The Rake Magazine

Category: Food and Drink

  • Shandy is Dandy

    Our first spring in Minnesota came late. It had not been much of a winter, in fact we felt fairly blasé about our capacity to survive Minnesota’s fabled frigidity. (But oh, how we have learned since!) The torrents pouring over St. Antony Falls inspired no particular shock nor awe, unlike the ceaseless roar of Spring 2001. There was road-grit, weak sunshine, and windblown tulips. Surprising then to hear accordion music outside, and the clash of small bells. But it was true—this music came by me on the waters. Rounding a corner we saw a white sleeve rhythmically waving a handkerchief, and were promptly transported from the shore of the Mississippi to the banks of the Thames at Oxford.

    England, God knows, is full of odd customs. The unwise think they are vestiges of primeval paganism, but most of them seem to have started in the High Middle Ages, the most Christian era of English history. If you don’t believe me, read a book called The Stations of the Sun by a learned bloke called Hutton. These calendar customs began not as gnarled substitutes for child sacrifice but as the secular entertainments of Christian civilization.

    Whatever the history, every May 1, thousands of Oxford people creep out of bed in the wee small hours of the morning. The crowds converge on Magdalen Bridge, where the main London road crosses the river. There they hear, generally in silence, the choir of Magdalen College, grouped on top of the college tower, sing a Latin hymn and a few madrigals, no louder at ground level than birdsong. Then the crowds head back into the city where the purveyors of greasy breakfasts do land-office business and “sides” of Morris dancers, dressed in white shirts and trousers, with colored cross-belts, bells strapped to their legs, and substantial boots perform with a vigor remarkable for the earliness of the hour.

    It was Morris dancers we ran into that evening in Minneapolis, one of four sides in the city (two men’s, one women’s, one—from the village of Uptown-on-Calhoun—mixed). They say they are often asked if their art is Irish, but no, it is firmly in the tradition of Thames Valley Morris dancing. This art form was “discovered” in 1899 just in time to prevent its disappearance by a remarkable musicologist named Cecil Sharp (did anyone dare to call him D Flat, one wonders), and it’s now more popular than ever before. Like their Oxford fellows, the Minneapolis dancers also take May Morning exercise early, clashing batons, fiddling, leaping, whirling hankies, but they also meet at a more sociable hour in the evening and come together from the four points of the compass to dance in front of the IDS Tower. (Isn’t there something a bit Freudian about that name?)

    So much leaping and clashing (even watching it) naturally works up a thirst, and it is indeed as much with Saturday evenings at Cotswold country pubs as with May Morning in the city that one associates the Morris. How good those white outfits look seen through a pint of Hook Norton Best Bitter, pulled by a shapely forearm from a proper draught-beer engine. Hook Norton promise an on-line shop for their bottled products, but who knows if they will be able to ship to the United States.

    Until they do, I recommend a refreshing summer beverage called “ginger beer shandy,” described as “new-fangled” in 1888. One simply adds one of the ordinary bitters (Bass, say, or McEwans Export) to an equal quantity of ginger beer. Not ginger ale, a clear brown cisatlantic drink, but ginger beer as my mother used to make it—with live yeast in the family’s heated linen cupboard (until it exploded), a sweet cloudy non-alcoholic drink now conveniently available from superior Minnesota grocers. The mixture brings out a healthy sweat. Let’s hope the summer is hot enough to warrant drinking plenty of it.

  • King of Fish

    There’s nothing quite like a Door County Fish Boil to kick off the summer. Up on the sandy Wisconsin peninsula that’s known as the Martha’s Vineyard of the Midwest, a warm Friday night is nothing without a cold can of beer and a steaming kettle of fish. It’s a steadfast tradition and comforting and safe. But if you’re not a careful non-coastal Northerner, you might end up eating fish boil and breaded walleye sticks your whole life. If you never get beyond our Great or 10,000 other lakes, you might not realize that on this little blue planet, the world’s stock of fish is our largest and most diverse wild food supply. The number of edible species of fish is so great that no one has tasted them all.

    It’s odd to think of fish as “wild.” Beyond sharks and movie piranha you rarely think of fish as being toothy and predatory. For the most part, they are thought of as docile—swimming, genteel creatures which aren’t even considered “meat” by many. Thai Buddhists, for whom vegetarianism has to do with reincarnation, will eat fish because the view is that they aren’t killed, but merely harvested from the water, like potatoes of the sea. The truth is, most fish will happily gobble up smaller fish as they have been doing since the time of the coelacanth. And ever since humans have been around, we have been gobbling them up.

    Fish skeletons have been found at stone-age excavation sites and in Danish peat bogs along with bone arrows. The works of ancient Chinese and Greek authors contain detailed accounts of fishing techniques which remain the world’s favorites: line and hook, spear, and net. Fish, in all its forms and glories, has meant a great deal to many cultures. Easterners have recognized the benefits of fish for thousands of years; in China the fish is a symbol of regeneration and marital bliss, as well as abundance and prosperity. Witness, too, how Christians here at home value fish during Lent, and as an icon to be displayed on the back of the minivan.

    There may be no more powerful emblem of fishy issues than the cod.

