Month: September 2025

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Gems From Larousse

During the pandemic I decided to read Larousse Gastronomique from start to finish, and I did. What fun. The 1200-page tome is considered by many to be the greatest culinary encyclopedia ever assembled. Along with over four thousand recipes, there are many thousands of fascinating culinary factoids, a few of which I will share with you now.

Cockaigne

A mythical land of plenty, where men live happily without working and there is an abundance of everything. The myth, which is found in Germany and Italy, is particularly deeply rooted in Flemish tradition and dates back to a time when the specter of famine often became reality. In the legend the lucky man arrives at the land of plenty by traveling through a tunnel cut into a mountain of buckwheat flour; there he discovers a roasted pig walking about with a carving knife in its belly, a table covered with pies and tarts, hedges made of sausages, etc. and roast pigeons drop into his mouth.

Colisée (Le)

A huge establishment for entertainment that was built in 1770 near the present Rond-Point on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. It catered to thousands of people and contained four cafes, several dance halls, an ornamental lake, shopping arcades, a restaurant with a fixed-price menu, and small indoor gardens. This leisure complex proved to be highly successful at first – Marie Antoinette went there twice! Eventually, it attracted too few people, and this, together with poor management, caused it to become bankrupt in 1780. It was demolished, and a road was named after it.

Duval (Pierre-Louis)

French butcher (born Montlhéry, 1811; died Paris, 1870) He supplied the Tuileries kitchens and owned several retail butcher’s shops in Paris. In 1860 he had the idea of creating a number of small restaurants serving a single dish – boiled beef and consommé – at a fixed price. The first ‘bouillon’, in the Rue de Montesquieu, was soon followed by a dozen others.

His son Alexandre successfully developed the chain of restaurants and made an immense fortune. A well-known figure of Parisian life nicknamed ‘Godefroi de Bouillon’ by humorists of the time, he composed a Marche de petites bonnes in honor of his waitresses, who all wore a coif of white tulle and, for the first time, replaced the traditional garçons in restaurants.

Fork fourchette

An implement usually made of metal with two, thee, or four prongs on the end of a handle, used at table either for lifting food to the mouth or for serving food. Forks are also used in the kitchen for turning food in cooking, etc.

The fork has a very ancient origin and is mentioned in the Old Testament. It was first used as a ritual instrument to grip pieces of meat destined for sacrifices; later it was used in the kitchen. According to the 11th-century Italian scholar Damiani, forks were introduced into Venice by a Byzantine princess and then spread throughout Italy. But it was Henry III of France who first introduced to the French the custom of using a two-pronged fork at the table.

restaurant

An establishment where meals are served between set hours, either from a fixed menu or a la carte. The word appeared in the 16th century and meant at first “a food which restores” (from restaurer, to restore), and was used more specifically for a rich highly flavored soup capable of restoring lost strength. The 18th-century gastronome Brillat-Savarin referred to chocolate, red meat, and consommé as restaurants. From this sense, which survived until the 19th century, the word developed the meaning of “an establishment specializing in the sale of restorative foods.”

Until the late 18th century, the only places for ordinary people to eat out were inns and taverns. In about 1765, a Parisian “bouillon-seller’ named Boulanger wrote on his sign: “Boulanger sells restoratives fit for the gods”, with a motto in dog Latin: Venite ad me omnes qui stomach laboretis, et ego restaurabo vos (Come unto me, all you whose stomachs are aching, and I will restore you.) This was the first restaurant in the modern sense of the term.

One beneficial effect of the Revolution was that the abolition of the guilds and their privileges made it easier to open a restaurant. The first to take advantage of the situation were the cooks and servants from the great houses whose aristocratic owners had fled. Moreover, the arrival in Paris of numerous provincials who had no family in the capital created a pool of faithful customers, augmented by journalists and businessmen. The general feeling of wellbeing under the Directory, following such a chaotic period, coupled with the chance of enjoying the delights of the table hitherto reserved for the rich, created an atmosphere in which restaurants became an established institution.

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Mantis From Outer Space

We had a praying mantis hanging out in our rose bushes for a couple days recently. This was the first praying mantis I’ve seen since I moved to Mendocino twenty years ago. I love praying mantises.

Not only are praying mantises exotic and beautiful and fun to watch, they are responsive to being talked to. This one in our roses, for example, looked at me when I spoke to her and seemed quite interested in what I had to say.

Speaking of which, this mantis visitation reminds me of the two times in my life I definitely had contact with aliens from outer space. And that reminds me of an article I published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser way back in 2011 and then posted on my blog.

So I went into my blog archives, which you can do, too, by going to the bottom of my blog page where several hundred of my articles are archived. Just type in key words and see what comes up.

I did that, typed in aliens, and up came my memoir of the two times I encountered aliens from outer space. I will now re-tell those two incidents.

