my friends: it's been exactly 2 million years since i last used my high dpi gaming mouse to click my tumblr post button. i'm sorry about this! i have no excuse. nothing has really changed in my life—i just got distracted by (then obsessed with) lanyard culture and then i accidentally ate a few of those capsules that grow into little sponge animals when you drop them in water.
in addition to conveying a sponge rhino through my bowels AND inventing some pretty dope basket weave knots, i've written some things that i'd like to share with you. the following short piece is about the intersection of my second and third favourite pleasures: literature and food. if either of these stimuli make your top ten list as well, you may enjoy it...
How big a deal was Charles Dickens in 1842? This is the question I asked a professor friend of mine to get some perspective on the two epic, though wildly different New York dinner parties held in Dickens' honor in 1842 and then 25 years later in 1867. "He was the biggest deal. If he visited your city, the press would scribble about it for days, even weeks afterwards." replied my friend.
"He was a Kim Kardashian?"
"When Dickens first came to New York in 1842, he was only 29 yet he'd already published several bestsellers including The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby. He was a prolific wunderkind that everyone, everywhere was going bonkers over."
"Bieber?"
"Another consideration is that New York was a place to be in the mid 19th century but it wasn't the place to be. To get there back then, to get anywhere, it took a long time. Dickens only visited the U.S. twice for a reason."
"So…like if Justin Timberlake went to Kolkata."
"Sure. Charles Dickens visiting New York in 1842 is like Justin Timberlake visiting Kolkata in 2015. But to keep the metaphor tight, Justin Timberlake will have do the song-and-dance equivalent of writing A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and ten other literary blockbusters by 2040 to be anything near what Dickens' return trip to America was like in 1867."
This is the tale of two dinners. Each was lavish beyond measure. Each included the crustiest of America's upper crust. Each honored Charles Dickens, the Justin Timberlake of the Victorian era. Both meals were paragons of haute cuisine—yet the dinners themselves were poles apart. Comparing the two reveals a fundamental shift in American dining, indeed a fundamental shift in America itself.
Imagine: you're the chairperson of Kolkata's hospitality committee and you just received word from new Mayor Sovan Chatterjee that Justin Timberlake will be visiting your city on his upcoming press tour. What will you serve for dinner?
If you're anything like Chef Gardner* and Mayor Robert Morris, you'll serve the most recherché ingredients you can get your sticky fingers on: truffles, ornamented Westphalia hams, stewed terrapin*, and larded sweet bread. You'll present a soup course with three soups, a fish course with three fish, a boiled course*, a roast course (containing cow, sheep, goose, turkey, bear, and castrated roosters), and a cold dishes course*. At this point, your guests might assume you're just about to wind down to cheeses and melons—but not you, you have over 25 more plates in store—you're only just getting started. Your entrées will require subtitles: macaroni à la Italienne (Italian-style macaroni); vol-au-vent, aux huîtres (oyster pies); and petites pâtés à la Bechamelle [sic] (small gravy patties). You'll spur gout sufferers to relapse with your battery of veal kidneys in Madeira wine, bread-crumbed mutton chops au jus, and larded beef filets. And still, there's the matter of dessert: all manner of puffs, pies, pastries, puddings and something called Madeira jelly. And none of this mentions the edible set-pieces: the pyramids of crystallized candy, spanish macaroni, and other assorted sweetmeats towering in the corner, double-dog-daring each guest to come and take a bite.
Conspicuously absent* from the bill of fare however are vegetables and fresh fruit. Produce only appears as a garnish or gravy: sorrel; olives; peas; and tomato, caper, and celery sauces (this is a comprehensive list). Though fresh fruit is out of the question due to the Februaryness of the banquet (apples do turn up in the puffs, coconuts in the candy, and cranberries in the pies). In the book Delmonico's, Lately Thomas writes, "Literary and promiscuous describes this agglomeration of things good and dreary to eat. The keynote was abundance—profusion—over-abundance —a prodigality of edibles, crudely grouped and offering little basic variety. No one could sample everything, and no one was expected to; Falstaff would have belched at the challenge."
