FOOD CULTURE INDEX

Depression Spaghetti (contributor post)

2011-12-13T11:57:00.003-05:00

Bill Drain from NYC writes in about a photograph in the current issue of Saveur magazine (no.143):

The picture on page 53 . . . captures a moment in time, the spaghetti (they didn't have "pasta" back then) lifting from the boiling water, steam rising, the cook looking at the men gathered outside of the window who are, for the most part, eyeing the spaghetti. Expectantly? It was taken in New York City in 1937 during the Great Depression. Why are they gathered there? Are they going to get free food? Did they eat that day? Are they enjoying some no cost street theatre? Their dress really doesn't tell us much. Men from all walks of life lost their livelihoods back then and would daily get dressed in their suits, maybe to maintain some self-respect, while they spent the day looking for work that didn't come. There's a Norman Rockwell feeling to the picture, some accidental warmth in a time of upheaval and desperation.

(Saveur doesn't attribute this photo, but I think it may be by Ida Wyckoff—KA)

Norma Duffield Lyon, Butter Sculptor (special guest post)

2011-11-17T18:44:00.003-05:00

This post comes to FCI from Nell Haynes, a Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology at American University. Nell's full bio follows the post.

Norma Duffield Lyon, affectionately known as “Duffy,” passed away on June 27, 2011. She was an 81 year old Iowa woman; both a farmer and an artist. Though her name never appeared in New York galleries, magazines like Artforum, practically every Iowa native gave pause at hearing of her death. For 46 years (from 1960-2006), Duffy sculpted the Iowa State Fair’s Butter Cow.

Norma Duffield Lyon with one of her creations, AP photo via Politico.com

In 2003, after meeting Duffy the first time, I wrote these notes about her process:

Duffy starts with choosing a dairy cattle breed, then works from sketches or photographs. Inside of the display case that is refrigerated to 35 degrees, she places 500-600 pounds of butter (about 2,400 sticks) on an armature made of wood and chicken wire. At first, she adds large handfuls to the frame to approximate the shape of the cow, and eventually fine-tunes the form with smaller additions of butter. Working both with her hands and sculpting tools, the process takes about two weeks.

armature for the Butter Cow, photo by author

Duffy would usually schedule her work to be finished in the first days of the fair, so that attendees could see her in process. Many fairgoers consider the Butter Cow to be the definitive fair experience. Information booth volunteers told us that the most common questions they are asked are, “Where are the bathrooms?" and "Where’s the Butter Cow?” (in the dairy building, of course). Some life-long devotees of the Butter Cow travel from the west coast, or will pay hundreds of dollars to assist with sculpting the tail through the fair’s Blue Ribbon Foundation. When the film crew stopped at a local sandwich shop for lunch, the twenty-year-old cashier told us, “Oh the Butter Cow. That thing used to make me so happy when I was a kid.”

Butter sculpture made its premiere in the United States in 1908 at the Iowa State Fair with the first Buttercow. The sculpture was sponsored by the Beatrice Creamery, who wished to display the success of the local dairy industry and promote local products. The Butter Cow as advertisement worked, with a six percent increase in sales the next year, but it also came to occupy an iconic position for locals. In essence, the Butter Cow came to symbolize enthusiasts see as Midwestern values. When former Midwest Dairy Association spokesperson, Katie Miron speaks of the Dairy industry she uses words like “hard work,” “dedication,” “wholesome” and “nutritious.” She connects these concepts to longstanding “American Values” and suggests that dairy farming, in many ways, represents the long held ideal of hard work leading to success. Butter art, for her is a way to both promote these values within the community, and communicate the values to outsiders.

"Duffy" Lyon in 1961
with her second solo Butter Cow. Photo via TravelIowa

And, like all icons, the Butter Cow adapts to symbolize prevailing social issues and political perspectives. What was once a symbol of progress, now has come to be a nostalgic representation of a disappearing way of life. As family farms disappear and Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations replace them, the Butter Cow stands as a testament to the idealization of the past and the values associated with it.

both photos by the author

With intimate knowledge of dairy farming and cows declining, those with the expertise to sculpt accurate likenesses in butter are disappearing as well. Duffy sculpted a Butter Cow for the Illinois State Fair as well, from 1969-2001. In 2003, many people felt the new sculptor’s work did not live up to the standard Duffy had set. I overheard numerous dairy farmers and others experienced in bovine anatomy talk of the sculpture's shortcomings. Duffy, who had earned a degree in Animal Science from Iowa State University, had an intimate knowledge of bovine anatomy. She sculpted specific breeds, and even the veins on her sculpted udders were anatomically correct. However, when the new sculptor’s cow was unveiled, a long time Dairy Association employee scoffed: “This one just looks like a mule with tits!” As lifeways change, old customs become endowed with new meaning. Butter sculptures may act as a reflector of the agricultural community. As knowledge of small family farms disappears in the wake of the rise of factory farms, these artworks lose part of their realism. However, as contexts change, art and tradition take on new implications and their relevance becomes increasingly valuable as symbols for examining the past and considering the future.

More about the author:

A doctoral candidate at American University with a concentration in Race, Gender, and Social Justice, Nell Haynes holds a Bachelor of Science Degree from Northwestern University in Anthropology and Theater. Her research addresses themes of violence, performance, audience interpretation, and gender and ethnic identity in Latin America. Her dissertation, "Chola in a Choke Hold: Discourses of Violence and Audience Interpretation in Bolivian Lucha Libre," explores the ways indigenous women represent violence, resisting, incorporating, and shifting cultural discourses. She is the recipient of the 2010 Roseberry-Nash Award for best paper in Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association.