    Also known as bacalao, cabillaud, dorsz, kabeljau, merluzzo bianco, torsk, and scrod, cod has been fished throughout the North Atlantic for hundreds of years. Initially thought of as “penitential” food because of its great availability and sad appearance when salted and dried, cod’s true destiny would prove to have a global impact. Because the fish breed prodigiously, large stocks have existed in the waters from the Bay of Biscay to the Arctic and back down to Cape Hatteras. “Icelandic cod” refers to the plentiful stocks in the areas around Iceland and the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. It is precisely these stocks that have tempted fishermen with the promise of greatness.

    Mark Kurlansky, who wrote Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed The World, believes that the Vikings were pursuing these very stocks of fish when they stumbled upon a new land—America. The Pilgrims believed they could live off the wealth of cod in the New World, despite having no idea how, nor the equipment to do it. From Clarence Birdseye, who founded the frozen-fish industry with cod in the 1930s, to the present-day cod wars, Kurlanky details the rise and decline of the fish whose now-threatened status is still shaping world politics.

    In fact, cod isn’t the only fish to swim in troubled waters. There are many who feel that the world’s fish supply in general is being overfished into extinction. Chilean sea bass is currently on the hit list among activists who boycot chefs and restaurants who carry endngered fish on their menus. Still others believe that boycotts are uninformed, not founded on real data, and can hurt or cripple small fishing communities. (Remember the swordfish scare in the late 90s?) All because a fish is fashionable.

    With today’s obsession with protein and good fats, fish aren’t about to go out of fashion any time soon. When categorized by their fat content, they fall into three groups: Lean fish with less than 2.5 percent fat (cod, perch, sole), moderate-fat fish with less than 6 percent (trout, swordfish, bonito), and high-fat fish that can go as high as 30 percent but usually hover around 12 (yellowtail, bluefish, some salmon). The fish that are especially good for you are the ones packed with lots of Omega-3 oils—or “polyunsaturated oils” in Zone-speak. Good choices include pompano, tuna, herring, mackerel, sardines, Atlantic bluefish, or butterfish. As for protein, fish have a greater advantage over land animals because water supports their weight, leading to a less elaborate skeletal system and a higher flesh-to-weight ratio.

    If you’re sold on international fish, but don’t have your schooner polished and ready to go, the best local source has long been Coastal Seafoods. They provide much of the seafood used by local chefs, and have a few well-stocked retail locations where they even teach classes about scary things like de-boning and wine pairing (newsflash: it’s not all about white). The key is to be open to new fish and new flavors—after all, it’s supposed to be brain food. If you’re wondering how much you need to consume for a positive effect, Mark Twain suggested “Perhaps a couple of whales would be enough.” But that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

  • Forgiving the French

    The early monks of the Egyptian desert often faced their demons head on. Abba Antony in the hot sandy silence of the wilderness found himself attacked by several wild beasts at once. They roared and hissed, they buffeted his makeshift cell until it shook. He stared them down. They gnashed their teeth and left.

    Often, though, subtle means were needed. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers is full of stories which show how simplicity and discernment (and often humor) learnt from long consideration of the human condition can outwit violence, distraction, and despair. There are plenty of later analogs: Sherlock Holmes caught his murderers by identifying myriad varieties of tobacco ash. Miss Marple and Father Brown recognized killers by applying to the motives of their fellow men the results of a lengthy and patient observation.

    Maybe it was something like this that the French Foreign Minister meant when he said France is an old country. He could scarcely have meant it literally. The present French constitution, that of the Fifth Republic, is substantially younger than the present President. Its ultimate ancestor, the constitution of the First Republic, emerged more than a century after the first constitution of Connecticut (supposedly the world’s oldest written constitution).

    In fact, France was drawn together as a single state only after the 16th century Wars of Religion. In the Middle Ages what is now French territory was home to two distinct Romance languages, the langue d’oc and the langue d’oui, named from their words for “yes,” the former derived from Latin hoc (“this thing”), the latter from hic ille (“this is it”). Large parts of it were ruled for centuries by the Kings of England.

    Wisdom, however, does not arise simply from the passage of time. It can grow out of reflection on shared suffering. As boys we were taught that French cooking might be good but it had evolved as an act of self-defense; the sauces and sausages had to be tasty because they needed to disguise dodgy meat cooked while French cities were being besieged by the armies of Henry V, the Duke of Marlborough, and other heroes. Our teacher had a point. As recently as the Prussian siege of 1870, the inhabitants of Paris were obliged to consume the inhabitants of their zoo, including the baby elephants Castor and Pollux.

    But French country cooking, like that which Elizabeth David taught us to love, grows from the judicious use of hard-won ingredients by sapient peasants making the best of a hard-scrabble life. Cassoulet is one of the splendid achievements of the southern region named (after its old language) the Languedoc. It consists of pork and duck, goose and beans (good for your heart) cooked together over several days. It is the foster-child of silence and leisure. An invitation from my friend the Philolog to her annual Cassoulet Dinner was therefore an act of kindness and one which deserved the offering of an appropriate libation.

