Author Archives: Ben

Stroganov’s Expanded Upon Beef Stroganoff

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

When a dish is as simple as beef Stroganoff it’s hard to sift through the claims of invention. It’s sliced beef in sour sauce. Cut away all the variations and that’s what’s left. Not exactly splitting the atom.

Every town in Italy that can attach an “-ese” to the end of its name invented Minestrone. “Before us, there was no boiling water with vegetables in it!” they boast. “Dopo di noi, il diliziosa!” It’s chaos. Multiple Italian claims would have plagued meat sauce too, but the wily Bolognese, as a condition of submitting to Papal rule in 1506, insisted that all pasta sauces made with beef and tomatoes throughout Christendom be referred to as “Bolognese,” increasing their opportunity to sneer “That’s not real Bolognese.”

Alexander Grigorievich Stroganov (1795-1891) is likely who the dish is named for though there are other claimants. One story tells that Grigory Alexandrovich Stroganov’s (1770-1857) chef made a dish of minced meat because his master’s teeth were either gone or in such a state that chewing was out. Another says a chef attending to Pavel Alexandrovich Stroganov (1774-1817) served julienned beef in sauce because the meat was so frozen it could only be shaved into ribbons. But it was Alexander Grigorievich Stroganov (1795-1891) who may have popularized the dish in Odessa, freeing it from aristocratic trappings, letting it mingle with common dishes of sliced beef in sour sauce where it could sneer, “That’s not real me.”

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POETS Day! Amy Clampitt

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

“Why wait until the middle of a cold, dark night / When everything’s a little clearer in the light of day / And we know the night is always gonna be here anyway?” So sang The Starland Vocal Band. “I didn’t want to write an all-out sex song,” said songwriter Bill Danoff. “I just wanted to write something that was fun and hinted at sex.” So he took the title from a Clyde’s restaurant happy hour menu in Georgetown, D.C. he ate at while his wife was having surgery for cervical cancer. “Afternoon Delight” hit number one on the charts and a POETS Day anthem was born. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization. Nearly all means are justified by the urge to prematurely escape the bonds of employment and settle in at a friendly neighborhood joint a few hours before even happy hour begins, lay comfortably in the grass at a local park, go for a swim, or God forbid, go for a light jog.

It’s your weekend. Do with it as you will, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

I’m pretty sure my uncle worked at that Clyde’s.

***

I’m not feeling terribly Christian at the moment.

My grumpy old man mood began when The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 2 caused a trip inside for a comparison with my high school copy of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. I was very comfortably reading in my backyard and the need for comparison annoyed me to no end.

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Getting Fries Right

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

“Eat a McDonald’s hamburger and you might be getting a mouth full of antibiotics, hormones, and dangerous bacteria.” The italics are mine. That’s from “What’s really in a McDonald’s hamburger?” by Robin Konie published at thatnkyourbody.com. The curious non-capitalized headline is theirs.

There was pink slime, but that’s either gone as an ingredient or renamed something like “pure real beef that we swear is organix” or something. “pure real…” should probably capitalized. It’s catching.

I think food fear mongering is funny. Mt Dew used to contain brominated vegetable oil. It doesn’t now because people accused Pepsi Co. of putting “flame retardant” in their sody pop even though they only used a meh 8 parts per million of the stuff when the FDA says up to 15 parts is fine. Never mind that Mt. Dew is a fire retardant, as anyone who’s ever doused a MORPG session ash tray fire can attest.

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POETS Day! WH Auden’s “September 1, 1939”

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Photo by Herzi Pinki, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

This week’s POETS Day enemy de jour de week is streaming video, not for affordably bringing entertainment of the highest and decidedly other quality to the consumer at a time and place of the consumer’s choosing, but for affordably bringing entertainment of the highest and decidedly other quality to the consumer at a time and place of the consumer’s choosing and making us soft. Our leisure is lurching towards too accommodating. They are waging war against our sense of what it means to have an event. When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch Knight Rider, you had to be on the couch at seven on a Friday night and turn the pliers to NBC or, and I swear this happened, your dad would tell you that it’s “No big deal,” because “They’ll re-run it over the summer.” Those were tough times, but we were tough kids; not like kids today, steeped in this post-anticipation dystopia where the universe virtually bends to their whims. What do millennials do with such a dulled sense of expectation, never to knowing the exquisite longing of flipping through the Sears Catalogue toy section? What’s it like to wake up Christmas morning to find there’s nothing left to unwrap? As P.J. O’Rourke wrote, instant credit killed the dry hump. Nobody saves up for anything anymore. They are raising a generation incapable of deferred enjoyment. So take a stand and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. It’s your life and your weekend so why should you wai… hold on… I…

This week’s POETS Day hero de jour de week is streaming video, not for…

***

Roy Campbell despised W.H. Auden. I assume the feeling was reciprocated.