The 1842 Dickens dinner was the Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End of tendered banquets. It was a spectacular blockbuster that reveled in how blockbustery it could be*. It was was an over-produced hodge-podge of oddly arranged ingredients, a pastiche of confused sources, a maze of throw-away tangents and no clear transition between its major components. The guests* finished the event feeling stuffed yet never fully satisfied and were left wondering what it was that they just spent several hours doing.
The banquet itself may seem ghastly to a modern eater but it was the very archetype of fine American dining in its day and its hosts were heavily congratulated on pulling off such a lavish feast. An account printed the following day in the New York Herald states that Dickens "was in high spirits, laughed heartily, ate heartily, drank wine with . . . Washington Irving, the Mayor and…everybody that asked him, and that was over a hundred." Indeed, Dickens was outwardly grateful for such a warm reception and gave every indication that he relished his dinner in New York and tour of the U.S. But then he returned to England and wrote two scathing and somewhat bilious books set in America, Martin Chuzzlewit, and American Notes. This is how Chuzzlewit describes the particulars of a New York Dinner, one that seems suspiciously familiar:
All the knives and forks were working away at a rate that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to eat his utmost in self-defense, as if a famine were expected to set in before breakfast time to-morrow morning…The poultry…disappeared as rapidly as if every bird had…flown in desperation down a human throat. The oysters, stewed and pickled, leaped from their capacious reservoirs, and slid by scores into the mouths of the assembly…Great heaps of indigestible matter melted away as ice before the sun. It was a solemn and an awful thing to see. Dyspeptic individuals bolted their food in wedges; feeding, not themselves, but broods of nightmares, who were continually standing at livery within them. Spare men, with lank and rigid cheeks, came out unsatisfied from the destruction of heavy dishes, and glared with watchful eyes upon the pastry…[There remained a single] comfort—it was very soon over.
[cue record scratch]
Twenty-six years elapsed before Dickens returned to America. In that time, the U.S. grew by seven territories and nine states. The ticking cogs of industrialization had rolled out of the Northeast via channels carved from telegraph wires and railroad ties. The U.S. had wrestled Texas away from Mexico and at one dark point even operated as two separate governments. In the time since Dickens last set foot on an American gangplank, the country had gone through puberty. Had the culinary scene grown up as well? Would Dickens be welcomed back after making such ungenerous observations (at best) and spiteful sneers (at worst)? And why would he even want to rear his head in the place he lampooned so severely? The answers are yes, yes, and money—Justin Timberlake had grown in popularity in the intervening years, but so too had Kolkata.
When Dickens arrived in New York in 1867, he was sick, secretly broke, and two years away from death. He was also more celebrated than ever and his American hosts were eager for a do-over, after all, the international perception of American fine dining would be at stake. The storied Delmonico's Restaurant, then the finest dining establishment North America, now a culinary legend, was chosen as the location for the extravaganza. The fate of the New York hospitality industry would be left in the hands of Delmonico's chef de cuisine, the great Charles Ranhofer*.