    The wine would clearly need to come from the Languedoc, the hot Mediterranean coastal area across which Hannibal and his pachyderms passed on their way from Spain to the Alps. Languedoc produces lots of wine, but not all of it slips down easily. I recall a Corbières some years ago which was the color of red ink and tasted a lot like sucking the nib of a fountain pen. (No, I don’t. Not often anyway.)

    This time, though, Fortune smiled. The 2001 vintage of Domaine de la Brune, a property in the Coteaux de Languedoc, is a heartening dark red (and about $10 a bottle). Only a tenth of it comes from the Carignan grape, until recently the most commonly grown grape in the Languedoc. But that’s enough to give it an edge. It is mostly Syrah, the grape of great Rhones such as Hermitage, sweetened and softened by some Grenache. The whole is pleasantly rounded, redolent of sunshine and alcohol.

    Redolent too of craft and patience on the part of the winemaker who produced this pleasing balance. One should be suspicious of a wine that seems to make one wise (or, for that matter, a superior driver). This one encourages the drinker to recognize something better: the wisdom of the man who made it. Soyez sage.

  • Sour and Sweet

    What a funny quirk of verbiage that a bum car is called a “lemon.” There’s even a “Lemon Law” to protect us from people selling used vehicles with hidden flaws. This assumes the worst about people and, I think, slanders lemons. Calling a car a lemon should be a great compliment, akin to linking its heritage to Andre Citroen, the great French automaker. Back in 1949 his head was filled with visions of a new automotive standard, a small-engined car “designed to provide realistically priced transport to rural French men who had little interest or knowledge of motor cars.” The Citroen 2CV, that funky-chunky little icon of French motoring, was launched to assist in the post-war reconstruction of France. Seeing only the greatest of possibilities for his creation, Citroen ran true to the nature of his name. Like the citrus fruit he embodies, he was an optimist.

    It’s not hard to see citrus as optimistic. Many of us choose to welcome each fresh new morning with a ritual glass of citrus juice. Throwing back a tall serving of sunny orange, pink, or yellow liquid is a signal of our willingness to take on the day and all it has in store for us. Hope—it’s not just for breakfast anymore. What could be more optimistic than lemonade? Not merely for the happy end-product of Life’s Lemons, but for every kid with a stand on the side of the road who is sure that she will make enough money to buy that Barbie Dreamhouse.

    Optimism is inherent in a fruit with a tough, bitter skin which needs to be overcome to get to the juicy, drippy, tangy center. If it weren’t for the belief that something good can lead to something better, Florida’s number one export would be bingo chips.

    Oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruit, tangelos, pommelos, and even ugli fruit all owe their existence to the citron, a large, ungainly and rough-skinned oddball whose peel is prized above its flesh. It is widely believed that the citron is the progenitor of all citrus fruits. Although the exact place of origin is unknown, it is generally agreed that an ancient variety of citron took root around 8,000 years ago in the Near East, somewhere in India or the fruitful area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Excavations of Mesopotamian sites have yielded citron seeds dating back to 4,000 B.C., and the mummy-makers of ancient Egypt recorded their use as an aid in embalming.

    It was the ever-optimistic Jews who had a great impact on the world of citrus, supposedly bringing the fruit to Israel from their imprisonment in Babylon around 500 B.C. Called “etrog,” the citron figures prominently in Jewish history. It appears on Jewish coinage, graves and synagogues, and was used as the handle for the ritualistic circumcision knife. The etrog is still used today in the Feast of Tabernacles ritual during the holiday of Sukkot. The original ritual called for a fruit of the hadar tree, or the cedar tree whose cone was called kedros in Greek. Kedros was Latinized as cedrus and this eventually turned into citrus.

    As the Jews traveled across the Roman Empire, they brought their beloved citron with them, planting the seeds throughout the Mediterranean, where the plant would flourish. Some historians believe that it was Jewish horticulturalists who were commissioned by the Romans to develop the orange and the lemon, by grafting and cross-pollinating variations of the citron. They believe what the Talmud refers to as “sweet citron” is actually an early orange.

    However the sanguine treasures were carried from culture to culture, citrus fruits came to be loved and cherished by almost all who discovered their fresh beauty. The Japanese used orange trees in fertility rituals and weddings because the tree bears flowers and fruits at the same time; the flower symbolized virginity and the fruit meant fertility. The Chinese used the dried fruits to repel moths from clothing. Arabic women distilled fruit essences and oils to cover gray hair, and the people in India still regard the branches of a citron tree to be a very lucky walking stick indeed.

    Medicinally, citrus has been a wellspring of cures for such maladies as seasickness, pulmonary problems, poisonings, dysentery, halitosis, rheumatism, and possession by evil spirits. Clearly, it takes an optimist to prescribe OJ for the latter.

    Columbus and his seafaring contemporaries knew that citrus fruits could prevent scurvy. He carried the fruits and seeds to the New World as part of his ship’s rations, spreading the crops throughout the Caribbean. Ponce de Leon is credited with bringing the orange to Florida in the 1500s, creating a future empire as he ordered his sailors to plant 100 seeds each wherever they landed.

