James Lockhart Perry's Blog, page 4

Flora MacDonald

When Flora MacDonald died in March, 1790, more than 3,000 mourners made the long and difficult trek to the Isle of Skye in Scotland to drink 300 gallons of whiskey in her honor. And small wonder, because Flora had led a life for the ages.

Loyal her entire life to the British Crown, she nevertheless had taken pity on Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1846, as he fled the British Duke of Cumberland after the disastrous Battle of Culloden ended the last Jacobite Rebellion. The British put a price of £30,000 on the Young Pretender’s head, but Flora didn’t care. She dressed the handsome bumbler as her spinning maid Betty Burke and ferried him across the Western Isles one step ahead of the relentless manhunt.

Finally convinced to shed his ridiculous disguise, Charlie shipped off from Skye to a lifetime of boozing, womanizing, and quarreling at the Vatican, where he eventually died and was interred beneath the Basilica floor. Flora, on the other hand, was captured and imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Nevertheless, the brave and gentle woman so impressed the English with her impeccable  manners, that they relented and released her to house arrest. There, she received visitors ranging from the writers Samuel Johnson and James Boswell all the way to the Prince of Wales. She also met and married Allan MacDonald (no relation), a junior Scottish nobleman on his way to the Carolinas to make his fortune.

Unfortunately for the intrepid couple, they arrived in America in 1773, just in time to join the losing Loyalist side in the American Revolution. They forfeited all of their lands and found themselves booted penniless first to Nova Scotia and then on a privateer back to London. Two of their seven children died en route at sea, but their son John shipped off to colonial India, where he made enough of a fortune to allow his parents a pleasant retirement back on Skye.

Like so many other characters in Scottish history, Flora got caught up posthumously in the rush to recreate a romantic Highland paradise that had never really existed. She inspired the lyrical Skye Boat Song and numerous mostly fictional portrayals in literature and film. Yet it isn’t difficult to imagine the 68-year-old grandmother shrugging aside all that celebrity as she sits on the shore of her beloved Skye, watching the early sun rise as gently and gracefully as the island girl herself.

Isle of Skye

When Flora MacDonald died in March, 1790, more than 3,000 mourners made the long and difficult trek to the Isle of Skye in Scotland to drink 300 gallons of whiskey in her honor. And small wonder, because Flora had led a life for the ages.

Loyal her entire life to the British Crown, she nevertheless had taken pity on Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1846, as he fled the British Duke of Cumberland after the disastrous Battle of Culloden ended the last Jacobite Rebellion. The British put a price of £30,000 on the Young Pretender’s head, but Flora didn’t care. She dressed the handsome bumbler as her spinning maid Betty Burke and ferried him across the Western Isles one step ahead of the relentless manhunt.

Finally convinced to shed his ridiculous disguise, Charlie shipped off from Skye to a lifetime of boozing, womanizing, and quarreling at the Vatican, where he eventually died and was interred beneath the Basilica floor. Flora, on the other hand, was captured and imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Nevertheless, the brave and gentle woman so impressed the English with her impeccable  manners, that they relented and released her to house arrest. There, she received visitors ranging from the writers Samuel Johnson and James Boswell all the way to the Prince of Wales. She also met and married Allan MacDonald (no relation), a junior Scottish nobleman on his way to the Carolinas to make his fortune.

Unfortunately for the intrepid couple, they arrived in America in 1773, just in time to join the losing Loyalist side in the American Revolution. They forfeited all of their lands and found themselves booted penniless first to Nova Scotia and then on a privateer back to London. Two of their seven children died en route at sea, but their son John shipped off to colonial India, where he made enough of a fortune to allow his parents a pleasant retirement back on Skye.

Like so many other characters in Scottish history, Flora got caught up posthumously in the rush to recreate a romantic Highland paradise that had never really existed. She inspired the lyrical Skye Boat Song and numerous mostly fictional portrayals in literature and film. Yet it isn’t difficult to imagine the 68-year-old grandmother shrugging aside all that celebrity as she sits on the shore of her beloved Skye, watching the early sun rise as gently and gracefully as the island girl herself.

Nell Gwynn

We went searching for Nell Gwynn’s London, but couldn’t find much the glamorous 17th century courtesan would have recognized. For once, you can’t pin this one on the bombs of the German Luftwaffe—most of Nell’s neighborhood off Drury Lane in Westminster was deservedly obliterated in the endless waves of urban renewal that have overwhelmed this city since its earliest days.

