choucroute garnie be far behind?

Our latest book, Sausage: A Global History , is finally out, so we published an article to provide a kind of back-story: “A Vegetarian Unmade,” at Roll Magazine.

Regular subscribers to our updates newsletter receive these updates from our blog, Just Served,  directly—but there is much more at the blog that isn’t delivered automatically. For example, Dr Sanscravat continued his idle speculations in essays, “We Are What We Ate,” and “Thinking About Lunch.” The blog also welcomed a guest poster: Becky Libourel Diamond, author of the new book The Thousand Dollar Dinner: America’s First Great Cookery Challenge.
It’s been a busy month.

You can, if you wish, follow us on Facebook, and Twitter. Still more of our online scribbles can be found at A Quiet Little Table in the Corner.

The presidential election is still over a year away, but we’re already dyspeptic from hearing about it on the news. As preventative medicine, this month’s quotes (from On the Table’s culinary quote collection) chooses a few non-political items from TV journalists:

You can never have enough garlic. With enough garlic, you can eat The New York Times. Morley Safer 

You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars. Charles Kuralt 

The federal government has sponsored research that has produced a tomato that is perfect in every respect, except that you can’t eat it. We should make every effort to make sure this disease, often referred to as “progress,” doesn’t spread. Andy Rooney 

Researchers have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same reactions in the brain as marijuana. The researchers also discovered other similarities between the two but can’t remember what they are. Matt Lauer

Gary
October, 2015
PS: If you encounter broken links, changed URLs—or know of wonderful sites we’ve missed—please drop us a line. It helps to keep this resource as useful as possible for all of us. To those of you who have introduced us to sites like the ones in this newsletter (such as Fabio Parasecoli), thanks, and keep them coming!

PPS: If you wish to change the e-mail address at which you receive these newsletters, or otherwise modify the way you receive our postings or—if you’ve received this newsletter by mistake, and/or don’t wish to receive future issues—you have our sincere apology and can have your e-mail address deleted from the list immediately. We’re happy (and continuously amazed) that so few people have decided to leave the list but, should you choose to be one of them, let us know and we’ll see that your in-box is never afflicted by these updates again. You’ll find links at the bottom of this page to fix everything to your liking.



---- the new sites ----
10 Wine Myths Debunked
(accepted wisdom... not so much)

Archaeological Team Prepares 4,000-year-old Hittite Meals 
(according to archaeologist Aykut Çınaroğlu, Chef Ömür Akk—an excavation team member—used “recipes” from clay tablets, recreating as closely as possible the techniques and equipment of the period)

Archaeologists Find Earliest Evidence of Humans Cooking with Fire 
(Kenneth Miller, writing in Discover, on the work of archaeologist Paul Goldberg)

Best-Tasting, Biggest American Fruit You Probably Haven’t Tasted, The
(Andrew Moore, enraptured by pawpaws, in The Washington Post)

Blessed Be My Freshly Slaughtered Dinner
(Kate Murphy, in The New York Times, on the ethics—and recent fashionability—of killing one’s own meat)

Boundaries of Taste, The
(special food-centered issue of Guernica: a magazine of art & politics)

Canning History: When Propaganda Encouraged Patriotic Preserves 
(Jessica Stoller-Conrad’s report, on NPR, about wartime efforts to conserve food)

Chew on This: The Science of Great NYC Bagels (It’s Not the Water)
(NPR takes a bite out of a much-loved myth)

Cultures and Cuisines
(“an illustrated guide to the culture and cuisine of Brazil”)

Fifth Flavor, The
(Roland Kelts, finding himself through umami, in Guernica)

Food as Therapy
(“Elements of the History of Nutrition in Ancient Greece and Rome,” 
Francesco Perono Cacciafoco’s posting at academia.edu)

French Bread History: Making Medieval/Renaissance Bread
(Les Leftovers, working without a net—or contemporary recipes, since there are none—to try to resurrect some pain perdú)

From Poison to Passion: The Secret History of the Tomato
(Sara Bir at modern farmer)

From the Crack Cocaine of Its Day to Craft Gin
(a juniper-scented addition to the history of alcohol, in The Economist)

Great Sushi Craze of 1905, The 
(“The Unexpected History of Japanese Food in America, From Edo Bay to the Bowery,” Part 1 of H.D. Miller’s article at eccentricculinary.com)

Hot Dog!
(sidewalk history on a bun; from the Museum of the City of New York)

How Black Chefs Paved the Way for American Cuisine
(Michael Twitty sets the record straight, at First We Feast)

Humans Hunted for Meat 2 Million Years Ago
(Robin McKie, writing in The Guardian, on recent work of anthropologist Henry Bunn: “We no longer needed to invest internal resources on huge digestive tracts that were previously required to process vegetation and fruit, which are more difficult to digest. Freed from that task by meat, the new, energy-rich resources were then diverted inside our bodies and used to fuel our growing brains.”)

Illustrated History of Soul Food, An
(Adrian Miller, writing at First We Feast)

My Great Grandmother’s Industrially Processed Food
(Rachel Laudan on methods used in mass-production of food in the nineteenth century)

New Rules of Oyster Eating, The
(Rowan Jacobsen, the proprietor-maven at Oysterater, shucks and tells at Lucky Peach)

Paleo Diet: Big Brains Needed Carbs: Importance of Dietary Carbohydrate in Human Evolution
(“...archaeological, anthropological, genetic, physiological and anatomical data [indicate] carbohydrate consumption, particularly in the form of starch, was critical for the accelerated expansion of the human brain over the last million years…”; article in Science Daily)

Peppermills
(Jan Whitaker discusses the once-common giant peppermills and how they got so big)

Popular Drinks of the Georgian Era
(a surprising number of ways to meet your daily vegetable requirements)

Price of Wine, The
(disentangling wine price and perceived quality at Priceonomics)

Rare History Well Done
(“meat in America;” a BackStory podcast from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities)