    Floridians have always been optimistic about citrus. Because of the 1906 hurricane, the pineapple culture of the Florida Keys was abandoned in favor of a new crop. Limes were planted, and the pickled fruit was sent to Boston where it was a popular snack for kids. Most of the businesses were decimated by the hurricane of 1926, but production rose again as a cottage industry when the fame of the key lime spread. If there’s one thing that’s more optimistic than citrus, it’s pie. Put the two together, forget about it. Locally, the Oceanaire Seafood Room has a killer key lime pie that’s as big as the happy-go-lucky head of a cheerleader!

    Spinning the positive doesn’t have to be a big production. Your citrus lift can come from the simplest of places. Lucia’s adorns their mixed greens with an uncomplicated lemon vinaigrette that has brightened many a mood. And there’s nothing quite like a jumbo, citrus-jammed smoothie from Fresco on a bright spring day to put a kick in your step and make everything right with the world.

  • Oranges and Persians

    Those few of us who spend our working lives in the Roman Empire find current events depressingly familiar. The superpowers of Late Antiquity, Rome and Persia, spent much of the half-millennium before the rise of Islam at war. The Persian Empire incorporated not only modern Iran, but also Iraq. The cockpit of imperial confrontation was precisely where modern Turkey, Iraq, and Syria come together.

    The Persians were generally the aggressors. During the invasion of 359 AD, a Roman staff officer was taken by a friendly highland chieftain into the foothills of the Kurdish Alps to look down into the Mesopotamian plain. This is one of the great vistas of the world. Through the heat haze, you can sense the curvature of the earth as you look out from the escarpment across the plain below (even if you have drunk nothing stronger than Turkish beer—a refreshing beverage called Efes Pilsen). The staff officer counted the Persian troops, their knights, their archers, their siege engines, and other weapons of mass destruction as they crossed the Great Zab River. The traverse took over three days.

    Romans never enjoyed any success following the Persian invasion route in reverse, i.e. south through modern Iraq along the valley of the Tigris. Once or twice they invaded successfully down the Euphrates (a route which cuts off a substantial corner of what is now Syria) and were able to besiege and burn the Persian capital, near where Baghdad is now. But such expeditions often ended in tears or worse; one emperor died from a thunderbolt during a desert storm.

    Despite being the aggressors, the Persians seem more sympathetic than the stuffy Romans. Persian courtiers hunted and played chess, which they called euphonically chatrang. Their silver drinking vessels display reliefs of dancing girls with bellies beautiful to behold. The genial king Khusro II liked to have his financial statements submitted on sheets scented with rosewater. Wine was certainly one of the pleasures of his court, as it was of the Persian poets who told stories about him and his wife Shirin (“Sweety”) well into the Islamic period. What the wine was like is anybody’s guess. Attempts to associate ancient or medieval Persia with the excellent modern grape called Shiraz seem pretty tenuous.

    The drink I associate with Persia is, oddly enough, Cointreau. It’s purely a matter of atmosphere. Cointreau is an after-dinner drink made out of oranges, and the orange is not recorded in Persia until later. Cointreau is distilled at Angers, in northwest France, from fruit grown in the West Indies, Brazil, and Spain. In its early days, in the mid-19th century, it had rather anti-clerical, rationalist overtones, in contrast to the sticky liquids made by monks—Benedictine, Chartreuse, and the elixir of Père Gaucher.

    But for me Cointreau means Persia. Thirty years ago, I was over there sorting pottery shards for an archaeologist. I came to drink rather a lot of it, courtesy of a friend who was house-sitting in North Teheran for a British diplomat with (thanks to the diplomatic bag) a well-stocked drinks cupboard. Foreign alcohol was available but was fiercely expensive; polite people in the suburbs seemed caught up in a dust-devil of conspicuous consumption. Western goods, such as good drink, were conspicuously consumed (it all came crashing down when the Shah fell). Anyway, my friend knew she could afford to replace only one bottle. So it was the Cointreau we polished off, looking out over the fruit tree blossoms, the melting snow from the mountain behind us pouring audibly down the nearby streams.

    The liqueur is clearer than a trout stream, sweet but not oppressive, a relief from the rosewater omnipresent in Persian sweetmeats. The oranges, in fact, make Cointreau somewhat astringent, like the coarser cuts of Tiptree marmalade (manufactured, of course, from bitter Seville oranges and not the watery things which go into inferior brands). One senses springtime and contentment, but not at the expense of rationality (and at the expense hereabouts of only about $10 for a little “pony” bottle), the Merry Monarch might have approved. I don’t know if the diplomat did, or if he ever knew. But then such folk are sent to lie abroad for their country.

  • Taters!

    She’s bumpy and oddly shaped, often times covered with a film of dirt. She prefers the dark, the underground areas. She’s like the slightly stinky kid in class who keeps to herself but gets all her work done on time. You think you know her—she’s simple and hard working, maybe a little bland. And then one day your eyes open and you see more than the poor ugly visage, you see the potential within. She’s no ugly groundflower. She’s silky and soft, complex, sexy and worldly and, dammit, you want to take her to the prom.

