James Lockhart Perry's Blog, page 9

Tabasco Sauce

Some trips are planned and some are pure serendipity. We were wandering around the Louisiana Bayou when we happened upon the sleepy Avery Island, a pure salt dome surfacing out of the marshland and owned since the US Civil War by the Marsh, Avery, and McIlhenny families.

Their family business, the McIlhenny Co., isn’t just another brand waiting to be exploited by a profit-crazed private equity fund, but a cultural phenomenon that has endured and grown since 1868. Today, their Tabasco Brand Pepper Sauce is the preferred pepper seasoning of 180 countries, the US Army (in its MREs), the International Space Station, and the British Crown.

The tabasco peppers originally came from the Mexican state of Tabasco and are not particularly hot by Scoville standards (2,500–5,000 SHU, compared to 100,000–350,000 for a habanero). Even today, when they reach a precise shade of red, they are hand-harvested, then mashed with the island’s salt and aged in used Jack Daniels whiskey barrels. After three years, the soup is filtered, mixed with vinegar, and then bottled in the same puckered cologne bottles as the original recipe. And that’s it—not a chemical additive in sight.

When you visit the island, virtually everyone you meet (including the owners) is a second-, third-, or fourth-generation employee. Some would call it paternalism, but there’s no question–this company knows how to treat and retain its employees. In fact, there are few products you can consume today with as clear a conscience, both for where they came from and what they will do to you. Think of that the next time you mix a Bloody Mary.

Filed under: America Tagged: Louisiana

Avery Island

Some trips are planned and some are pure serendipity. We were wandering around the Louisiana Bayou when we happened upon the sleepy Avery Island, a pure salt dome pushing up out of the marshland and owned since the US Civil War by the Marsh, Avery, and McIlhenny families.

Their family business, the McIlhenny Co., isn’t just another brand waiting to be exploited by a profit-crazed private equity fund, but a cultural phenomenon that has endured and grown since 1868. Today, their Tabasco Brand Pepper Sauce is the preferred pepper seasoning of 180 countries, the US Army (in its MREs), the International Space Station, and the British Crown.

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The tabasco peppers originally came from the Mexican state of Tabasco and are not particularly hot by Scoville standards (2,500–5,000 SHU, compared to 100,000–350,000 for a habanero). Even today, when they reach a precise shade of red, they are hand-harvested, then mashed with the island’s salt and aged in used Jack Daniels whiskey barrels. After three years, the soup is filtered, mixed with vinegar, and then bottled in the same puckered cologne bottles as the original recipe. And that’s it—not a chemical additive in sight.

[image error]

When you visit the island, virtually everyone you meet (including the owners) is a second-, third-, or fourth-generation employee. Some would call it paternalism, but there’s no question–this company knows how to treat and retain its employees. In fact, there are few products you can consume today with as clear a conscience, both for where they came from and what they will do to you. Think of that the next time you mix a Bloody Mary.

Filed under: America Tagged: Louisiana

Orient Express

The original Orient Express started running in 1881 from Paris to Istanbul via the northern, Romanian route (Paris-München-Wien-Budapest-București-Istanbul). After World War I, the southern route substituted Belgrade-Sofia for București to bypass the worst of the Balkan political mayhem. After growing up with Agatha Christie (Murder On the Orient Express), Graham Greene (Stamboul Train), and Ian Fleming (From Russia With Love), we pegged either hyper-romantic route at the top of our bucket list.

Today, the original services are long gone, but you can retrace their steps with individual trains booked along the way. We added another variant to the original route, starting in Bruxelles and changing in Köln for Wien. With a few days off in Romania to search for Vlad the Impaler, this meant six days of travel with four nights on sleeper trains.

Each country manages its own leg of the route. The quality runs from Spartan cleanliness (Germany-Austria) to decrepit elegance (Hungary-Romania) to something else (Bulgaria-Turkey). Our favorite was the Romanian train, the Ister, even though we were advised to bring our own toilet paper and food in case they forgot to hitch up the saloon car. And then there was the minor inconvenience of the bunk that collapsed outside Budapest… And the accidentally canceled reservation in București… And the traveler with the expired passport we watched begging the Bulgarians to let him back on the train… And…

Don’t even think about taking this journey without consulting the British train expert, The Man in Seat 61. There are simply too many variables and mishaps awaiting you, and he does a beautiful job of covering them all. Even then, be prepared for a shock or two. For us, it was being dropped in the middle of the night into the ex-Communist Eastern European mob scene of Budapest-Keleti train station. In the light of the next day, of course, we couldn’t recall what all the fuss had been about.