Riots and Rye: Bread and the French Revolution 
(Michael R. Lynn, writes about passion the French have for bread, for the Ultimate History Project)

Scientists Who Found Gluten Sensitivity Evidence have now Shown it Doesn’t Exist
(Jennifer Welsh, at Business Insider, on the rigorous tests that disproved the popular belief in gluten’s effects on non-celiac consumers)

Searching for the “Grey Market” Foods of New York City
(Malcolm T. Nicholson’s quest to find, and sample, forbidden food and drink)

Seduction of Stink, The
(Fuchsia Dunlop writes, in Saveur, of the disgusting/enchanting fermented foods of Shaoxing, China)

Slaughter, The
(Stewart Sinclair—no relation to The Jungle’s author—writes, in The Dallas Morning News, about the ethics of taking an animal’s life for food)

Sorghum: A Love Story
(Julian Brunt, waxes euphoric in the magazine of the Southern Fan Beverage Institute, about a Mississippi tradition)

Sugar Crazy: The Story of our Doughnut Obsession
(Michael Krondl, an historian who has begun to specialize in sweet treats, dishes in Zester Daily)

Syneresis and Other Geeky Jargon for Cooks
(Valerie Ryan, in The Boston Globe, on the pleasures of food science)

To Go
(Jan Whitaker on the history of take-out food)


---- inspirational (or otherwise useful) site for writers/bloggers ----
4 Things to Consider When Researching Literary Agents

Beautiful Cookbooks with Stories and Personality Sell Best, Says Editor

Diana Henry: How to Write a Cookbook

Judging a Book by its Cover: What Book Publicists—and Media—Want to See on the Outside of a Book


---- other blogs ----
Fresh Loaf, The

My African Food Map

Nigerian Lazy Chef


---- changed URL ----
What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?
(“The Government’s Effect on the American Diet;” based on a 2011 exhibit at The National Archives Museum; also check “A Menu of Food-Related Primary Sources”)


---- that’s all for now ----
Except, of course, for the usual legalistic mumbo-jumbo and commercial flim-flam:

Your privacy is important to us. We will not give, sell or share your e-mail address with anyone, for any purpose—ever. Nonetheless, we will expose you to the following irredeemably brazen plugs: 

Want to support On the Table, without spending a dime of your own money on it? 

It’s easy. Whenever you want to shop on Amazon. Com, click on any of the book links below, then whatever you buy there (it doesn’t even have to be one of our books) will earn a commission for this newsletter.

The Resource Guide for Food Writers
(Paper)(Kindle)
The Herbalist in the Kitchen
(Hardcover)(Kindle)
The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food And Drink Industries
(Hardcover)(Kindle)
Human Cuisine
(Paper)(Kindle)
Herbs: A Global History
(Hardcover)(Kindle)
Sausage: A Global History
(Hardcover)(Kindle)
Terms of Vegery
(Kindle)
How to Serve Man: On Cannibalism, Sex, Sacrifice, & the Nature of Eating
(Kindle)
Here endeth the sales pitch(es)...

...for the moment, anyway.

______________
The Resource Guide for Food Writers, Update #180 is protected by copyright, and is provided at no cost, for your personal use only. It may not be copied or retransmitted unless this notice remains affixed. Any other form of republication—unless with the author’s prior written permission—is strictly prohibited.
Copyright (c) 2015 by Gary Allen.