All Stuck Together Pickles

2011-11-08T16:17:00.001-05:00

Two awesome stills from Ozu's 1949 film Late Spring:

actors: Jun Usami & Setsuko Hara
Arigatou — Ozu's Teapot

Two Interesting Sites About African Food

2011-11-04T09:04:00.004-04:00

A beautiful website clearly made with love, African Chop documents dozens of traditional and popular foods from throughout the entire continent. Here's one example—a fried dough recipe from East Africa.

Maandazi
Every culture seems to have thier own version of fried dough! This East African version has a sweet taste and pleasant chewy texture. You might eat maandazi for breakfast in a Kenyan cafe.

2cups white flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
¼ teaspoon cardamom
¼ teaspoon salt
1 egg
¾ cup water
4 cups vegetable oil, for frying
1. Combine flour, baking powder, sugar, cardamom and salt in a large bowl.
2. Whisk egg and water together in a small bowl. Make a well in center of dry ingredients and add egg mixture. Mix together gradually with a fork until mixture forms a soft dough. You can add 1 or 2 tablespoons of flour (one at a time) if it is too sticky. Cover dough with a wet towel or plastic wrap and leave 30 minutes or longer.
3. Heat oil in a deep, heavy pot (cast iron is preferable) until is reaches 360° F. While oil is heating, roll dough out on a floured surface into a rectangle ½ inch thick. Cut into 2-inch rounds with a glass or small biscuit cutter. You can also use a knife to cut rectangles. Form ball again with remaining dough and repeat process until all of dough is cut. You should have about 20 rounds.
4. Fry maandazi in batches of 5, for about 5 minutes per batch, turning to brown both sides. Hint: Turn the mandaazi before it gets too puffy, or the air bubbles will prevent you from turning it at all. I usually turn them several times during frying process. Remove from oil when both sides are golden brown. Serve warm, dipped in powdered sugar if desired.
Yield: about 20 maandazi

The travel site South African Tours and Travel has a wonderful page on traditional South African Food. Here's a small sample:

Umngqusho
A favourite among the Xhosa people and said to be one of mr. Nelson Mandela’s favourites. It is "samp", broken dried maize kernels mixed with beans. After boiling for three hours butter, onions, potatoes, chillies, lemons salt and some oil are added after which it is allowed to simmer on low heat until all ingredients are tender and done.

Typical Xhosa or Zulu dish consisting of samp, rice, beans, pumpkin and cabbage, almost like Umngqusho.

Blue Rice and Unfamiliar Fishes: Sarah Vowell's Hawaiian History

2011-11-01T20:59:00.002-04:00

A fun audio excerpt from Sarah Vowell's latest book Unfamiliar Fishes provides a brief history of Hawaii illustrated with bento-box style arrangements of Hawaii's traditional and apparently ubiquitous "plate lunch."

Smutty Sweets—Will Cotton's Paintings

2011-10-29T15:53:00.001-04:00

I've read Will Cotton say in a few interviews that he paints landscapes that just happen to be composed of whipped cream, cotton candy, soda, cake, and icing. He claims to feel more akin to the Hudson River School of landscape painters than to someone like Wayne Thiebaud. Now, I get it, but before reading those interviews, I saw in Cotton's paintings pretty much the same thing I see in Emily Eveleth's gigantic, slouching donuts: big, soft bodies, oozing, sensual, id-drenched. Well, truthfully, that's still what I see.

Sometimes Cotton puts actual bodies in his work, though if I had to hang one of these paintings on my living room wall (had to?—I'd kill to, or maybe not kill but lightly maim) I'd prefer one of the obscene smears, muddy pools, or messy piles of soft, sweet matter that imply whole bodies, but hide them from view. The sly ambiguity of a painting like Root Beer Swamp is, to my mind, so much funnier and more mysterious than the fairly clear and unsurprising, though gorgeously executed, goings on in paintings like Frosted or Appenine.

But the most deeply engaging element of Cotton's work is, I think, how he treats time. The bubbles in Root Beer Swamp are on the verge of popping and the custard-slick landslide of Creamy Dream is about to give way again. It's this tension between what is and what is about to be (or, in the post-orgasmic scenarios of paintings like Frosted or Appenine, between what is and what just was) that transcends the surface simplicity of Cotton's sugary subject matter and delivers some serious meat and potatoes of artistic significance.

Root Beer Swamp (2002)

Chocolate Wave (2002)

Frosted (2002)

Summit (2002)

Custard Cascade (2001)

Creamy Dream (200)

Fog (2008)

AppeninPPENINE (2009)

Candy Curls (2005)

Will Cotton's website is here. An interesting interview is here.

Seriously Expensive Food from Serendipity 3 in NYC

2011-10-25T18:56:00.007-04:00

"Haute Dog"
Price: $69
Ingredients: beef, white truffle oil, salted pretzel bread, white truffle butter, duck foie gras, carmelized Vidalia onions, heirloom tomato ketchup, Dijon mustard, black truffles.
Note: must be ordered 24 hours in advance.

"The Golden Opulence"
Price: $1,000
Ingredients: vanilla bean ice-cream, edible gold leaf, chocolate sauce, exotic candied fruits, gold drageés, truffles, marzipan cherries, all topped with a tiny bowl of "Grand Passion" caviar (golden, salt-free eggs sweetened and infused with passion fruit, orange, Armagnac).
Note: served in a Baccarat goblet with gold spoon; caviar is served with smaller mother-of-pearl spoon, topped with a gilded sugar flower.

The Frrrrozen Haute Chocolate
price: $25,000
Ingredients: 14 rare cocoas, milk, ice cubes, whipped cream, chocolate truffle, truffle shavings, edible gold.
Note: served in a Baccarat crystal goblet with a $14,000 jewel-encrused spoon attached to a gold and diamond bracelet.

More info available on Serendipty 3's website.

