Earlier, I mentioned that the fennel in the grocery store was looking pretty sad. My guide to in-season veggies says to watch for fennel January through May.
A not very nice girl (by which I mean she is totally sweet) just mentioned on her blog, in her comments, on her own cooking posts, in response to my completely unsolicited comment about my weirdo fennel-sardine-pasta dish, that she found fennel intimidating.
There is a very easy cure for strange-vegetable intimidation. Her name is Deborah Madison.
From Deborah, I learned that what you do with fennel is this:
Slice it thickly. (Trim off the stalks and discard.)
Dip into beaten egg, then into breadcrumbs (with a touch of salt).
Shallow fry in olive oil.
Serve with aioli (that's garlic mayonnaise) and a squeeze of lemon.
Don't make too often, as tempting as it is, or you'll be the size of your couch.
Of course, fennel isn't in season, so just try to keep this in mind when it appears in the markets in January.
Aioli is best when it's made fresh. The components are simple: lots of olive oil, a room-temperature raw egg yolk, lemon juice, some dijon mustard, and a healthy dose of garlic. You can do it in the mortar and pestle like a hardcore cook, or you can be lazy like me and do it in the blender. If you're totally lazy, just mince some garlic with salt until it forms a paste, add to jarred mayonnaise, thin with hot water, add a touch of olive oil for flavor, and make do.
P.S. I think all these food posts stem from the fact that I did not eat lunch today.
[end]
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Sicilians Never Forget (2 Recipes)
Once upon a time, one of my favorite persons in the world said to me, in reference to some past slight she'd received at the hands of persons I've now forgotten, "I am Sicilian and we forget nothing." If you knew her, you'd laugh as hard as I did.
Previously, the only characteristic of Sicilians that I had noted was that going against one when death was on the line was one of the classic blunders
.
Later, of course, I saw what Hollywood thought of Sicilians.
All of these dramatic declarations of what it is to be Sicilian aside, I don't judge a people by their ability to hold a grudge, by their violent tendencies, or by their unsettling relationship with organized labor. I judge them by their food.
Will's version of Italian food invariably involves the two mainstays of Italian-American red-checked tablecloth cuisine: red sauce and cheese. And let's face it: everyone loves red sauce and cheese. We love it even when the red sauce comes out of a jar and the cheese comes out of a grocery store plastic baggie with a zip top, pre-shredded. Some of us even love it shaken like dust out of the green Kraft can. (Count me out on that one.)
But me, I can't help it. I get bored easily with red sauce from a jar. It's the Will specialty, anyway, so there's no point in me cooking that when I have someone on hand who's better at opening jars than I am. So this weekend, I announced we would be Sicilian for a night via sardines and pasta, which I hear is as Sicilian as it gets.
[more]
This recipe was based on a Gourmet dish from a few years ago. It called for fennel bulbs, but they aren't in season, and what's on our local produce shelves looks pretty mangy. So I replaced the chopped fennel bulbs with chopped spinach, just to get some vegetation in our guts, and added a little chopped celery for a bit of that soft bite you get from fennel. Not authentic Sicilian, maybe, but hey, it works. The aroma of the crushed fennel seeds, the raisiny sweetness, the savory dark meat of the fish—trust me, it works. And it's definitely not red sauce and cheese.
Sardines and Pasta (adapted from Gourmet)
The sauce:
2 cans of sardines packed in oil OR if you're a lucky son-of-a-gun, grilled fresh sardines (we aren't so lucky, but if I could get my hands on some fresh sardines, I'd be all over that)
1/4 cup good olive oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1/2 cup raisins (trust me, it works)
healthy pinch of saffron (if you don't have saffron, you can leave it out, and throw some chiffonaded basil in at the end for an extra flavor oomph)
1/4 cup dry white wine
tablespoon of fennel seeds, bruised in a mortar
salt to taste
your chopped vegetable (optional): fennel bulb, spinach, or chard stalks (I added a single chopped celery stalk to my cup of cooked leftover spinach, but it's fine without)
1/3 cup toasted pine nuts or toasted chopped walnuts
1/3 cup toasted fine bread crumbs
The pasta:
We used a box of perciatelli, which was in the Gourmet recipe, but spaghetti will do. Perciatelli is a long tubular noodle, fatter than spaghetti but hollow in the center. It cooks up into long hoses of pasta. It's awkward to eat that way, so I recommend breaking it before boiling it.
First thing you do: combine raisins, wine, and saffron in a bowl and set aside.
Put the pasta on to boil per package directions, and set aside. Start toasting your pine nuts and bread crumbs, too, if you haven't already. I like them on 350 degrees for about ten minutes. Open the door and smell them every couple of minutes, to make sure they're not burning. When they smell toasted and look toasted, they are toasted.
In a saucepan, heat up the olive oil. When it's hot, add the onions, fennel seed, and chopped vegetable. Cook until the onions and vegetable are soft. (If you have a fast-cooking vegetable, wait until the onion has softened considerably before you add the vegetable.)
Take one can of sardines, drain off the oil, and break the fish into the sauce in chunks. Add the mixture of wine and raisins, plus the salt. Simmer for about 15 minutes. Add the rest of the sardines, the crumbs and nuts, the drained pasta, and mix. Taste for salt. Enjoy!
P.S. I find a squeeze of lemon over the whole right before serving wakes it all up. A dash of red wine vinegar might do it too. Don't add cheese. You've got sardines, raisins, saffron, and fennel. You don't need no stinking cheese. Drink it with the wine you used to cook it, too. You know what they say: If it's not good for drinking, it's not good for cooking.
But you like red sauce and cheese. OK, I get you. So do we. But why waste the last beautiful tomatoes of summer by buying your old Ragu at the store? In fact, why buy Ragu? You can even make a fresh-tasting sauce with canned tomatoes in the winter. In fact, you can cheat now, if you're too sleepy and hungry to reduce tomatoes all night on the stove, by (shhhhhhh) adding canned tomato puree to your fresh tomato mixture, or even using straight canned chopped tomatoes in puree. Canned tomatoes are often better than the fresh kind, which show up too frequently pale and mealy in the store. When it's tomato season and the local tomatoes are out in force, juicy and deep red and willing, use them. If not, do not make do with a second-rate fruit. Get the fruits of summer. They're in the cans.
Also, the secret to a delicious sauce, as any chef will tell you, is butter.
Butter! B-b-b-b-but it's Italian! Italians use olive oil!
Yes, my dear companion. And we shall too.
With butter.
BTiGB's All-American Pasta with Red Sauce and Cheese
The sauce:
4 tablespoons of butter
1 tablespoon of olive oil
2 tablespoons finely chopped shallots
2 cloves garlic, slivered
salt to taste
optional: 1/4 cup dry white wine (you can use red if you're using canned tomatoes, but I find red wine overwhelms the delicate flavor of the fresh)
4 large diced fresh tomatoes OR 1 big can crushed or chopped tomatoes OR some mixture of the two
optional: a teaspoon of finely chopped oregano
optional: a handful of chiffonaded fresh basil
*if you haven't got fresh herbs, use dried, but add them earlier (after you've sauteed the shallots and garlic, stirred in for a few seconds before the tomatoes)
The pasta:
After a long time of struggling with this sentiment, I have decided I dislike penne. Shoot me, I dislike it. I think it's too thick to easily pick up on the fork, and the hole's too big to soak up a thinner sauce. A big chunky sauce or something with peas is OK for penne. (It's very cute when the pea ends up in the tube. Well, I think it's cute.) Use spaghetti here, or if you like a little bite-sized pasta, I say go for a little curly thing with places for sauce to cling. I have a silly fondness for gemelli, the little twists, or spiralini, an open ringlet of a noodle. I imagine gnocchi would be stellar too, but I'm too lazy to make gnocchi fresh and I don't trust the stuff from the store. I tried some once and it's hard to describe the dry, dragging, adhesive paste I ended up serving. Thank goodness it was only to Will.
Making it:
Boil pasta per package directions. Drain, but don't rinse, and set aside.
Meanwhile, butter and olive oil go into a medium to big saucepan over medium heat. When the butter is melted and the whole thing is hot, add the shallots and garlic, and let that cook until the shallots look soft and translucent. If using dried herbs, add them here, stir for a few seconds. Then add your fresh tomatoes, if using. Cook them down until they're reduced by about half, then add any canned you want to add if it needs extra body (or if you're just using canned, skip the fresh part and get to here), plus the wine. Cook another ten minutes, until it's reduced again by about a third. Add salt to taste, plus the fresh herbs, reserving a pinch for garnish, and take off the heat and set aside. Let the residual heat warm up the herbs.
Add your pasta, and let the pasta sit in the sauce for a while, soaking up the flavor. Grate some fresh parmesan or romano over each serving, and have at it. Don't tell anyone how much butter is in it. It's our secret.
Warning: All measurements and such are estimates from memory. Always trust your own eyes, nose, and tongue.
Ruth Reichl is my hero.
Previously, the only characteristic of Sicilians that I had noted was that going against one when death was on the line was one of the classic blunders
.Later, of course, I saw what Hollywood thought of Sicilians
.All of these dramatic declarations of what it is to be Sicilian aside, I don't judge a people by their ability to hold a grudge, by their violent tendencies, or by their unsettling relationship with organized labor. I judge them by their food.
Will's version of Italian food invariably involves the two mainstays of Italian-American red-checked tablecloth cuisine: red sauce and cheese. And let's face it: everyone loves red sauce and cheese. We love it even when the red sauce comes out of a jar and the cheese comes out of a grocery store plastic baggie with a zip top, pre-shredded. Some of us even love it shaken like dust out of the green Kraft can. (Count me out on that one.)
But me, I can't help it. I get bored easily with red sauce from a jar. It's the Will specialty, anyway, so there's no point in me cooking that when I have someone on hand who's better at opening jars than I am. So this weekend, I announced we would be Sicilian for a night via sardines and pasta, which I hear is as Sicilian as it gets.
[more]
This recipe was based on a Gourmet dish from a few years ago. It called for fennel bulbs, but they aren't in season, and what's on our local produce shelves looks pretty mangy. So I replaced the chopped fennel bulbs with chopped spinach, just to get some vegetation in our guts, and added a little chopped celery for a bit of that soft bite you get from fennel. Not authentic Sicilian, maybe, but hey, it works. The aroma of the crushed fennel seeds, the raisiny sweetness, the savory dark meat of the fish—trust me, it works. And it's definitely not red sauce and cheese.