By the time of Nell’s birth in Coal Yard Alley, somewhere around 1650, the brooks and runnels crisscrossing the land had been paved over or had degenerated into the vermin-filled open sewers that begat the murderous Great Plague of Nell’s teen years. The near-universal use of coal for heating and locomotion cast a hideous pall over the city that could black out the sun on a drizzly summer’s day. And nearly 300 years before any British politician gave a serious damn, child prostitutes and brothel-keeper’s daughters like Nell were lucky to make it out of adolescence alive and disease-free.

But the fabulously talented girl somehow ended up selling oranges outside the newly restored King’s Theater where, around 1665, she caught the eye of the famous English stage actor Charles Hart. Within a few years, she was rightly recognized as one of the great comediennes in the hilarity-filled history of the London stage. Within another year or two, she was chief mistress to King Charles II, the happily debauched and oversexed Stuart monarch who had brought England back from its soulless experiment with Cromwellian Puritanism.

Nell insisted on calling her first son by the King “you little bastard”, until the exasperated monarch caved in, legitimized the boy, and gave him the title Duke of St. Albans. Nell herself  fought off the waves of rival mistresses and, in 1687, died in the only house on Pall Mall still not owned by the Crown, her debts paid off by the grateful King’s brother, James II. Yet while Nell might have prospered, the wildly popular woman was still in her early thirties when repeated strokes felled her.

Today, the Drury Lane neighborhood is a hipster’s paradise, bursting with famous theaters, exotic eateries, and trendily dressed crowds. The worst you have to fear from its narrow alleyways is the hangover you’ll find in the cute, little pubs hidden there. The former project housing, designed to fight the uber-persistent slums, has been gentrified out of recognition. But everyone seems to be wringing their share of fun and pleasure out of the neighborhood, and Nell would have approved of that.

London

We went searching for Nell Gwynn’s London, but couldn’t find much the glamorous 17th century courtesan would have recognized. For once, you can’t pin this one on the bombs of the German Luftwaffe—most of Nell’s neighborhood off Drury Lane in Westminster was deservedly obliterated in the endless waves of urban renewal that have overwhelmed this city since its earliest days.

By the time of Nell’s birth in Coal Yard Alley, somewhere around 1650, the brooks and runnels crisscrossing the land had been paved over or had degenerated into the vermin-filled open sewers that begat the murderous Great Plague of Nell’s teen years. The near-universal use of coal for heating and locomotion cast a hideous pall over the city that could black out the sun on a drizzly summer’s day. And nearly 300 years before any British politician gave a serious damn, child prostitutes and brothel-keeper’s daughters like Nell were lucky to make it out of adolescence alive and disease-free.

But the fabulously talented girl somehow ended up selling oranges outside the newly restored King’s Theater where, around 1665, she caught the eye of the famous English stage actor Charles Hart. Within a few years, she was rightly recognized as one of the great comediennes in the hilarity-filled history of the London stage. Within another year or two, she was chief mistress to King Charles II, the happily debauched and oversexed Stuart monarch who had brought England back from its soulless experiment with Cromwellian Puritanism.

Nell insisted on calling her first son by the King “you little bastard”, until the exasperated monarch caved in, legitimized the boy, and gave him the title Duke of St. Albans. Nell herself  fought off the waves of rival mistresses and, in 1687, died in the only house on Pall Mall still not owned by the Crown, her debts paid off by the grateful King’s brother, James II. Yet while Nell might have prospered, the wildly popular woman was still in her early thirties when repeated strokes felled her.

Today, the Drury Lane neighborhood is a hipster’s paradise, bursting with famous theaters, exotic eateries, and trendily dressed crowds. The worst you have to fear from its narrow alleyways is the hangover you’ll find in the cute, little pubs hidden there. The former project housing, designed to fight the uber-persistent slums, has been gentrified out of recognition. But everyone seems to be wringing their share of fun and pleasure out of the neighborhood, and Nell would have approved of that.

Cucina Italiana

For what it’s worth, our rules for eating out in Italy (unless you’re desperate, of course):

1. Avoid any restaurant large enough to accommodate a busload of gawkers. Especially one with bright lights, huge, curtained windows, and elaborate chandeliers. Gaudy is good—just not that kind of gaudy.

2. Avoid any restaurant with English menus out front. Look at what everyone else is eating and point politely—they’ll get a laugh out of it. Never give in to the blandishments of a busker stationed at the door to harangue you inside–if the staff knows how to cook, they won’t need him.

3. Specialized is better. Any place with a sign like “Ristorante Bar Pizzaria” or the like doesn’t care what they serve you, as long as you pay the check. Avoid any restaurant with “pizza” in its sign unless you see that pizza is the only thing they serve (stand-ups are best).