Guest Post: Becky Libourel Diamond

In 1851, fifteen wealthy New Yorkers wanted to show a group of Philadelphia friends just how impressive a meal could be and took them to Delmonico’s, New York’s finest restaurant. However, not to be outdone, the Philadelphia men invited the New Yorkers to a meal prepared by James W. Parkinson in their city. In what became known as the “Thousand Dollar Dinner,” Parkinson successfully rose to the challenge, creating a seventeen-course extravaganza featuring fresh salmon, baked rockfish, braised pigeon, turtle steaks, spring lamb, out-of-season fruits and vegetables, and desserts, all paired with rare wines and liquors. Midway through the twelve-hour meal, the New Yorkers declared Philadelphia the winner of their competition, and at several times stood in ovation to acknowledge the chef ’s mastery. The Thousand Dollar Dinner: America’s First Great Cookery Challenge tells this unique story, presenting the entire seventeen-course meal, course by course, explaining each dish and its history. A gastronomic turning point, Parkinson’s luxurious meal helped launch the era of grand banquets of the gilded age and established a new level of American culinary arts to rival those of Europe.Excerpt – “An Invitation”A cool spring breeze swept over the Camden and Philadelphia Steamboat ferry as it chugged its way across the Delaware River toward the city of Philadelphia. That evening in April 1851, many of the ferry passengers were on the final leg of their journey from New York City. Among those who had made this excursion were fifteen impeccably dressed New York gentlemen. They had accepted an invitation to dine at an exclusive Philadelphia restaurant called Parkinson’s.After the boat docked at the Walnut Street wharf, the men collected their leather travel cases and stepped off the ferry. They located the livery drivers who had been hired to meet them and were soon riding in three sleek black carriages, the horses’ feet clip-clopping on the cobblestones. As the carriages reached Eighth Street, they turned south and stopped in front of number 38, a three-story brick building displaying a large sign with “PARKINSONS” in block lettering. Gleaming white marble steps led up to the restaurant’s front door, which was surrounded on either side by a storefront made completely out of clear glass, with etched detailing at the top.The headwaiter came out to meet the gentlemen and led them up the stairs into one of the restaurant’s richly furnished front salons. Decorated in deep shades of burgundy, the room featured Wilton carpets, marble-topped tables, and ornately curved mahogany furniture. Waiting to greet the New Yorkers were their Philadelphia friends. While they made light conversation, several waiters approached with aperitifs on silver trays—cognac and wine bitters, with Madeira and sherry—designed to stimulate the appetite. Unknown to the guests, this was the first taste of a meal they would remember for a lifetime.Soon the headwaiter directed them up the stairs into the banquet room where they would be dining. Thirty place settings of the finest china, silver, and crystal were situated around the enormous mahogany table, covered with a cloth of freshly starched white linen. A table fork and a fish fork were placed to the left side of each plate, and to the right lay a table knife, a silver fish knife, a soup spoon, and a small fork for oysters. Small individual saltcellars were above each plate on the right side.To the left of each plate a silver stand held the bill of fare, a large booklet beautifully printed in gold and decorative colors. Mounted pieces of ornamental confectionery, statuettes, and striking flower arrangements were artfully displayed down the center of the table. The light of dozens of candelabras mixed with the glow from three gas chandeliers. Tall, exquisitely decorated cakes, meringues, and colorful confectionery were arranged on the massive carved sideboard. The long buffet held rows of wine and liquor bottles, ice buckets of champagne, and pitchers of water. These thirty men were about to experience a meal of extraordinary proportions.***By the mid-nineteenth century, restaurants were popping up by the dozens in cities throughout the United States, where demand was the highest.  Both Philadelphia and New York were leaders in this restaurant revolution and developed a culinary rivalry. Upper-class residents of each city felt their metropolis had the best chefs and superior restaurants. This competitiveness was the driving force in bringing these fifteen wealthy New York gentlemen to dine at Parkinson’s.This culinary duel began a few months earlier, when the New Yorkers wanted to show a group of Philadelphia friends just how impressive a meal could be had in their city. These two “clubs of good-livers” apparently “spent one day in every year and all their spare cash in trying to rival each other’s banquets.” To pull off this feat, they went to Delmonico’s, New York’s finest restaurant, and requested the services of its host, Lorenzo Delmonico. They told him they wanted to “astonish our Quaker City friends with the sumptuousness of our feast,” assuring him that money was no object and instructing him to do “his level best” as their honor and the honor of New York were at stake. Lorenzo Delmonico agreed, and he treated the New Yorkers and their fifteen invited Philadelphians to a magnificent banquet at his restaurant on South William Street, much enjoyed by all. However, not to be outdone, the Philadelphia men politely invited the New Yorkers “to drop in upon them some evening and take pot-luck with them.” They then contacted their best caterer and restaurateur, James W. Parkinson, and asked him to create a similar dinner.They set the date for April 19, which made things rather tricky for Parkinson, as it was between seasons. But Parkinson successfully rose to the challenge, creating a seventeen-course feast famously referred to by Philadelphia newspapers as the “Thousand Dollar Dinner” (since it reputedly cost the Philadelphians $1,000, an enormous sum equivalent to perhaps thirty-two times that amount today). The guests sat down at 6 P.M. and did not rise from their chairs until 6 A.M. the next morning. ***Parkinson’s dinner paired different rare wines and liquors with each of the courses, which included such delicacies as fresh oysters, green turtle soup, game birds, diamond-back terrapin, out-of-season fruits and vegetables, pièces montées, and several dessert courses showcasing rich pastries, ice cream, cakes, and puddings. Each of Parkinson’s courses was designed to meld familiar dishes with novel presentations. Special praise went to an artful and luscious sorbet that he created using an expensive Hungarian Tokaj wine.

The meal was astonishing, unlike anything the New Yorkers had ever experienced. Three different times during the meal the New Yorkers stood in appreciation, not only to acknowledge that the Philadelphians had “conquered them triumphantly,” but also to unanimously declare that the meal “far surpassed any similar entertainment which had ever been given in this country.” This was not a light compliment. Delmonico’s set the tone for nineteenth century fine dining in New York City, and the rest of America as well.But at the same time Delmonico’s was firmly entrenching itself as the place for elegant dining in New York, Parkinson’s was establishing a similar presence in Philadelphia. James Parkinson had a creative, innovative way with food, such as the invention of Champagne frappe à la glacé (a semi-frozen froth made with the sparkling wine) and the creation of elaborate ice cream sculptures. In addition to his fine dining establishment, he had a highly successful catering business and was nationally known for his ice cream and confectionery. It was no surprise then that this group of fifteen wealthy Philadelphians would choose Parkinson’s restaurant to host their banquet. They knew James W. Parkinson had the culinary prowess to win over their New York friends. And on a seasonable April evening in 1851, the history of American cooking would be changed forever.__________
Becky Libourel Diamond’s new book, The Thousand Dollar Dinner: America’s First Great Cookery Challenge, will be launched on October 15th, 2015 (but can be pre-ordered from Amazon).
___________
The contents of this article are:
 Copyright 2015, Becky Libourel Diamond

