ellipsoid glandular bodies

longtime ragbag bosom buddy, ramona has written in to tell us that both salep (the turkish drink made from orchid flour) and orchids themselves both derive from words meaning testicle. 

salep supposedly comes from the arabic phrase: ḥasyu al-tha`lab which means fox balls. orchid is of course from the greek word for testicle (three guesses what an orchidometer measures or what an orchidectomy involves removing).

you would think that a flower as dainty as the orchid would be associated with feminine organs, but that is only because you are looking at the top half of the plant. once you start digging down below, you will quickly find yourself cupping a hairy pair of root nuggets.

who want’s to be the georgia o’keeffe of a flower’s bottom half?

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ramona also tells us, a little too excitedly if you ask me, that avocado is the nahuatl word for the same little dangling sperm balloons, and if you said the word to a proper nahua spinster, she would probably die of extreme mortification on the spot.

Ozymandias

The nice lady in the kitchen tchotchke shop gave me a miniature ice tray that spells out RITZENHOFF. She got it from a german company of the same name that’s been making glassware since 1904, and she gave it to me for free because she liked my coat. Being the plucky researcher that I am, I hied me to a computer and started digging to see if my new toy came with a curiosity attached.

At the age of 27, sporting a fine physique (5’10”, 176 lbs, as a matter of official record) and no doubt an even finer handlebar mustache, Wilhelm Ritzenhoff traveled from the Ruhr to take part in his one and only Olympic Games. As a member of Germany’s athletic team, he acquitted himself reasonably well, if not exactly achieving crowd-rousing flag-hoisting glory,  in the standing long jump, three parts of the pentathlon, the men’s stone throw (!), and the 100 meters. At last his real moment of triumph came as part of an eightsome that beat the host nation, Greece, to win gold.

The sport that our new pal Wilhelm got to be king of the world at? Tug-of-war, ditched by the International Olympic Committee as an event fourteen years later. And the Games in which he tossed and leaped and ran and tugged? The 1906 summer games, demoted retroactively—with a small embarrassed cough—to non-Olympic status, and now parenthesized in lists and dubbed “Intercalated”.

I have no idea if he was part of that same family whose company now makes glass ‘collectibles’: I could find no other mention of him in any language that I had the wits to deploy (I was really hoping for a photograph of that mustache). He died in 1954 not far from where he was born, and I don’t think I want or need the details of how he made it through two world wars. But I pulled out a glass of my own last night and with a splash of whisky and a tiny rapidly-melting anagram of RITZENHOFF gave a toast to Wilhelm and his Olympic Gold Medal, because if that’s not sportsmanship I don’t know what is, and now I have the german word for tug-of-war.

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

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

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

Today is also Evacuation Day!

It is with an unleavening sense of disappointment that I must tell you there is nothing inside this book that comes close to the across-a-crowded-junk-shop impact of its front cover. Professor Arnold Ehret’s mesmeric (and slightly frog-eyed) gaze, his cuspidate mustachios, the careful separation of “paper” and “back”, that delicious shade of not-Penguin orange, and above all, the rhythmic slitheriness of “mucusless”: to be fair, it’s an awful lot for one small volume to live up to. One exception is the clear small statement on the back cover that “This book has never before been available at this price”. Another is the motivational rah-rah-rah, peppered with exclamation points, of the publisher’s frontispiece introduction to this 1972 facsimile.

Beyond the cover, the book is fairly standard bowel-blasting stuff, taken up with XXV Lessons which should, if you follow them faithfully, leave you fully evacuated and decongested, a metabolic ubermensch ready to take on the world armed only with the diet of a fruit bat. It’s a pity Chairman Mao didn’t have a copy.

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

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.

‘striches, bitches

An ostrich, on the average, gives about 60 pounds (30 kilograms) of meat and 40 pounds (20 kilograms) of fat.

The flesh of this bird, forbidden to the Jews and the Moslems, was much valued by the Romans. The second Apicius dedicated a special sauce to it. 

The full extent of the entry on ostrich (autruche) in The Larousse Gastronomique by Prosper Montagné (1961). The ladies above look underwhelmed.

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

ganan gone wild

i typically spend my spring breaks getting dirty with jakobson or bumping uglies with trubetzkoy—but this spring break is different. this spring break, raynor ganan is going wild. i have spent the last few weeks building up my alcohol tolerance on white peach daiquiris, polishing my nipples with tung oil, and (re)learning the lambada. needless to say, i will be out of posting range for the next few days, indeed due to the illusion of time + the artifice of the internet, i am already out of range (not as i type this, but as you read it).

but all is not lost! i have been able to trick my savvy compadre ramona to step up to the (serving) plate and lob a few flavory morsels at your monitors for the next few days. ramona is a culinerd of the first water and a self-described magpie and international lurker. she lives (in all places) in williamsburg (the very un-colonial one) though scottish sangria continues to course through her arteries. she works (in all places) in riker’s island as a prison chef and prison larder (upon meeting her for the first time, you will find this shocking, but by the second time—exceedingly apropos). she keeps her fingers in a lot of pies (both literal and metaphoric) and, like yours truly has a taste for the timeworn and the peculiar. i am ecstatic that she has agreed to keep things fresh around these stale environs while i am girls-gone-wilding myself for the next week and hope that you will share in my ecstasy.

also: because ramona will be guest editing, you may encounter an occasionally capitalised letter where you are not accustomed to doing so. i beg your pardon in advance.