Sakurako Kitsa's Bento Boxes

2011-10-22T14:53:00.005-04:00

Amorette Dye is a complicated person. I figured this this from a brief google search and a look at her pull-no-punches blog, which chronicles her life as a mother and cancer fighter-survivor—as a tough cookie, basically. It doesn't mesh with how I think of tough cookies, but Dye (under the name Sakurako Kitsa) also makes bento boxes. Kick ass bento boxes. Here are a few examples from her enchanting flickr stream:

Faded Coca-Cola Murals—contributor post

2011-10-07T10:09:00.001-04:00

James, from Boston, a.k.a. my husband, writes:

Throughout the world, everyday architecture is adorned with hand-painted advertising murals, often for food products, and perhaps none so ubiquitous as Coca-Cola. These murals, often as faded as ghosts, are a part of the fabric of the built environment, as familiar as the bricks they are painted on. These are two very nice examples. The first is from Somerville, Massachusetts, and the second from Belfast, Maine. Both evoke bygone times, and yet both also evoke the immediate, the satiation of hunger and thirst, the crisp tingle of a cold coke on ones lips. How often, in how many places the world over, are those same quiet, internal, perhaps even unnoticed sensations felt by people as they move through their cities and towns, glancing up at a building, a cloudy sky, and the familiar red and white words: "DRINK Coca Cola".

(Many more images of Coca Cola murals can be found on this flickr group.)

John Cage's Cookies: a recipe

2011-09-22T21:17:00.001-04:00

John Cage and Merce Cunningham.
Photo by Steven Mark Needham / Associated Press
Source: Chicago Tribune

According to the Walker Art Center website, Yoko Ono turned John Cage and Merce Cunningham onto macrobiotics, and these vegan cookies were a Cage specialty. He made them once while visiting Teeny Duchamp (Marcel Duchamp's widow) in France. Apparently they were something of a hit. Someone at greg.org made the cookies and reports that they were "as good as anything made primarily of almonds, cinnamon, maple syrup, and homemade raspberry jam could be." Hm. Think I'll skip. (Though a post on this blog makes them look fairly appetizing—like gorpy fingerprint cookies).

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a food processor, grind:
1 c. raw almonds
1 c. raw oats
Combine almonds and oats in a large bowl. Stir in:
1 c. whole wheat flour or brown rice flour (if you want a gluten free option, you may need to add slightly more than the 1 c. brown rice flour, so that you are later able to form balls with the dough)
Add ground cinnamon to the dry mixture.
To the dry mixture, add:
1/2 c. almond oil (other nut oils work as well)
1/2 c. real maple syrup (no Aunt Jemima!)
Stir mixture until you are able to form one-inch balls. Place on ungreased cookie sheet. Flatten slightly, and press a small dollop of your favorite jam or preserves (jelly is too thin) into the center of each cookie. Bake for 15-20 minutes, turning the pan once, halfway through the baking process. Cookies are done when light golden brown. They store well in the fridge.

The Little Fellow Is Appetizing

2011-09-19T17:57:00.000-04:00

Three fantastic food-related scenes from Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925, reissued 1942). In the first, luckless prospectors Charlie Chaplin and Big Jim are so desperate for food that they cook up one of Charlie's boots for dinner. Needless to say, Charlie gets stuck munching the sole, while Big Jim sups on the upper. Still, Chaplin makes the best of it, delicately licking each nail and making a neat pile of them on the side of his plate. In the second scene, Big Jim, delirious with hunger, imagines that Chaplin is a large chicken. He comes to his wits, though not for long, deciding that "chicken or no chicken, the little fellow is appetizing." And the last scene here is the famous dance of the bread rolls, in which Charlie dreams of entertaining some beautiful girls at an extravagant dinner party on New Years Eve.

eat that bannana

2011-09-13T11:27:00.002-04:00

Two iconic rock and roll related designs that have always been linked in my mind are Warhol's peelable banana drawing on the cover of the Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico and John Pasche's instantly recognizable "Tongue and Lip" design for the Rolling Stones. These seem perfect yin (banana) and yang (mouth) counterparts, as well matched as any set of salt and pepper shakers you might find on the kitschiest table of your local flea market. What do you do with a banana, after all? You eat it! What do you do with a frankly Freudian PINK banana? You eat it with a frankly Freudian set of teeth, lips, and a cartoonishly lascivious tongue (which always manages to unsettle me just a little—like any decent vagina dentata should). The original, almost elegant grayscale version of Pasche's design, which sold for an astromical sum in 2008, and which was designed by Pasche when he was still a student at the Royal College of Art in 1970, is last in the line-up below.

John Pasche's original artwork for the Rolling Stones' logo, acquired by the V&A for $92,500

You are/look like what you eat

2011-07-18T13:00:00.015-04:00

I got into a heated argument the other day (Gchat arguments can get very hot, and often I don’t realize when warm water turns to a rolling boil) with a friend about social impropriety, voyeurism, cannibalism, and pornography.

She had generously, and unsuspectingly, turned my attention to this website, and I was horrified. Jon Huck takes beautiful photos and portraits of people not at breakfast, but with their breakfast dish. This was too much for me, way too much information, food pornography gone raunchy and revealing rather than mouth-watering and exquisite.

My friend suggested (I think we were at a simmer) that I was being hyper-sensitive. I didn’t think so. Soon I was “completely unable to appreciate” (getting hotter) the beauty of the prints. I told her she was patanegra-headed and naïve (simmer upgrade) for finding these pictures so innocent. Soon I was a philistine (rolling boil) who takes himself too seriously (no comment).