Thinking about Lunch

Now that school’s back in session, I’ve been remembering a bit about the most important part of the school day. Well, it was the most important part to me. As a child, and as an adolescent, my appetites were more visceral than intellectual (some might say they still are). I’ve written elsewhere about one transformative experience in the school cafeteria and, frankly, the less I have to recall about the food there, the better. Let’s just say that some of that cafeteria‘s offerings might have constituted a violation of provisions in the Geneva Convention.No, I’ve been thinking about the lunches we carried to school in brown bags or metal lunchboxes (and they were fashioned of metal, back then—in the days before all children were protected from anything that might be used as a weapon). Alas, for most of us—unlike the star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding—lunch was not savory leftover moussaka. Our lunch-bags held sandwiches. Usually soggy sandwiches.After years of such moist disappointments, a few strategies have emerged to make the brown-bagging experience less traumatic. Most of them are structural.The first should be familiar to those who (presumably, as adult cooks) have prepared classic canapés. Applying a thin layer of fat on the bread slows the transfer of wetness from topping ingredients. I’m not suggesting a bagful of canapés for your first grader’s lunch (it would probably garner the same sort of negative social pressure that “moose caca” did in the movie).However, almost every child has had to face a squelchy PB&J —at the very moment when he or she was most in need of some comforting from mom. I won’t get into the choices of jams, jellies, and preserves that have to better than the ubiquitous concord grape jelly—‘though I’m sure we all could. No, this doesn’t involve any ingredient changes. Prevent (or, at least, diminish) the sodden frustration of that PB&J by spreading half of the peanut butter on each of the slices of bread, thereby isolating the jelly from the bread.The same principle can applied to other (perhaps more grown-up) sandwiches. Imagine that you’ve got some lovely left-over roast pork, and tangy-sweet chutney might be the perfect condiment. Simply spread the chutney between (rather than atop) the layers of meat, and it won’t soak into the bread. I, personally, don’t like tuna salad—‘though it has been brought to my attention that others do—but I suspect that a few lettuce leaves betwixt bread and tuna would help make the sandwich last longer in the bag.Lettuce and tomato sandwiches benefit from the same approach—‘though mayonnaise provides some of the requisite water-proofing. Two brief asides: while big juicy tomatoes, like beefsteaks, are great for sandwiches served à la minute, drier paste tomatoes (Roma, for example) are a better choice for traveling lunches; and do not fear food poisoning from the mayo. The mayo’s acidity makes it much safer than a lot of common advice would have you believe.In addition to the anti-wetness issues, experimenting with structure and ingredient sequence can lead to better sandwiches in another way. We taste multiple ingredients according to the order in which our tongue first encounters them. By tinkering with that sequence, we can alter the perceived flavor of the sandwich. Do you want your first bite to taste like ham or mustard? The sandwich’s construction might determine the result (McDonald’s test kitchens spend a lot of time on this seemingly trivial, but significant, element of the flavor profiles of their menu items).

We Are What We Ate

A million or more years ago, in Africa, we started to become something very different from anything ever seen on the planet—and we did it by eating. We became creatures that had much bigger brains than any animal had ever needed. Also, our brains increased in size at a rate that far exceeded anything that evolution had been able to manage before. How we accomplished this is the source of some argument. That's because there are (at least) three separate ways of looking at this process—and while they all arrive at the same destination, they take different routes. The hypothetical causes of our sudden brainy development distinguish each explanation from the others.Let’s begin with the trendiest (at least among non-scientists) one. In recent years, after thinking about our condition and how we got here—“here” meaning overweight and unhealthy—many people have adopted the Paleo Diet. They place on our modern, starchy diet. They assume that, before the advent of cereal  agriculture, our hunter-gather forebears had a diet that was high in meat protein (and, obviously, devoid of all sorts of chemicals found in food today). They reason that, if we could only go back to a so-called “caveman diet,” we could return to our former state of good health.The Paleo argument goes something like this:“Once our species got a taste for meat, it was provided with a dense, protein-rich source of energy. We no longer needed to invest internal resources on huge digestive tracts that were previously required to process vegetation and fruit, which are more difficult to digest. Freed from that task by meat, the new, energy-rich resources were then diverted inside our bodies and used to fuel our growing brains.As a result, over the next two million years our crania grew, producing species of humans with increasingly large brains—until this carnivorous predilection produced Homo sapiens.” SourceIf we choose to ignore the fact that we live a lot longer than our Stone-age ancestors (in itself, a fairly good argument against the Paleo Diet), one look at our teeth—and comparisons with the teeth of our ancient ancestral species—is enough to prove that we are meant to eat a varied diet, and reveals our evolution from ape-like vegetarians to all-consuming omnivores. Also, our smaller guts and bigger brains mark us as distinctly different from our hairier past. 

It’s true that added high-protein flesh and calorie-rich fats could explain the sudden growth-spurt in our crania. However, the development of social systems that permitted cooperative hunting techniques might also have led to our increased intellectual development. It’s not always so easy, separating cause and effect.But is a carnocentric diet the only possible explanation for the sudden development of big brains, and simultaneous diminution of teeth and digestive tracts? Some scientists question the premises of the Paleo dieticians:“...archaeological, anthropological, genetic, physiological and anatomical data [indicate] carbohydrate consumption, particularly in the form of starch, was critical for the accelerated expansion of the human brain over the last million years…” SourceThis idea is especially appealing (considering the much later effect that cereal agriculture had on the development of civilizations—a distinguishing feature of our species, even over other social species), but it runs into another problem. If plant-based foods, even those with lots of caloric starch, were the reason for our larger crania, how do we explain the changes to our teeth and abdomens? No herbivores have demonstrated such radical changes to their mental equipment. That’s because raw plant material must be consumed in large quantities, and requires large expenditures of digestive energy to extract their nutrients. Exclusively plant-eating creatures tend to have large teeth and bellies.Which brings us to the third explanation:“[Richard] Wrangham’s book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human … makes the case that the ability to harness fire and cook food allowed the brain to grow and the digestive tract to shrink, giving rise to our ancestor Homo erectus some 1.8 million years ago.” SourceCooking made hard-to-digest foods—like starchy roots and grains—more easily assimilated. In effect, fire acted as an external digestive system, allowing us to get much more energy from our food without having to expend our own energy to do so. Recently, archaeologists have found evidence of ancient fires—pushing the time-frame for cooking into the 1-2 million year range of the other two explanations: “…the remains of campfires from a million years ago—200,000 years older than any other firm evidence of human-controlled fire… fanned the flames of a decade-old debate over the influence of fire, particularly cooking, on the evolution of our species’s relatively capacious brains. “SourceOf course it also made that carefully-hunted meat taste even better. Perhaps the conflicts between these approaches should be abandoned in favor of a shared explanation.

Perhaps our exponential growth of gray matter is a result of the confluence of multiple adaptations. 

Perhaps we developed big brains by thinking about eating. Imagine a bunch of hominids, sitting around a campfire on the savannah, planning the next day’s hunt or foraging expedition, while sharing a roasted haunch of wildebeest, passing the boiled root-vegetables, and apishly grinning their satisfaction over a dessert of some ripe berries. 
Eating, and planning our meals, together made us human.