Filed under: Elsewhere, Europe Tagged: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Turkey

Chancellorsville

We spent days poring over the historical accounts, talking to Park Rangers, and trampling through the undergrowth outside Chancellorsville, Virginia, in search of the precise spot where, on 2 May, 1863, Stonewall Jackson was shot. Given the catastrophic effect on the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, we naturally expected some sort of physical marker, but there was none to be found. We’re pretty sure the thicket in the photo was the scene of the crime, but wouldn’t have bet Jackson’s life on it.

For the uninitiated, General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson was the Confederacy’s tactical visionary to General Robert E. Lee’s strategic genius. He personally saved the day at the First and Second Battles of Bull Run and, prior to being shot at Chancellorsville, enveloped the Union forces in a maneuver that is still taught in military academies. He prided himself on always knowing what was going on–no mean feat in the burning, smoke-filled forest of a US Civil War battlefield–and would wander all over the terrain in search of intelligence. So it was no accident that he found himself outside the Confederate lines when one of his own pickets challenged and shot him off his horse.

Three bullets hit the General in the left arm and right hand, but in the primitive medical conditions of the US Civil War, even the most superficial wounds could prove lethal. Transported to Chandler’s Plantation in nearby Guinea Station, he suffered amputation before contracting pneumonia and dying the next day. Lee and the rest of the Confederacy were grief-stricken. As Lee said without irony, “He has lost his left arm but I my right.” Jackson would be sorely missed at Gettysburg, where Richard E. Ewell would fail to read Lee’s mind and then fumble his one great chance to win the battle and end the war.

In the occasionally bizarre and gruesome way of death in 19th century America, Jackson and his arm were buried under separate monuments 140 miles away from each other. The man was laid to rest in Lexington, Virginia, and the arm in Fredericksburg. As late as 1921, the illustrious Marine Major General Smedley Butler, a two-time Medal of Honor winner, would refuse to believe the story and order his men to dig the arm up. The offending member was still there, mouldering away in its original wooden box.

Chancellorsville would go down in history as either Lee’s greatest victory or the Union’s most pathetic defeat. But even though Lee ran rings around a far larger Union Army, he used up too many of his precious men and let the success tempt him, as it always seems to do, into overreach.

And then there was Stonewall Jackson, who died just when he was most needed.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Virginia

Rijsstaffel

One of my favorite childhood meals used to come when the family crossed the Dutch border to the town of Bergen op Zoom for Indonesian Rijsstaffel. An ancient (at least to my 12-year-old eyes) Dutch ex-colonial couple had taken over a manor house and turned it into a restaurant. Bowls of aromatic rice (Nasi Goreng and Nasi Kuning) complimented by up to 30 dishes for a table of six—satays, curries, spring rolls, fritters, meat and fish balls, bites of duck and pork belly, sauces by the dozen, and deviled eggs so explosive that you dared not touch the mixture with your fingers.

Rijsstaffel, or Rice Table, came from the traditional Nasi Padang of West Sumatra. It was a way for colonials to introduce visitors to a cross-section of Indonesian tastes. With an archipelago of 13,466 islands and 742 languages and dialects spoken by 237.6 million citizens, Indonesia has always punched far below its cultural weight on the world stage. But for the initiated, there are few richer and more varied cuisines to be had anywhere.

So… Naturally, 25 years ago when we moved to Los Angeles, a hotbed of Asian culture and cuisine, I expected to find some of the best Rijsstaffel on the planet—but nada. None. Today, the only restaurants that serve it manage a monthly or bi-weekly special. And it isn’t the difficulty of presentation that stops them, but political correctness. As a colonial concoction, Rijsstaffel has become a political embarrassment.

This baffles me. Admittedly, the Dutch East Indies was one of the more horrific colonial administrations, and admittedly the occupation started with the procurement of foodstuffs—spices, sugar, and coffee—and only later oil. But still… One of my favorite meals in Bruxelles is the classic Yassa and Cassava stew offered by l’Horlogerie in the Congolese section of Ixelles. I wear cotton without cringing at the horrific history of the crop in the ante-bellum US South. Soul food is another favorite, even though it originated with the scraps of food left for slaves.

I claim no particular allergy to political correctness—another favorite meal in Palos Verdes, California, being the oysters and martinis served at the Trump National Golf Course clubhouse. After the last year, I can no longer make myself go there. But to cut out an entire class of food—much less one that serves as so spectacular an advertisement for a country’s cuisine—makes no sense. That I can see anyway. Maybe I’m just getting old?