*

On a winter evening in 1981 at Sacramento City College I read a few of my short stories to a receptive audience of about forty people. After my performance I was about to exit the lecture hall when a most unusual being approached me.

She appeared to be an extremely slender female human approximately six-feet-tall, wearing a sleeveless form-fitting dress made of glimmering silver fabric. At first glance she seemed exquisitely beautiful, and at second glance her face resembled the face of a praying mantis. Most striking of all were her eyes, huge multi-faceted diamonds suspended in large transparent globes floating in her eye sockets.

She was also radiant, and by radiant I mean she seemed to be glowing from within, and her inner light was indistinguishable from sunlight. She spoke with an enticing Serbian accent and I might have fallen in love with her had she not been so obviously an alien from another planet.

“I em Yanina,” she said, her diamond eyes turning subtly turquoise as she spoke. “I hev mosst unusual life to tell, bet I em no writer. Hearink your stories I em zinking, ‘Yes, he is what I em needing for to tell my story.”

Then she took my hand and I felt a fantastic flow of energy entering my body, a terrifying flow that made me quickly let go of her hand before I was rendered her compliant slave.

“I pay you very well,” she said, her diamond eyes glowing ruby red. “Come now to my hotel.”

So powerful was her magnetism, despite my fear of her, I almost agreed to go with her until I realized she was not alone. Standing behind her was a huge man wearing a black suit and a pulsating red bow-tie, his jowly face dominated by a stupendous carrot-red handlebar mustache.

Yanina noticed me noticing her gigantic companion and said, “He is Raul. My bodyguard.” Then she smiled a smile so multi-dimensional it might have been a 3-D rendering of one of Escher’s drawings of infinity.

“Oh,” I said. “Why do you have a…”

“When I tell you my story you will understend why,” she said, reaching for my hand again.

I shoved my hands in my pockets, and using every drop of my emotional strength I said, “Gosh, I’m so sorry but for the next thirty or forty years I’m focusing on my own stuff, though I sure do appreciate you thinking of me in this regard.”

“You are afraid of me,” she said, nodding sagely. “Don’t be. There has never been story like mine. We will save the world. I promise.”

Somehow I escaped.

*

My second meeting with an alien from outer space also took place in Sacramento, seven years after my close encounter with Yanina.

The summer day was blazing hot and humid, my garden a riot of basil and sunflowers and corn and tomatoes. I was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs leading from the garden up to the deck adjoining my house and thinking about where in my garden to stand while holding the hose running over my head to cool down, when I heard a whirring sound and saw something the size of a hummingbird zooming toward me at an altitude of about two feet.

In fact, I thought the thing was a hummingbird because hummingbirds do make a kind of whirring sound when they fly fast, though this was a different sort of whirring than hummingbird whirring.

A split second later the thing was hovering in the air about a foot from my face. It was definitely not a hummingbird. I should note I was not under the influence of any drug or alcohol at the time, though I was excessively warm and more than mildly depressed.

The thing was definitely a machine. I could hear other sounds accompanying the whirring, notably clanking and squeaking. I felt certain the thing was looking at me and checking me out.

I said something like, “Yikes!” and the thing flew away, and I never saw it again.

*

Some years after my close encounter with the alien flying machine in my garden, I saw a documentary made by Errol Morris entitled Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, the title referring to the work of Rodney Brooks, an M.I.T. scientist who designed tiny robots and wrote a famous paper suggesting we send one hundred one-kilogram robots to Mars instead of a single hundred-kilogram robot. That way, if some of the robots broke down or didn’t work properly, there would still be many more robots to carry out the exploring. The paper was entitled “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System” published in 1989 in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.

After seeing this documentary, I was convinced that the flying thing in my garden was an exploratory robot sent from a distant solar system to check out life on earth.

Given the state of the world today, I regret not helping the alien named Yanina write her story. Maybe her story would have saved the world. I also regret not saying to the little alien spacecraft, “Hey let’s talk. Maybe we can figure out a way to interact that will help reverse humanity’s headlong rush to destroy the biosphere.”

Should aliens ever contact me again, I’m ready to communicate.

fin

Incongroovity from Todd’s album of piano tunes Incongroovity.

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Moving Right Along

Life, you may quote me, is a trip.

We’ve been without a functional well for a month and just got our water system back online today! We’ve got four cords of oak firewood to get into the woodshed before the rains come, and the gutters need to be cleaned in anticipation of that blessed rain.

The tubs need to be planted with potatoes, I’ve fallen behind on my pruning of rampant shrubs, the huckleberries are crying out to be harvested, and soon we must net the apple trees to keep the ravens from filching our crop.

I am finally over a debilitating case of food poisoning that rendered me fairly useless for the last eight days. I’m deep into writing a new novel Poets of Mercy, and we’re in the home stretch of preparing my fable The Dog Who Wanted A Person for publication.