4. Small is beautiful–a TRATTORIA should be the size of your mama’s kitchen, a ROSTICCERIA or SALUMERIA should have a few stools and maybe a table (or a bench in a nearby square). RISTORANTES are for formal dining and often overpriced and overwrought (and see rule #1 above). The classifications have been bastardized over the years, but they still mean something.

5. Avoid major squares and avenues. Ignore foreign guide book recommendations. Avoid any high-traffic area where they assume they’ll never see you again. If you walk by a poorly lit eatery packed with locals (dark or bleached hair and darkish complexions; overalls, old suit jackets, plain shirts, long pants, plunging décolletages; no gawking or selfies), make a note and reserve and/or return for the next meal.

6. Lunch at either 11:55 or 2:15 and dinner at either 6:20 or 9:40. That way you can get in almost anywhere with no notice. If not, reserve with the owner for the next meal on your agenda.

7. Pasta is a first course (Primi Piatti), not an entire meal, especially at lunch (which is dinner). Ristorantes and Trattorias used to enforce this rigidly, but have grown lax with the onrush of tourists. Nevertheless, if the pasta is that good, the meat or fish course will be even better (and portions will be adjusted). Go with the Italian flow.

8. We don’t expect good manners from servers, and if the owner and her bambini are frantically rushing about trying to do everything themselves, so much the better. The food will get to you when it gets to you. The check will come in less time than it takes to grow a beard. Have another glass of wine and enjoy the chaos.

9. Drink a carafe of the house red unless you want to throw money away on a bottle that probably won’t be any better. Same for the white, except start with a glass.

10. If the door is locked near or during opening hours, ring the bell and ask for a table. Seriously. If they’re trying to discourage casual diners, you might have hit the culinary jackpot.

11. Do your research on regional foods and/or ask the owner. Eat Neapolitan in Naples, Tuscan in Florence, Piemontese in Turin, Trentinese in Venice, and Roman in Roma. Don’t expect a great Carbonara in Palermo or a mouth-watering Bolognese in Genoa or terrific Vongole Veraci in Milan. Fish on the coast, meat inland–as a rule anyway, outside of Rome.

12. Tipping will never buy you the love you might crave and has been technically outlawed by the EU anyway. Some Americans still insist on tipping, and in the gaudy tourist joints on the big squares, it’s probably expected—of them. Otherwise, it just marks you out as a foreigner who doesn’t care much about the local scene and will never return. Don’t expect the servers to fawn over someone like that.

13. Eating in Italy is the main event of your day and not just a stop on the way to the leather market or the Coliseum. Expect at least two hours for lunch, and you’ll always come away happy.

Italia

For what it’s worth, our rules for eating out in Italy (unless you’re desperate, of course):

1. Avoid any restaurant large enough to accommodate a busload of gawkers. Especially one with bright lights, huge, curtained windows, and elaborate chandeliers. Gaudy is good—just not that kind of gaudy.

2. Avoid any restaurant with English menus out front. Look at what everyone else is eating and point politely—they’ll get a laugh out of it. Never give in to the blandishments of a busker stationed at the door to harangue you inside–if the staff knows how to cook, they won’t need him.

3. Specialized is better. Any place with a sign like “Ristorante Bar Pizzaria” or the like doesn’t care what they serve you, as long as you pay the check. Avoid any restaurant with “pizza” in its sign unless you see that pizza is the only thing they serve (stand-ups are best).

4. Small is beautiful–a TRATTORIA should be the size of your mama’s kitchen, a ROSTICCERIA or SALUMERIA should have a few stools and maybe a table (or a bench in a nearby square). RISTORANTES are for formal dining and often overpriced and overwrought (and see rule #1 above). The classifications have been bastardized over the years, but they still mean something.

5. Avoid major squares and avenues. Ignore foreign guide book recommendations. Avoid any high-traffic area where they assume they’ll never see you again. If you walk by a poorly lit eatery packed with locals (dark or bleached hair and darkish complexions; overalls, old suit jackets, plain shirts, long pants, plunging décolletages; no gawking or selfies), make a note and reserve and/or return for the next meal.

6. Lunch at either 11:55 or 2:15 and dinner at either 6:20 or 9:40. That way you can get in almost anywhere with no notice. If not, reserve with the owner for the next meal on your agenda.

7. Pasta is a first course (Primi Piatti), not an entire meal, especially at lunch (which is dinner). Ristorantes and Trattorias used to enforce this rigidly, but have grown lax with the onrush of tourists. Nevertheless, if the pasta is that good, the meat or fish course will be even better (and portions will be adjusted). Go with the Italian flow.