Sardines and Pasta (adapted from Gourmet)
The sauce:
2 cans of sardines packed in oil OR if you're a lucky son-of-a-gun, grilled fresh sardines (we aren't so lucky, but if I could get my hands on some fresh sardines, I'd be all over that)
1/4 cup good olive oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1/2 cup raisins (trust me, it works)
healthy pinch of saffron (if you don't have saffron, you can leave it out, and throw some chiffonaded basil in at the end for an extra flavor oomph)
1/4 cup dry white wine
tablespoon of fennel seeds, bruised in a mortar
salt to taste
your chopped vegetable (optional): fennel bulb, spinach, or chard stalks (I added a single chopped celery stalk to my cup of cooked leftover spinach, but it's fine without)
1/3 cup toasted pine nuts or toasted chopped walnuts
1/3 cup toasted fine bread crumbs
The pasta:
We used a box of perciatelli, which was in the Gourmet recipe, but spaghetti will do. Perciatelli is a long tubular noodle, fatter than spaghetti but hollow in the center. It cooks up into long hoses of pasta. It's awkward to eat that way, so I recommend breaking it before boiling it.
First thing you do: combine raisins, wine, and saffron in a bowl and set aside.
Put the pasta on to boil per package directions, and set aside. Start toasting your pine nuts and bread crumbs, too, if you haven't already. I like them on 350 degrees for about ten minutes. Open the door and smell them every couple of minutes, to make sure they're not burning. When they smell toasted and look toasted, they are toasted.
In a saucepan, heat up the olive oil. When it's hot, add the onions, fennel seed, and chopped vegetable. Cook until the onions and vegetable are soft. (If you have a fast-cooking vegetable, wait until the onion has softened considerably before you add the vegetable.)
Take one can of sardines, drain off the oil, and break the fish into the sauce in chunks. Add the mixture of wine and raisins, plus the salt. Simmer for about 15 minutes. Add the rest of the sardines, the crumbs and nuts, the drained pasta, and mix. Taste for salt. Enjoy!
P.S. I find a squeeze of lemon over the whole right before serving wakes it all up. A dash of red wine vinegar might do it too. Don't add cheese. You've got sardines, raisins, saffron, and fennel. You don't need no stinking cheese. Drink it with the wine you used to cook it, too. You know what they say: If it's not good for drinking, it's not good for cooking.
But you like red sauce and cheese. OK, I get you. So do we. But why waste the last beautiful tomatoes of summer by buying your old Ragu at the store? In fact, why buy Ragu? You can even make a fresh-tasting sauce with canned tomatoes in the winter. In fact, you can cheat now, if you're too sleepy and hungry to reduce tomatoes all night on the stove, by (shhhhhhh) adding canned tomato puree to your fresh tomato mixture, or even using straight canned chopped tomatoes in puree. Canned tomatoes are often better than the fresh kind, which show up too frequently pale and mealy in the store. When it's tomato season and the local tomatoes are out in force, juicy and deep red and willing, use them. If not, do not make do with a second-rate fruit. Get the fruits of summer. They're in the cans.
Also, the secret to a delicious sauce, as any chef will tell you, is butter.
Butter! B-b-b-b-but it's Italian! Italians use olive oil!
Yes, my dear companion. And we shall too.
With butter.
BTiGB's All-American Pasta with Red Sauce and Cheese
The sauce:
4 tablespoons of butter
1 tablespoon of olive oil
2 tablespoons finely chopped shallots
2 cloves garlic, slivered
salt to taste
optional: 1/4 cup dry white wine (you can use red if you're using canned tomatoes, but I find red wine overwhelms the delicate flavor of the fresh)
4 large diced fresh tomatoes OR 1 big can crushed or chopped tomatoes OR some mixture of the two
optional: a teaspoon of finely chopped oregano
optional: a handful of chiffonaded fresh basil
*if you haven't got fresh herbs, use dried, but add them earlier (after you've sauteed the shallots and garlic, stirred in for a few seconds before the tomatoes)
The pasta:
After a long time of struggling with this sentiment, I have decided I dislike penne. Shoot me, I dislike it. I think it's too thick to easily pick up on the fork, and the hole's too big to soak up a thinner sauce. A big chunky sauce or something with peas is OK for penne. (It's very cute when the pea ends up in the tube. Well, I think it's cute.) Use spaghetti here, or if you like a little bite-sized pasta, I say go for a little curly thing with places for sauce to cling. I have a silly fondness for gemelli, the little twists, or spiralini, an open ringlet of a noodle. I imagine gnocchi would be stellar too, but I'm too lazy to make gnocchi fresh and I don't trust the stuff from the store. I tried some once and it's hard to describe the dry, dragging, adhesive paste I ended up serving. Thank goodness it was only to Will.
Making it:
Boil pasta per package directions. Drain, but don't rinse, and set aside.
Meanwhile, butter and olive oil go into a medium to big saucepan over medium heat. When the butter is melted and the whole thing is hot, add the shallots and garlic, and let that cook until the shallots look soft and translucent. If using dried herbs, add them here, stir for a few seconds. Then add your fresh tomatoes, if using. Cook them down until they're reduced by about half, then add any canned you want to add if it needs extra body (or if you're just using canned, skip the fresh part and get to here), plus the wine. Cook another ten minutes, until it's reduced again by about a third. Add salt to taste, plus the fresh herbs, reserving a pinch for garnish, and take off the heat and set aside. Let the residual heat warm up the herbs.
Add your pasta, and let the pasta sit in the sauce for a while, soaking up the flavor. Grate some fresh parmesan or romano over each serving, and have at it. Don't tell anyone how much butter is in it. It's our secret.
Warning: All measurements and such are estimates from memory. Always trust your own eyes, nose, and tongue.
Ruth Reichl is my hero.
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Fragrance Ho Needs Your Help
Listen up, all my fellow fragrance hos. You know who you are.
So I've been collecting smelly bottles of stuff for a couple of years now. It was an odd journey here. I had long been one of those people who believed that she would find one scent she wanted, and that she would then stick with it. At most, I had three bottles: a couple for every day, and one fancy one. But then I stopped smoking. Suddenly, I had disposable income, and a need to continue, you know, inhaling something fun.
I've smelled a lot, Lord help me, but always, always I suspect I'm missing something vital to the fragrance story—like I fear that I've somehow managed to read all of Shakespeare's plays by trial and error but accidentally skipped Hamlet.
It's a common enough condition for a hobbyist: at first, everything you smell seems one-of-a-kind, spectacular, surprising, exciting, different. You want to buy anything you can get your hands on. But after a while, things start reminding you of other things. (It's often the same with people; most faces seem to remind you of other faces, once you've seen enough of them.) Your enthusiasm wanes in one respect, but surges in another. You start to smell with goals in mind. You begin to discriminate seriously. You want to know if something is the best of its kind, or if there's something else out there that does it better. And money starts bleeding out of a critical financial wound.
So, smelliacs, tell me: What fragrances do you think are the epitome of what they are, the cream of the crop, the top of the pops, and must be smelled or you haven't smelled it all?
Tell!
UPDATE: To clarify, I mean things that you think are Best in Show—best leather, best oriental, best so-fresh-and-so-clean-clean, best expensive French bee-yotch, best cheap American teenager, best whatever, so long as it does something that nothing else does better. Inspired because I always thought I hated fruit and now suddenly I'm liking fruit (Pamplelune? Un Jardin Sur le Nil? Montale Chypre Fruité? what's happening?) and wondering if there's a fruity scent I haven't tried that will be the greatest fruity scent of all time. Also, because I've been thinking about Frank Sinatra, still the best male singer on record. You get the picture.
[end]
So I've been collecting smelly bottles of stuff for a couple of years now. It was an odd journey here. I had long been one of those people who believed that she would find one scent she wanted, and that she would then stick with it. At most, I had three bottles: a couple for every day, and one fancy one. But then I stopped smoking. Suddenly, I had disposable income, and a need to continue, you know, inhaling something fun.
I've smelled a lot, Lord help me, but always, always I suspect I'm missing something vital to the fragrance story—like I fear that I've somehow managed to read all of Shakespeare's plays by trial and error but accidentally skipped Hamlet.
It's a common enough condition for a hobbyist: at first, everything you smell seems one-of-a-kind, spectacular, surprising, exciting, different. You want to buy anything you can get your hands on. But after a while, things start reminding you of other things. (It's often the same with people; most faces seem to remind you of other faces, once you've seen enough of them.) Your enthusiasm wanes in one respect, but surges in another. You start to smell with goals in mind. You begin to discriminate seriously. You want to know if something is the best of its kind, or if there's something else out there that does it better. And money starts bleeding out of a critical financial wound.
So, smelliacs, tell me: What fragrances do you think are the epitome of what they are, the cream of the crop, the top of the pops, and must be smelled or you haven't smelled it all?
Tell!
UPDATE: To clarify, I mean things that you think are Best in Show—best leather, best oriental, best so-fresh-and-so-clean-clean, best expensive French bee-yotch, best cheap American teenager, best whatever, so long as it does something that nothing else does better. Inspired because I always thought I hated fruit and now suddenly I'm liking fruit (Pamplelune? Un Jardin Sur le Nil? Montale Chypre Fruité? what's happening?) and wondering if there's a fruity scent I haven't tried that will be the greatest fruity scent of all time. Also, because I've been thinking about Frank Sinatra, still the best male singer on record. You get the picture.
[end]
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Sinatra Helps Girl Grow Up
Anyone young enough to have known Frank Sinatra mostly through his imitators knows the problem: When you've come to know the imitations and parodies before you ever hear the real thing, you're incapable of hearing him properly at all.
My least favorite English professor at NYU, a trollish and belligerent jerk who assumed we were all morons and whose peevish lectures on Theory made even a postmodern punk like myself at the time feel like turning to classicism out of spite, said only one thing of value all term. He said, "I spent the weekend with my mother. We did what she wanted. We went to this lounge to hear this Frank Sinatra impersonator. I'm sitting there miserable, but she's in love with the performance. The guy is just an imitator. He's note for note, tic for tic, Sinatra. And I started thinking, what's wrong with me? If this guy sounds just like Frank Sinatra, what's the difference, really, between listening to him and listening to Sinatra? Why treasure the original?" It was a joke, but I held onto it. What's the difference between a spot-on copycat and the real thing? Why cling to the Romantic obsession with novelty?
[more]
It is hard to imagine any imitator good enough to sing just like Frank Sinatra wouldn't eventually come up with his own ideas and make his own records (Harry Connick Jr., I'm looking at you), and so you assume that eventually the ones left still doing Ol' Blue Eyes are the ones for whom that really is the best they have to give. And is that so bad? If a few Long Island mothers get to twirl their ankles under the table and thrill to the tender tenor they've always loved, is this an affront?