    Maybe it’s because we love the underdog, or a good Cinderella story. Whatever it is, the world’s love affair with the potato is long and far-reaching. According to the 5-A-Day cult, the potato is America’s favorite vegetable, followed distantly by empty-headed lettuce and onions. We most like to eat our spuds baked, mashed, and fried, in that order. Consuming around 126 pounds per person each year proves that for most of us, she’s a safety date. We’ll take our mashed with butter and salt, and our fries with a side of ketchup (or catsup, depending on your pedigree).

    But then there are those of us who can’t have casual meals. Our relationships have to go deeper, we need to explore all facets, to see if the plain girl has a secret drawer filled with kinky fun. Considering the beauty of ice-cold vodka, satiny vichyssoise, and the addictive chip, I’d say the potato has been asked to dance a few times.

    Like most late-bloomers, the potato’s road to popularity has been hard won. The Incas knew what they had: a hardy food source that could be grown in harsh conditions and used in many ways. Praying to potato gods, they used the tuber to measure units of time, heal broken legs, and prevent rheumatism. Having sacked the Incans for their treasures, the Spanish toted the potato back to Europe unaware of its true potential. In fact, the spud was ill-received by most Europeans. The misguided French believed them to cause leprosy, the Scots couldn’t find their mention in the Bible, and others saw their familial relation to deadly nightshade—and on that ground refused them as human sustenance. Sir Walter Raleigh, a potato cheerleader, gave some plants to Queen Elizabeth I, whose cooks threw away the ugly bulbous root section and prepared the stems and leaves. The result was horrendous, and the vegetable was banned from England for many years.

    But the Irish were more sensible—or perhaps desperate. Raleigh introduced the potato to Cork in the late 1500s, at a time when the country was war-torn and struggling to feed itself. Quickly becoming the darling of farmers, the potato’s popularity was supported by the sheer volume it produced. The potato yielded more nourishment per acre than any other Irish crop. By the 1800s, the potato was the national food, so much so that some of the poorer counties relied entirely on it for survival. By 1840, the potato had done its part to grow the country’s population to eight million. While some foresaw the dangers of so many people depending on one crop, nothing was done about it. The blight which caused the Irish Potato Famine wiped out potato crops for five years, beginning in 1845. Almost one million people died from starvation or disease, and another million left the country seeking a better life, by and large in the New World. They brought their potato recipes with them and forever changed a new nation.

    Back in the Old World, the potato was still seen as a food for prisoners or the poor. Then the humble spud found its European Prince Charming: Antoine August Parmentier of France. A prisoner of the Prussians in the Seven Years’ War, Parmentier was rationed three squares a day, which consisted solely of potatoes. He returned to his native land to find his countrymen starving, but incredibly still offended by the thought of eating potatoes. Like a Dr. Doolittle of the veggie world, he set about glamming up the image of our starchy girl. He resorted to shrewd PR tactics: He convinced Marie Antoinette to wear potato blossoms in her hair, which created a fashion stir. He stood guards around his potato crops by day, so that the peasants would steal them at night, thinking them precious enough to covet. He threw elaborate potato-themed dinners, which notables like Ben Franklin attended. Slowly but surely, the potato came up from the cellar and danced with other members of fine cuisine—in soups, gallettes, soufflés, aperitifs, and other dishes across the continent.

    There’s no doubt that the potato has again come into her heyday, with the food renaissance of the last few years. Tater Tot casserole may have been edgy and new at one time, but now seems pretty pedestrian, as we seek Yukon golds, purple Peruvians, Russian fingerlings, and ruby crescents—spuds that go way beyond the traditional Idaho russet. Due to its many versatile properties — waxy, fluffy, starchy — this tuber can be put to the test by many different chefs in dozens of ways. She’s out on the scene as tarragon potato puree, rosemary potato bread, potato dumplings on many street corners from every culture, as well as in the potato pancakes under some of the best caviar in town. Even good old mashed potatoes have recently been seen on menus as smashed, crushed, and smooshed with accompaniments from chipotles to curries to wasabi. Watch out, the girl has gone crazy! If you doubt that the potato is the “it” girl of the hour, just try to be an Atkins devotee, and see if you can avoid the belle of the ball. If you truly look at potatoes, you’ll see that, like delicate snowflakes, no two are ever exactly alike, each is unique in its beauty. Deservedly so for this Cinderella story, gone from reviled to revered over the last 400 years.

  • Sushi and Sauvignon

    It always seems to happen on a Friday. The phone rings and someone says, “Do you speak Latin?” and I reply “Well, I teach it,” or something equally noncommittal. Then comes the question. “What is the Latin word for ‘color’?” Phew, that’s easy. “Color, spelt the way Americans spell it.” “Well what’s the Latin for enhanced?” “It depends what you mean.” “Okay, then, what’s the Latin for shampoo?”

    That one was a local soap company brainstorming the name of an enhanced product. Over the years, I have furnished love-legends for engraving on wedding rings, an inscription for a cake for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and translations of choice phrases in a doctor’s letter to his patient’s lawyer (sui generis perversus, that sort of thing), which had clearly been left in the chaste obscurity of a learned language for a good reason.