During the Spanish Civil War, Campbell and his family on occasion hid Carmelite Monks in his house in Toledo from Loyalist communists backed by Stalin. It was a sprawling house and the monks not only took refuge, but stowed church documents there. He risked his life, as well as the lives of his wife and daughters, in doing so.

On July 22, 1936, Republican militia murdered seventeen Carmelites in the streets, among them former guests of the Campbell house. Suspecting ties, militiamen searched though the home. The family, fearing such a possibility, was able to clean out crucifixes and icons from the house but there was no time to remove the trunk of papers from the monastery from the front hall. Peter Alexander, author of Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography wrote, “The search of the house was thorough, but though the militiamen leaned their rifles on the Carmelite trunk, they never thought of opening it.” Alexander points out that possession of a missal could have meant death. One of the communists found Campbell’s copy of The Divine Comedy and yelled “Italian!” and then quickly “Fascist!” Alexander again: “But Campbell, with admirable presence of mind, showed them some of his Russian novels, and so convinced them that he was neutral.”

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I’m Told It’s Called Lamb Keema Curry

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

My family gave me James May’s cookbook, Oh Cook! 60 Easy Recipes That Any Idiot Can Make, for Father’s Day.

“Hey!” you might be saying to yourself as you read this. “I know James May. He’s that English guy from Top Gear back when it was cool and producers got punched. He’s the one who wears those Jackson Pollock shirts and whose hair won’t let him be his age.” And you’d be right.

I’m a cookbook reader, by which I mean when I get a new cookbook, not always but usually, I start at the beginning and read all the non-instructional text. I do read the text of recipes before I eventually make them, but I like the stories and bits of history and trivia that pepper the pages enough to put up with the naturally sourced/sustainable/organic sanctimony (Jamie Oliver thinks he’s Food Jesus.) I’ve pored over Escoffier, Marcella Hazan (Her Name Be Praised), and again and again the books of M.F.K. Fisher. I don’t write this lightly:

Under the heading “A Note on Weights and Measures,” James May has written the most important paragraph ever to grace the pages of a cookbook.

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POETS Day! Yeats’ “Easter, 1916”

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Welcome once again to POETS Day, that wonderous day where we do our best to usher in the weekend, Henry Ford’s greatest creation, a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization. Nearly all means are justified by the urge to prematurely escape the bonds of employment and settle in at a friendly neighborhood joint a few hours before even happy hour begins, lay comfortably in the grass at a local park, go for a swim, or God forbid, go for a light jog. It’s your weekend. Do with it as you will, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

***

“Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.”
– from “Swift’s Epitaph” by W.B. Yeats

Though a thorough Nationalist, it was not Yeats’ wish that Ireland should erupt in violence, but he knew a Rubicon when he saw one.

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Chicken Spiedini with Amogio Sauce

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

“Spiedini” is an Italian word, but it means “skewer.” There’s nothing innately Italian about that part. People have been cooking things on sticks the world over since the first guy burnt his hand. “Amogio” is innately Italian, specifically Sicilian; old as the hills but with no good story trailing behind. It’s citrus and herbs with olive oil and a touch of spice. It’s a simple recipe that takes advantage of the island’s selective bounty.

I’ve read that when the Greeks arrived, Sicily was inhabited by the Elymi to the west, the Sicuni in the central region, and the Siculi along the east. Each had a style of cooking that, other than that they all used roughly the same ingredients – citrus, herbs, olives, nuts, seafood, and the occasional meat, I’ve read was distinct. I can’t find any commentary to enlighten me as to how they were distinct, just that they were. The Greeks didn’t change much to the cuisine other than introduce fish stew, which seems improbable. Anybody that lives by the sea and has a pot will get that notion on their own.

The Greeks had staying power. Syracuse was a force as early as the fifth century B.C. and Hellenic dialects were still dominant under Augustus when Rome was dependent on the island for wheat. In 831, under Saracen rule, the capital moved from Syracuse to Palermo and Greek influence faded. According to Waverley Root in his book The Food of Italy, the Saracens never left, “They are at any rate still with us in the kitchen. Almost everything which strikes us today as typically Sicilian is typically Saracen.”