If abundance was the keyword of the 1842 dinner, refinement* was the word of 1868. Where the first dinner had sixty-odd, incongruous plates, the second featured a heavily-edited menu of thirty. Dishes like quartiers d'artichauts Lyonnaise (artichokes), épinards au velouté (spinach soup), and petits pois à la Anglaise (English peas) are still just as intricate as their '42 predecessors, but they also mark a return to vegetables, and offer a balance not found in the Atkins-tastic first dinner. Lately Thomas chronicles some other major improvements,
Symmetry has been imposed upon variety, the meal charted along a definite line of development; it is no longer a superfluity of abundance. The sauces contain shadings that the palate could catch...The clumsy crutch of two languages has been thrown aside, for New York's educated diners had passed that primer stage. There are a multitude of literary allusions…a soup named for Dumas, chopped lamb à la Walter Scott, grouse à la Fenimore Cooper…timbales à la Dickens...And not only are the diners carried by easy transitions from course to course, they are so wafted in a way to reanimate flagging appetite. The concluding stages, especially, are beyond the scope of the simple pastries of 1842, when two versions of that insipidity, blanc mange ("rose color" and "almond"), were a pale alternative to repetitious "puffs,"…and "plum puddings, blazing." "Madeira jelly" would melt with confusion before "corbeille de biscuits Chantilly" (1868), and those jolly "apple puffs" would be country cousins beside "lait d'amandes rubané au chocolat"
While waiters poured sherrys, champagnes and perfect coffees and the guests enjoyed confections by the ones, twos, threes, and petit fours, Dickens arose to say a few words. Would he renew his negative opinions? Would he pretend he never had them in the first place? Or would he just talk about his latest book and why everyone in the room should buy four copies?
With the poise of Lady Dedlock and polish of Dr. Marigold, Dickens addressed his audience and apologized for his prior behavior,
"…on my return to England…[I resolve] to record that wherever I have been [in America], in the smallest places equally with the largest, I have been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect for the privacy daily enforced upon me by the nature of my avocation here and the state of my health. [Applause.] This testimony, so long as I live, and so long as my descendants have any legal right in my books, I shall cause to be republished as an appendix to every copy of those two books of mine in which I have referred to America. [Tremendous applause.]
The event was a smashing success. As a critic later pointed out, the guest of honor had eaten crow for dinner even though it was not on the menu. Four days later, Dickens left for England just as I.R.S. G-men were about to nab him for not declaring $180,000 in income from his American book tour.
[Record scratch resolves to Bourne Identity style techno music]
Whereas the 1842 Dickens dinner was the story of Charlie and the Cheesecake Factory, the follow-up was something more like Charlie and Glass Elevator full of French Laundry. A critical adjustment was underway, not only was the New York culinary scene maturing, so too was the scrappy country known as the United States.
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Footnotes
A highly-regarded caterer of his time, but not so highly regarded that his first name is locatable via the usual modern methods.
Turtle!
Does "boiled beef à la mode" mean what I think it means?
A cold hare patty sounds like something I would fish out of a shower drain. I'd rather eat oysters in aspic jelly and I have a shellfish allergy.
A further indication of the over-the-top, not quite thought-out atmosphere of the banquet can be found in the twelve marble busts that decorated the room: (two founding fathers, four of history's greatest Romantic poets, two famous Roman orators, two deities, a Supreme Court Justice, and—the guest of honor, Charles Dickens.)
From a modern perspective at any rate. Or, on second thought, maybe not.
And what of Dickens' many groupies? Were they allowed to dine with the assembly? According to Thomas, no. The men "were honored by the semipresence of a number of ladies, who sat in a group around Mrs. Dickens and through the open door of an anteroom were permitted to witness the festivities as far as was consistent with propriety." [Delmonico's]
This is also the tale of two Charleses. Chef Charles Ranhofer would go on to invent Lobster Newberg, popularize Baked Alaska, and introduce U.S. diners to a buttery fruit known as the alligator pear (which is today called the avocado*)—the 1868 Dickens dinner was the Timberlake of literature meeting the Timberlake of cuisine.
* a replacement name that sounds much more benign until a friend of yours points out that avocado comes from the nahuatl word for testicle.
And what of the decor? Did the same head-scratching busts preside over this second dinner? Thankfully no, though a New York World reporter does mention that, "Confections were converted into…tempting pictures of the most familiar characters of the great novelist…Sairy Gamp and Betsy Frig and Poor Joe and Captain Cuttle blossomed out of charlotte russe, and Tiny Tim was discovered in pâté de foie gras."