Why all the bickering? Because these are good, smart photos, and they promote conversation, in some cases hostile. I find something, many things in fact, voyeuristic and weird about seeing a portrait of a person presiding over a breakfast meal. Unless you have the luxury of a private chef, the money to eat breakfast out every morning, or the time to think about different ingredients and breakfast combinations, chances are you eat the same meal for breakfast every single day of the work week. I think that is part of Huck’s point – these are photos that identify not just a taste or preference, but an unwavering choice these people have made for their first meal of the day. What looks optional and delectable at first glance, on second thought, is prescriptive. It’s not clear to me all these people enjoy their breakfast foods, and then I think of them eating that same meal every single day, with only the occasional variation. Breakfast is our least democratic meal; we eat the same thing so often that the idea of choice becomes an illusion. By now I am questioning Jon Huck’s politics. What designs do his breakfast pictures have on me? What designs does my muesli have on me?

I’ve been staring at these photos for a couple of weeks now, and they are scaring me for a new reason. Did you, or someone you love (blame it on them), ever watch the annual Westminster Kennel Club competition? See the movie Best in Show? It’s not in our imaginations, the owners and the dogs really do look like one another…Is it because they’ve spent too much time together? Economized by using the same hair stylist?

And then I look back to Jon Huck’s photos, and keep looking, and masters seem to resemble their gustatory creations, which are not creations at all – they are ruthless jailers of some kind. Like a train wreck before my eyes, I can’t stop looking, uncovering, decoding, inventing the resemblances. Of course test subject 27 eats that meal everyday. Her sense of self is so clearly present and presented on that fair china, which belies, but cannot hide, the bangers and mash that she is.

Things are now tepid between my friend and me. She’s stopped eating breakfast, and I am searching for a new morning foodstuff. One that, if Jon Huck had his way, I wouldn’t mind acting as my personal avatar.

Reconsidering the Oyster

2011-06-22T16:59:00.007-04:00

I have heard others describe M.F.K. Fisher’s Consider the Oyster as playful, fun, escapist, light, and it certainly hits those notes. Can you really conceal a smirk when Fisher writes that “all oysters, like all men, are somewhat weaker after they have done their best at reproducing”? I’m particularly fond of the raw ‘somewhat’ in the sentence, but her usage of ‘best’ is delightfully crude.

And yet there is no escaping the dark palimpsest upon which Fisher sets Consider the Oyster. Fisher dedicated the book to her husband, Dillwyn Parrish, whose health was, at the time of writing, deteriorating rapidly from Buerger’s Disease, and so it comes as no surprise that Consider the Oyster is so intensely personal, haunted by private struggle and the threat of death, even though it begins with a consideration of birth. The opening epigram comes from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: “…Secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster,” which brings us to the first sentence: “An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life.” Fisher continues, “Indeed, his chance to live at all is slim, and if he should survive the arrows of his own outrageous fortune and in the two weeks of his carefree youth find a clean smooth place to fix on, the years afterwards are full of stress, passion, and danger.” It is tough to say, with certainty, whether Fisher is describing oyster spat or human sperm. Perhaps she sees no need to differentiate between the two.

Either way, Fisher raises her oysters from conception to consideration to consumption, and she consumes them in all forms. There are 27 recipes in the 12 chapters, and I find myself thirsty for a shot of oyster liquor after reading just the first few. Fisher’s great achievement, to my mind, is that Consider the Oyster is not really a book about oysters at all, and yet it is not not a book about oysters at the same time. Elegy and recipes have never fit so well, and disturbingly, together. Fisher has “thought seriously” about oysters, bread, butter, and lemon juice

while incendiary bombs fell and people I knew were maimed and hungry, and I believe that all American oyster-bars and every self-respecting restaurant in this good land which presumes to serve raw oysters in their shells or even naked in a cup, should at once make it compulsory to serve also a little plate of thin-sliced nicely buttered good dark bread, preferably the heavy fine-grained kind and buttered with sweet butter I should say, and a few quarters of lemon.

Perhaps it is perverse to think about oyster etiquette in the same breath with maimed bodies, but Fisher is proud, and not ashamed, to confess what the mind can do, what it must do: think seriously, both about the high and the low, the fragility and richness of life. The key word from the title is “consider,” and if there is one thing Fisher demands of her reader it is the ability to think, “since it is impossible to enjoy without thought, in spite of what the sensualists say.”

Thought was Fisher’s antidote for emotional suffering, and perhaps at no other time in her life was Fisher so in need of treatment. Parrish and Fisher had left Europe in 1940, both because of the war and to seek treatment, medication, and palliatives for Parrish’s debilitating condition. He was in extreme pain and facing further amputations when he took his own life with a rifle in August of ’41 – I suspect we will we find a dark echo of Fisher’s consideration of the oyster in David Foster Wallace’s suicide and his essay Consider the Lobster. Fisher and Parrish escaped the war, but their own, personal hell crossed the Atlantic with them.

The more I read Consider the Oyster, the more I sense that Fisher is writing her own form of stiff-lipped elegy, stoic, sensual, sarcastic, ironic – her ‘consideration’ contains all registers. She writes for Parrish, for her life with Parrish, for the vagaries of the unknown life she sensed approaching. This book does not have the historical aspirations of Serve it Forth, and it does not smart in the way that How to Cook a Wolf would a year later. This is the moment in which Fisher transitions between two styles, by turning deeper inward than she had ever done in print to express her own thoughts and feelings.

The final chapter, “As Luscious as Locusts,” brings out, explicitly, the tension between thought and feeling that Fisher has been building throughout the “novella,” and I do believe that Consider the Oyster achieves fictional heights at times. Again the epigram is more than well chosen, from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “The best in this kind are but shadows…” Fisher cuts the quote short, but a quick glance at the first scene of the play tells us that “the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.” The best and the worst, shadows and bodies, thought and feeling. The binaries pull in opposite directions, but they are our source of knowledge. Only the imagination can mend and amend the maimed – both the terminally ill and their lovers. Fisher wants, needs to think and feel: “And yet to be a man who has once eaten something and taken thought about it…not merely digested it and remembered that, but eaten, digested, and then thought” is critical. But the chapter ends with a very different image, that of two boys lost at sea overnight, who find that their boat, come morning, has nested atop a paradise of great oysters.