8. We don’t expect good manners from servers, and if the owner and her bambini are frantically rushing about trying to do everything themselves, so much the better. The food will get to you when it gets to you. The check will come in less time than it takes to grow a beard. Have another glass of wine and enjoy the chaos.

9. Drink a carafe of the house red unless you want to throw money away on a bottle that probably won’t be any better. Same for the white, except start with a glass.

10. If the door is locked near or during opening hours, ring the bell and ask for a table. Seriously. If they’re trying to discourage casual diners, you might have hit the culinary jackpot.

11. Do your research on regional foods and/or ask the owner. Eat Neapolitan in Naples, Tuscan in Florence, Piemontese in Turin, Trentinese in Venice, and Roman in Roma. Don’t expect a great Carbonara in Palermo or a mouth-watering Bolognese in Genoa or terrific Vongole Veraci in Milan. Fish on the coast, meat inland–as a rule anyway, outside of Rome.

12. Tipping will never buy you the love you might crave and has been technically outlawed by the EU anyway. Some Americans still insist on tipping, and in the gaudy tourist joints on the big squares, it’s probably expected—of them. Otherwise, it just marks you out as a foreigner who doesn’t care much about the local scene and will never return. Don’t expect the servers to fawn over someone like that.

13. Eating in Italy is the main event of your day and not just a stop on the way to the leather market or the Coliseum. Expect at least two hours for lunch, and you’ll always come away happy.

Macbeth

King Mac Bethad mac Findlaích might have burned to death his first liege lord (Gille Coemgáin) and beheaded his second (King Duncan I), but as medieval Scottish leaders went, he was no more vicious or ruthless than the average. Nevertheless, by the time William Shakespeare had finished turning Mac Bethad into Macbeth, his reputation was destroyed forever.

Not to mention the hit his poor Queen Gruoch ingen Boite has taken. Yes, she married Mac Bethad after the burning of her first husband Gille, but there wasn’t a hint of seduction or madness in her history—certainly nothing as gruesomely femme fatale as Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth.

From Shakespeare to Mel Gibson, Scottish history has been twisted, turned, and flat-out invented to serve the purposes of short-term propaganda. Shakespeare in particular was an expert at coddling the ego and aspirations of his sovereign. He produced the tragedy Macbeth sometime after 1605, just as the Scottish King James I was ascending the English throne. As a Catholic Scotsman in a country full of angry English Protestants, James needed all the help he could get.

The truth is that the standard for most kings of Scotland ranged from brutally incompetent to dismally ineffectual—and it wasn’t entirely their fault. The clan system was always the true locus of power in what was already a geographically ungovernable country. A king was lucky to rule more than half of the country, much less die in his bed.

So… In Scotland, you never know where history ebbs and legend flows, but one accounting has it that Mac Bethad met his end on 15 August, 1057, at the Peel of Lumphanan west of Aberdeen in the Eastern Lowlands. Duncan I’s vengeful son, the future King Malcolm III, drove Mac Bethad’s army off the fortification and then beheaded him on what is now called Macbeth’s Stone (underneath the tree in the top photo).

Or so the story goes…

Truffles

No vegetable is invested with more hype and idiosyncrasy in its cultivation and consumption than the hideously ugly, yet über-expensive European truffle. French blacks (Tuber melanosporum) and Italian whites (Tuber magnatum) regularly fetch more than $1,000 per pound at market and are then doled out, one hyper-thin slice at a time, on everything from soup to eggs to pasta and risotto to roasted turkeys.

The pigs are the main story, of course. Dogs have no particular affinity for the tuber and have to be trained to sniff it out from just below the surface among the roots of oak and beech trees. Female pigs, on the other hand, go crazy for the plant’s odor, an androstenol sex pheromone which can otherwise only be found in the saliva of wild boars. In Italy, the oversexed sows have been banned altogether from the hunt, whereas their French handlers still regularly fight them to the last orgasmic bite.

And 80% of that fight these days takes place not in pristine forests, but in tortured plantations on some of the driest, chalkiest, least promising land in Provence and Piedmont. These mini-jungles pop out of the landscape amid vast swathes of lavender and some of the most beautiful vineyards in Europe. So when we decided to go truffle-hunting in Provence, it was really just an excuse to wander lost about the countryside, trespassing down remote limestone trails and constantly shaking our cell phones to help Google Maps rescue us from another convoluted maze.

The Provençal truffle traffic is centered around villages and towns like Richerenches, Grignan, and Carpentras that are every bit as famous in their business as the surrounding Côtes du Rhône communities are in wine-making. But the inherent vagaries of cultivation, along with the rural depopulation and climate change that have afflicted traditional agriculture all over the world, have led to a general decline in production. In 1937, France produced around 1,000 metric tonnes of truffles—by 2014, the harvest had dropped to just 50. Other countries have experimented with mass production, but it will be a while before you see a King Ranch delivering truckloads of bland imitation to your grocer’s shelf.