Several new tunes are manifesting on the piano to be recorded in October after I have my piano tuned.

And beyond our little plot of land on the outskirts of our little town, the human world has gone batty with people of questionable emotional stability and questionable intelligence running large parts of the global and national shows and making a shambles of our economy, our healthcare system, our government, and what was left of our democracy.

The natural world is reacting to the excesses of greedy humans according to the immutable principles of Universe. And so it goes.

Here is an excerpt from my novel in progress, the novel’s narrator having a memory involving his Korean grandmother Nari. 

I’m fifteen, sitting at the kitchen table having an after-school snack and reading A Tale of Two Cities. Nari looks up from her cooking and asks me in Korean, “Is this homework, Ya’akov? This book you’re reading?”

“No. This is the antidote to homework,” I say, smiling. “This is what I love. I feel like I’m actually there in the midst of the French Revolution. The writing is that good.”

She comes to me and I show her the cover of the book.

“I read this book,” she says, returning to her cooking. “Do you know what the title means? A Tale of Two Cities?”

“Well… Paris and London. Half the action takes place in London, half in Paris.”

“That is not what the title means,” she says, chopping an onion.

I frown. “Of course that’s what it means. Those are the two cities where…”

“That’s the surface meaning,” she says calmly. “Dickens means something deeper. He is speaking of two states of being, two ways of feeling, two ways of perceiving. Sorrow and joy. He is asking us to contemplate how sorrow and joy can exist simultaneously in the same moment. That’s why you love that story and why it seems so real to you because it’s how life really is. We want to believe sorrow and joy are different from each other, separate from each other, but they are inseparable, just as you are inseparable from me and from everything else. If you understand this, then you won’t wallow in sorrow and self-pity. You will accept the duality of existence and be less confused.”

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Mystery Memory from Todd’s CD of piano/bass duets Mystery Inventions.

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Time Capsule Tidbits #2

Having had encouraging responses to my previous post featuring excerpts from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature published in 1939, a volume I love for being a delightful British-centric time-capsule full of fascinating factoids, here is another batch of goodies from that tome.

Auto-da-fé, a Portuguese expression meaning act of faith, popularly applied to the burning alive of heretics.

Bohemian, frequently used in the sense of a gipsy of society, especially an artist, literary man, or actor, who leads a free, vagabond, or irregular life, and despises conventionalities. This meaning was introduced into English by Thackeray.

Brummel, George Bryan (1778-1840), called BEAU BRUMMEL, a friend of the prince regent (George IV) and leader of fashion in London. He died in poverty at Caen.

Caligula, GAIUS CAESAR, son of Germanicus, so called from his wearing, when a boy, caligae or soldiers’ boots, was Roman emperor A.D. 37-41. The cruelties and vices that marked his reign were perhaps due to his madness. He was finally murdered.

Chiasmus, a figure of speech by which the order of the words in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second, e.g. He saved others; himself he cannot save.

Cook, Eliza (1818-89). Her complete collected poems were published in 1870. The most popular of these was The Old Arm Chair, which had appeared in 1837.

Darien Scheme, THE, a scheme proposed by William Paterson (1658-1719), the projector of the Bank of England, for a Scottish settlement on the isthmus of Panama; the scheme was abandoned in 1700. Practically the whole circulating capital of the Scottish people was invested in the scheme; and so, at the Union (1707), a sum of money was paid by England in compensation for the losses sustained by Scotland.

Derrick, a noted hangman at Tyburn, c. 1600, the origin of the word derrick, a crane.

Deus ex machina, God from the machine, an unexpected event or intervention in a play or novel, which resolves a difficult situation. When a god was introduced in the ancient Greek drama, he was brought on the stage by some mechanical device.

Dolly Dialogues, The, by Anthony Hope (Hawkins) (1894) They are amusing and witty conversations hung on a slight thread of story, in which figure Samuel Travers Carter, a middle-aged bachelor, and the attractive Dolly Foster.

D’Urfey, Thomas (1653-1723), familiarly known as Tom Durfey, wrote a large number of songs, tales, satires, melodramas, and farces. He was a scurrilous fellow, but the familiar friend of everyone, including Charles II and James II.

Elliot, Jane (1727-1805), author of the most popular version of the old lament for Flodden, The Flowers of the Forest, beginning with I’ve heard them lilting at our ewe-milking.

Field, Michael, the pseudonym adopted by Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862-1913). They wrote several novels and some good poetry.

Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939) born at Frieberg in Moravia, of a Jewish family, is known as the inventor of psychoanalysis. His studies led him to important conclusions as the to the influence of a subconscious element in the mind and also as to the importance of the sexual motive in human behavior. He was expelled from Austria in 1938.

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Mystery Music Box, piano and bass, from Todd’s album Mystery Inventions.