An Observation from John Lennon

Maybe it's because I'm reaching the age when John Lennon recorded "Nobody Told Me" just before he was shot, or maybe it's just because at this age we are more relaxed about pointing out the general ambiance of pointless bullshit that we're all engaged in, but either way I've been fixated on the song. With respect to food, he nails a couple of nice cliches in juxtaposition:

There's always something cookin'

But nothin's in the pot

They're starvin' back in China

So finish what you've got

 Strange days indeed, and we're still in them.

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Olive Garden ....

It shouldn't have taken me this long to realize that there is no such thing as an olive garden, I grew up in California's Central Valley. The restaurant should be called Olive Orchard.

Or if you just want to embrace the absurdity, Pasta Garden.

But no, again, this would have to be a Pasta Orchard. To wit (starts at 0:30):

There is a Right and Wrong Way to Build a Sandwich. I'm Sorry.

When I can't get myself together well enough to make my own sandwiches for lunch, I buy them from the local university so-called catering service on campus. These [adjectival and adverbial expletive] [noun expletives] don't know or care about how to build a sandwich. Typically the meat is on top. Then there's a weird set of understoreys, usually lettuce, then cheese, then tomatoes, or similar. It's done systematically, by the dozens, so I wonder why do they do it (vehemently) systematically wrong when it could be done systematically right?

My ideal for a sandwich is thus:

By convention there are two pieces of bread, excepting the delightful Club Sandwich, which has three. The single-slice "Open-Faced Sandwiches" of my youth are emphatically not sandwiches: you may as well call salsa on a tortilla chip or Cheez-Whiz on a Ritz an "open-faced sandwich" if you accept the single-slice paradigm. So-called "wraps" are a topic for another day but they are not sandwiches (also, Spoiler alert: there is no such food as a "wrap", and I refuse to eat any thing so-named). So now it's clear what I am and am not referring to here.

Two pieces of bread. On these pieces of bread are spread such condiments as mayonnaise, mustard, perhaps even horseradish, butter, cream cheese, chutney, olive oil, aioli or ketchup. Or Vegemite! Or Nutella ... or an olive tapenade. Or whatever. People always spread stuff, whether you like it or not. We all know that.

Anyhow, between the bread, at the bottom is the meat. [NB: Often the sandwich is named after the meat, e.g., Roast Beef Sandwich.]

Above it is the cheese.

Then leafy greens, if they are in the sandwich. If you have juicy stuff like tomatoes, that goes above the lettuce.

Crackers, Ruffles, pickles -- those will be be around the lettuce layer but below the tomatoes.

And all for good reason. To wit:

The point of a sandwich is the meat, or in non-meat sandwiches the cheese, or eggplant, or garden burger, etc. If you make a PBJ (because you're high or nostalgic probably), the peanut butter is on the bottom -- especially if it's crunchy/chunky (which it should be). When you bite into a sandwich the first thing after the bread that you should taste and feel is the meat. If it doesn't reach your tongue quickly, then you are just mashing a bunch of random stuff up in your mouth with no discrimination -- like a fucking swine plowing through offal. (I acknowledge that certain sandwich-eaters [e.g, fucking swine] would disagree with this characterization of themselves as fucking swine. Thou dost protest too much, says I.)

Back to it: Cheese is known to be awesome, so you want to taste it next. It melts as you chew it and it blends with the fats and proteins of the meat on your tongue, as your saliva starts digesting it. Why is a blue cheese burger so good? Because it doesn't enter your mouth on top of a salad between two pieces of bread.

Leafy greens taste less good (on average) than ripe tomatoes, grilled peppers, etc., but they impede the incisors cutting through the upper layers, so it's best to have the tomatoes above them, otherwise the tomatoes et al. get shmooshed out the sides as you bite.

This is my logic. If you don't care about the construction of a sandwich, you shouldn't be making them. A good, coherent sandwich made with even perfunctory care can be a minorly awesome thing that restores you at midday and puts you in a good place. A sandwich of apparent madness -- ass-over-teakettle, or trína chéile as my Irish mom would say -- is antagonizing. And no one needs to be antagonized by a goddamned sandwich.

Re: Piglets. My New Favorite Russian Saying

Up until a moment ago, my reigning favorite Russian saying was one I heard on a show where some Brits were trying to recreate a transcontinental Eurasian roadtrip in 1920s or 1930 era cars. They broke down badly in Siberia, and tried to convince the mechanics to bust their balls to fix their blown engines or whatever it was. As the Brits (and BBC or TLC camera crews) tried to hurry them to act and offered to pay for more folks to help, the gathered mechanics got all circumspect and Russian and one pronounced:

Nine pregnant women don't make a baby in one month.