    The most engaging inquiry was also the most serious. Someone rang from the Medical School (again, a Friday afternoon) wanting to know the origin of a word meaning “pain during intercourse.” He was doing research and wanted to coin a similar word for pain during anal intercourse, and please could I oblige. The term we came up with was proctalgia, derived from Greek “alge,” meaning pain (as in analgesic) and Greek “proktos,” denoting the posterior passage (as in proctophone, one who speaks through that part of his body). Proctalgia is surely a word which deserves a broader usage, for instance, in reference to a tiresome acquaintance, “the fellow gives me acute proctalgia.” I leave it with you.

    One hopes that local government appreciates such pleasing contributions to our land grant mission, but it certainly does not discharge a fraction of the service to the state which is rendered by the University’s Classics Department. The hard humanities are as necessary as the hard sciences.

    But such telephonic repartee does inspire me to go straight from the office to the new sushi shop to sample the exact pleasures of contrasting fish. (It is, after all, still Friday). Seafood supposedly inspires a kind of cognitive precision, especially sushi. A molecule of mackerel follows a soupcon of salmon. I am reminded of the Latinate epicure newly arrived at Boston’s Logan Airport anxious to sample the local New England delicacies without delay. “Take me,” he said to the cabbie, “to where I can get scrod.” “That’s the first time I’ve heard that in the pluperfect,” came the reply.

    A sushi-enhanced sharpness of mind should lead you, too, to the 2002 Sauvignon Blanc from an Argentine winery called Bodegas Norton. This is a light and pleasing wine, a fine complement to raw fish (it would be overpowered by anything smoked or canned). The color is pale, the taste is clean, with a faint fizz, and a hint of the blackcurrant flavor which is more pronounced in, say, Pouilly-Fumé, a wine from the Loire valley in western France, made from the same grape. Above all, it is young and refreshing, serious without being intense.

    For all its youth, this is a wine with an interesting history. Sir Edmund Norton was one of those bold Victorian engineers not afraid to take his art to the undiscovered ends. In the late 19th century, Argentine agriculture was transformed by being able to transport its produce to distant markets, not least to Britain and the United States. Immigrants arrived to work the land—readers of Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia will recall the communities of Welsh cattlemen with names like Pedro Evans and Sancho Jones. The secret of this success lay in the railways, largely British-built, and Sir Edmund Norton designed and constructed railway bridges. He married a local woman and settled in the wine country; Bodegas Norton is in the upper Mendoza valley, three and a half thousand feet above sea level, in the eastern foothills of the Andes Mountains.

    Those who want the Sauvignon without the sushi can find it for less than $8 all around town. You do not need to be a Latin lover to like this wine. (Remember how Dan Quayle was going to find his Latin handy in Latin America?) But it certainly will put a spring in your step. This wine says “Thank God it’s Friday.”

  • Bite Your Head Off

    My inner Mothra would be so proud. I had no fears that the gorgeous Icelandic woman sitting next to my husband at a dinner party was any competition for me, but that didn’t stop me from engaging the table with jokes told in rapid-fire English that I was sure she couldn’t get. It’s not bad to remember in this, the sappiest of all months, that there is a dark side to love. My dark side happens to be defined by monster movies along the lines of King Kong. Mothra may be my jealous side, and surely Gamera is present on my “less calm days.” But in every dark side there exists the glimmer of good, as in Godzilla. At first he may seem to want to pillage and burn urban centers of commerce and hydro-electric plants, but he can be turned and tamed, for the good of all.

    This strange and spicy side of love is often ignored, and certainly not explored by amateurs, much like the wasabi sitting on that Bjork chick’s plate. I’m sure she saw it as merely a green glob of pasty yuck that need not be introduced into her safe meal. In fact, she seemd to be refusing to try it at all. As for the rest of us monsters, we choose to dance with the Japanese condiment’s bright heat and dinosaur roar.

    These days it’s easier to find wasabi than a good print of Godzilla. Not only has the proliferation of sushi restaurants throughout the country raised wasabi awareness, but the word itself has been turned into a moronic ad campaign by those clever marketeers at Budweiser. And while more and more people are embracing the neon green, sinus-clearing paste of love, few really understand what it is. An informal dinner-party poll yielded these speculations as to what wasabi might be: fish guts, seaweed, Japanese mountain grass, flower pollen, and—my personal favorite—spicy wheat. Time to cut off the sake, I’m afraid.

    Wasabia japonica is, as its scientific name implies, indigenous to Japan. It is not a member of the “spicy wheat” family, but a perennial herb of the Cruciferae, or mustard, family. It grows wild along stream beds and on river sand bars in wet, cool river valleys in the mountainous regions of Japan. The geographic range of wild wasabi runs from the northernmost islands to the southernmost, but production of the plant is centered on the interior section of the Izu peninsula and the Azumino plain tucked between the Japanese Alps in Nagano. The plant produces a rhizome, or an above-ground root-like runner, which is harvested and grated to form powders and pungent pastes.