Food Sites for September 2015

It’s pickling season, and we’ve got fresh dill. If here’s any left over, it’ll make a great potato salad.

The dog days of August are about to end (and it can’t come too soon for us). Don’t get us wrong—we much prefer the heat to sloppy wet winter weather, but a few cooler evenings would be nice. You know what we’re saying?

We’re told that our latest book, Sausage: A Global History, is scheduled for publication on the fifteenth of September. If only we had learned—in time—that there was a lovely slang term for encased meats in Victorian England. We suspect, however, that the publisher (Reaktion) would never have approved Bags o’ Mystery as a title.

Regular subscribers to our updates newsletter receive these updates from our blog, Just Served,  directly—but there is much more at the blog that isn’t delivered automatically. You can—if this once-a-month newsletter is just not enough—follow us on Facebook,  and Twitter.  Still more of our online scribbles can be found at A Quiet Little Table in the Corner. 

In an attempt to make light of the summer’s heat, consider this month’s quotes (from On the Table’s culinary quote collection) as a low-brow set of variations on the salad theme:

All normal people love meat. If I went to a barbeque and there was no meat, I would say, “Yo Goober! Where’s the meat?” I’m trying to impress people here, Lisa. You don't win friends with salad. Homer Simpson 

My grandfather had a wonderful funeral... On the buffet table there was a replica of the deceased in potato salad. Woody Allen 

In Spain, attempting to obtain a chicken salad sandwich, you wind up with a dish whose name, when you look it up in your Spanish-English dictionary, turns out to mean: “Eel with big abscess.” Dave Barry

GarySeptember 2015
PS: If you encounter broken links, changed URLs—or know of wonderful sites we’ve missed—please drop us a line. It helps to keep this resource as useful as possible for all of us. To those of you who have introduced us to sites like the ones in this newsletter (such as Cara De Silva and Fabio Parasecoli), thanks, and keep them coming!

PPS: If you wish to change the e-mail address at which you receive these newsletters, or otherwise modify the way you receive our postings or—if you’ve received this newsletter by mistake, and/or don’t wish to receive future issues—you have our sincere apology and can have your e-mail address deleted from the list immediately. We’re happy (and continuously amazed) that so few people have decided to leave the list but, should you choose to be one of them, let us know and we’ll see that your in-box is never afflicted by these updates again. You’ll find links at the bottom of this page to fix everything to your liking.



---- the new sites ----
7 Dirty Truths About BBQ (that Nobody Wants to Talk About)
(Robb Walsh bares all)

Canon of Taste
(Jill Neimark explains: “why we should add food to the cultural canon,” like “those of literature, art, music, architecture, religion and science”)

Carry on Cooking: The Crazy Culinary World of 1970s and 80s Cookbooks
(Andrew Webb, in The Guardian, reminisces with a mixture of delight and disgust)

Fast Food Nation
(Aaron Their, in Lucky Peach, on what we can tell, about Roman eating habits, from Pompeii’s evidence)

How Brisket Conquered the BBQ World
(Jim Shahinon on a fundamentally-changed BBQ scene: “Do not confuse the sacred with the propane”)

How Does Seedless Fruit Reproduce
(the botanical facts-of-life, from Melissa’s Produce)

How Syrians Saved an Ancient Seedbank from Civil War
(Lizzie Wade, in Wired, on how Ahmed Amri and the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas preserved genebanks containing grain developed over thousands of years)

How Tupperware’s Inventor Left a Legacy That’s Anything but Airtight
(“I’ve got one word for you: plastics”—Mitchell Parker, on “…a revolution driven by women”)

Is There a Better Way to Talk About Wine?
(The New Yorker’s Bianca Bosker, on how the written evaluation of wine has grown “intrinsically bullshit-prone”)

Just Like Mom Used To Make
(Michael Snyder, in Lucky Peach, on why that favorite family recipe might not come out “just like mom used to make”)

Manuscript Cookbooks Survey
(searchable “…database of pre-1865 English-language manuscript cookbooks;”adapted recipes, glossary; also “what manuscript cookbooks can tell us that printed cookbooks do not”)

Oleogustus: Why We Might All be Getting a New Taste for Fat
(move over umami, seems there’s a sixth taste; article in The Guardian)

Parsleyed Ham and Kitchen Breezes: The Letters of M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child
(Cynthia Bertelsen on the two women who taught America how to eat well)

Pleasures of the Literary Meal
(Bee Wilson’s New Yorker review of Christina Hardyment’s book, Pleasures of the Table: A Literary Anthology—an exercise in innocent gustatory voyeurism)

Renaissance Painting Reveals How Breeding Changed Watermelons, A
(using art to study the history of agriculture)

Researching Food History—Cooking and Dining
(conference and exhibit calendar, historic measurement conversions, recipes, glossaries, classes)

Rethinking the Word “Foodie”
(Mark Bittman’s op ed piece for The New York Times)

Rise of Egotarian Cuisine, The
(Alan Richman, in GQ, on chefs who serve food “…straddling the line between the creative and the self-indulgent”)

Sonic Seasoning
(a Gastropod report of the way the perception of food can be altered by he sounds heard while eating)

Study Suggests Carbs Fueled Human Evolution
(brief article, in Archaeology, on the impact of starches on our development as a species)

Sweet Reason
(Dwight Furrow, on why dessert wines seem to grow less sweet as they age)

Ten of the Greatest Books in Food Studies
(John M. Burdick’s list)

Theorizing Cuisine from Medieval to Modern Times: Cognitive Structures, the Biology of Taste, and Culinary Conventions
(Vanina Leschziner and Andrew Dakin, on how French cooking changed the way all Western diners conceive the meal)

UC Food Observer
(University of California’s Global Food Initiative selects important food news)