But it's like when philosophy becomes dogma, or when architectural solutions to specific regions become the standard for the whole, regardless of the region. What I'm saying is that imitation is dead because it doesn't change. It just repeats the past. Sometimes well, in a craftsman-like way, and really, there's nothing wrong with it. But an imitator of Sinatra can't be as good as Sinatra, because Sinatra already happened. Therefore, to hear Sinatra, I had to find a way to undo him first.
My father was nearly 50 when I was born. When other kids got to go through their parents' Jimi Hendrix and Beatles records, I was left with Perry Como, Burl Ives, Nat King Cole, and the greatest hits of Richard Rodgers. But I just wanted to listen to Michael Jackson, not watch the Lawrence Welk show. I rejected the whole shebang, until one day, on a whim, when I was 15 or so I bought a Billie Holiday record along with a handful of punk CDs, just because I liked the look of her; I liked the sound of her, too, and then I checked out an Ella Fitzgerald record from the library; and next thing you know it was Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker in my room; but I still couldn't get down with that corny Frank Sinatra.
Then sometime during college, I was traveling, which was part of my scholarship deal: one educational, escorted voyage per school year, during the winter break. We were headed to Greece, and my dependable pal Steve, for my birthday, gave me a bag full of cassette tapes. He'd made selections from his considerable and obsessive musical library, to entertain me during the chilly tour.
I took to reaching into the bag for just about anything, at random. Fortunately, you can trust Steve for music. I heard the jolting, clever/stupid punk of the Mekons as I faced out on a boat to some island, the sadly underappreciated perfect pop of the Monkees as I rested against the omphalos, the gleefully frantic breath of Rahsaan Roland Kirk blowing through his multiple instruments and half singing through the flute as I wandered lost through the rubble below the Pantheon, and then, late one afternoon, Frank Sinatra, In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.
Far from home, things sound different, taste different, feel different, smell different, take on a different hue. I only knew Frank from his blustery, muscular swing, but he was singing softly, slowly now. Right in my ear, like a lover's whisper, was an intimate croon, but not a schoolboy's plea. I'd never heard a man — a real man! a grown man, with history! — sound so vulnerable.
There is a reaction you have to really, really beautiful things—your breath comes faster, your pupils dilate, your face freezes, your pulse thuds, as if you've just figured out the solution to a problem that has plagued you all your life but you were unaware of until now. It needn't even be the first time you encounter something; it happened to me when I saw a Cézanne still life in person and understood what all those wan calendar reproductions had been trying to tell me without success; it happened when I ate a piece of yellowtail sashimi; when I was 21 and drank my first really great pinot noir, a Burgundy (at a working lunch with my boss and another editor, which left me shocked into silence in front of those dignified gentlemen); and when I heard Frank Sinatra sing.
Anyone who has ever tried to sing in tune will know that singing softly and well is much harder than belting. When Sinatra croons, you can hear sometimes, as he exhales or shifts his tone, the power he's withholding, as he sighs a note out. His efforts to keep his voice controlled sound like the efforts of a man trying to control his heart, and you clutch the greasy windowframe of your rattling tourist bus and lean your cheek against the pane, thinking of the mistakes you've made.
I could feel all my old romantic delusions being replaced, granule by granule, like old tree grain turning to stone, with new romantic delusions, of adulthood, of loving the kind of man whom you could never really know or control, and of being the kind of woman a man like that would love.
When I returned, back to my bachelorette pad off of the upper reaches of Central Park West, my roommate Kevin, who had gotten a part in a musical and had been doing singing exercises nonstop, happened to catch me slicing onions and playing Sinatra one night.
"This guy has a beautiful voice," noted Kevin, a wistful look washing over him. "Who is this?"
I tried grandly not to be smug.
My least favorite English professor at NYU, a trollish and belligerent jerk who assumed we were all morons and whose peevish lectures on Theory made even a postmodern punk like myself at the time feel like turning to classicism out of spite, said only one thing of value all term. He said, "I spent the weekend with my mother. We did what she wanted. We went to this lounge to hear this Frank Sinatra impersonator. I'm sitting there miserable, but she's in love with the performance. The guy is just an imitator. He's note for note, tic for tic, Sinatra. And I started thinking, what's wrong with me? If this guy sounds just like Frank Sinatra, what's the difference, really, between listening to him and listening to Sinatra? Why treasure the original?" It was a joke, but I held onto it. What's the difference between a spot-on copycat and the real thing? Why cling to the Romantic obsession with novelty?
[more]
It is hard to imagine any imitator good enough to sing just like Frank Sinatra wouldn't eventually come up with his own ideas and make his own records (Harry Connick Jr., I'm looking at you), and so you assume that eventually the ones left still doing Ol' Blue Eyes are the ones for whom that really is the best they have to give. And is that so bad? If a few Long Island mothers get to twirl their ankles under the table and thrill to the tender tenor they've always loved, is this an affront?
But it's like when philosophy becomes dogma, or when architectural solutions to specific regions become the standard for the whole, regardless of the region. What I'm saying is that imitation is dead because it doesn't change. It just repeats the past. Sometimes well, in a craftsman-like way, and really, there's nothing wrong with it. But an imitator of Sinatra can't be as good as Sinatra, because Sinatra already happened. Therefore, to hear Sinatra, I had to find a way to undo him first.
My father was nearly 50 when I was born. When other kids got to go through their parents' Jimi Hendrix and Beatles records, I was left with Perry Como, Burl Ives, Nat King Cole, and the greatest hits of Richard Rodgers. But I just wanted to listen to Michael Jackson, not watch the Lawrence Welk show. I rejected the whole shebang, until one day, on a whim, when I was 15 or so I bought a Billie Holiday record along with a handful of punk CDs, just because I liked the look of her; I liked the sound of her, too, and then I checked out an Ella Fitzgerald record from the library; and next thing you know it was Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker in my room; but I still couldn't get down with that corny Frank Sinatra.
Then sometime during college, I was traveling, which was part of my scholarship deal: one educational, escorted voyage per school year, during the winter break. We were headed to Greece, and my dependable pal Steve, for my birthday, gave me a bag full of cassette tapes. He'd made selections from his considerable and obsessive musical library, to entertain me during the chilly tour.
I took to reaching into the bag for just about anything, at random. Fortunately, you can trust Steve for music. I heard the jolting, clever/stupid punk of the Mekons as I faced out on a boat to some island, the sadly underappreciated perfect pop of the Monkees as I rested against the omphalos, the gleefully frantic breath of Rahsaan Roland Kirk blowing through his multiple instruments and half singing through the flute as I wandered lost through the rubble below the Pantheon, and then, late one afternoon, Frank Sinatra, In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.
Far from home, things sound different, taste different, feel different, smell different, take on a different hue. I only knew Frank from his blustery, muscular swing, but he was singing softly, slowly now. Right in my ear, like a lover's whisper, was an intimate croon, but not a schoolboy's plea. I'd never heard a man — a real man! a grown man, with history! — sound so vulnerable.
There is a reaction you have to really, really beautiful things—your breath comes faster, your pupils dilate, your face freezes, your pulse thuds, as if you've just figured out the solution to a problem that has plagued you all your life but you were unaware of until now. It needn't even be the first time you encounter something; it happened to me when I saw a Cézanne still life in person and understood what all those wan calendar reproductions had been trying to tell me without success; it happened when I ate a piece of yellowtail sashimi; when I was 21 and drank my first really great pinot noir, a Burgundy (at a working lunch with my boss and another editor, which left me shocked into silence in front of those dignified gentlemen); and when I heard Frank Sinatra sing.
Anyone who has ever tried to sing in tune will know that singing softly and well is much harder than belting. When Sinatra croons, you can hear sometimes, as he exhales or shifts his tone, the power he's withholding, as he sighs a note out. His efforts to keep his voice controlled sound like the efforts of a man trying to control his heart, and you clutch the greasy windowframe of your rattling tourist bus and lean your cheek against the pane, thinking of the mistakes you've made.
I could feel all my old romantic delusions being replaced, granule by granule, like old tree grain turning to stone, with new romantic delusions, of adulthood, of loving the kind of man whom you could never really know or control, and of being the kind of woman a man like that would love.
When I returned, back to my bachelorette pad off of the upper reaches of Central Park West, my roommate Kevin, who had gotten a part in a musical and had been doing singing exercises nonstop, happened to catch me slicing onions and playing Sinatra one night.
"This guy has a beautiful voice," noted Kevin, a wistful look washing over him. "Who is this?"
I tried grandly not to be smug.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Nothing Like Nuoc Mam
In her erudite and cantankerous masterwork, Serve It Forth, MFK Fisher spends some time considering the Roman gustatory excess that culminated in institutionalized bulimia, and the peculiar flavors and smells that graced the tables of those epicures. She, who has written so movingly of the delicious, takes a wicked pleasure in reveling in the disgusting, as she explains:
Vietnamese nuoc mam dipping sauce is, like most Southeast Asian foodstuffs when translated into American, too sugary in restaurants. Or perhaps I'm just cruel. But when I order Vietnamese food—usually bun cha gio—the nuoc mam sauce comes in thoroughly diluted with lime juice and as sweet as a Sprite.
[more]
This is not the nuoc mam I remember, and so I start to demand, with difficulty, more nuoc mam. Usually, the waiter comes out with more of the same, and I must say to him, no, I mean the fish sauce itself, the unadulterated stink, bring it here, I'm going to pour it on.
Oh no, Miss, they apologize, laughing at my misunderstanding, that is very strong, you don't want it.
I know it is very strong, and I want it, I insist. And if I am not too tired to press the point, eventually someone will come out from the back with a little bottle of the most wretchedly stinky fish sauce, salty enough to make the flesh of your mouth shrivel, pungent with the essence of what people who hate fish mean when they say, I hate the smell of fish.
My fellow diners reel away and stare as if I had just had a bloodied hand delivered to me, and I suffer the effects of what I know is my rudeness because I just want a drop or two more, just a bit more, to adulterate this lemonade you've given me...
When my mother made bun cha gio, and when I make it now, first she made the cha gio, or Vietnamese spring roll. The wrapper for spring rolls is much thinner than the thick tortilla you get in Chinese-American egg rolls. When it fries, it becomes on the outside browned and crisp, with a wafer-light crunch. If it is rolled perfectly, the insides stay inviolate and steam gloriously when you bite into them while hot, but if you are a lazy girl and overstuff the roll or leave it loose and careless, the filling will burst out and vitiate the cooking oil and leave one end of the spring roll blackened, like an exploded end of dynamite.