Now that I write it out again, honestly that may still be my favorite Russian proverb. That's a lesson I learned in Belize over and over again, especially with broken down trucks. It's burned deeply into me. But I read this one from Vladimir Putin  in an AP story about US requests to extradite Eric Snowden out of the international terminal of a Moscow airport:

"Ask yourself a question: Should people like that be extradited so that they put them in prison?" he said. "In any case, I would prefer not to deal with such issues. It's like shearing a piglet: a lot of squealing and little wool."

Much like department meetings in the humanities. After all the fighting you don't even end up with bacon.

Egads!

The JoC and an Unnecessary Marxist/Realist interlude

Looking for the way to reseason a cast-iron implement in my 1974 Joy of Cooking, I read these passages on page 163, where Rombauer and Becker acquire that almost mystical tone that makes their book timeless (though by using "she" throughout they do ground it in a particular time):

There is a certain pace in food preparation that an experienced cook learns to accept. This doesn't mean she scorns short cuts, but she comes to know when she has to take the long way 'round to get proper results. She senses not only the demands of her equipment but the reactions of her ingredients.

In much of the JoC it's easy to get the feeling that you're just being talked at as someone whose main concern is home economics. That is, literally, your main job is to figure out how to stretch the household's dollar as you feed it using money that you had no part in acquiring (i.e., 'He' earned it by using his body to convert labor into capital at the service of The Man). It therefore quietly reinforces the woman's role in the classic (now mostly altered for the intended audience) nuclear family unit of production in a capitalist system where the basic unit of economic production is that heterosexual nuclear family unit, where the primary goals of the unit are to reproduce itself biologically by having more kids to form more similar units, and to reproduce the ideologies of the roles of everyone in that family unit. Paraphrasing Althusser (1927): as every child knows, the ideological apparatus has not only to reproduce itself, but also the conditions of that reproduction. If not, then folks say "Fuck this, I'm not teaching my kids to reproduce our shitty family life because it enslaved me and I don't want my children enslaved" and before you know it, the state and ideological apparatuses collapse, leaving us all in (at least we are told so) an unintelligible social reality of pervasive horror and nausea ... at best!

Well, okay, maybe that's one function the JoC can and does serve: domesticating the domestic human. But when I read passages like those above and identify with "The Cook" subject regardless of the "she" (which I do), or when I go back for the one millionth time to check on what they say is the difference between a soft- and hard-boiled egg, I get something else. Despite the major theme of home-economy and the functional role of She in the biological necessity of familial subsistence, there are these other notes throughout that specifically identify that the Means of Production, at the most basic level -- i.e., physiologically maintaining and reproducing the family labor unit, day after day -- are not substantially alienated from She (or me, or us). To me the above passage is not just some mystifying rhetoric about what She knows intrinsically as a woman, aka, over-determined biological reproductive unit situated in a society. All people that love cooking know the truth of that statement. That's a reality of cooking. Just to be glib and Hegelian, let's say the cook is in a constant dialectical relationship with the demands of its equipment and the reactions of the ingredients. I see there is some room here, by defining a dialectic without reference to the other forces of the present economic system that is true anywhere at any time, always and already over-determined by the nature of food: physically, chemically, culturally. This dynamic the cook participates in has been (is being) reproduced in some or many forms since humans started to alter raw foods, along with the reproduction of the classic family group -- not always with it -- and one does not inevitably reproduce alongside the other.

Which is why though I'm mostly a boy I cook, and I don't only cook boiled Irish meats and vegetables like that She known as my mom.

A Central PA Wegman's Moment

This afternoon I was shopping at Wegman's, which can be frustrating at the tail-end of some sort of "Penn Stater" type weekend where adults and children are staggering around drunk at midday and vomiting in the gutter. I remained generally calm, despite the bovine masses slumping along leaning on their carts as if they were paddling through warm molasses -- and as if that was a special privilege of theirs.

I got to the checkout line and things were moving along well. Then there's a pause and the checker (a student) holds up a bag of some round bright red objects with some leaves attached.

Checker: Gaahh... Uhn?

Me: Those are radishes.

Seriously? Radishes? Don't they use flash cards in elementary school anymore? I'll cut them some slack for, say, a turnip vs a rutabaga or even a parsnip vs a carrot. But radishes?

Poor kids. They deserve better.

Lament to the Pacific Mackerel

Scomber japonicus!

Why are you so somber?

What's wrong with us?