Dear Rennie,
As a novice pickler, I find myself at a loss of where to source the right sort of crock. Stoneware? Fiestaware? Does Le Crueset make an appropriate version? A householding neighbor suggested making my own, but, I can’t seem to find that back issue of ReadyMade. Help!
Yours truly,
New Undertaking of Bubbling Brine In Newcastle
Wherein notions about wheat are righted by one Oliver Ewell-Minnis.
“You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is.” Mark Twain
While she lays claim to The Golden State as home, my Mom’s side of the immediate family hails from the south. That fundamental extraction — my great grandparents, grandfolks, great aunts and uncles — were tagged with southern handles such as Ethel, Elsie, Billy, Hardy, Eddie, Jimmy, Wilma, Thelma, and Jasper. You get the idea. Bobber-fishin’, potluck-eatin’, guitar-pickin’, church-goin’ people who migrated north and west right when the gettin’ was good.
(The first installment of a serial pulled pork odyssey. Darwin had The Beagle–our author has the H.M.S. BBQ.)
Some years ago, whilst working for a New York based ad agency, I was part of a team that pitched a potential client in Atlanta. No one on the team had spent much time in The South™, and we all suffered from more than a little culture shock. Sure, we all spoke English, but the dialect spoken on our side of the conference table was completely different from the one spoken on theirs. I’m not just talking about different accents, either, though their drawls were considerable. Our very manner of communicating was different. While our speech was quick, polished and aggressive, theirs was slow, friendly and maddeningly sincere.
Wherein the author re-imagines Robert Frost’s classic ‘Mending Wall’.
When considering its cooling,
Looks like the curve of the bowl
You’ve placed it in,
Or the underside of an exposed breast;
1. Dr. Smucker’s Thrice-Performing Chastity Pants: Now With Toasting Compartment
2. Strategic placement of fennel bulbs behind the ears, according to the Swiss Gendarme Method
3. A simple cockle broth. Fresh out? Substitute pennies.
Dear Rennie,
You know how in middle school, you’re hoping to not be the one girl in the group of girls that makes the other girls look good? But, it can be, like, super hard to tell? I need a way to know. Something more certain than skinny jeans, and way more definite than daikon in my lunch, because let’s face it, just about anyone can get those these days. Please, help! There’s a pool party coming up at Tina D’Amicco’s, and I have to know before I wear that bikini!
Sincerely,
Nervous Elle in West Bromley
People do not go to Disneyland specifically to dine, but they do go to Disneyland—in droves that remind one of the curve that plots population density against violence and cannibalism—and they must be fed. If they were not fed, they would grow impatient and disillusioned while queuing thirty-five minutes to sit in a spinning teacup for nineteen seconds. Disbelief would fail to be suspended. No one would pay fifty cents for a squashed penny, or $12.85 for a blinking Tinkerbell scepter that the TSA will inevitably confiscate (and perhaps use as an excuse to make you poop into one of those clear toilets).
Darwin makes dinner, And it’s not as complicated as it seems. Time passes insistently In his kitchen of stone and oak– The hearth stoked, the knives Always sharp. His ingredients stalk one another Across the table tops; Wait in ambush behind earthen jars; Growl and Hiss and Chirp and Call in the pantry. Darwin’s dinner Selects itself, naturally. The least fit is best for him. He does almost no work (aside from warming the oven And collecting the cutlery). He places in a pan The mangled and extinct; The mate-less and exhausted; The too easy prey perhaps still gasping On his counter. He plucks mammal and invertebrate From his plate, Without prayer of mastication– Swallowing elaborate swallows (not incautiously). Darwin’s dinner Tumbles down his…