My mother's filling was ground pork, crabmeat, minced shrimp, browned onion, finely diced jicama (for a water-chestnut-like crunch that was better than water chestnuts), and clear bits of bean thread scissored into confetti, to soak up any extra liquid, plus egg to bind it, and salt and pepper to season it. (I suspect she dosed us all with MSG, too.) She cooked the filling first, then rolled it into the wrappers, shallow fried them in an electric pan on the patio, and set them aside in a paper-towel lined bowl to cool, and to be diminished by impatient thieves who might later be identified by the raggedly branded soft flesh of their palates.
Bun is a noodle salad, served cold or at room temperature, with a hot element on top, like the famous Vietnamese grilled pork chop, with its savory sugar glaze, or the cha gio chopped into segments, for ease of picking up with your chopsticks. You needn't make bun with just the regulation Vietnamese toppings, of course. I have tossed it together with segments of fried Chinese sausage, with leftover roast pork or fried chicken. What's essential is that you have the noodles, which are rice noodles boiled and then cooled, the salad greens, which for us meant shredded lettuce and slivers of carrot and cucumber, the herbs, which the Vietnamese will pile up on a separate plate as if it were another salad but which is meant to be torn and scattered all over everything in sight, and the nuoc mam sauce.
The herbs we got from Dad's garden, sending Diana or me out moments before dinner to pull up some special narrow-leafed basil, handfuls of cilantro, and all the mint in we could get our fists around. I wish I could say I did all this with a hearty farmer girl's enthusiasm, but frankly I was always terrified I was going to grip onto a worm or a praying mantis, so I tended first to kick whatever plant I was going to pick to shake loose any inhabitants.
The nuoc mam preparation smelled up the whole house. Mom would mix several tablespoons of the fish sauce in a bowl with boiling hot water, then dissolve sugar into it. When the hot water hit the fish sauce, a cloud of stink would rise up like a phantom summoned from a world of the damned. She would then squeeze copious volumes of lime juice into the mixture, and then, if I recall correctly, she threw in lots of minced garlic and a pile of shredded carrot for color. It wasn't nearly as sweet or diluted with water as what is served in restaurants. I wish I could give you proportions but I only know it by taste. I can make it, but just by pouring, tasting, squeezing, stirring. But I will say that the hot water and the fish sauce made the house reek, along with our clothes and hair and anything porous around.
But ladies and gentlemen, when you could assemble a bite that had some noodle, a section of cha gio, a leaf of mint and one of basil, some cucumber and lettuce for crunch, and the whole thing dripping with nuoc mam and heated with a dash of Sriracha chili paste, as soon as your teeth burst the crisp skin of the roll, crushed the fragrance from the herbs, and let the sauce-soaked noodles roll over the tongue, it sent contradictions of texture, aroma, temperature, and taste rollicking across the gustatory centers of your mind, and it is still, after all this time, the thing I hope above all else my mother is going to make when I visit her at home.
There is another easy thing to do with nuoc mam sauce, because of course my mother makes a huge jar of it so there's some for later. There are these long rolled rice noodles, the name of which I never learned, which makes it damned difficult for me to ask for them. They're always made fresh, and you ought to eat them the day you buy them. Essentially, each noodle is a long sheet, which is rolled up into something like a big tube. Usually there are bits of dried shrimp throughout, plus small O's of green scallion polka dotting the whole at irregular intervals. My mother would slice these up, steam them until hot (or microwave them, later on, with a bit of water added to prevent them from drying out), then scatter herbs and salad greens over the top, soak them in nuoc mam sauce, and eat while the salad was cool and the noodles were hot.
While delicious and easy, this is a poor version of the banh cuon I ate in Saigon. There they spread a rice flour paste over a large screen stretched like a drum over a rim, underneath which steam is rising. The thing cooks into a delicate, translucent crêpe, which is carefully rolled off, folded around a filling of cooked ground pork, mushrooms, and shrimp, dressed over with all kinds of herbs and fried shallots and things, and served with nuoc mam. It looks like a giant, sheer ravioli, and I could eat them forever until I died of either gastric disaster or bliss. I have ordered banh cuon at restaurants here, but even where the chefs are clearly Vietnamese, no one has replicated it.
Many times in my life, I have asked my mother, "What is in nuoc mam?" And every time, she has declined to answer, saying only, "If you knew how they make it, you wouldn't eat it!"
She was wrong, this time.
One course of a Roman meal would lay us very low, probably, and strip our palates for many days of even the crudest perceptions of flavour.
Look, for a minute, hand over nose and a piece of ice on the tongue, at the recipe for garum:
Place in a vessel all the insides of fish, both large fish and small. Salt them well. Expose them to the air until they are completely putrid. In a short time a liquid is produced. Drain this off.
And "this" is garum, most highly prized and used of all seasonings. In Cochin-China there is something like it, in these days, called nuocman—and of course we have our English meat sauces.
Vietnamese nuoc mam dipping sauce is, like most Southeast Asian foodstuffs when translated into American, too sugary in restaurants. Or perhaps I'm just cruel. But when I order Vietnamese food—usually bun cha gio—the nuoc mam sauce comes in thoroughly diluted with lime juice and as sweet as a Sprite.
[more]
This is not the nuoc mam I remember, and so I start to demand, with difficulty, more nuoc mam. Usually, the waiter comes out with more of the same, and I must say to him, no, I mean the fish sauce itself, the unadulterated stink, bring it here, I'm going to pour it on.
Oh no, Miss, they apologize, laughing at my misunderstanding, that is very strong, you don't want it.
I know it is very strong, and I want it, I insist. And if I am not too tired to press the point, eventually someone will come out from the back with a little bottle of the most wretchedly stinky fish sauce, salty enough to make the flesh of your mouth shrivel, pungent with the essence of what people who hate fish mean when they say, I hate the smell of fish.
My fellow diners reel away and stare as if I had just had a bloodied hand delivered to me, and I suffer the effects of what I know is my rudeness because I just want a drop or two more, just a bit more, to adulterate this lemonade you've given me...
When my mother made bun cha gio, and when I make it now, first she made the cha gio, or Vietnamese spring roll. The wrapper for spring rolls is much thinner than the thick tortilla you get in Chinese-American egg rolls. When it fries, it becomes on the outside browned and crisp, with a wafer-light crunch. If it is rolled perfectly, the insides stay inviolate and steam gloriously when you bite into them while hot, but if you are a lazy girl and overstuff the roll or leave it loose and careless, the filling will burst out and vitiate the cooking oil and leave one end of the spring roll blackened, like an exploded end of dynamite.
My mother's filling was ground pork, crabmeat, minced shrimp, browned onion, finely diced jicama (for a water-chestnut-like crunch that was better than water chestnuts), and clear bits of bean thread scissored into confetti, to soak up any extra liquid, plus egg to bind it, and salt and pepper to season it. (I suspect she dosed us all with MSG, too.) She cooked the filling first, then rolled it into the wrappers, shallow fried them in an electric pan on the patio, and set them aside in a paper-towel lined bowl to cool, and to be diminished by impatient thieves who might later be identified by the raggedly branded soft flesh of their palates.
Bun is a noodle salad, served cold or at room temperature, with a hot element on top, like the famous Vietnamese grilled pork chop, with its savory sugar glaze, or the cha gio chopped into segments, for ease of picking up with your chopsticks. You needn't make bun with just the regulation Vietnamese toppings, of course. I have tossed it together with segments of fried Chinese sausage, with leftover roast pork or fried chicken. What's essential is that you have the noodles, which are rice noodles boiled and then cooled, the salad greens, which for us meant shredded lettuce and slivers of carrot and cucumber, the herbs, which the Vietnamese will pile up on a separate plate as if it were another salad but which is meant to be torn and scattered all over everything in sight, and the nuoc mam sauce.
The herbs we got from Dad's garden, sending Diana or me out moments before dinner to pull up some special narrow-leafed basil, handfuls of cilantro, and all the mint in we could get our fists around. I wish I could say I did all this with a hearty farmer girl's enthusiasm, but frankly I was always terrified I was going to grip onto a worm or a praying mantis, so I tended first to kick whatever plant I was going to pick to shake loose any inhabitants.
The nuoc mam preparation smelled up the whole house. Mom would mix several tablespoons of the fish sauce in a bowl with boiling hot water, then dissolve sugar into it. When the hot water hit the fish sauce, a cloud of stink would rise up like a phantom summoned from a world of the damned. She would then squeeze copious volumes of lime juice into the mixture, and then, if I recall correctly, she threw in lots of minced garlic and a pile of shredded carrot for color. It wasn't nearly as sweet or diluted with water as what is served in restaurants. I wish I could give you proportions but I only know it by taste. I can make it, but just by pouring, tasting, squeezing, stirring. But I will say that the hot water and the fish sauce made the house reek, along with our clothes and hair and anything porous around.
But ladies and gentlemen, when you could assemble a bite that had some noodle, a section of cha gio, a leaf of mint and one of basil, some cucumber and lettuce for crunch, and the whole thing dripping with nuoc mam and heated with a dash of Sriracha chili paste, as soon as your teeth burst the crisp skin of the roll, crushed the fragrance from the herbs, and let the sauce-soaked noodles roll over the tongue, it sent contradictions of texture, aroma, temperature, and taste rollicking across the gustatory centers of your mind, and it is still, after all this time, the thing I hope above all else my mother is going to make when I visit her at home.
There is another easy thing to do with nuoc mam sauce, because of course my mother makes a huge jar of it so there's some for later. There are these long rolled rice noodles, the name of which I never learned, which makes it damned difficult for me to ask for them. They're always made fresh, and you ought to eat them the day you buy them. Essentially, each noodle is a long sheet, which is rolled up into something like a big tube. Usually there are bits of dried shrimp throughout, plus small O's of green scallion polka dotting the whole at irregular intervals. My mother would slice these up, steam them until hot (or microwave them, later on, with a bit of water added to prevent them from drying out), then scatter herbs and salad greens over the top, soak them in nuoc mam sauce, and eat while the salad was cool and the noodles were hot.
While delicious and easy, this is a poor version of the banh cuon I ate in Saigon. There they spread a rice flour paste over a large screen stretched like a drum over a rim, underneath which steam is rising. The thing cooks into a delicate, translucent crêpe, which is carefully rolled off, folded around a filling of cooked ground pork, mushrooms, and shrimp, dressed over with all kinds of herbs and fried shallots and things, and served with nuoc mam. It looks like a giant, sheer ravioli, and I could eat them forever until I died of either gastric disaster or bliss. I have ordered banh cuon at restaurants here, but even where the chefs are clearly Vietnamese, no one has replicated it.
