A New and Complete Culinary Encyclopedia containing Facts Worth Knowing, Health Suggestions, Care of the Sick, Table Etiquette, Dinner Giving, Menus, Household Toilet and Cooking Recipes by Minnie Palmer with the approval of Mrs. J. B. Lyon, President of the Woman’s Exchange, Chicago, Ill. (1901)
A wonderful cookbook, full of handy recipes for things not generally now eaten. I will probably have to post some tips on cooking songbirds next.
If you were intrigued or horrified by the “spherical olives” on Top Chef, you should take a look at this assortment of recipes involving high tech gels, hydrocolloid recipe collection.
by Brother Herman E Zaccarelli, C.S.C., 1960
Someday, perhaps, I will feature Brother Zaccarelli’s horrifyingly sexist advice on managing an (ideally!) all female (and so emotional!) cafeteria staff, but today, his recipe for Tuna Bunsteads! I made a (small) batch, and it’s good stuff.
Tuna Bunsteads
Ingredients 100 portions 50 portions 12 portions Cheese, American, cubed 4 pounds 2 pounds 1/2 pound Eggs, hard cooked, chopped 48 24 6 Tuna, drained, flaked 84 ounces 42 ounces 10.5 ounces Peppers, green, chopped 2 cups 1 cup 1/4 cup Onions, chopped 2 cups 1 cup 1/4 cup Olives, stuffed, chopped 2 cups 1 cup 1/4 cup Pickles, sweet, chopped 2 cups 1 cup 1/4 cup Mayonnaise or salad dressing 2 quarts 1 quart 1/2 pint Buns, frankfurter, split 100 50 12
Procedure: 1. Combine and blend thoroughly the first 8 ingredients.
2. Fill buns. Wrap in aluminum foil. Arrange on bakers sheet.
3. Bake in a very slow oven, 250 F., 30 minutes or until cheese is melted. Remove. Serve hot.
Updated numbers on the impressive voter turnout in Washington state this year. Though it looks like historically, Washington has been pretty participatory.
In Japan, ramen is an art form you can dedicate your life to perfecting, in some tiny shop in the warrens of the city. And in my hometown, it’s a 10 cent lunch. But outside my fevered faux poetic brain it is also 10 cents in Japan and can be had at some fairly greasy spoons in the warrens of the city.
I like instant ramen because it is very pre-lingual: fill bowl to fill line with boiling water, wait 3 minutes, eat. There are more complex ones, but you can only go so far wrong. The most difficult are the bowl-less, where you have to find the number next to cc and thank your stars for the metric system.
I just had the swankiest instant ramen I’ve ever eaten: there was a photo of the shop and famous chef on the lid! Or perhaps he was a very cheflike sponsor? It was delicious and full of exotic ingredients that I’m sure I didn’t properly appreciate.
And after recent complaints about the dearth of flying cars, I must point out that ramen is your ideal food for space stations, plankton farming villages on the ocean floor, and cloud cities. Just add hot water!
The AP reports “Mothers in Kenya have marked Barack Obama’s historic win in the U.S. presidential elections by naming their newborns after him and his wife. More than half of the babies born in a Kisumu Hospital on the day after the election were named either Barack or Michelle Obama.”
I didn’t celebrate in the street, but I’m happy to see the pictures of everyone who did (and hear about the celebrants in Seattle who picked up other people’s litter after, and were thanked by the friendly police people who had been indulgently watching the hoo-ha. That’s Seattle all over, I must say).
I am also happy to hear that this election had the highest national voter turnout since 1908 (!!!!!), when not everyone could vote, you know, so it should count as the highest turnout ever!
We get a new president and Sasha and Malia get a puppy. Huzzah!
If more than 30 percent of the student body pledges to abstain from sex, it doesn’t work, again showing that evangelical Christians need to feel persecuted.
A telecoms-based order of nuns answers phones at the Vatican (except at night).
A Newfoundland specialty, the Jiggs Dinner!
Mine All Mine, Davies. No. Davies seems to want this to be Soon I Will Be Invincible, or at least Bad Monkeys, but it’s just not. At the same logical point in the plot where I settled in to finish Half a Crown, I could very happily have set Mine All Mine down and thought of it almost never again. Davies is a decent writer, but he’s simply not good enough to succeed at the level of cleverness he attempted. Footnotes are especially not recommended.
Addendum: Turns out I hadn’t even finished the book; I was about a third of the way through the last chapter, and the book demonstrated its put-downability by letting me put it down and imagine I had finished it (I realized my misapprehension only when I was packing it up to take it back to the library and wondered why the bookmark was still in it). I think I like the ending I imagined it had better than the one it actually has.
by Louis Diat, Chef, Ritz-Carlton Hotel, New York, 1941
A 524 page long book of recipes from the famous restaurant, supposedly for the American housewife. I think most American housewives would look on this beast with horror in their eyes. It’s packed with horrifically complex sauces and dishes containing huge ingredients lists, each requiring extensive preparation. One of the basic sauces, called for in many of the subsequent sauce recipes? First ingredient is a lobster. It is the very definition of mid-century fancy food.