know your spoon handles

the next time your special spooning partner asks for a special spoon, you might consider offering one of the prelude, enchantress, 1810, or courtship variety.

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source: 1939 advertisement for the international silver co.

week 9: uno

what intrigues me most about diy prison culture is the same thing that intrigues me about the oulipo: that creativity can persevere, indeed it can flourish even under the most severe constraints—be they the inability to use multisyllabic words or the lack of access to metal forks.

some of the objects that jailbirds have been able to craft during their time in the big house are absolutely genius. but alcohol? is improvised prison wine even possible? like great scotch, pruno has many different methods of preparation and flavour notes, but the basic recipe is the same:

mix warm water, fruit juice, sugar, ketchup and moldy bread (for yeast!) in your prison toilet. cover, heat occasionally, wait a month et voilà, enough hoochy booze to inebriate a mastodon!

i was going to make a batch and force my handsome friends and orson to test it out. thankfully this has already been done. what i can do is give you the hook-up on some other words that have uno in them.

ceraunoscope · an apparatus used by the ancients to imitate thunder and lightning
chaunoprockt · wide-breeched
crunode · a point on a curve where it crosses itself; a node with two real tangents
cunopic · dog-faced, shameless
eunomic · law-abiding; socially well adjusted or ordered
lacunose · of a manuscript: full of gaps or hiatuses
lacunoso-rugose · wrinkled with irregular furrows
nounou · a wet nurse
unodorable · incapable of being smelled
unorn · of persons: plain in manners or appearance

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this is a post in the ragbag word summer series. for this series, i search for words in the oh ee dee that contain a randomly generated string of 3 letters and report my findings. it is a thrill ride.

turtle-ka-bob

if you are like me and have a pet turtle and haven’t gone shopping for groceries since parsnips were in season, this recipe for turtle (from the indian ocean island of mauritius) may come in handy:

Skewered Turtle Meat

Marinate 1-inch cubes of turtle meat in lemon juice, salt, crushed garlic, and a little oil. Alternate on skewers with pieces of turtle liver and grill over charcoal. Serve with boiled turtle eggs, a hot chutney sauce, and rice.

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disclaimer: i did not actually eat this recipe. i don’t really like rice, so i served the turtle meat on toast points instead.
from: unmentionable cuisine (1979) by calvin schwabe

words wholly unrelated

mouse & dormouse

both are freaky little rodents and both have the word mouse in their name, but neither word is related. mouse comes from the old english word mus while dormouse most likely comes from the latin word dormir meaining “to sleep” (the dormouse is inactive in the winter).

incidentally, as long as i still have this cookbook infronta me, here is schwabe’s recipe for ancient rome-style stuffed dormice:

prepare a stuffing of dormouse meat, pepper, pine nuts, broth, asafœtida, and some garum. stuff the mice and sew them up. bake them in the oven on a tile.

just like mama used to make

if you are getting tired of making each and every one of rachael ray’s “entréetizers” you may be interested in a cookbook that orson just got me. it’s called unmentionable cuisine (1979) by calvin schwabe and features authentic recipes for taboo meats. the “ozark stuffed opossum” caught my eye, as did “grilled rat bordeaux style” which recommends using wine cellar rats because of their high alcohol content.

but what really made my salivary glands frothy—is the recipe “cuyes a la arequipeña” (guinea pig arequipa style). in peru, guinea pigs are widely consumed, even by vegetarians. it is said that their meat is similar to that of a rabbit, although it tasted more like gerbil to me. anyhow, in honor of my very good friend alfonso who is getting married this weekend in lima, here is the recipe for cuyes a la arequipeña that combines all three traditional andean ingredients (i’ll spare you the method of at-home slaughtering, though will mention that it involves the word disarticulation)

fry meat along with finely chopped onions and a generous amount of crushed garlic in oil until golden. add fresh yellow chili peppers (previously seeded, soaked in saltwater, and ground into a paste), black pepper, and salt. cook a bit and add quite a bit of ground toasted peanuts (or peanut butter), several boiled potatoes, and a couple of potatoes mashed with a fork.

et voilà!

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image credit: 8th result on google image search for “guinea pig” with the safe search off, because that is how raynor ganan lives his life: without filters and haplessly surrounded by ben wa balls.

rice probably

This pronunciation guide is from Où est le garlic? by Len Deighton (1965), the author of The Ipcress File. For anyone who hasn’t heard of The Ipcress File, or of Michael Caine for that matter, here. You’re welcome.