Many times in my life, I have asked my mother, "What is in nuoc mam?" And every time, she has declined to answer, saying only, "If you knew how they make it, you wouldn't eat it!"
She was wrong, this time.
Some Literature Is Sci-Fi, but Most Sci-Fi Is Not Literature
One of the several problems with Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, one of the classic sci-fi (or speculative fiction, if you prefer) novels that have been reissued under the Millennium SF Masterworks imprint, is that its war does not actually last forever.
[more]
The war is either incredibly short or incredibly long, depending on your relativistic viewpoint, but it is finite. In a more troubling development, war itself is finite. The war of the title is the war to end all wars, because it ends in something like interstellar utopia. And utopia in literature is always wrong.
Let me back up now and talk about what the novel does well, what it does badly, and how it illuminates what science fiction can do at all.
I ought to love sci-fi. I have all the earmarks of a sci-fi lover: a fondness for leaps of imagination in fiction, a preference for authors with huge backlogs of material to read through, a self-identification as nerd, a love of involved descriptions of the latest technologies, and a soft spot for corny plots.
But it turns out that all of these tendencies are trumped by my first love, which is literature itself, and which sci-fi is always betraying.
My fellow bookish pal, Steve, once went on a bender reading heaps of sci-fi. We had met on an online board devoted to Thomas Pynchon (because we were the only two inhabitants of that board), and since then we'd been reading the best of postmodern and modern literature and discussing it online and in person for years. But Steve had a common complaint about sci-fi, which was that while it was interesting stuff, it wasn't literature.
Sci-fi lovers will scream and throw volumes of Samuel R. Delany and Philip K. Dick at your head with a side of Ursula K. LeGuin if you say this to them, but Steve has a point. The primary engagement between author and reader in a sci-fi book tends to be the creation of the speculative world. The characters that move through that world, the events that occur, the aesthetic effects—all of these are secondary to the act of imagination required on the part of both author and reader to construct an alternate reality, generally one that has something to say about the reality we inhabit. Literature as I think of it does a related but entirely more difficult trick: It makes you re-imagine reality. Sci-fi's alternate reality ought to make us re-imagine reality, and its best, it does. But the correlation between reality and sci-fi reality is where the fiction tends to break down. Literature questions what is. Sci-fi speculates what might be in ways that sometimes contradict what is.
In The Forever War, Haldeman is making a point about war and the estrangement it brings into being between those that serve in it and those who are served by it. I grabbed the book in the Strand because I'd had war on my mind, and was thinking of those soldiers on the way home from Iraq and Afghanistan and what they'd been through, and what they were about to go through.
Soldiers in conflicts around the world are turned into killing machines by the military, and often they find themselves unsuited to life back home, which has moved on without them, and has no place for them. In Haldeman's book, the estrangement is intensified because the war is interstellar, requiring travel at close to the speed of light. The relativistic effects mean that, for the soldiers, subjective years pass, while on Earth, everyone they know has aged decades or centuries between engagements, and nations alter, values shift, ideas of the normal swing far beyond what they were when the soldiers were kids, and technological advances leave the soldiers fumbling to catch up with civilian everyday life.
There's no doubting that the book is well written. Especially in the opening chapters, in which Haldeman puts you in Mandella's company as he trains as a grunt, preparing for interstellar battle under severe conditions and dangerous technology. It seems truer than the other portions, probably because Haldeman is a Vietnam Vet. The novel's descriptions—of the boredom and the danger, the close familiarity between people who must reconcile themselves with their closeness to death at all moments—seem plausible, even recognizable, if you've ever read accounts of war or known a soldier.
Where it all starts to go awry is when Haldeman begins to speculate about life on Earth. His first future Earth, which Mandella and Marygay discover on their first return, is a dystopia of martial law, corruption, and chemically controlled moods and sexual preferences. OK, so far, not so bad. And for some reason, everyone is being encouraged to become homosexual as a way of controlling the population.
To which my reaction is, huh?
The idea that everyone would simply turn homosexual, whether by chemical inducements or otherwise, to control the population is the most bizarre idea in the whole novel. It is more bizarre than teddy-bear like creatures on other planets that can kill you with ESP. It is more bizarre than stasis shields in which nothing can move faster than a few meters per second, which means no electromagnetic energy can be transmitted. (The soldiers wear protective gear while in the shield, so their bodies don't shut down.) The idea that widespread gay sex would be the answer to population troubles, rather than some kind of massive sterilization program, is so absurd that I assumed that Haldeman would abandon it in the next tour of Earth. But no: on the next tour, not only is homosexuality encouraged, it is mandated, and heterosexuality has become considered first a crime, then a disease.
It's little speculative touches like these, which rely not on technology but a series of cultural changes, that really turn me off science fiction sometimes. I can usually swallow all the violations of physics—the explosions, the sounds carrying through empty space—so long as the human story makes sense. But if the human story ceases to make sense, the whole thing collapses. The disbelief I've been suspending for so long breaks free and runs around screaming things like, "And how did they manage to convince everyone of that, eh? How did all the horny girls and boys in the world disentangle themselves from their feelings? What did they put in the water? What about the cultural taboos? Did the government just show up on TV one day and say, 'From now on, we will all be gay, for the good of the planet.' We can't even get people to recycle, for godsakes..."
Sex plays a huge part in the novel, but it is weirdly unmessy and is never a source of real conflict. You encounter it first in the grunt chapters, in which it seems the army has made it a requirement that the male and female privates rotate among beds in a set pattern, so no one forms strong partner attachments that could interfere with their work as soldiers, everyone's sexual urges are taken care of, and no one's feelings are hurt. As the Earth gets gayer and gayer, Mandella, in the army, finds himself ostracized from new recruits, who are all completely gay and consider him a perverted deviant. It's a nice switcheroo, but again, I'm reading it thinking, "And they let him continue to lead? Sex taboos in the military just die out? What army is this?"
Mandella's faithfulness to his time-doomed lover, Marygay, could have been resolved with some kind of tragic meeting, with she a crone of 110, and he a 30-year-old pup. His faithfulness could have been seriously tried. Love could waver. Maybe it's because I just saw for the first time The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, one of the giddiest doomed-love stories ever committed to film, but this more optimistic love story strikes me as trite and unlikely. Unfortunately, the love between these soldiers is the core of the whole story, since the time dilation effects on the human heart are what give the plot its interest. It's handled so ham-handedly that were it presented as literary fiction, and not science fiction, it would be chuckled out of town. But presented as science fiction, it's a classic.
At the end, some ideal human is cloned to form entire populations, war ends, and everyone who wants to keep having sex is sent to some other sex-friendly planet (which I can only imagine as some kind of degenerate interspace Bangkok), as genetic stock in case of unforeseen problems with the cloned DNA. The clone is perfect, so there's no war. Genetic variation, apparently, prevented previous populations from communicating effectively with interplanetary enemies. Now that everyone's a clone, there's peace.
I can just imagine a planet full of my clones. They'd all want to head to the beach on the same day. All of them would want to be writers, and none of them would want to fix the toilet. It's like in Woody Allen's Love and Death when Diane Keaton's character says, in response to Woody's character's torturous thoughts about what would happen if everybody behaved as he did, that (I paraphrase from memory) if everyone went to Katz's at the same time and ordered blintzes, there'd be chaos. If everyone was the same person, they'd all need to use the bathroom at once! Think of the lines! Plus, did the clones slaughter all the non-clones? Did all the non-clones simply say, "Oh, yes, Larry's the best one we've got. All future children should be Larry!"
See, this is why I just can't hunker down and read sci-fi as if it were literature. (Because I'm a jerk, yes, but there's more.) Part of what makes Shakespeare so compelling is that his plays and poems reveal things about the world to you that you didn't know. They tell you about yourself, about why we do things, about human beings, about how things happen. The scales fall from your eyes and you sit there with the light shining from your face thinking in a rush, it's true, it's true, it's true. You imagine a different world, and the best thing is that you never leave it—it's your world. It is changed forever.
In contrast, so much sci-fi requires that you hush the voice in your head that says, how? and just believe that it's so, that people would behave in ways they never would. It's the mistake of utopian literature, to underestimate the trouble of predicting human beings, and often the mistake in sci-fi. There's no better illustration of it than how badly love and sex usually come out in sci-fi, including this novel that I'm talking about right now, which tries so hard to be open-minded about sex but ends by being closed-minded about love. Love and sex are the bread and butter of literature, but you're left hungry here. That may be why Messrs. Dick and Delany are accepted, frequently, as real authors, and not just sci-fi writers. There's real love and sex, messy and surprising and strange as it is in life, in their books.
Real literature makes you question what you believe, what the world is made of, what is beautiful, what is frightening, what is. Sci-fi too frequently asks you to stop questioning and just buy in to things that don't jibe with your own experience. And so I'm forced to conclude that the reason sci-fi makes bad literature is because it isn't terribly scientific, and good literature is.
Sci-fi lovers, you may now open fire.
On the other hand, when literary writers go speculative, wonderful things can happen.
I can't remember where I read the article that claimed this novel for sci-fi, but it was correct. It does not take place in the future; it's one of those Victoriana sci-fi fictions that's become rather popular. The things it has to say about our society and our human nature are astute. The language is in the muscular, American tradition of 20th Century postmodern realism. It is a detective story, a Dickensian musing on class and money, and a Gothic horror tale all at once. And the war between the haves and have nots, I suspect, may be the true "forever war."
(If you haven't read Doctorow's Ragtime, you are cheating yourself.)
One more sci-fi recommendation for your summer reading:
The same author wrote Solaris, which I tried to read but put down after the first page revealed that the book was not in the least bit funny. The Cyberiad, on the other hand, is a crackup.
[more]
The war is either incredibly short or incredibly long, depending on your relativistic viewpoint, but it is finite. In a more troubling development, war itself is finite. The war of the title is the war to end all wars, because it ends in something like interstellar utopia. And utopia in literature is always wrong.
Let me back up now and talk about what the novel does well, what it does badly, and how it illuminates what science fiction can do at all.
I ought to love sci-fi. I have all the earmarks of a sci-fi lover: a fondness for leaps of imagination in fiction, a preference for authors with huge backlogs of material to read through, a self-identification as nerd, a love of involved descriptions of the latest technologies, and a soft spot for corny plots.
But it turns out that all of these tendencies are trumped by my first love, which is literature itself, and which sci-fi is always betraying.
My fellow bookish pal, Steve, once went on a bender reading heaps of sci-fi. We had met on an online board devoted to Thomas Pynchon (because we were the only two inhabitants of that board), and since then we'd been reading the best of postmodern and modern literature and discussing it online and in person for years. But Steve had a common complaint about sci-fi, which was that while it was interesting stuff, it wasn't literature.