What are Kitchens, Sculleries, and Larders?
(article from Geri Walton’s blog, “History of the 18th and 19th Centuries”)

Why Everyone Should Stop Calling Immigrant Food “Ethnic”
(Lavanya Ramanathan gives her reason in The Washington Post)

Why Is the Federal Government Afraid of Fat?
(Dariush Mozaffarian and David S. Ludwig, in The New York Times)


---- inspirational (or otherwise useful) site for writers/bloggers ----
27 Food Stories Nobody Needs to Write Again

Book Designer, The

British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Reuse & Remix, The

Copyright Fair Use and How it Works for Online Images 

How to Lose Fans and Alienate Followers

Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use, The

Social Media in 15 Minutes a Day, by Guest Blogger Frances Caballo


---- other blogs ----
Camille Bégin

Fig and Quince

First We Feast

Fortune Cookie Chronicles, The

Four Pounds Flour

Godful Food [not about religion]

Hungary Dish, The

Rachel E. Black

Scenes of Eating

Sean Thackrey: Wine Maker

Taste of Savoie

Yummy Books


---- changed URL ----
Recipes Project, The


---- that’s all for now ----
Except, of course, for the usual legalistic mumbo-jumbo and commercial flim-flam:

Your privacy is important to us. We will not give, sell or share your e-mail address with anyone, for any purpose—ever. Nonetheless, we will expose you to the following irredeemably brazen plugs: 

Want to support On the Table, without spending a dime of your own money on it? 

It’s easy. Whenever you want to shop on Amazon. Com, click on any of the book links below, then whatever you buy there will earn a commission for this newsletter (it doesn’t even have to be one of our books) .

The Resource Guide for Food Writers
(Paper)(Kindle)
The Herbalist in the Kitchen
(Hardcover)
(Kindle)
The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food And Drink Industries
(Hardcover)(Kindle)
Human Cuisine
(Paper)(Kindle)
Herbs: A Global History
(Hardcover)(Kindle)
Sausage: A Global History
(Hardcover)(Kindle)
Terms of Vegery
(Kindle)
How to Serve Man: On Cannibalism, Sex, Sacrifice, & the Nature of Eating
(Kindle)

Here endeth the sales pitch(es)...

...for the moment, anyway.

______________
The Resource Guide for Food Writers, Update #179 is protected by copyright, and is provided at no cost, for your personal use only. It may not be copied or retransmitted unless this notice remains affixed. Any other form of republication—unless with the author’s prior written permission—is strictly prohibited.
Copyright (c) 2015 by Gary Allen.

Troubled Waters

Yesterday, as my eighteen-year-old niece frolicked with her boyfriend in the pool, her ten-year-old cousin looked on in dismay.
At first, I imagined her pre-pubescent concern was that boy-girl touching was “yucky,” but perhaps I was projecting my own self-conscious horror of public displays of affection—hell, any kind of public display.
But that’s just me.
She was so upset that she complained to her mother, at length, afterwards. It turns out that the source of her concern was something else altogether. 
A lot of her friends, at school, were dating (which was, in itself, quite a revelation—that ten-year-olds were dating).
When our son was only slightly older, there had been many short-lived romances among his friends—but they occurred mostly in the minds of the girls. The boys were mostly unaware that they were even in relationships or—if they even knew—had no clue what it meant, or what their roles and responsibilities in the relationships might entail. But that was around age twelve, and we only got to see the boys’ side of the drama. The girls’ side of the stories was, apparently, very different.
She went on to reveal—with increasing levels of emotion—that her friends and their “boyfriends” were constantly breaking up. This comes as no surprise to me (I was a former boy, myself). The break-ups caused endless anguish among all the girls, even those—like her—who were merely spectators of the primal struggles.

Oh so slowly, I deduced that she was not disgusted by the observed physicality of the romance, but dreading the inevitability of a painful break-up. Her concern reflected her, albeit limited, experience: that all romantic entanglements must, perforce, end in disaster. Her worries about her older cousin’s potential for suffering were touching—and strangely informative—because she had no personal knowledge of any part of romantic entanglement except of the unavoidable agony of separation.

That this tawdry sturm und drang is the stuff of literary tragedy—not to mention countless country/western songs—suggests that the chroniclers of misery might, themselves, be cases of arrested pre-adolescence.

Food Sites for August 2015

Bitter Bolete, Tylopilus felleus, Poughkeepsie, NY

It’s been a hot, wet summer around here—and mushrooms are popping up everywhere. Alas, not all of them are chanterelles, black trumpets, or the more savory species of bolete. Fortunately, summer provides a host of tastier alternatives—and endless choices of seasonally- (and age-) appropriate libations.

Regular subscribers to our updates newsletter receive these updates from our blog, Just Served,  directly—but there is much more at the blog that isn’t delivered automatically. You can, if you wish, follow us on Facebook, and Twitter. Still more of our online scribbles can be found at A Quiet Little Table in the Corner. 

This month’s quotes (from On the Table’s culinary quote collection) continue our celebration of summer.

The egg creams of Avenue A in New York and the root beer float are among the high points of American gastronomic inventiveness. Mark Kurlansky 

Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he will sit in the boat and drink beer all day. OldFox 

He is no true fisherman who is willing to fish only when fish are biting. Grover Cleveland 

In the Barbecue is any four footed animal—be it mouse or mastodon—whose dressed carcass is roasted whole... at its best it is a fat steer, and must be eaten within an hour of when it is cooked. For if ever the sun rises upon Barbecue, its flavor vanishes like Cinderella's silks, and it becomes cold baked beef—staler in the chill dawn than illicit love. William Allen White 

The story of barbecue is the story of America: Settlers arrive on great unspoiled continent, discover wondrous riches, set them on fire and eat them. Vince Staten 

For each glass, liberally large, the basic ingredients begin with ice cubes in a shaker and three or four drops of Angostura bitters on the ice cubes. Add several twisted lemon peels to the shaker, then a bottle-top of dry vermouth, a bottle-top of Scotch, and multiply the resultant liquid content by five with gin, preferably Bombay Sapphire. Add more gin if you think it is too bland... I have been told, but have no personal proof that it is true, that three of these taken in the course of an evening make it possible to fly from New York to Paris without an airplane. Isaac Stern

GaryAugust, 2015
PS: If you encounter broken links, changed URLs—or know of wonderful sites we'‘ve missed—please drop us a line. It helps to keep this resource as useful as possible for all of us. To those of you who have introduced us to sites like the ones in this newsletter (such as Fabio Parasecoli), thanks, and keep them coming!