Now that we’re all properly briefed, we can appreciate the intricate genius of Len Deighton: the working man’s John le Carré, primogenitor of Harry Palmer and therefore arguably of Michael Caine’s career, military historian, and occasional cookery columnist for The Observer (London). Throw in his background as an utterly cool art student cat whose parents were ‘in service’ as a chauffeur and a housekeeper-cook, and we begin to get that whiff of early 1960s anti-establishment irreverence, a refusal to kowtow to the status quo that was all the more vicious for its subtlety.

So read this pronunciation guide with all that context informing your font appreciation and vowel sounds, and with Harry Palmer’s vocals reverberating in your cranium. It is pure frang-lays, the lingua franca of the bowler-hatted Brit abroad, priggishly bourgeois and culturally tone deaf. Deighton absolutely nails the plummy droning diphthongs and plodding stresses. Hi-bloody-larious.

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Alexis Soyer: Victorian Celebrity Chef

Alexis Benoist Soyer (1810-1858) was a chef. That statement is on a par with saying that Baron Münchhausen got about a bit. Soyer cooked banquets for the top bananas of european society, saved lives with a soup kitchen in Dublin during the potato famine, invented a portable stove for the public and another for the army, wrote cookbooks for housewives, bottled his own brand of relish, and worked with Florence Nightingale to revolutionize military and hospital kitchens, all seemingly with buckets of flair and chipless shoulders. (While I am typing this very abbreviated list of his accomplishments I am also dithering about cooking an egg for breakfast. Maybe I should just go back to bed.)

But my favorite Soyer factoid relates to one of his failed endeavors - and he gets a round of applause for the sheer grandiosity of the enterprise even though it nearly bankrupted him. In 1851, to coincide with the Great Exhibition, Soyer opened a restaurant in Gore House in London, calling it Soyer’s Universal Symposium to All Nations. It offered menus for all means and aimed to turn 5,000 covers a day, and to put the cherry on the bombe, our hero commissioned the journalist George Augustus Sala to paint a mural along the grand staircase, a panoramic cartoon of the big shots of the day. Soyer then insisted on titling this masterpiece (take a deep breath):

“The Grand Macédoine of All Nations; being a Demisemimitragicomipanodicosmopolytolyofanofunniosymposiorama, or Suchagettingupstairstothegreatexhibition of 1851”

Sala, who had a gentleman’s education and a robust sense of his own significance, was disgusted by this, and wrote in his autobiography “I groaned as I interpolated this hideous rubbish in my manuscript, but it was a case of Ancient Pistol and the leek. I wrote, and eke I swore.” The restaurant only lasted three months, and Gore House was flattened just over a decade later to make way for the fabulous pudding mould that is the Royal Albert Hall. This monument to high Victorian philanthropy seems an appropriate marker for Soyer’s Symposium. If he’d lived to see it he probably would’ve used it to turn out a monster blancmange.

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know your knives -or- the art of dismembering

LA based auteurs of splattercore and other horror sub-genres should take note: there are levels of ancient artistry involved in separating limbs and rending flesh that have been ignored too long and should be resurrected. I am the proud owner not only of an antique abattoir knife bigger than my arm (that took some fast-talking to get through baggage security) but also a solid brass ferro da maccaroni—as seen above—that my cousin-in-law’s mother sent me from Lucania (more smuggling through airports*). It weighs in at a whopping 824 grammes and each of its 50 circular ridges is razor sharp. I keep it by the door in case some random b&e artist is deranged enough to climb seven flights of stairs and try to break in to Limey Towers. I mean, it makes gorgeous spaghetti alla chitarra, but as a cosh its potential for gory R-rated mayhem is unparalleled. Fortunately for me and for the burglars of Brooklyn, their being short-winded means so far I’ve only used this terrifying piece of metalwork as its manufacturer intended. But I throw this possible scenario out there for any screenwriters browsing past. Is it too much to ask for a little slasher flick finesse, if that’s what it takes to reboot an interest in the cutler’s art?

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image of very sharp italian things via
*Professional customs-official-reassurer and eyelash-flutterer: Do Not Attempt

the content and capital letters of this post have been brought to you by the ever plucky ramona ranchera.