Sci-fi lovers will scream and throw volumes of Samuel R. Delany and Philip K. Dick at your head with a side of Ursula K. LeGuin if you say this to them, but Steve has a point. The primary engagement between author and reader in a sci-fi book tends to be the creation of the speculative world. The characters that move through that world, the events that occur, the aesthetic effects—all of these are secondary to the act of imagination required on the part of both author and reader to construct an alternate reality, generally one that has something to say about the reality we inhabit. Literature as I think of it does a related but entirely more difficult trick: It makes you re-imagine reality. Sci-fi's alternate reality ought to make us re-imagine reality, and its best, it does. But the correlation between reality and sci-fi reality is where the fiction tends to break down. Literature questions what is. Sci-fi speculates what might be in ways that sometimes contradict what is.
In The Forever War, Haldeman is making a point about war and the estrangement it brings into being between those that serve in it and those who are served by it. I grabbed the book in the Strand because I'd had war on my mind, and was thinking of those soldiers on the way home from Iraq and Afghanistan and what they'd been through, and what they were about to go through.
Soldiers in conflicts around the world are turned into killing machines by the military, and often they find themselves unsuited to life back home, which has moved on without them, and has no place for them. In Haldeman's book, the estrangement is intensified because the war is interstellar, requiring travel at close to the speed of light. The relativistic effects mean that, for the soldiers, subjective years pass, while on Earth, everyone they know has aged decades or centuries between engagements, and nations alter, values shift, ideas of the normal swing far beyond what they were when the soldiers were kids, and technological advances leave the soldiers fumbling to catch up with civilian everyday life.
There's no doubting that the book is well written. Especially in the opening chapters, in which Haldeman puts you in Mandella's company as he trains as a grunt, preparing for interstellar battle under severe conditions and dangerous technology. It seems truer than the other portions, probably because Haldeman is a Vietnam Vet. The novel's descriptions—of the boredom and the danger, the close familiarity between people who must reconcile themselves with their closeness to death at all moments—seem plausible, even recognizable, if you've ever read accounts of war or known a soldier.
Where it all starts to go awry is when Haldeman begins to speculate about life on Earth. His first future Earth, which Mandella and Marygay discover on their first return, is a dystopia of martial law, corruption, and chemically controlled moods and sexual preferences. OK, so far, not so bad. And for some reason, everyone is being encouraged to become homosexual as a way of controlling the population.
To which my reaction is, huh?
The idea that everyone would simply turn homosexual, whether by chemical inducements or otherwise, to control the population is the most bizarre idea in the whole novel. It is more bizarre than teddy-bear like creatures on other planets that can kill you with ESP. It is more bizarre than stasis shields in which nothing can move faster than a few meters per second, which means no electromagnetic energy can be transmitted. (The soldiers wear protective gear while in the shield, so their bodies don't shut down.) The idea that widespread gay sex would be the answer to population troubles, rather than some kind of massive sterilization program, is so absurd that I assumed that Haldeman would abandon it in the next tour of Earth. But no: on the next tour, not only is homosexuality encouraged, it is mandated, and heterosexuality has become considered first a crime, then a disease.
It's little speculative touches like these, which rely not on technology but a series of cultural changes, that really turn me off science fiction sometimes. I can usually swallow all the violations of physics—the explosions, the sounds carrying through empty space—so long as the human story makes sense. But if the human story ceases to make sense, the whole thing collapses. The disbelief I've been suspending for so long breaks free and runs around screaming things like, "And how did they manage to convince everyone of that, eh? How did all the horny girls and boys in the world disentangle themselves from their feelings? What did they put in the water? What about the cultural taboos? Did the government just show up on TV one day and say, 'From now on, we will all be gay, for the good of the planet.' We can't even get people to recycle, for godsakes..."
Sex plays a huge part in the novel, but it is weirdly unmessy and is never a source of real conflict. You encounter it first in the grunt chapters, in which it seems the army has made it a requirement that the male and female privates rotate among beds in a set pattern, so no one forms strong partner attachments that could interfere with their work as soldiers, everyone's sexual urges are taken care of, and no one's feelings are hurt. As the Earth gets gayer and gayer, Mandella, in the army, finds himself ostracized from new recruits, who are all completely gay and consider him a perverted deviant. It's a nice switcheroo, but again, I'm reading it thinking, "And they let him continue to lead? Sex taboos in the military just die out? What army is this?"
Mandella's faithfulness to his time-doomed lover, Marygay, could have been resolved with some kind of tragic meeting, with she a crone of 110, and he a 30-year-old pup. His faithfulness could have been seriously tried. Love could waver. Maybe it's because I just saw for the first time The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, one of the giddiest doomed-love stories ever committed to film, but this more optimistic love story strikes me as trite and unlikely. Unfortunately, the love between these soldiers is the core of the whole story, since the time dilation effects on the human heart are what give the plot its interest. It's handled so ham-handedly that were it presented as literary fiction, and not science fiction, it would be chuckled out of town. But presented as science fiction, it's a classic.
At the end, some ideal human is cloned to form entire populations, war ends, and everyone who wants to keep having sex is sent to some other sex-friendly planet (which I can only imagine as some kind of degenerate interspace Bangkok), as genetic stock in case of unforeseen problems with the cloned DNA. The clone is perfect, so there's no war. Genetic variation, apparently, prevented previous populations from communicating effectively with interplanetary enemies. Now that everyone's a clone, there's peace.
I can just imagine a planet full of my clones. They'd all want to head to the beach on the same day. All of them would want to be writers, and none of them would want to fix the toilet. It's like in Woody Allen's Love and Death when Diane Keaton's character says, in response to Woody's character's torturous thoughts about what would happen if everybody behaved as he did, that (I paraphrase from memory) if everyone went to Katz's at the same time and ordered blintzes, there'd be chaos. If everyone was the same person, they'd all need to use the bathroom at once! Think of the lines! Plus, did the clones slaughter all the non-clones? Did all the non-clones simply say, "Oh, yes, Larry's the best one we've got. All future children should be Larry!"
See, this is why I just can't hunker down and read sci-fi as if it were literature. (Because I'm a jerk, yes, but there's more.) Part of what makes Shakespeare so compelling is that his plays and poems reveal things about the world to you that you didn't know. They tell you about yourself, about why we do things, about human beings, about how things happen. The scales fall from your eyes and you sit there with the light shining from your face thinking in a rush, it's true, it's true, it's true. You imagine a different world, and the best thing is that you never leave it—it's your world. It is changed forever.
In contrast, so much sci-fi requires that you hush the voice in your head that says, how? and just believe that it's so, that people would behave in ways they never would. It's the mistake of utopian literature, to underestimate the trouble of predicting human beings, and often the mistake in sci-fi. There's no better illustration of it than how badly love and sex usually come out in sci-fi, including this novel that I'm talking about right now, which tries so hard to be open-minded about sex but ends by being closed-minded about love. Love and sex are the bread and butter of literature, but you're left hungry here. That may be why Messrs. Dick and Delany are accepted, frequently, as real authors, and not just sci-fi writers. There's real love and sex, messy and surprising and strange as it is in life, in their books.
Real literature makes you question what you believe, what the world is made of, what is beautiful, what is frightening, what is. Sci-fi too frequently asks you to stop questioning and just buy in to things that don't jibe with your own experience. And so I'm forced to conclude that the reason sci-fi makes bad literature is because it isn't terribly scientific, and good literature is.
Sci-fi lovers, you may now open fire.
On the other hand, when literary writers go speculative, wonderful things can happen.
I can't remember where I read the article that claimed this novel for sci-fi, but it was correct. It does not take place in the future; it's one of those Victoriana sci-fi fictions that's become rather popular. The things it has to say about our society and our human nature are astute. The language is in the muscular, American tradition of 20th Century postmodern realism. It is a detective story, a Dickensian musing on class and money, and a Gothic horror tale all at once. And the war between the haves and have nots, I suspect, may be the true "forever war."
(If you haven't read Doctorow's Ragtime, you are cheating yourself.)
One more sci-fi recommendation for your summer reading:
The same author wrote Solaris, which I tried to read but put down after the first page revealed that the book was not in the least bit funny. The Cyberiad, on the other hand, is a crackup.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Thursday, August 04, 2005
BTiGB Responds to Interview Tag
I have been Interview Tagged by Parisjasmal. I must now answer her 5 questions or else I will be turned into a monkey. At least, I think those are the rules. Anyway, here we go:
1. What is one of the best things about your Philippines heritage?
The usual, easy answers people give about why they love their heritage, which I would probably recite if you had asked about my Chinese-Vietnamese side, are the food, the culture, the land. I don't think it's going to work for being Filipino, though.
Filipino food is sort of a disaster. I mean, I often enjoy it, but it's not one of my favorites. It's sort of coarse, actually, very peasanty, with heavy Spanish influence and too much pork. I can sum up Filipino food for you: pork, goat, rice, fermented shrimp paste, salt and vinegar. Oh, and extremely sugary peanut butter and ketchup. (Go on, ask me about "chocolate soup" which has nothing to do with cocoa and everything to do with pig's blood.)
[more after click]
The culture is a little bit of a mess. After so many years of being kicked around by greater powers, it's largely a hodgepodge of colonial influences, from Chinese to Spanish to American, including a pervasive religiosity that I find annoying. On the other hand, Filipinos take tremendous pride in Filipino-ness. This is probably only natural, since to resist being totally overwhelmed by their pushy visitors, Filipinos have had to strongly assert whatever is theirs. Granted, their stick and knife fighting arts are primo. Yet their national dress is bizarre. The men's formal shirt isn't so bad, even if Americans find it odd that men should wear to weddings shirts so sheer that undershirts are fully visible. But the women's dress with the gigantic stiff butterfly sleeves is just hideous, and I won't wear it.
And the land...the land is beautiful. I'll give you that.
No, the best part about being Filipino is being able to identify and commiserate with other Filipinos about the comic quandary of being ourselves. Maybe that's why Filipinos tend to be so ready to laugh, and why wherever I go, Filipinos are accosting me, eagerly asking, "Are you Filipina?" I used to resent the immediate familiarity I'd earn by responding yes, but now I like it. We are like the members of some secret club. We share a funny history and a battered pride, which is more powerful for being founded on wackiness.
2. You are a gifted writer, so I am interested to know-- Who is your favorite author and why do you like them?
Aw, I'm gifted!