PPS: If you wish to change the e-mail address at which you receive these newsletters, or otherwise modify the way you receive our postings or—if you’ve received this newsletter by mistake, and/or don’t wish to receive future issues—you have our sincere apology and can have your e-mail address deleted from the list immediately. We’re happy (and continuously amazed) that so few people have decided to leave the list but, should you choose to be one of them, let us know and we’ll see that your in-box is never afflicted by these updates again. There’re You’ll find links at the bottom of this page to fix everything to your liking.



---- the new sites ----
Applying Concepts from Historical Archaeology to New England’s Nineteenth-Century Cookbooks
(Anne Yentsch’s article in Northeast Historical Archaeology; PDF)

Case for Eating Small Fish, The
(John Donohue’s article, in The New Yorker, on the ecological, nutritional, and economic advantages of eating bait)

Cooking Pot, The
(history of one-pot cooking; proceedings of the 1988 Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery)

Dark Side of the Truffle Trade, The
(Ryan Jacobs’ article, in The Atlantic, on the fungal underground)

Dining with Darius
(Rachel Laudan on power and provender in ancient Persia; in The Cairo Review of Global Affairs)

Fabled Flatbreads of Uzbekistan, The
(Eric Hansen’s article in Aramco World)

First Kitchen, The
(Laura Shapiro’s New Yorker article on the horrors of dining in FDR’s White House) 

Foods Americans Once Loved to Eat, The
(Li Zhou, on some forgotten dishes, in Smithsonian magazine)

foodseum
(“Chicago’s Food Museum,” a work in progress)

Gerard’s 1597 Herball
(digitized pages from a copy in the collection of the University of Oklahoma Libraries)

Illustrated Guide to Indian Vegetables, An
(Michael Snyder’s article at Lucky Peach)

Knockout Blow for American Fish Stocks, A
(Gib Brogan, in The New York Times, on environmental threats to New England’s fishery)

Little Library Café, The
(a collection of recipes, inspired by literature)

Magnificent Lie Behind Champagne, The
(no, it wasn’t Dom Perignon in the Abbey of Hautvillers)

Mid-century Menu
(RetroRuth said a mouthful: “It was a long, painful and sometimes disgusting road that lead to our current national gourmand status.”)

Naturally Cured Meats: Quality, Safety, and Chemistry
(Gary Anthony Sullivan’s doctoral dissertation; PDF)

Oxford Symposium Downloads
(searchable archive of papers presented at Oxford’s fabulous Food and Cookery conference)

True Place of Science in Gastronomy, The
(Len Fisher’s talk at 2015 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery)

Vegetable Detective, The
(Todd Oppenheimer’s article, in Craftsmanship, on the occurrence of heavy metals in cruciferous vegetables, even organic kale )

What It’s Like To Go A Year Without Processed Food
(Kate Bratskeir’s Huffington Post interview with Megan Kimble, author of Unprocessed: My City-dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food)

When Taste Is a Trade Issue
(Jack Ewing’s New York Times article on the legal, economic, political, and cultural differences that influence our cheese choices)

White House Orders Review of Rules for Genetically Modified Crops
(Andrew Pollack, on the Obama administration’s attempts to deal with this contentious subject in The New York Times)


---- inspirational (or otherwise useful) site for writers/bloggers ----
5 Reasons Why Writers Should Blog

Agents & Editors: A Conversation With Four Literary Agents

Ask an Editor: How Do You Create A Stunning Visual Identity?

Get Started on Twitter in 7 Simple Steps

How to Publish on Wattpad


---- other blogs ----
aashpaz

DL Acken Photographer

five o’clock teaspoon


---- that’s all for now ----
Except, of course, for the usual legalistic mumbo-jumbo and commercial flim-flam:

Your privacy is important to us. We will not give, sell or share your e-mail address with anyone, for any purpose—ever. Nonetheless, we will expose you to the following irredeemably brazen plugs: 

Want to support On the Table, without spending a dime of your own money on it? 

It’s easy. Whenever you want to shop on Amazon. Com, click on any of the book links below, then whatever you buy there (it doesn’t even have to be one of our books) will earn a commission for this newsletter.

The Resource Guide for Food Writers
(Paper)(Kindle)
The Herbalist in the Kitchen
(Hardcover)
(Kindle)
The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food And Drink Industries
(Hardcover)(Kindle)
Human Cuisine
(Paper)(Kindle)
Herbs: A Global History
(Hardcover)(Kindle)
Sausage: A Global History (for pre-order)
(Hardcover)(Kindle)
Terms of Vegery
(Kindle)
How to Serve Man: On Cannibalism, Sex, Sacrifice, & the Nature of Eating
(Kindle)
Here endeth the sales pitch(es)...

...for the moment, anyway.

______________
The Resource Guide for Food Writers, Update #178 is protected by copyright, and is provided at no cost, for your personal use only. It may not be copied or retransmitted unless this notice remains affixed. Any other form of republication—unless with the author’s prior written permission—is strictly prohibited.
Copyright (c) 2015 by Gary Allen.