Filed under: Europe Tagged: Netherlands

Bergen op Zoom

One of my favorite childhood meals used to come when the family crossed the Dutch border to the town of Bergen op Zoom for Indonesian Rijsstaffel. An ancient (at least to my 12-year-old eyes) Dutch ex-colonial couple had taken over a manor house and turned it into a restaurant. Bowls of aromatic rice (Nasi Goreng and Nasi Kuning) complimented by up to 30 dishes for a table of six—satays, curries, spring rolls, fritters, meat and fish balls, bites of duck and pork belly, sauces by the dozen, and deviled eggs so explosive that you dared not touch the mixture with your fingers.

Rijsstaffel, or Rice Table, came from the traditional Nasi Padang of West Sumatra. It was a way for colonials to introduce visitors to a cross-section of Indonesian tastes. With an archipelago of 13,466 islands and 742 languages and dialects spoken by 237.6 million citizens, Indonesia has always punched far below its cultural weight on the world stage. But for the initiated, there are few richer and more varied cuisines to be had anywhere.

So… Naturally, 25 years ago when we moved to Los Angeles, a hotbed of Asian culture and cuisine, I expected to find some of the best Rijsstaffel on the planet—but nada. None. Today, the only restaurants that serve it manage a monthly or bi-weekly special. And it isn’t the difficulty of presentation that stops them, but political correctness. As a colonial concoction, Rijsstaffel has become a political embarrassment.

This baffles me. Admittedly, the Dutch East Indies was one of the more horrific colonial administrations, and admittedly the occupation started with the procurement of foodstuffs—spices, sugar, and coffee—and only later oil. But still… One of my favorite meals in Bruxelles is the classic Yassa and Cassava stew offered by l’Horlogerie in the Congolese section of Ixelles. I wear cotton without cringing at the horrific history of the crop in the ante-bellum US South. Soul food is another favorite, even though it originated with the scraps of food left for slaves.

I claim no particular allergy to political correctness—another favorite meal in Palos Verdes, California, being the oysters and martinis served at the Trump National Golf Course clubhouse. After the last year, I can no longer make myself go there. But to cut out an entire class of food—much less one that serves as so spectacular an advertisement for a country’s cuisine—makes no sense. That I can see anyway. Maybe I’m just getting old?

Filed under: Novels Tagged: Netherlands, Travel

Waterloo

It was the bloodthirsty celebrity matchup the world had been waiting for. Not until Erwin Rommel met Bernard Montgomery at El Alamein in 1942 would the world see a more anticipated battle than Waterloo. That conflict, on 18 June, 1815, pitted the invincible French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte against Arthur Wellesley, the brilliant British Duke of Wellington. For more than a decade these two had made life miserable for each other without ever coming onto the same field at the same time.

Napoleon was the effervescent flash and Wellington the dour, grumpy Englishman, so most of the betting naturally favored the Emperor. And even though Napoleon was missing some of his key players, he still had Marshal Michel Ney, one of the most celebrated cavalry commanders in history.

On that Sunday afternoon, Ney fought like a man unhinged, which he in fact was. He had broken his word of honor that he would never again take up arms for Napoleon (for which he would pay 175 days later in front of a French firing squad), so he had nothing to lose. Five horses were shot out from under him as he led one murderous charge after another against the artillery positioned on the ridge in the photo. When he ran out of horses, he led his troops on foot, shouting “Come see how a Marshal of France dies!”

The battle raged back and forth all day until the hitherto unbeaten French Imperial Guard shocked everyone by inexplicably breaking and fleeing. Wellington leapt up in the stirrups of his horse Copenhagen and waved his troops forward for the final conclusive attack. By the time the fighting petered out, the ground lay hidden under a carpet of 48,000 dead and dying bodies.

Napoleon was, of course, finished—he had “met his Waterloo,” as the famous proverb went, and was exiled to St. Helena where the British might or might not have poisoned him. The French Revolution was once and for all buried by the universally despised Bourbon monarchy and its obese, gout-plagued King, now temporarily restored. Ney was under arrest, and Wellington was on his way to dominating the British political scene.

One winner was Wellington’s horse Copenhagen, who spent the rest of his 28 years gracefully chomping on apples fed him by adoring fans. Another was a London merchant named Thomas Cook, who had started a business shipping British officers’ belongings to Belgium for the campaign. After the war, Cook expanded his operation to transport battle buffs to Waterloo and, in the process, invented the modern tourist industry.

The battlefield, a short bike ride away from my childhood home, still hosts enough British tourists to keep the local fish & chips industry in business. But the cast-iron British Lion with its imperial foot on the globe has long since faded into the mists of history.