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POETS Day! Translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

My kids are out for summer vacation; have been for almost two weeks now. They got a preview of a classless existence twice in May. Their schools allow for a number of “snow days” every year so that should Alabama see a repeat of The Blizzard of ’93 (TM) and the world stops the kids still have the required amount of official school days on the books. If those days don’t get used the administration starts doling them out like a UN aid worker with food and nylons. Suddenly the kids are beaming on a Thursday at three o’clock because the weekend’s arrived a day early. Though floating snow days are nothing new, I was taken by surprise this year because I assumed that post COVID we all knew how to pretend that we got enough done online to meet state guidelines and wouldn’t need them anymore. But the free days popped up and graced early and mid-May Fridays with smiling children playing jacks and hopscotch on the sidewalk, sucking in their stomachs for the high-school lifeguards plus one-third their age, and doing other loveable scamp Rockwell fodder. Good for them. POETS Day knows no age restrictions. I’m taking the idea of unused excuses for off days and running with it. Never go into the half with timeouts in your pocket. Last week was my seventy-fifth POETS Day post for Ordinary Times and it passed right by me, unnoticed. I’m sure some of you were puzzled why I didn’t mention it, but I didn’t realize. This week I’m calling for a POETS Day SNOW Day where POETS stands for Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday like always and SNOW stands for Skedaddle Now. (The O and W are part of NOW so the acronym actually does work. It’s like the A would be in NASA if instead of National Aeronautics and Space Administration it was National Space Administration and they still kept it NASA, because people wouldn’t mind the A from National bleeding into the Space because they like vowels in words. A lot of people probably do think it is National Space Administration and they’ve never complained, so… it’s fine.) Take the belated celebratory free day with my tardy apology. Tell your boss you’re pissing off early in honor of the POETS Day Diamond Jubilee… No. Tell him you’re pissing off early in honor of the Diamond Jubilee. He’ll know.

***

When I first decided to write a weekly series about poets and poetry I mapped out what I wanted to do and set a few parameters. One of the first rules was that there would be no translations. I’ve broken that rule a few times but I didn’t want to be caught in a situation where I was unsure if I enjoyed the work of the poet, the translator, or the combination. When I read Pound’s Cathay, or more specifically when I read about how Pound’s Cathay came to be, my conception of translations changed.

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Nero Wolfe’s 45 Minute Scrambled Eggs

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

If you haven’t read any of the Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout, you’ve deprived yourself of endless well spent afternoons. That’s why the books exist. They’re lunch to dinner length and engaging so you don’t nap away a day off.

My dad claims to have read them all though I don’t see how he knows. I’ve read ten or twelve, I think. Maybe I’ve read six of them twice or four of them three times. They’re not meant to be life changingly memorable. The plots are intricate enough to keep you guessing but evenly so throughout the series. They’re tuxedos; none of them impolitely stands out, interchangeable like a Bertie and Jeeves story, but with crimes more serious than pilfering cow creamers.

Murder’s not the thing anyway, at least for me. It’s the joy of spending time in the agoraphobic Wolfe’s brownstone with the orchids or in the study where every seat has an attending table to sit a beer on, stopping for a ham sandwich and a glass of milk with Archie Goodwin the narrator, or imagining the menu put out by Fritz Brenner, Wolfe’s live-in chef.

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POETS Day! Robert Service

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

A woeful POETS Day casts a shadow on my corner of Birmingham. My local library sunk.

It flooded, actually. A pipe burst and they’ve closed to replace drywall and carpeting, and according to a “Letter from the Director,” they won’t re-open for the next few months. The Director advised patrons to hold on to borrowed books until the Mississippi State game (she didn’t phrase it that way exactly, but this being Alabama she could have) rather than return them to other branches; something about storage. I’m stuck with a Longfellow collection I’m not fond of and Lowell’s The Dolphin that I’ve read and enjoyed but am not likely to pick up again anytime soon.

For the librarians – the bearded guy who seems in charge and looks like he’s wearing a turtleneck even when he isn’t, the nice lady whose tattoos suggest a pre-librarian wilding, the young guy who paints his nails black, the persnickety guy who’s mad at me because I returned a book without the bar code it didn’t have when I checked it out but who still suspects I have a drawer full of ill-gotten bar codes in my lair, and the guy who says, without fail, “I’ve been meaning to pick up [fill in poet’s/author’s name] again,” no matter what book I check out – it was looking like an involuntary Piss Off Early, ‘Til September. The most recent missive from the Director states that they’ve found a temporary location so they’ll be back to shushing soon, but the selection of books on hand will be limited. I suspect there will be little poetry to browse.

Other locations in the Jefferson Co. system have poetry sections, but O’Neal, the nearby flooded one, was the repository. It’s where the system stores the bulk of the genre, thankfully on the second floor, and where requests are filled for patrons of other branches. It sounds like the collection will be available, but I’ll have to order what I want which means I’ll have to know what I want. I like wandering around on a Monday looking for a tempting spine. As it is, for the next few months I’ll lean mostly on my collection and internet-available poems. Be ready for revisited poets. If you thought I spent too much time talking about Pound before…

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