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Sources
Bennett, James Gordon. "The Grand Literary, Fashionable, Legal, Judicial and Miscellaneous Dinner to Boz on Friday Night, at the City Hotel." The New York Herald. Feb. 20 1842.
Dickens, Charles. Speeches, Letters, and sayings of Charles Dickens. New York, 1870.
Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzelwit. New York, 1884.
Kitton, Frederic. Charles Dickens: His Life, Writings, and Personality. London, 1902.
Thomas, Lately. Delmonico's: A Century of Splendor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1967.
Wilson, Rufus Rockwell. "Foreign Authors in America." The Bookman. Vol XIII, New York, 1901.
may day (the 1st day of the 5th month) & mayday! (the distress call)
it just so happens that the distress call "mayday" is actually an englished spelling of the french "m'aider" which translates to "come help me." it has not a lick to do either with may (from maia, a roman goddess of the earth) or day (from old english dæg, "the daylight hours").
speaking of mayday: i'm still at lanyard camp and it turns out the camp registrar won't accept any transfer credits from raynor ganan autodidact university. if anyone knows any good attorneys that specialize in lanyard law, please let me know. thank you and goodbye—or as we say in the lanyard community, "good bight."
select non-verbal notations from bill murray's recent esquire interview
[TALKS IN SLURRED, NUMBED VOICE]
[BARELY ARTICULATING SYLLABLES]
[CONTINUES SLURRING AND MUMBLING]
[MAKES CLUMSY BLIP SOUNDS]
[MAKES SMOOTH BLIP SOUNDS]
and then this article from gq.
[PICKS UP RECORDER]
[LAUGHS]
[DEADPAN EASTERN EUROPEAN ACCENT]
[BREATHES IN AND OUT SLOWLY]
[GENUINELY CONFUSED]
[BEAT]
[GETTING GENUINELY EXCITED]
[PITCH-PERFECT, LIKE CRAZILY EERILY PERFECT AYKROYD IMPRESSION]
[LONG BEAT, AND THEN HE BREAKS INTO A HUGE GRIN]
because it's cold as balsamic salad dressing outside right now, i've been working on an indoor project: remodeling an extra bedroom and turning it into a sit-up studio slash fajita station. mostly this means arranging throw pillows and grills but it also means i got to demolish a (hopefully) non-load-bearing wall. what i found behind the drywall was an unintentional time capsule: 30 or so mysterious, hand-typed quiz cards. the plot—like grandma ganan's holiday gizzard gravy—thickens quickly.
presented above are a few fine specimens. what is the provenance of this wonderful little deck? my fajita friends think they are from the 1960s and my sit-up bros have noticed a few new-york centered questions—but other than that we can only speculate and wonder.
children's books on my mind for "reasons" these days
as a faux-classicist, i'm particularly enamoured with baby books written in dead languages. so it's little wonder that first thousand words in latin caught my bloodshot eyes. it's awful that the publisher of this book skimped paying the proper fee (a $50 gift certificate to ruby tuesday's) to a qualified latin scholar—however as far as unintended translation gaffes go, buying this book might just be worth it. (even it it means your little baby will grow up to equate mud with moral filth)
communal meal prior to informal gathering: articles
the superficial point of this post is to tell you about a book worth reading/purchasing/purchasing for everyone on your secret santa list. the book is potluck supper with meeting to follow: essays (hereafter pswmtf:e). the author is my bromantic internet bro, andy sturdevant.
inasmuch as the twin cities are a microcosm of everywhere and andy is a microcosm of everyone, this is the best book—on how everyone from everywhere ponders everything—that 22 united states of american dollars can buy.
but what this post is really about is what all good posts are about: me. in the last year, "circumstances" challenged me to pare down my entire library to just 99 books—3 shelves worth. i live in a himalayan library castle after all so this was no small feat. my reasons for ultimately undertaking the challenge were a complex stew of hitching a ride on the minimalist bandwagon (bndwgn), wanting to own my books and not have them own me, constant moving, getting involved in community bookshare programs (aka libraries), environmentalism (not really) and raising the average amazon rating of my books from two yellow stars to four point nine yellow stars (out of five point zero yellow stars).