 

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Belgium, Travel

Yorktown

Of all the battlefields we’ve photographed, from Austerlitz in the Czech Republic westward to San Pasqual in California, Yorktown was the most beautiful and, oddly enough, the most pacific. It didn’t hurt that we arrived at dawn on a perfect winter day and had the place to ourselves; or that all of the hatchets flung about in that conflict had been long buried; or that  only 142 soldiers died during the 23-day siege that ended here in 1781 (on my birthday, 19 October) with a decisive Franco-American victory.

The American Revolution had started out as little better than a civil war, with Patriots (40%) opposed to Loyalists (20%) and with Neutrals (40%) stuck in between. In the British Parliament, these divisions were reflected in vicious debates between the King’s Tories and the opposition Whigs. In the British army, the ambivalence translated into hapless administration, poor communications, weak and defensive strategies, and near-universal back-biting among the Generals. The American Revolution would prove the graveyard of many a British military and political career.

Like the Vietnamese 200 years later, all the Patriots needed to do was survive—a good thing since, like the Vietnamese, they weren’t particularly good at winning military victories. Even in 1781, George Washington insisted on attacking the British in their New York stronghold and was only saved from that folly by the French fleet sailing off unannounced to Virginia. Had Washington had his way, there would have been no Yorktown and no allied victory.

And yet… When you breath in the atmosphere of this battlefield, you feel a thorough sense of inevitability you never feel at places like Manassas, Gettysburg, Ypres, Verdun, Normandy, or Waterloo. By the time Washington arrived here and picked up a soldier’s pickax to start the first trench, history had already taken one of its massive turns. On their way out through the American lines, the defeated British played the marching song, “The World Turned Upside-Down.” How little they knew.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Travel, Virginia

Dinant

Here we help the city of Dinant celebrate the birth of its favorite son Adolphe Saxe, who first patented the saxophone on 28 June, 1846.

The Belgian musician was a human catastrophe who survived falls, poisoning, drowning, burning, explosions, two bankruptcies, and—most tellingly—lip cancer, only to die in abject poverty in a Paris slum. Still, he did know his musical instruments.

Dinant is also famous as the spot where General Erwin Rommel finally crossed the Meuse River in 1940 to keep the sputtering German offensive alive and bring the world the misnamed legend of the Blitzkrieg. 

Less well known was the singular talent the city had for irritating the German invaders of World War I. In 1914, the Hun responded with massacres of more than 6,500 civilians—in one incident alone, they threw 654 people off this bridge and brought river navigation to a halt. The Rape of Dinant turned into one of the first propaganda salvos in a war that overflowed with them.

Nowadays, we’re all friends, and the city has become a tourist mecca of sorts. But we never eat here—for no reason we can fathom, the city has the worst restaurants we’ve ever seen. But the music is wonderful.

 

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Belgium, Travel

Death Valley

Our first encounter with an American desert came in driving Interstate 15 north from Los Angeles to Las Vegas through the High Mojave. Where we expected to find Lawrence of Arabia waving from atop a sand dune, we instead crossed an ugly moonscape of barren rocks and tumbleweed half-hidden under a mountain of ghost housing, discarded junk and furniture, assorted car trash, and reams of toilet paper trailing off in the desiccated breeze.

It wasn’t until 15 years later that we actually left the highway and discovered the hidden wonders of Death Valley and the Mojave National Preserve. Two novels came out of our many adventures: Until I Die, where Iris and Charlie hide out from the law in an abandoned mining camp and fight off the Manson family; and Cat Flight From Birdland, where the hero and his favorite lesbian couple hide $9,999,900 stolen from Bulgarian mobsters (who apparently couldn’t count any higher) in a sand dune north of Stovepipe Wells.

We trekked every inch of these spectacular locations, most often at 5:30AM as the sun was still thinking about rising. Fortunately, we didn’t hear about the risks we were taking until long afterward. The first thing you learn in climbing a slot canyon filled with rock falls and with 30 pounds of photo equipment on your back is that what goes up might or might not, depending on your luck, come down.

Another old adage more accurately sums up the desert experience: less is more. The subtlety of the landscape means you have to actively seek out its treasures. In our modern, spoon-fed version of tourism, this ensures that 99% of travelers will sail onward to the nearest slot machine with hardly a glance in their rear-view mirror at the trash they just tossed out their windows. But if you do your research, pay attention to your surroundings, and watch out for stray snakes, scorpions, fire ants, black widows, hungry desert cats, and Mansonites, there is nowhere in the world where nature so openly bares her under-processed soul.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: California, Travel