A Literary Feast

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Posts from the “Uncategorized” Category

Notable And Potable Vol. 19: A Rum For Dr. Jane

Posted on April 20th, 2012

The opening credits of “Jane’s Journey” show a nearly 80-year-old Dr. Jane Goodall first packing and then enjoying Johnnie Walker Red Label on a plane to Africa. She holds a Collins glass containing a generous pour of the whisky while reading an academic paper as the clouds rolls by. That’s how Dr. Jane rolls. Even if all you do is read the Wikipedia article on Dr. Jane, you’ll quickly realize you are learning a little bit about a genuine badass. She is the only human to have been accepted into chimpanzee society (she was kicked out in the end, which is badass in its own right). She earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge University without having a B.Sc. (her undergraduate education started with a self-funded…

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No Booze For You, or Why Would a Craft Beer Bar Close Early Every Night?

Posted on April 19th, 2012

People who move to New York claim a variety of reasons for relocation; among them are culture, diversity, career opportunities, culinary adventures, the art scene, fashion forwardness and anonymity. All of these are, for the most part, lies to mask the real reason people come to live here: the 4am closing time. In London, you can cultivate a beer gut until only about midnight; in Boston, you can curse the Yankees over a pint until a more reasonable 2am; but for the unadulterated joy of entering any of the one trillion bars, lounges, pubs and dives scattered across the five boroughs and proceeding to pound your mind and body into alcoholic stupor until 4am – perhaps later, if the bar is off the beaten…

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Cervo

Posted on April 19th, 2012

It’s so loud, the heat–the birds scream, sing. It should be summer, but it’s April. The sky is a violent pale blue from a star casting its hot light into our atmosphere. The wings of these birds – volatile dinosaur offspring – beat as they battle for gutter space. Their feathers and shrieks pierce the air, adding to the oppression of the day. Last year, summer felt like spring: it rained, it was cool, and I was in the Italian Alps with the Chindemi family. If a better person than Gerard Depardieu could fill the shoes of comic character Obélix, Matteo Chindemi is that person. His presence, though physically imposing, is nothing if not kindness. Not a day went by that his eyes didn’t…

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Suspicion Confirmed

Posted on April 19th, 2012

Around the time I came of legal drinking age I had acquired a very eclectic group of friends a handful of years of older than me. One of them waited tables at a very stylish “Irish Pub” in our pseudo-urban New England capitol. It was a dimly lit venue that always seemed a little hazy despite the lack of indoor smoking. The decor was big and dark: high ceilings; dark wood finishes; an antiqued mirror behind the bar. The proprietors did an excellent job of creating an atmosphere; however genuine I don’t know, because I have yet to go to an actual Irish-Pub-in-Ireland. But, at twenty-one in suburban New England, this seemed like a step above local college bars and dance clubs filled with…

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How To Pound A Moose

Posted on April 19th, 2012

With a hammer – that’s how you pound a moose. On the kitchen counter, on your bamboo cutting board that has heretofore never brushed its fine grains against red-blooded flank. A dead moose, to be precise, one that was butchered in your suburban cul-de-sac on a cool July afternoon on the back of your neighbor’s flatbed trailer. Sliced into thick steaks that went into another neighbor’s industrial freezer, packed in tight with two years’ worth of salmon and halibut. Then pulled out on a bitterly cold night six months later by the same neighbor as you sit in their driveway in front of a fire built in a sawed-off oil barrel, nursing a can of beer in your mittens, the moose steak pressed into…

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What The Dickens

Posted on April 19th, 2012

It’s easy to tell that a tangelo is a hybrid of the tangerine and a pomelo. Like Brangelina, the title itself is sufficiently descriptive. What you may not know is that many of the ordinary varieties of citrus that we know, love, and slice up for breakfast are also hybrids — the unlikely kin of disparate citrus varieties. The common grapefruit, it turns out, is actually the bastard child of a pomelo and a sweet orange. The versatile lemon? That’s (at least according to some recent studies) the result of the union of a sour orange and a citron. Even a regular old orange can trace its lineage to a pomelo and a mandarin — they think. Scientists are still a little fuzzy on…

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Meat Is Murder

Posted on April 19th, 2012

When most delinquent girls were practicing sneaking out in the middle of the night and stealthing liquor out of their parents’ stash, I was up to far worse. When I was 15 years old, I became a member of PETA. This did not sit well with my father. Teenaged girls were already his worst nightmare. He grew up with four brothers, no sisters, and as far as he (and his traditional Volga German family) was concerned, there were two types of young women: good Christian girls and whores. I hadn’t been to church in years, but that wasn’t really the problem. The worst thing I could do (besides getting pregnant by a black guy) was to become a vegetarian. His deer tag and “I’m…

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In Between

Posted on April 19th, 2012

I have been the black sheep. Welcome neither in the front nor the back of the house. Exiled to a purgatory between the kitchen and the dining room, in limbo on 18-stairs covered in industrial carpet. For one short summer I was persona non grata within the social strata of a restaurant in Vail, Colorado. It was Sysco Italian — no more, no less — my first restaurant job, running food from the basement kitchen up to hungry Texans in the dining room above. With a too-small black polo shirt stretched across my back, I was led out into the weeds by a manager with a homespun pot leaf tattoo; unknowing and untouchable. “Trays are over here, tickets come out here, it’s on you…

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Please Pass The Euphemism

Posted on March 16th, 2012

Raise a chicken – eat a chicken; catch a fish – eat a fish; culinary terminology seems simple enough, right? Kill the animal, eat the animal. Things get more complicated as the animals get larger. Raise a cow-eat a cow? Hunt a deer-eat a deer? Raise a pig-eat a pig? Concretely, the answer to the previous three questions is yes-but according to well-established vernacular the answer to each is no and beef, venison, and pork, respectively. It seems we frequently kill an animal and eat something else – linguistically, at least. Our culture disconnects the meat we eat from the actuality of the carcass it came from in many ways, and language plays an important role in that process. Let’s start at the beginning:…

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Eating Icons

Posted on March 16th, 2012

About 12-years-ago my sister got married in a torrential downpour in a field in Maine. After a promising day of preparations under threatening skies, the heavens quit procrastinating and really let us have it. That did nothing to stop her from slogging down a torch-lined path through a cornfield in ankle-deep mud to get hitched on the banks of the Kennebec River. The guests, aside from my elderly grandparents, weren’t deterred either, washing along together down to the ceremony, then back to the rented tent for a country potluck like you read about. Kegs of homebrew stood stacked to the tent flaps and tables bowed under the weight of produce from friends’ farms and gardens, with a spit roasted lamb from my brother’s flock…

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