in the last few months i've gifted some old, heavily-marginalia'd favourites, donated some coffee table clunkers, squirreled away some guilty pleasures, and even trashed <gasp> some gardening narratives that i got on ebay which smelled like kitty litter. eventually i was left with just 99 books.
my collection will always be in flux. i may tire of josé saramago, i may get weirdly into christopher moore or elfpunk—but i'll always try to level off at 99 books. which brings me back to the superficial point of this post. in order to add potluck supper with meeting to follow: essays to my boiled down library i had to get rid of something. and after deliberating about it for three days straight, the thing i finally got rid of was the story of o by pauline réage with an old ticket to ted leo and the pharmacists bookmarking my favourite passage—that's how much i'm looking forward to andy's book.
i just stumbled into this unintentionally great book cover: the first scanned page of the mad pranks and merry jests of robin goodfellow (1841). observe:
finger condoms
white space
orange space
a thumb condom
a gentle book goosing
john boehner flesh tones
sorry ladies, this man hand is married
and the central mystery of the piece: how do we interpret the fact that he isn't wearing a finger condom on his marriage finger?
as far as i can tell, this weird, slant-rhymey, pro-tobacco, geographically questionable, dripping-with-bodily-effluvia limerick from 1606 is the first printed limerick:
O metaphysical tobacco
Fetched as far as from Morocco
Thy searching fume
Exhales the rheum
O metaphysical tobacco
however, it's not a very pleasing example. for starters, morocco is only mentioned for a cheap rhyme. but even worse is that the first line is simply repeated for the last line. if you or i tried to pull this lazy stunt back in 7th grade poetry camp, we'd've been kicked to the curb with a barbaric yawp (this is a breaking bad allusion).
prominent early century limerick researcher carolyn wells notes that limericks like 'o metaphysical tobacco' "lack the distinguishing trait of the modern limerick, which is a first line stating the existence of a certain person in a definite place." she dates the first published modern limerick to this 1834 chant:
There was a young man of St. Kitts
Who was very much troubled with fits;
The eclipse of the moon
Threw him into a swoon,
When he tumbled and broke into bits.
consider however that limericks with their jokey, narrativey, super-rhymey nature are an oral tradition passed around schoolyards and campfires. it seems reasonable to assume that the limerick existed well before 1606—probably in the form of nursery rhymes which still echo throughout our oral sphere. therefore for the earliest oral limerick, we can turn to halliwell (as we have done many times in the past) and find this one among several ancient mother goose rhymes which were probably "current about the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries":
Diddledy, diddledy, dumpty!
The cat ran up the plum-tree;
Half a crown
To fetch her down,
Diddledy, diddledy, dumpty.
now if you'll excuse me, i'm off to meet a man from nantucket. there's something peculiar about his anatomy but for the life of me i can't remember what. i'll be sure to inquire and report back.
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thanks to ragbag junior word sleuth ed spittles for putting me onto the wells article.
1925 - what were you doing on h'alloween 1925? i had tickets to a houdini show at the moulin rouge but missed it because i was on the titanic hanging out with the cast of downton abbey. #history
1944 - although i can't find a source for this, several well-respected war historians have told me that for hal'loween 1944, hitler dressed up as a sexy pumpkin
1955 - in 1955, dwight eisenhower was president of the united states
1974 - this was the only time in at least 1,000, years that hallowe'en, a full moon, and friday the 13th all coincided ON THE SAME DAY!!!
2020 - by this time it will have been almost 46 years between full moon halloweens'. also: bobbing for apples will be cool again.