Truffle season in Provence runs from November through January, a time when colors change by the day and deliver some of the most beautiful views in France. No wonder all those rich Parisians and Londoners seem so intent on buying up the local farm and housing stock for their weekend retreats. But if they—or you—are cooking with truffle oil, beware—unless you make it yourself, you’re actually cooking with imitation 2,4-Dithiapentane oil—the chemical 2,4-Dithiapentane in nearly all commercial truffle oil being a key compound in halitosis, flatulence, and formaldehyde.

Yum to that…

Filed under: Europe, Food Tagged: France

Tain-l’Hermitage

Thomas Jefferson might have had better weather in the 1780s when he came to the Hermitage Mountain here and declared this vista of the Rhône River valley the most beautiful in all of France. The trip from the Colonial Ambassador’s residence in Paris—564km by modern roads—would have taken him weeks in the official buggy. But Jefferson made several such trips around the country, all in search of the finest French wines for his spectacular collection back in Virginia.

This small granite mountain has been producing some of the finest red wines ever since 1224, when the returning crusader Sir Gaspard de Stérimberg was given the Queen’s permission to retire here. The Syrah grape was born on these slopes, from which it has sallied forth to conquer the fashionable world. But in the 20th century, the mountain started to fall behind its principal competitors, Château Lafite of Bordeaux and Romanée-Conti of Bourgogne. Mainly it was a matter of economics—at $100 for a high-end bottle, the 300 local growers are still hard pressed to make a profit on land that fetches more than $1 million per hectare. And as long as the wine world is ruled by equal parts taste, snobbery, and foolishness, the prices will stay where they are.

But that at least prevented the mountain from providing grist for the greatest scandal in the history of the wine world. In 1985, a German trickster named Meinhard Görke (but going by the goofy name of Hardy Rodenstock) started selling bottles of Bordeaux once owned by Jefferson and supposedly unearthed in a long-hidden Parisian cellar. For more than a decade, Rodenstock obtained world-record auction prices for ancient bottles he had in fact refilled with ho-hum modern vintages. Eventually the fraud was unmasked (by the political Koch Brother Bill, no less), but not before Rodenstock had made utter fools of the wine world’s upper crusts.

You can read all about it in The Billionaire’s Vinegar, a book by Benjamin Wallace. Or wait for the HBO movie—which you can watch with a little French bread, a little French cheese, and a large glass of the finest Hermitage.

Filed under: Europe Tagged: France

Vittel

The European Spa Movement was synonymous with la Belle Époque, the 40-year dream period from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 until 1914 and the carnage of the Great War.  European aristocrats and politicians held their collective breath and noses and tried their hardest not to notice the churn of the grubby, socialist-ridden ground beneath them. It was a time of astonishing hypocrisy and impeccable manners, of opulent fashion and elaborately conspicuous consumption. It was Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde in the drawing room, with Auguste Escoffier ruling the kitchen, and Karl Marx scribbling away in the gutter.

But at least it was clean, for those who could afford it. The geological underpinnings of the Continent, from Belgium through central Europe into Prague and Budapest, were a froth of hot, steamy, mineral-laden waters waiting to burst forth into the spa pools and showers of the rich. The first notion was to drink the refined liquid— à la Évian, Vittel, or Chaudfontaine—but then the remarkable idea emerged of bathing in it.

Almost overnight, every town that could sink a pipe was building its niche in the elaborate network of spa palaces and grand hotels that covered Europe. But there was a limit to how much froth the market could absorb. Between changing tastes, the invention of the private bathtub, and the convulsions of the 20th Century wars, the movement was doomed to a quick obsolescence.

The experience of the town of Vittel in central Lorraine was typical. After a brief flourish, its four grand hotels were taken over by the Americans in 1917 to house a field hospital assembled by Detroit’s Wayne State University. Then, in the Second War, the Nazis commandeered the spa for housing the high-value American, British and Jewish internees they hoped to ransom. In 1944, the American Third Army arrived and transformed the entire town into an armed headquarters camp. By the time Vittel had finished reeling, the spa movement had puttered onward.

Today, we hear about a renaissance of the European spa—and major centers in places like Mondorf-les-Bains, Baden-Baden, Abano Terme, and Budapest at least appear to be flourishing—but for the vast majority of the hundreds of towns with “les-Bains” or “Bad” or “Terme” in their name, the past is still stuck in the seedier reaches of the past.

Filed under: Europe Tagged: France