They remove their clothes and dive into the undisturbed morning sea. Fisher’s descriptions could not be more sensual. The boys could not be thinking any less. They are unthinking bodies who inhabit the shadows of the reader’s imagination. “When each little boy had emptied his shells, he dove down for more, and all the hidden fears of the hard night vanished as they ate, and dove, and ate, naked as they were born in the growing light.” Rhythmic repetition of “ate” and “dove” complement the edenic nude bodies of the scene.

Fisher’s divers eat from the sea of life and imagination, a clear avatar for the tree of life and knowledge, and in keeping with their predecessors they are escorted out of a watery paradise. The arch-angel is a simple guard, and he doesn’t wield a flaming sword, but a sufficiently menacing gun: “The end of the story was that a bullet plunked into their little cabin wall, because they were stealing oysters from one of the most famous privately owned beds…The guard frightened them, and then pitied them and let them go, and they headed into the bay full of the best breakfast they were ever to eat in their lives, wiser but not sadder little boys.” Why, and how, does wisdom, amidst the gluttony of sensations, slip into the skiff? By a trick of dramatic irony. The readers know what the boys do not: consider the oyster, and wisdom will be yours.

surreal salami

2011-06-16T17:10:00.001-04:00

A random google find... I assume this is by Terry Gilliam, who did all those fantastic collages in the Monty Python shows. The hairy knuckles make it:

a pocketful of sunflower seeds

2011-06-08T16:22:00.006-04:00

Lately, I've been craving contemporary European literature—really, like, hankering after it. You know, insatiably. But not just any old contemporary European literature; for instance, Sebald is off the list, Saramago, too. I just want light stuff. Or at least not seriously heavy stuff. I know what's going on: the small stack of recently purchased Archipelago and Europa books on my nightstand are an abstract, ink-based, not entirely satisfying way of dealing with my current bout of wanderlust.

I'm going nowhere more exotic than the coast of Maine this summer, but in my head I'll be visiting Italy, Holland, Poland, and France as I lay huddled on some gusty, down-east beach. I've already been to the former USSR and Germany, which provide the settings for Alina Bronsky's The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine.

Despite the title, Bronsky's novel isn't all that food-themed. In fact, the title is a bit of a mystery, though my best guess is that it refers to the unwritten sequel suggested by the novel's final chapter. Either that, or Tartar cuisine played a much bigger role in some earlier draft than it does in the final version, and it just never got dropped as the title.

The plot is nicely propulsive, the story funny and depressing by turns (but never quite dark), and told by a fantastically unreliable narrator. Rosa is a hard-core narcissist who has a streak of goodness in her about the diameter of a spider's thread. It's just enough to make her complex.

The story revolves around Rosa's relationship to her granddaughter, Aminat, in whom she sees reflections of herself and toward whom (on account of her narcissism) she is utterly devoted. She has no respect whatever for her daughter as a person or a mother, and considers it her personal duty to make sure Aminat grows "into a well-bred child." She is so overbearing a presence, however, that her daughter (a teen mother) soon runs away, taking Aminat with her. When Rosa catches up with the two of them, she discovers that her "well bred" program is an uphill battle. For instance, one day, searching through the girl's school bag, she discovers, among other distressing signals (a lot of money, a lot of unfinished home work, and a lot of hysterical notes from teachers), a few sunflower seed shells. It is the sunflower seeds that upset Rosa most of all.

If you didn't support and look after children, didn't raise them properly and teach them right from wrong, they'd grow up badly. This child was out on her own all the time, and obviously stole money. It was also no coincidence that sunflower husks fell out of Aminat's bag. That meant she was hanging around with the old ladies who sat in front of the market and sold things from their own gardens—potatoes, wild garlic, and lilies of the valley. They had a huge open sack of sunflower seeds and for ten kopeks these uneducated women would fill a cup with seeds and dump them into a baggie made of newspaper or directly into the jacket pocket of the buyer. . . . In our early years together Kalganow [Rosa's husband] had also bought himself sunflower seeds, but I quickly broke him of the bad habit. There was nothing more peasant-like, crude, and unhygienic than putting unshelled seeds in your mouth and then spitting out the husk the way old women did, sitting around gossiping on stoops or on warped park benches, dirtying the ground at their feet. I used to root around in all of Kalganow's pockets looking for a seed that would betray him, and now, so many years later, I would have to do the same thing with my granddaughter. To let things go could be disastrous..."

Obviously, the social-economic insight here is interesting, but what I find most intriguing about this passage is the brief mention of the market women pouring seeds directly into the pockets of their customers. It reminds me of the market scene in E.T.A. Hoffmann's "My Cousin's Corner Window," in which a similar reference is made, but instead of seeds, it is plum jam, and instead of pockets, it is into fur caps that the market women deposit their tasty treats. (A post on the Hoffmann passage can be found here.)

...and the chicken tastes like wood

2011-06-03T16:10:00.005-04:00

I once knew the words to the Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight by heart. Now, all I remember (why am I wired this way?) are the food related bits, excerpted, below (full lyrics available at STLYRICS). Has there ever been a more addictively repeatable non sequitur than: i dont mean to brag i dont mean to boast / but we like hot butter on our breakfast toast --? The musical food gross-out ("while the stinky foods steamin your mind starts to dreamin / of the moment that it's time to leave / and then you look at your plate and your chickens slowly rottin / into something that looks like cheese") reminds me a little of Beck's "Satan Gave Me a Taco."