    While the plant occurs naturally in the wild, cultivation for commercial use is a trickier matter. For high-quality wasabi to flourish, it needs to be continuously washed over with pure, cold water. Obviously, glacial run-off allows for great irrigation in the upper regions where it is grown in terraces on sloping hills. But the plant is also being grown in the plains, with flat beds which must be banked by streams or diverted waters. Soil cultivation of the plant is also being explored, but this method has real problems. Even in ideal conditions, a wasabi plant will not reach maturity for 15 months—an awful long wait in the plant world, and an eternity in the human one.

    Time is of the essence, because, like the three-headed alien Ghidrah, wasabi is taking over the world. Demand is up and there is high competition for the goods. In order to meet the needs of the current marketplace, there have been some adjustments to the traditional recipe. In fact, chances are the wasabi you’re eating contains no authentic wasabi whatsoever. Most commercial pastes sold in supermarkets and used at sushi restaurants are made from horseradish powder, mustard, and food coloring.

    Compounding the demand for real wasabi is the mounting research that tells us how darn good the stuff is for you. The same compounds that provide the nostril-searing rush are known to be an effective treatment for food poisoning—thus it’s no accident that the Japanese use it so prevalently with raw fish. Asthma, blood clots, and even stomach cancer have all been treated successfully with wasabi, which has been used medicinally in Japan since the 10th century. Then there’s the really important application of wasabi—as a snack food. Dried wasabi peas and peanuts are invading markets across the country, and making special inroads in the coop community. The spicy little bar snacks can be found locally at Schuang Hur market on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis.

    Wasabi may just be the monster crop of the new millennium. Pacific Farms in Oregon is currently the only producer of fresh wasabi in the USA. Their moist climate has proven to be a boon to farmers looking for a fresh crop. New Zealand is also exploring their wasabi growing potential, and even looking for people to come over, start a farm, and take a chance. If you think you want to start small, The Frog Farm will provide you with seedlings and cultivation instructions. (They glibly make it sound like a piece of ricecake).

    Chino Latino, in Minneapolis, is currently using fresh wasabi from Pacific Farms with their sushi creations. Compared to the wasabi found in most joints, it does have a brighter snap and a grainier texture. Mainstream sushi-eaters often mix their wasabi into their soy sauce and then dip their fish. This masks the green monster’s potency a bit. The truly daring and the super-heroic plop a dollop right on top the fish, and go head-to-head with the dark side.

  • Boys Will Be Boys

    I recently spent a sad evening in a basement in South Minneapolis. An acquaintance was seeking subsidised legal advice about the custody of his children. He had found it pretty difficult uncovering a voluntary agency able to offer advice to men on such matters. But now here he was with six other unfortunates waiting his turn and talking about his experiences.

    The stories we heard seemed to suggest that there are areas of Minnesota life where inequality of the sexes has been turned on its head. One wife’s lawyer had apparently suggested a baseless accusation of domestic abuse simply to get the husband out of the house. Other men’s accounts left a similar impression of helplessness, which the legal clinic was striving, with limited resources, to redress. Perhaps it was useful to just get together and commiserate with the boys.

    Male friendship is a sensitive plant, growing most strongly when supported by the trelliswork of such institutions as the bowling league, the English pub, or the backstreet tea-house of a Near Eastern town, where mustachioed men sit low to the ground on stools made of old tires and play tric-trac by the hour. I remember a Persian friend once asking me why Americans, such effusive folk when you meet them, spend their evenings shut away each in his home. There certainly do seem to be a lot of lonely men around, and those in this basement, separated from their families, seemed especially bereft.

    According to popular belief, the frail flower of American male friendship is often watered by beer—and in the case of most American beer, watered is certainly the word. Thanks to advertising, Budweiser is not only the most popular brew in America, it is increasingly chic abroad. To each his own. But for me, Bud brings to mind the old pub adage that “you only rent your beer.” It is therefore a pleasure to recommend a good solid brew that has a taste.
    The August Schell company of New Ulm is one of the oldest breweries in the country and one of the oldest businesses in the state. It was established even before the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862, by immigrants from the Black Forest. The German tradition at New Ulm is obvious. The city boasts a statue of Hermann the German (Arminius to you, me, and Tacitus), whose destruction of three Roman legions at the Battle of the Teutoburger Forest in 9 A.D. prevented the expansion of the Roman Empire into Germanic lands. (Professor Peter Wells of the U of M will soon be publishing a splendid new book on this battle.)

    The German pedigree is a fine omen (though I suppose Schlitz, Schmidt, and Blatz are respectable German names, too). Of the numerous admirable brews produced by Schell’s, the one which pleases me most bears not the name of the company but the city. Ulmer Braun has a gold label with a rutting buck who is either ecstatic or angry—has he just consumed the contents? Or trodden on a broken bottle, inconsiderately disposed of? The beer is a pleasing dark brown, the color of old mahogany, and at less than a dollar a bottle for the six-pack, is extremely affordable. You can taste the hops and malt. If you prefer not to taste your beer, you can chill it in the American style, I suppose.

    Ulmer Braun is not so stout as Guinness. Nor is it so muscular as Porter, a beer originally made for the men who carted around the crates of fruit and vegetables at Covent Garden Market in London. (Summit Brewing Company makes a fine Porter for those who really like to get their teeth into their beer.) Ulmer Braun has more heart than most lagers. It is a comforting beverage to have with a pork chop and potatoes on a bitter January evening.