For a long time I would have confidently answered Thomas Pynchon. The narrative fictional voice he crafted is the greatest in 20th Century American fiction, as far as I'm concerned. His greatest work, Gravity's Rainbow, plays an endless stream of meaningful jokes on the reader while speaking in a Babel's worth of tongues: technical jargon and '40s slang; the languages of science, rocketry, Pavlovian psychology, and comic books; television, film and radio; the speech of the military man and the high school girl. He speaks high and low, rhapsodizing in some of the most beautiful prose ever written while describing a bucolic landscape in one chapter, then turning your stomach with explicit (and for me, hilariously unsettling) fetishistic sex scenes in the next. Famously, or infamously if you prefer, Gravity's Rainbow was unanimously voted for the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 by the 3-member fiction jury, but the full board protested that the book was unreadable and obscene, and no fiction prize was given that year. (Those of you who didn't want to see The Aristocrats would probably loathe this book.)
I still love Pynchon, but he only wrote a handful of books, so I've had to expand my horizons. I've become passionate about M.F.K. Fisher's work, for her wit, her feeling for detail, her candor, her brains, the rhythm of her sentences, and her refusal to be ashamed about writing about food as if it were as important as love and death. And yet, there's a sloppiness and repetitiveness sometimes in her later writing that frustrates me. When she is genius, she is pure genius, but she occasionally falls into rambling. I would never say this if she were still alive, though, I admire her so much.
So those are my two main favorites: Tom Pynchon, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher. Oh, and Will Shakespeare, but that's a gimme.
3. If you could live in a non-English speaking country for a year, which country would you choose and why? What would be your occupation there?
Jen, everyone speaks English.
4. You are starring in a play on Broadway! Who is your leading man/woman? Why you chose them?
I would star opposite Danny DeVito, so I could look taller.
5. If you could have a full page in the New York Times this Sunday, what would you write about? What is so important to you that you could write a whole page in the NY Times about it? Would you make it funny or serious?
I would write about war, and I would be dead serious.
...
OK, I'll answer 3 for real. I want to say China or Vietnam, to learn more about where my mother came from, but neither is a good place to be a writer, which is what I would need to be. Writing the truth in both those places might land you in fetters, and I'm chicken. Instead, I'd probably live in either Japan, because it is one of the weirdest places on earth, or France, because I can speak the language somewhat and that would give me a head start. Not to mention, you've got the food, the shopping, and Neela to have a beer with.
...
That was a nice thing to do over breakfast!
Now, if you have a blog and you want to be interviewed, leave me a note in the comments that says, "Interview me, please."
I will respond by asking you 5 questions, but not the same as above questions. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions and interview someone else in the same post or new post.
1. What is one of the best things about your Philippines heritage?
The usual, easy answers people give about why they love their heritage, which I would probably recite if you had asked about my Chinese-Vietnamese side, are the food, the culture, the land. I don't think it's going to work for being Filipino, though.
Filipino food is sort of a disaster. I mean, I often enjoy it, but it's not one of my favorites. It's sort of coarse, actually, very peasanty, with heavy Spanish influence and too much pork. I can sum up Filipino food for you: pork, goat, rice, fermented shrimp paste, salt and vinegar. Oh, and extremely sugary peanut butter and ketchup. (Go on, ask me about "chocolate soup" which has nothing to do with cocoa and everything to do with pig's blood.)
[more after click]
The culture is a little bit of a mess. After so many years of being kicked around by greater powers, it's largely a hodgepodge of colonial influences, from Chinese to Spanish to American, including a pervasive religiosity that I find annoying. On the other hand, Filipinos take tremendous pride in Filipino-ness. This is probably only natural, since to resist being totally overwhelmed by their pushy visitors, Filipinos have had to strongly assert whatever is theirs. Granted, their stick and knife fighting arts are primo. Yet their national dress is bizarre. The men's formal shirt isn't so bad, even if Americans find it odd that men should wear to weddings shirts so sheer that undershirts are fully visible. But the women's dress with the gigantic stiff butterfly sleeves is just hideous, and I won't wear it.
And the land...the land is beautiful. I'll give you that.
No, the best part about being Filipino is being able to identify and commiserate with other Filipinos about the comic quandary of being ourselves. Maybe that's why Filipinos tend to be so ready to laugh, and why wherever I go, Filipinos are accosting me, eagerly asking, "Are you Filipina?" I used to resent the immediate familiarity I'd earn by responding yes, but now I like it. We are like the members of some secret club. We share a funny history and a battered pride, which is more powerful for being founded on wackiness.
2. You are a gifted writer, so I am interested to know-- Who is your favorite author and why do you like them?
Aw, I'm gifted!
For a long time I would have confidently answered Thomas Pynchon. The narrative fictional voice he crafted is the greatest in 20th Century American fiction, as far as I'm concerned. His greatest work, Gravity's Rainbow
, plays an endless stream of meaningful jokes on the reader while speaking in a Babel's worth of tongues: technical jargon and '40s slang; the languages of science, rocketry, Pavlovian psychology, and comic books; television, film and radio; the speech of the military man and the high school girl. He speaks high and low, rhapsodizing in some of the most beautiful prose ever written while describing a bucolic landscape in one chapter, then turning your stomach with explicit (and for me, hilariously unsettling) fetishistic sex scenes in the next. Famously, or infamously if you prefer, Gravity's Rainbow was unanimously voted for the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 by the 3-member fiction jury, but the full board protested that the book was unreadable and obscene, and no fiction prize was given that year. (Those of you who didn't want to see The Aristocrats would probably loathe this book.) I still love Pynchon, but he only wrote a handful of books, so I've had to expand my horizons. I've become passionate about M.F.K. Fisher
's work, for her wit, her feeling for detail, her candor, her brains, the rhythm of her sentences, and her refusal to be ashamed about writing about food as if it were as important as love and death. And yet, there's a sloppiness and repetitiveness sometimes in her later writing that frustrates me. When she is genius, she is pure genius, but she occasionally falls into rambling. I would never say this if she were still alive, though, I admire her so much.So those are my two main favorites: Tom Pynchon, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher. Oh, and Will Shakespeare, but that's a gimme.
3. If you could live in a non-English speaking country for a year, which country would you choose and why? What would be your occupation there?
Jen, everyone speaks English.
4. You are starring in a play on Broadway! Who is your leading man/woman? Why you chose them?
I would star opposite Danny DeVito, so I could look taller.
5. If you could have a full page in the New York Times this Sunday, what would you write about? What is so important to you that you could write a whole page in the NY Times about it? Would you make it funny or serious?
I would write about war, and I would be dead serious.
...
OK, I'll answer 3 for real. I want to say China or Vietnam, to learn more about where my mother came from, but neither is a good place to be a writer, which is what I would need to be. Writing the truth in both those places might land you in fetters, and I'm chicken. Instead, I'd probably live in either Japan, because it is one of the weirdest places on earth, or France, because I can speak the language somewhat and that would give me a head start. Not to mention, you've got the food, the shopping, and Neela to have a beer with.
...
That was a nice thing to do over breakfast!
Now, if you have a blog and you want to be interviewed, leave me a note in the comments that says, "Interview me, please."
I will respond by asking you 5 questions, but not the same as above questions. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions and interview someone else in the same post or new post.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
If You Can't Stand the Heat, Don't Turn on the Stove (with 2 Recipes)
We're having a triple-H summer: hazy, hot, and humid.
As many of you know, I love to cook, but when it gets like this, the thought of turning on the stove or the oven makes us want to lie down and die. The air conditioner can't even win the battle with the outside air, let alone the roaring gas fires of our appliances. We throw the windows open, keep the lights off, and stalk the rooms in shadow, clad only in our underwear. There's no dignity in weather like this.
For a while, we were living on cheeses: nice ones from the Bedford Avenue cheese shop in the mini-mall, where the proprietor takes pleasure in providing robust descriptions of his goods, such as our favorite one so far: "Smells like a sweaty wrestler." Will likes soft, creamy, frequently runny cheeses; I like a nutty, aged hard cheese, like the 20-year-old Gruyère I still dream of, and a deep beige Tarentaise of which I almost ate a quarter pound all in one go.
[more after click]
Fruit and cheese and salad seemed the perfect summer dinner, especially washed down with a nice crisp white wine, but then we got fat. It turns out that eating a lot of cheese every night before bed while assiduously avoiding physical exertion is actually the ideal recipe for huge weight gain.
Instead, I've switched to a more Mediterranean platter: hummus, babaganoush (homemade when it's cool enough to merit roasting an eggplant), olives, a little cheese or thick Greek yogurt, some soft no-pocket pitas, cucumber salad, etc. Much better.
Another excellent light meal: some olive-oil packed Brisling sardines on buttered toast (the toaster's effect on the kitchen temperature is judged negligible), a bowl of perfectly ripe sliced tomatoes with a light sprinkle of sea salt and black pepper, and a glass of cold lemonade, made with freshly squeezed lemons and seltzer water.
Easy Chickpea Salad
1 can of chickpeas (I usually cook dried beans for bean recipes, but since the whole point is to avoid turning on the stove, it would be pointless to insist on you boiling chickpeas for an hour and steaming up the room)
4 big garlic cloves
2 coarsely chopped medium tomatoes, nice and ripe (none of that pale, mealy winter tomato here)
a handful of chopped parsley (if you want to be pedantic, go for 5 tablespoons)
juice of two lemons
as much olive oil as lemon juice
1 teaspoon salt
a pinch of cayenne pepper
First you mush up the garlic with the salt. If I had a mortar and pestle, I'd use that, but I don't, so I chop the garlic with the salt on a board. The salt helps break down the garlic into a gooey paste. When it's nice and minced fine or pounded into paste, mix it with the chickpeas in a big bowl. Then throw in everything else, mix it up, taste it for seasoning, and serve at room temperature or cold.
Serving suggestion: I ate this last night with triangles of pita bread and babaganoush. First I spread the babaganoush on the pita, then topped with a spoonful of chickpea salad. Delicious!
Mom's Cucumber Salad
2 fresh cucumbers
salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
freshly ground black pepper
soy sauce
roasted sesame oil
optional: 1 teaspoon chopped cilantro, and/or one thinly sliced scallion, including a little of the green part
First, my mother always cuts off one end of the cucumber and rubs the two cut surfaces together. Usually, a white foam comes out, and she claims this is the bitterness and if I fail to do this the cucumber will taste foul. I don't know if this works, but I use small to medium sized fresh cucumbers from the farmer's market and never had an issue with bitterness, so I don't do this. Don't tell my mom.
Next, you wash and peel the cucumber. I like to leave little stripes of peel, for decoration. Then you slice thin rounds, with thickness depending on how much crunch you like. I usually make them pretty thin, about 1/8 inch.