I dont mean to brag i dont mean to boast
but we like hot butter on our breakfast toast

---

like a can of beer that's sweeter than honey
like a millionaire that has no money
like a rainy day that is not wet
like a gamblin fiend that does not bet
like dracula with out his fangs
like the boogie to the boogie without the boogie bang
like collard greens that dont taste good

---

have you ever went over a friends house to eat
and the food just aint no good
i mean the macaroni's soggy the peas are mushed
and the chicken tastes like wood
so you try to play it off like you think you can
by sayin that youre full
and then your friend says momma he's just being polite
he aint finished uh uh that's bull
so your heart starts pumpin and you think of a lie
and you say that you already ate
and your friend says man there's plenty of food
so you pile some more on your plate
while the stinky foods steamin your mind s
tarts to dreamin
of the moment that it's time to leave
and then you look at your plate and your chickens slowly rottin
into something that looks like cheese
oh so you say that's it i got to leave this place
i dont care what these people think
im just sittin here makin myself nauseous
with this ugly food that stinks
so you bust out the door while its still closed
still sick from the food you ate
and then you run to the store for quick relief
from a bottle of kaopectate
and then you call your friend two weeks later
to see how he has been
and he says i understand about the food
baby bubbah but we're still friends

A Trippy Crumb

2011-05-24T16:20:00.004-04:00

photo by Andre Mouraux

Elizabeth Bishop called her sestina "A Miracle for Breakfast" her "Depression poem." Written around 1936, it was, Bishop said, a poem about hunger, and her own social conscience. But whenever I read it, I can only just barely make out a few dim anonymous figures—a generic blur of "hungry folk"—standing defeatedly in the margins; honestly, I find Bishop's claims a bit of a stretch. "A Miracle for Breakfast" is simply too playful to suggest the privation and real depression of the Depression. The six end-words that Bishop builds on—crumb, river, sunlight, coffee, balcony, and miracle—are, after all, essentially happy words, both sonorous and suggestive of small, pleasant, sparkling, or magical things, and the scene their repetition creates evokes (at least in my mind) the narrow balcony of a pricey pension somewhere along the Seine—a far cry from the bread lines that, according to Bishop, actually inspired the poem.

Bishop harnesses the naturally hypnotic quality of the sestina form's arhythmic repetitions to create fractal-like images: everything in this poem seems to shrink and swell according to the speaker's ever-shifting focus—one that can see across the river, through the ages, as well as "very close up." In this way, the crumb is in one stanza a roll, in another a buttered loaf, and in yet another both a mansion and a miracle. The coffee, likewise, is a drop, a cup, and gallons... There's a pleasantly psychedelic quality to these transmutations, highlighted by the surprise appearance of God (or maybe not-God: that possibly crazy man handing out crumbs) and the acid-like vision of entering the interior of a crumb made "through ages, by insects, birds, and the river," and, once there, discovering a world of leisure and lovely surfeit ("Every day, in the sun, / at breakfast time I sit on my balcony / with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.").

I once taught this poem in a Freshman Lit class at Suffolk University; my favorite student was the only older person in the class—a bank clerk by day who was getting her college degree in the off-hours. The class met at seven a.m. When I asked what the students made of this poem, there were several forgettable answers (see, I forget what they were—though I do remember that none of them lit on the idea of hunger or parity). And then there was the older woman's insight: "To me, this poem is about coffee," she said. "It's about waking up and having that first cup of coffee, and you know the day is gonna be long, but for that one moment, it's just you and the coffee, and it's so good. This poem is about being thankful for that."

Well, I hadn't thought of it that way, though now I do.

A Miracle for Breakfast

At six o'clock we were waiting for coffee,
waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb
that was going to be served from a certain balcony
--like kings of old, or like a miracle.
It was still dark. One foot of the sun
steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.
The first ferry of the day had just crossed the river.
It was so cold we hoped that the coffee
would be very hot, seeing that the sun
was not going to warm us; and that the crumb
would be a loaf each, buttered, by a miracle.
At seven a man stepped out on the balcony.
He stood for a minute alone on the balcony
looking over our heads toward the river.
A servant handed him the makings of a miracle,
consisting of one lone cup of coffee
and one roll, which he proceeded to crumb,
his head, so to speak, in the clouds--along with the sun.
Was the man crazy? What under the sun
was he trying to do, up there on his balcony!
Each man received one rather hard crumb,
which some flicked scornfully into the river,
and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.
Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle.
I can tell what I saw next; it was not a miracle.
A beautiful villa stood in the sun
and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.
In front, a baroque white plaster balcony
added by birds, who nest along the river,
--I saw it with one eye close to the crumb--
and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb
my mansion, made for me by a miracle,
through ages, by insects, birds, and the river
working the stone. Every day, in the sun,
at breakfast time I sit on my balcony
with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.
We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.
A window across the river caught the sun
as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.

Big Pink Cake, by the Razorcuts

2011-05-11T13:40:00.000-04:00

I've searched high and low, but can't find the lyrics for this song. Though it includes lines like:

I made a big pink cake, a birthday present for the human race.
I made a big mistake, I should've known you wouldn't like the taste.
...
I made a big pink cake...
I made a big mistake...
I should have pushed the whole thing in your face.

Huh? Food Ampersands

2011-05-04T18:50:00.003-04:00

Why, I don't know. Can't imagine, actually. But graphic designer Dan Beckemeyer makes big old ampersands out of food images—things like wine & cheese, burgers & fries, cookies & milk. You get the idea. Wonderfully useless. My favorite is the PB&J.

E.T.A. Hoffmann's Description of a Berlin Marketplace

2011-02-16T22:58:00.004-05:00

E.T.A. Hoffmann, self-portrait

The window in E.T.A. Hoffmann's short story "My Cousin's Corner Window" is the dominant feature of a "small room with a low ceiling, high above the street"—in other words, a garret apartment. "That is the usual custom of writers and poets," writes Hoffmann. "What does the low ceiling matter? Imagination soars aloft and builds a high and cheerful dome that rises to the radiant blue sky."