Perfectable Perdu

I’ve heard there are people who live only in the present, as either free spirits or enlightened Zen masters. I don’t personally know any of them, and can only think of them in the same way as Plato’s troglodytes could picture life outside. The picture is rather fuzzy—possibly warm and fuzzy, but fuzzy nonetheless.I’m not one of them.Certainly there are others who live only for the future. Whether they long for a Christian hereafter, or some form of paradise on earth, Utopia is where they want to live. Their goal is “a future so bright they’ve got to wear shades.”I’m not one of them, either. The present is just too slippery, too evanescent, to hold onto, and the future—well who’s to say if there will even be a future? So what does that leave me? While there are philosophical and scientific arguments about the nature of time—and if it even exists—the only “time” I’m able to comprehend is the past. With increasing age, the ratio of the past to the future increases, so it’s only natural that I spend more time there.Also, with advancing age, faith in the perfectibility of the future decreases (experience tends to make us less optimistic). The past, however, just gets better and better. Our rearview mirrors are often rose-tinted—and the further into the past we look, the rosier it appears. Its tense becomes increasingly pluperfect.One of past’s best attributes is its malleability. We may not be able to change the facts of the past—as the events, themselves, are no longer available—but their interpretation is infinitely variable. It’s a cliché that “history is written by the victors,” but all memory is constantly re-written, by winners and losers alike. Needless to say, everyone comes out looking better in the memories of events in their pasts. The past is a lovely place to visit, and we’d all love to live there.
And we do.

The Hunting of the Snipe

Once, while riding in the backseat with a coupla’ Texas cousins, the conversation turned to the best hunting techniques for snipe. Back home, up north, I knew about snipe; they were brown-spotted, streaky-looking birds that ran along sandy shorelines on legs that looked too long and flimsy to hold them up, let alone run.
As I listened, it was clear that the Texas variety was a different animal altogether.
These elusive creatures seemed to have more in common with the armadillo tribe than any snipe I ever saw. Perhaps it was living in the vicinity of oil wells and pipelines—and the sort of men who worked in such places—but Texan snipe had an inexplicable fascination with the smell of burning sulfur, like when you lit up one of those old-fashioned strike-anywhere matches. They could also be lured close to a hidden hunter by softly calling “snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe…” into the darkness.
I’d never heard of a wild animal that was so egotistical as to know, let alone answer to, its name. This was Texas, after all—so, if any animal did have an inflated self-image, that would be the place it would live. On the other hand, I’d never heard of a bird that looked like an armadillo and liked the smell of burnt matches.
Still, their enthusiasm for the hunt led me to believe that these snipe must be very good eating, so I was more than willing to try my beginner’s hand at capturing a bagful of them.
We spent the rest of the afternoon gathering supplies and working out our hunting strategy. The supplies were easy: a large grocery sack and a box of kitchen matches for each of us. The strategizing fascinated this neophyte, and I paid careful attention to every word of my more-experienced cousins. It was clear that they knew a lot about the ins and outs of snipe hunting.
For one thing, it made no sense to try to track them or run them down; they were just too wily and quick for that. The most effective method was to sit quietly in a likely spot in snipe country, armed as described, calling softly and lighting matches just in front of the open grocery sack. I was warned to be careful not to hold the matches too close to the bag (that was obvious, even to me—if the sack got burned, what would I use to carry all the snipes I caught?).
I also learned how efficient my cousins were. In order to best cover the snipe terrain, we would spread out to learn where they were congregating. Whoever caught the first snipe would then call out to the other hunters—then everyone would form a circle of gradually-decreasing diameter, driving the snipe toward the waiting bag of the first successful hunter.
I so wanted to be that snipe hunter.
We waited anxiously for it to get dark, when we (or rather my sixteen-year-old cousin) could drive us out to the hunting grounds.
Now Callahan was, at the time, a dry county—and the only place a thirsty Texan could get a drink was in a private club. There was just such a place, a mile or two outside of Clyde. It was a signless and windowless cinderblock building surrounded by mesquites, only identifiable because it sat in front of a pile of empty Lone Star cans as tall as the building itself. This, I was surprised to learn, was prime snipe country. No doubt it had something to do with all the smokers (and the constant lighting of matches) among the club-members.
Since I was the honored guest on the hunt, I was given the best spot.
It was well away from the security light of the clubhouse, on flat sandy ground, surrounded by exactly the kind of brush that provided ideal cover for the secretive snipes. They got me set up, making sure I had everything I needed and understood the night’s strategy. Then they went off to find suitable spots to hunt. I felt bad for them, knowing that they were not as likely to be successful, since they had given me the choice location.
It was a moonless night, but the broad Texas sky was full of stars and their light was more than enough to make out the surrounding mesquites, slightly darker than the sky. I opened the bag slowly, being careful not to make too much noise with the stiff brown paper. I laid it on its side, placing a few small stones inside so that its bottom was flush with the ground. When the mad rush of a snipe happened, I wanted to be sure that it didn’t run under the bag.
I lit the first match.
Barely louder than a whisper, I began calling “snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe” into the darkness.
Another match, and slightly louder, “snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe…”
Nothing yet. I wondered if my cousins were having any better luck. Of course not—I would have heard them yell if they had.
Another match, and slightly louder, “snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe…”
The stars slowly wheeled around the sky, and my matches were running low, but still no sign of the first snipe.
Then I heard it.
A very faint moaning sound.
My cousins hadn’t mentioned the kind of noise that snipe made—or perhaps they did, but I hadn’t been paying close-enough attention? There it was again, a little louder. What if it wasn’t a snipe, but some other animal, possibly a territorial longhorn, or some other dangerous beast for which I was unprepared? The moaning faded away a bit, suggesting a change of direction. Maybe the creature had found some more interesting prey. No, it was getting louder again, heading straight for me.
That was no animal.
It was a pick-up truck.

It stopped not far from where I sat, matchless in the wilderness. My grandfather walked over to me, cursing softly in the darkness. “Damfool kids. What the hail would the sheriff say if he found him out here all by hisself?”