2039 - if you plan on trick-or-treating on this day in 25 years, watch out for werewolves and/or weremice (bats) because the full moon activates their powers
2058 - the full moon on 10/31/2058 will mark the start of armageddon which will conclude on november 5th of the same year
2077 - here is a good costume idea for 2077: a witch who is part robot
2096 - it is said that 'halloween 2096 may not happen because of global warming. it's up to you to do what's right for mother earth.
thank you for your interest in raynor ganan's jocose tales #1 (raynor ganan vanity press, 2013). all available copies in the universe have now been claimed. i hope to repsond personally (or through my assistant) to every claimant by this evening. should a secondary market ever open up, i will make an announcement on twitter or something.
in the meantime, i'm working on a post about the earliest ever limerick (dirty or otherwise). if you have any candidates, please notify me via the usual channels (pinterest, etc.) thanks again.
in researching some of the names mentioned in the dictionary of manicuring and pedicuring (1996), i came across marian newman, and boy if this isn't the best blurb that i ever read about anyone. ever.
i suppose you saw this coming, but evenstill: i have included a few of my favourite words that start with f from the dictionary of manicuring and pedicuring (1996). there are some obvious words here (french manicure and file for instance) but there are also a few undisputable gems (freenail, obviously) as well as occasional nonchalant allusions to "extreme pedicuring" and "concave fingernails." enjoy!
falsies • artificial nails meant to mimic the appearance of real fingernails
farrier rasp • tanged horse rasps used mainly by horseshoers and blacksmiths but employed sometimes in extreme pedicuring
felon • an inflammatory sore under or near the nail of a finger or toe
finger bath • a bowl for soaking fingers in acetone, nail polish remover, nail oils, turpentine, hot or cold water, or the like
file • a tool which can be smuggled inside a cream pie and used to escape from prison
fingerlet • a small or delicate finger
foghorn leghorn manicure • a style of manicure featuring the likeness of the looney tunes character foghorn j. leghorn
free margin • the anterior margin of the nail plate corresponding to the abrasive or cutting edge of the nail
freenail • the practice of not charging extra when a client has a superfluous finger or toe (cf. polydactyly)
french manicure • a popular style of manicure that features white tips accentuated by a natural looking base
fruit wax • an alternative to paraffin wax for use when client has an allergy to or political disinclination towards using petroleum-based products
furtwangler’s gnarlus • a condition of the fingernails in which the outer surfaces are concave rather than convex
the dictionary of manicuring and pedicuring (1995) is a verifiable treasury of nail nomenclature (nailmenclature?). for instance, did you know that the head of a nail clipper is called a beak? or that there are different classes of lever arms? also: longenituls fulcrum?
jocose tales #1 is free (€0.00). quantity is limited
owing to a supply chain problem (mexican orchid weevils) i've been unable to assemble all the bonus materials for jocose tales #1—until yesterday. i now have all the information you need to get your veiny hands on a copy. check it out:
the good news is that i will be selling hard copies for free (domestic and international postage included). the other news is that quantities are extremely limited to 12 (and I already promised one to uncle rannulph, so effectively 11). here's how to get one:
if you'd like a copy, be one of the first 11 people to email me after 13:00 (eastern time) this monday — ([email protected])
do determine ahead of time if you want me to include a random baseball card from my 5th grade collection which i will sign with my own autograph OR a cute little felt snake which my kid sister made for an indiana jones diorama
do consider that there will only ever be at most 12 copies of jocose tales #1 in the universe. if you accidentally drop yours into your turkish bath or some idiot neighbour borrows it and tosses it into a wood chipper as a goof, i will not be able to replace it for you.
also, it goes without saying that if you work for me or are otherwise employed by me in any manner (personal trainer, alpha male coach, tea leaf reader, etc. etc.) you are not eligible to receive a copy—though at my discretion i may give you a random baseball card with a made-up person's autograph as consolation.
thank you for your interest in jocose tales #1. i do hope that if you really want one you will really receive one.