The writer in question—the narrator's cousin—is a once successful but now unhappy man who's been overcome by a mysterious paralysis of the limbs. Confined to his tiny room, he spends his happiest hours staring out of his corner window, which looks out, two days a week, on a bustling German marketplace, circa 1820.

For a Hoffmann story, "My Cousin's Corner Window" is very simply structured: the narrator pays a visit to his cousin and, sitting at the window with him, looking down into the marketplace, is given a lesson on how to really "see" things. Like Hoffmann himself, the cousin-writer is a Romantic who believes that true vision is less a function of the eyes than of the imagination.

Because the story is essentially an extended description of the marketplace, it's worthwhile reading for anyone interested in the classic form of that dying institution. What follows is just one brief scene, more food-centered than most of the little vignettes contained within the story, and concerning an eccentric of the sort that inevitably makes an appearance in any Hoffmann story. (The story is partly arranged as a dialogue. The cousin begins talking and, after the break, the narrator takes over.)

I've had my eye for some time now on an extremely puzzling figure: the man standing by the second, more distant pump, beside the cart on which a peasant woman is dispensing plum jam from a large barrel. First of all, dear cousin, do admire the woman's dexterity. Armed with a long wooden spoon, she first deals with the major purchases of quarter-pounds, half-pounds and whole pounds of jam, and then with lightning speed she throws a threepenny dollop to each of the greedy sweet-lovers who are holding out paper bags and sometimes even their fur caps to receive the jam, which they promptly devour with great enjoyment as a superior snack—the people's caviar! As I watch her dispensing the jam so skillfully by brandishing her spoon, I recall hearing in my childhood about a rich peasant's wedding conducted in such splendour that a delicious rice-pudding, coated with a thick crust of cinnamon, sugar, and cloves, was dispensed by means of a threshing-flail. Each of the honoured guests had only to open his mouth cheerfully to receive his portion, and so it was just like the Land of Cockayne. But, cousin, have you got your eye fixed on this man?

[here, a description of the man's odd appearance, clothing, and accessories, which include an artist's paint box]

He's opening the lid of the box. The sun shines in, radiant reflections . . . The box is lined with metal. He is lifting his hat and making an almost reverent bow to the woman selling plum jam. What an original, expressive face. . . . He's giving the box to the woman on the cart; she immediately fills it with plum jam, and hands it back to him with a friendly nod. The man takes his leave with a second bow. He winds his way past a keg of herring. He pulls out a drawer from the box, puts in some salted almonds which he as purchased, and closes it again. A third drawer, I see, is intended for parsley and other vegetables. He now walks to and fro across the market-place with long, dignified strides, until he stops in front of a table richly spread with plucked poultry. Here, as always, he makes several deep bows before beginning to haggle. He talks volubly and at length to the woman, who listens with a particularly friendly expression. He puts the box cautiously down onto he ground and seizes two ducks, which he stuffs quite comfortably into the capacious pocket of his coat. Heavens! they're followed by a goose!

(trans. Ritchie Robertson)

—

A painting of the market square in Berlin around the same time that Hoffmann briefly lived there (and on which the market description in "My Cousin's Corner Window" is based):

Friedrich August Calau, Gendarmenmarkt, 1815 (ca. 1815)

beautiful animation with flour

2011-02-05T09:56:00.000-05:00

Ukranian sand artist Kseniya Simonova

This is an incredible video called, I think, "Histoire du Pain," or "The History of Bread." It's up on u-tube, but unattributed (which is why the title also seems uncertain). However, looking through the related videos on the sidebar, I discovered some animations by the Ukrainian sand artist Kseniya Simonova, and her style, as well as her hands, look very similar to what's in this video. I'm betting she's the artist behind this lovely creation done entirely with flour.

Two Expressionists, Three Chickens

2011-01-26T22:02:00.025-05:00

Here are two paintings of dead chickens on white cloths by two Expressionists, one French, the other German, both Jewish.

I keep going back and forth between these two images, trying to decide which one is bolder, more subversive, more beautiful on its own strident terms. Chaim Soutine's eviscerated bird carcasses in Two Chickens on a White Cloth is certainly more formally daring than Ludwig Meidner's Still Life with Cock, in part because its center of gravity seems off. The image gives the impression of being sort of slopped across the canvas; the white cloth is off-center in a way that feels not quite on purpose (though no doubt is), and while the light quality reads as thoroughly flat, the tangles of darkness on the upper and left sides of the canvas imply shadows that don't quite make sense.

Chaim Soutine, Two Chickens on a White Cloth (1924/25)

The more I've studied Soutine's work, the more I've come to appreciate his weird black humor. Shot through all that excessive, existentially anguised gore, through all that death, is a frankly cartoonish exhuberance—it's in Soutine's brushwork, his color choices, and the maniacal energy that surges through his lines. These things contribute to the sense of vitality that inhabits the carcasses of most of his still lifes. Soutine's animals might be dead, but they're still kicking.

(An earlier post on two of Soutine's beef carcasses can be found here.)

Ludwig Meidner, Still Life with Cock (1966)

Ludwig Meidner's bird, on the other hand, doesn't look like it's going anywhere soon. Instead, this carcass seems at peace with death. I think this has something to do with Meidner's cool palette (especially those ice-green feet!). But how impotent this image would be if the bird's comb and its whole bottom region weren't set aflame with luminous reds and yellows.