  • Cabbage Roles

    It was a very snowy January when I ran away to Prague. The family I stayed with lived in one of a cluster of monolithic stone apartment buildings on the outskirts of the city. The grey air outside the buildings smelled of coal and smog, and the air inside smelled of tea and cabbage. Each night after I returned from exploring the city, I would stop by the market to buy the beer for the evening, my contribution to the dinner. And each night I would be surprised by the ingenuity and creativity of the meal, which somehow had to contain cabbage. The Czech couple and their three-year-old daughter Dereska happily cleaned their plate night after night, as did I, with the help of a few Pilsner Urquells.

    Cabbage and I, as is the case with most Americans, had not had a loving history. I rather disdained the vegetable for my memories of its bitterness and stinkiness. My first meal of boiled cabbage in their tiny, cramped apartment was choked down with a smile. The next night greeted me with cabbage soup, which proved tolerable. The following week was headlined by turkey and cabbage hash, potato and cabbage pancakes, and cream of cabbage soup and ham. During dinner the family spoke honestly about their economic struggles and their hopes for the future of their country, and sitting in the kitchen which was also laundry room and living room, I realized that they had never taken anything for granted, ever. Maybe it was this new insight or perhaps a simple wearing down of the taste buds, but cabbage had a new place of honor in my life. From then on, cabbage’s starring role in our meals seemed to signify stability. Lenka admitted to me that she often got tired of it, but for her family, the vegetable was cheap, healthy, abundantly available, and versatile. For me it became the flavor of strength and character.

    Because it is so easy to grow in so many areas, cabbage has come to be known as commoner’s food, hardly the kind of thing that would show up on an epicurean’s table. Those with a love of cabbage understand that when prepared right, the subtle textures and flavors complement the richest dishes. When prepared with a bevy of different techniques such as stir-frying, steaming, braising, blanching, and sautéing, this Cinderella of vegetables deserves a night at the ball.

    Many Americans may remember cabbage from the kitchens of their immigrant parents as they boiled the hell out of it, producing a smell that could ward off the Bolsheviks. Or maybe they remember their parents forcing them to eat it, not letting them leave the table (a la Joan Crawford) until their plates were clean. These parents—like my Czech friends—remembered a time when nothing could be taken for granted. But somewhere along the way, the first-generation children rebelled. Instead of learning to cook, they ordered take-out. Instead of forcing their own kids to eat something that was good for them, they went to the drive-through.

    Have we sacrificed fortitude for ease? Have we given up on character? Do we necessarily have to eat stinky vegetables in order to gain it back? Happily, as Lin Yutang said, “Our lives are not in the lap of the gods, but in the lap of our cooks.”

    First of all, let’s be frank: Cabbage can be nasty. When you cook cabbage, especially when you boil it, the mustard oils and isothiocynates break down to form stinky compounds, including hydrogen sulfide, otherwise known as “that rotten egg smell.” The bigger insult is that the longer the cabbage cooks, the more smelly the compounds become, actually doubling in intensity between the fifth and seventh minutes of boiling.

    One of the best ways to deal with cabbage is the way it has been prepared over thousands of years, through the process of fermentation. As far back as ancient China, there have been people preserving their cabbage in salt and vinegar. Documentation shows the builders of the Great Wall supplementing their rice diets with cabbage fermented in wine. This tradition took hold in nearby Korea, where today kimchi is the national condiment. Popular enough to be immortalized as a sassy cartoon figure, kimchi consists of fermented cabbage and other vegetables including spicy variations of red pepper powder, garlic, ginger, green onions, and radishes. Spiritually as well as culturally, this cabbage dish is special. Any variation of kimchi will always follow the Korean cosmology—a strict set of symbolic correspondences known as the Five Colors and the Five Flavors.

    Genghis Khan is widely credited with bringing the fermented cabbage to Europe, where it was adopted by the Teutonic tribes. There, it was named sauerkraut, or “sour herb.” The Germans and Dutch thought so highly of it that they stocked all sea-going vessels with it, thereby curing the scurvy that had previously plagued their sailors. (Cabbage—and thus sauerkraut—is a very rich source of vitamin C; red cabbage has about twice as much as green.)

    The Russians consider cabbage to be their national food. With cabbage dishes that can be incorporated into meals at all times of day, the Russians eat seven times the amount North Americans do. They believe their Schi (cabbage soups, including borscht) strengthen the sight and help chronic cough, and cabbage leaves wrapped around the head will relieve headache.

    Yet for many, the pickling and flavoring can do nothing to hide the reputation of cabbage. Perhaps this will help: Instead of thinking of it as a stinky, lowly food, think of it as an ancient fortifier of armies. It feeds nations fighting for freedom. Living its noble life close to the ground, cabbage doesn’t need frilly vines or explosively bright flowers; it bears down and keeps out of the way. Change may take baby steps, so a good way to start is by steaming some of the beautiful leaves and seasoning with caraway and celery seeds, or dill, mustard, oregano, or tarragon. Once the warm virtue of cabbage seeps into your soul, you might find yourself delightfully force-feeding it to the loved ones around you.