Put the slices in a bowl and lightly salt them, just enough so there's a little salt all over when you mix them up. Don't use too much, or the final result will be too salty to eat. You're using the salt to draw out the water. Set the bowl aside for 15 minutes, covering with a plate or damp cloth so the cats don't stick their faces in.
Drain the slices through a colander and transfer to a bowl. Then add the sugar and vinegar, a splash of soy sauce (the liquid should be pale amber), mix it up, and taste for the balance of sweet and sour. You can add more sugar or more vinegar if you like. Then add just a few drops of sesame oil, to give it flavor and aroma. Add fresh chopped herbs if you have them, grind on a little black pepper to taste (entirely optional), and toss the thing together.
You can serve right away or chill it first. (If chilling, don't add the cilantro until it's time to serve.)
As many of you know, I love to cook, but when it gets like this, the thought of turning on the stove or the oven makes us want to lie down and die. The air conditioner can't even win the battle with the outside air, let alone the roaring gas fires of our appliances. We throw the windows open, keep the lights off, and stalk the rooms in shadow, clad only in our underwear. There's no dignity in weather like this.
For a while, we were living on cheeses: nice ones from the Bedford Avenue cheese shop in the mini-mall, where the proprietor takes pleasure in providing robust descriptions of his goods, such as our favorite one so far: "Smells like a sweaty wrestler." Will likes soft, creamy, frequently runny cheeses; I like a nutty, aged hard cheese, like the 20-year-old Gruyère I still dream of, and a deep beige Tarentaise of which I almost ate a quarter pound all in one go.
[more after click]
Fruit and cheese and salad seemed the perfect summer dinner, especially washed down with a nice crisp white wine, but then we got fat. It turns out that eating a lot of cheese every night before bed while assiduously avoiding physical exertion is actually the ideal recipe for huge weight gain.
Instead, I've switched to a more Mediterranean platter: hummus, babaganoush (homemade when it's cool enough to merit roasting an eggplant), olives, a little cheese or thick Greek yogurt, some soft no-pocket pitas, cucumber salad, etc. Much better.
Another excellent light meal: some olive-oil packed Brisling sardines on buttered toast (the toaster's effect on the kitchen temperature is judged negligible), a bowl of perfectly ripe sliced tomatoes with a light sprinkle of sea salt and black pepper, and a glass of cold lemonade, made with freshly squeezed lemons and seltzer water.
Easy Chickpea Salad
1 can of chickpeas (I usually cook dried beans for bean recipes, but since the whole point is to avoid turning on the stove, it would be pointless to insist on you boiling chickpeas for an hour and steaming up the room)
4 big garlic cloves
2 coarsely chopped medium tomatoes, nice and ripe (none of that pale, mealy winter tomato here)
a handful of chopped parsley (if you want to be pedantic, go for 5 tablespoons)
juice of two lemons
as much olive oil as lemon juice
1 teaspoon salt
a pinch of cayenne pepper
First you mush up the garlic with the salt. If I had a mortar and pestle, I'd use that, but I don't, so I chop the garlic with the salt on a board. The salt helps break down the garlic into a gooey paste. When it's nice and minced fine or pounded into paste, mix it with the chickpeas in a big bowl. Then throw in everything else, mix it up, taste it for seasoning, and serve at room temperature or cold.
Serving suggestion: I ate this last night with triangles of pita bread and babaganoush. First I spread the babaganoush on the pita, then topped with a spoonful of chickpea salad. Delicious!
Mom's Cucumber Salad
2 fresh cucumbers
salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
freshly ground black pepper
soy sauce
roasted sesame oil
optional: 1 teaspoon chopped cilantro, and/or one thinly sliced scallion, including a little of the green part
First, my mother always cuts off one end of the cucumber and rubs the two cut surfaces together. Usually, a white foam comes out, and she claims this is the bitterness and if I fail to do this the cucumber will taste foul. I don't know if this works, but I use small to medium sized fresh cucumbers from the farmer's market and never had an issue with bitterness, so I don't do this. Don't tell my mom.
Next, you wash and peel the cucumber. I like to leave little stripes of peel, for decoration. Then you slice thin rounds, with thickness depending on how much crunch you like. I usually make them pretty thin, about 1/8 inch.
Put the slices in a bowl and lightly salt them, just enough so there's a little salt all over when you mix them up. Don't use too much, or the final result will be too salty to eat. You're using the salt to draw out the water. Set the bowl aside for 15 minutes, covering with a plate or damp cloth so the cats don't stick their faces in.
Drain the slices through a colander and transfer to a bowl. Then add the sugar and vinegar, a splash of soy sauce (the liquid should be pale amber), mix it up, and taste for the balance of sweet and sour. You can add more sugar or more vinegar if you like. Then add just a few drops of sesame oil, to give it flavor and aroma. Add fresh chopped herbs if you have them, grind on a little black pepper to taste (entirely optional), and toss the thing together.
You can serve right away or chill it first. (If chilling, don't add the cilantro until it's time to serve.)
Monday, August 01, 2005
Another Series: All the Dates
So my last two long-term blog projects were a botch. By that, I mean my project to blog essays about every man in my romantic/sexual history (I failed to consider the emotional trauma for everyone involved) and my project to blog about every job I'd ever had (I failed to consider how boring most of those jobs were).
This one should be easier: All the Dates. Most will be Internet Dates, because for some reason, men have rarely asked me out in person. I don't believe it's because I am fearsome to the eye. I suspect it's because at 4'10" I'm far, far, far below eye level. Also, I'm cranky.
Here are two, to start.
The Barrister from Guyana
When you go to NYU, you spend many hours in Washington Square Park. There, pigeons, skateboarders, itinerant musicians, and the idle congregate. One afternoon as I sat in the shade of a tree, an elderly light-skinned East Indian gentleman, well dressed, with a short, delicate, slightly stooped frame, introduced himself as a barrister from Guyana. He told me the world was full of possibility, that he enjoyed conversations, and that he would like to take me for Indian food. He was cheery and avuncular, and I had no concept of risk. We drove in his golden Mercedes to Avenue A, where he stopped in front of a building and asked the doorman for information about the owner. “I would like to buy a building here,” he said. “This neighborhood is changing!” We dined in a low-ceilinged dive, hung with a jungle of mylar and plastic decorations. Of the yellow split-pea dal he said, “This liquid sustains India.” He told me I should save my money and buy a hot dog cart and hire a man to run it, and that I should take the proceeds and buy another hot dog cart, and so forth. He had endless streams of jovial advice, anecdotes about his life, proverbs for every occasion. Throughout the night I waited for the dark turn, but it never came. We parted on cheery terms, and he gave me a brief yet sincere hug that curiously did not feel in the least bit lecherous.
[more after click]
The Former Model
J’s Nerve profile seemed the height of charm—he was clever (if a little glib), motivated (had his own business), well connected (he might be a socialite), and handsome (no picture, but he claimed to be a former model). Perhaps that’s why I did not recognize him when he arrived at the Whitney in a worn softball-team t-shirt, green sweatpants, and horrendous acne. He was a white boy with a tan, rather chubby, topped with scruffy hair and beaming a gap-toothed smile. I imagined he must have been a child catalog model. "I've gained a bit of weight," he explained, "since I quit heroin." We had lunch at a stuffy place nearby, and when I ordered wine, he seemed nervous. His business was personal shopping for Japanese fashionistas. He name-dropped: “Puffy is the nicest guy.” I stared—I couldn’t help it—at his childish face, and felt suspicious. He effused as we sat in Central Park, “You’re a cross between Janeane Garofalo and Audrey Hepburn!” All lies, but nice ones. His high, rabbity voice went on and on, and he spoke endlessly about his high school chums, until at last, over frozen hot chocolate, I asked him, “How old are you?” He had lied by 4 years on his profile. He was 18. I was 23. I had provided alcohol to a minor at 2 in the afternoon. I smiled and patted his arm. “You’re a bit much for me,” I explained, as I got into a cab, “but thank you for a lovely day.”
This one should be easier: All the Dates. Most will be Internet Dates, because for some reason, men have rarely asked me out in person. I don't believe it's because I am fearsome to the eye. I suspect it's because at 4'10" I'm far, far, far below eye level. Also, I'm cranky.
Here are two, to start.
The Barrister from Guyana
When you go to NYU, you spend many hours in Washington Square Park. There, pigeons, skateboarders, itinerant musicians, and the idle congregate. One afternoon as I sat in the shade of a tree, an elderly light-skinned East Indian gentleman, well dressed, with a short, delicate, slightly stooped frame, introduced himself as a barrister from Guyana. He told me the world was full of possibility, that he enjoyed conversations, and that he would like to take me for Indian food. He was cheery and avuncular, and I had no concept of risk. We drove in his golden Mercedes to Avenue A, where he stopped in front of a building and asked the doorman for information about the owner. “I would like to buy a building here,” he said. “This neighborhood is changing!” We dined in a low-ceilinged dive, hung with a jungle of mylar and plastic decorations. Of the yellow split-pea dal he said, “This liquid sustains India.” He told me I should save my money and buy a hot dog cart and hire a man to run it, and that I should take the proceeds and buy another hot dog cart, and so forth. He had endless streams of jovial advice, anecdotes about his life, proverbs for every occasion. Throughout the night I waited for the dark turn, but it never came. We parted on cheery terms, and he gave me a brief yet sincere hug that curiously did not feel in the least bit lecherous.
[more after click]
The Former Model
J’s Nerve profile seemed the height of charm—he was clever (if a little glib), motivated (had his own business), well connected (he might be a socialite), and handsome (no picture, but he claimed to be a former model). Perhaps that’s why I did not recognize him when he arrived at the Whitney in a worn softball-team t-shirt, green sweatpants, and horrendous acne. He was a white boy with a tan, rather chubby, topped with scruffy hair and beaming a gap-toothed smile. I imagined he must have been a child catalog model. "I've gained a bit of weight," he explained, "since I quit heroin." We had lunch at a stuffy place nearby, and when I ordered wine, he seemed nervous. His business was personal shopping for Japanese fashionistas. He name-dropped: “Puffy is the nicest guy.” I stared—I couldn’t help it—at his childish face, and felt suspicious. He effused as we sat in Central Park, “You’re a cross between Janeane Garofalo and Audrey Hepburn!” All lies, but nice ones. His high, rabbity voice went on and on, and he spoke endlessly about his high school chums, until at last, over frozen hot chocolate, I asked him, “How old are you?” He had lied by 4 years on his profile. He was 18. I was 23. I had provided alcohol to a minor at 2 in the afternoon. I smiled and patted his arm. “You’re a bit much for me,” I explained, as I got into a cab, “but thank you for a lovely day.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