Although on the whole Meidner's work—according to these images—is nearly as violent and dystopian as Soutine's, this particular painting is gently impressionistic. I wonder how much of this spirit of relative peacefulness—especially considering the subject matter, which is not so much a chicken as it is mortality—has to do with the fact that Meidner made this painting at the very end of his life? (He died, at 82, in May 1966; the painting is given the date of 1966 by the Judisches Museum website). Still, the Expressionist in Meidner left his calling card in the bird's white, unsettling blob of a face.

Things I'd like to know: Did Meidner base his painting on Soutine's much earlier one? If not, what is it about dead chickens on white cloths that drew both artists to them as a subject? And if so, what was Meidner responding to in Soutine's painting that called forth such an uncharacteristically soft, even tender approach in his own painting?

An interesting article about Meidner, "The Economics of Obscurity," by Robert Bunkin, is up on a blog called marginalmatters. And for those with an insatiable taste for chicken carcasses, a very ugly Soutine painting (imho) called Chicken Hanging in Front of a Brick Wall can be found here.

Eating as Destructive Act

2010-11-18T08:42:00.007-05:00

A funny and thought-provoking very short essay by German writer/critic Walter Benjamin.

Is criticism art? In my opinion, most definitely, at least when someone like Walter Benjamin is writing it—and "it" winds up being a kind of dense thought-poetry. In any case, this is just one of Benjamin's little anecdotes, not really criticism. But it's philosophical to the core, even with such sensuous images as "...when you bite into a mortadella as if it were bread, or bury your face in a melon as if it were a pillow, or gorge yourself on caviar out of crackling paper..." (For hardcore WB-heads, "Fresh Figs" is especially interesting if read with "The Destructive Character" in mind.)

"Fresh Figs" by Walter Benjamin

No one who has never eaten a food to excess has ever really experienced it, or fully exposed himself to it. Unless you do this, you at best enjoy it, but never come to lust after it, or make the acquaintance of that diversion from the straight and narrow road of the appetite which leads to the primeval forest of greed. For in gluttony two things coincide: the boundlessness of desire and the uniformity of the food that sates it.

Gourmandizing means above all else to devour one thing to the last crumb.

There is no doubt that it enters more deeply into what you eat than mere enjoyment. For example, when you bite into mortadella as if it were bread, or bury your face in a melon as if it were a pillow, or gorge yourself on caviar out of crackling paper, or, when confronted with the sight of a round Edam cheese, find that the existence of every other food simply vanishes from your mind.

—How did I first learn all this?

It happened just before I had to make a very difficult decision. A letter had to be posted or torn up. I had carried it around in my pocket for two days, but had not given it a thought for some hours. I then took the noisy narrow-gauge railway up to Secondigliano through the sun-parched landscape. The village lay in still solemnity in the weekday peace and quiet. The only traces of the excitement of the previous Sunday were the poles on which Catherine wheels and rockets had been ignited. Now they stood there bare. Some of them still displayed a sign halfway up with the figure of a saint from Naples or an animal. Women sat in the open barns husking corn.

I was walking along in a daze, when I noticed a cart with figs standing in the shade. It was sheer idleness that made me go up to them, sheer extravagance that I bought half a pound for a few soldi. The woman gave me a generous measure. But when the black, blue, bright green, violet, and brown fruit lay in the bowl of the scales, it turned out that she had no paper to wrap them in. The housewives of Secondigliano bring their baskets with them, and she was unprepared for globetrotters. For my part, I was ashamed to abandon the fruit.

So I left her with figs stuffed in my trouser pockets and in my jacket, figs in both of my outstretched hands, and figs in my mouth. I couldn’t stop eating them and was forced to get rid of the mass of plump fruits as quickly as possible. But that could not be described as eating; it was more like a bath, so powerful was the smell of resin that penetrated all my belongings, clung to my hands and impregnated the air through which I carried my burden. And then, after satiety and revulsion – the final bends in the path – had been surmounted, came the ultimate mountain peak of taste. A vista over an unsuspected landscape fo the palate spread out before my eyes – an insipid, undifferentiated, greenish flood of greed that could distinguish nothing but the stringy, fibrous waves of the flesh of the open fruit, the utter transformation of enjoyment into habit, of habit into vice.

A hatred of those figs welled up inside me; I was desperate to finish them, to liberate myself, to rid myself of all this overripe, bursting fruit. I ate to destroy it. Biting had rediscovered its most ancient purpose. When I pulled the last fig from the depths of my pocket, the letter was stuck to it. Its fate was sealed; it, too, had to succumb to the great purification. I took it and tore it into a thousand pieces.

Tom Waits got a cherry popsicle

2010-11-08T20:44:00.003-05:00

Tom Waits' "Ice Cream Man" is just as earnest as Jonathan Richman's, but I don't think Jonathan was thinking drumstick when he wrote his version...

lyrics:

I'll be clickin' by your house about two forty-five

Sidewalk sundae strawberry surprise,

I got a cherry popsicle right on time

A big stick, mamma, that'll blow your mind

'Cause I'm the ice cream man, I'm a one-man band (yeah)

I'm the ice cream man, honey, I'll be good to you.

Baby, missed me in the alley, baby, don't you fret

Come back around and don't forget,

When you're tired and you're hungry and you want something cool,

Got something better than a swimming pool

'Cause I'm the ice cream man, I'm a one-man band

I'm the ice cream man, honey, I'll be good to you.

'Cause I'm the ice cream man, I'm a one-man band

I'm the ice cream man, honey, I'll be good to you.

See me coming, you ain't got no change

Don't worry baby, it can be arranged:

Show me you can smile, baby just for me

Fix you with a drumstick, I'll do it for free

'Cause I'm the ice cream man, I'm a one-man band

I'm the ice cream man, honey, I'll be good to you.

Be good to you, be good to you,

Good to you yeah, good to you yeah, good to you yeah, good to you yeah,

Good to you yeah, good to you, I'll be good to you, I'll be good to you...