'A Gastronomic Rainbow': Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from The Bee Dance. Today's quote is taken from a Scribner's Monthly essay published in 1871.  The essay  rues the passing of the traditional Thanksgiving feasts of old even as its exclamatory prose seeks to preserve the excitement of the holiday.  I was very much torn over whether to entitle this entry "A Gastronomic Rainbow" or simply "Ineffable Pork and Beans."  Could pork and beans ever be so good as to defy description?  Apparently so. 

"Who that ever tasted can forget the aroma of those dusk-red depths where yet the fragrance of blazing hickory lingered? What chicken-pies emerged thence!  What brown bread, what unimaginable piglets in crisp armor of crackling, what ineffable pork and beans! [...]  How we longed to eat more pumpkin pie, and more; how, following the advice of our elders ,we stood up and 'jumped three jumps' and then couldn't.  How even our favorite little tarts, crowned with ruby jelly, passed us by unscathed, while we sat, replete and sorrowing!  [...]  Shall we ever again see those marvelous spheres, one for each person, whereon, in many-colored segments, cranberry pie, and apple, mince, Marlborough, peach, pumpkin, and custard, displayed themselves like a gastronomic rainbow?  Shall we ever rove with unsated fork through a genuine, old-fashioned Indian pudding, of the land which in those good days bubbled day and night over wood fires, spicy as Arabia, brown as chesnut, flavorous, delicate?

---"Home and Society,"  Scribner's Monthly: an illustrated magazine for the people, Volume 003, Issue 2 (December 1871), 240-242.

Today, let us celebrate the old rituals and traditions that we have maintained and welcome the new ones that we have infused into this most American of holidays. [Finally, I am thankful for the outstanding Making of America project at Cornell University (and also at Michigan) which enabled me to bring you this quote from the comfort of my couch, and in view of the televised Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.]

Paean to Pies

Today, I offer you yet another quote from A Modern Instance-- one that is straightforward yet still delightful in its humorously extended reference to savory pies. In an ode to a pastry that sounds suspiciously similiar to its twentieth century cousin, the Hot Pocket, the speaker posits pie as a rival to fish in its power to nourish the brain and feed the imagination.  Only a reference to pecan pie could improve this paean to pies. As the expression goes, The Pies Have It. 

     "He turned round, and cut out of a mighty mass of dough in a tin trough a portion, which he threw down on his table and attacked with a rolling pin.  'That means pie, Mr. Hubbard,' he explained, 'and pie means meat pie--or squash pie, at a pinch.  Today's pie-baking day.  But you needn't be troubled on that account.  So's tomorrow, and so was yesterday. Pie twenty-one times a week is the word and don't you forget it....they say old Agassiz recommended fish as the best food for the brain.  Well, I don't suppose but what it is.  But I don't know but what pie is more stimulating to the fancy.  I never saw anything like meat pie to make ye dream.'
     'Yes,' said Bartley, nodding gloomily, 'I've tried it.'
     Kinney laughed. 'Well, I guess folks of sedentary pursuits, like you and me, don't need it; but these fellows that stamp round in the snow all day, they want something to keep their imagination goin'.  And I guess pie does it.' "

---William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance (1882)

Don't Chase Boys

 Or so suggests William Dean Howells in this quote taken from his novel of 1882, A Modern Instance. In this scene, a mother and father contemplate their daughter's engagement to a slick journalist.  We might think of their advice as the nineteenth century rendition of the more familiar parental refrain.   Sound advice?  Or perhaps not?  Twenty-first century parenting might sound a bit different...

"He's smart enough, "said Mrs. Gaylord, as before.

"M-yes, most too smart," replied her husband, a little more quickly than before. "He's smart enough even if she wasn't, to see from the start that she was crazy to have him, and that isn't the best way to begin life for a married couple, if  I'm a judge."

"It would killed her if she hadn't got him.  I could see 't was wearin' on her every day, more and more.  She used to fairly jump, every knock she'd hear at the door; and I know sometimes, when she was afraid he wasn't coming, she used to go out, in hopes't she sh'd meet him; I don't suppose she allowed to herself that she did it for that--Marcia's proud."

"M-yes," said the Squire, "she's proud.  And when a proud girl makes a fool of herself about a fellow, it's a matter of life and death with her.  She can't help herself.  She lets go everything."

---William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance  (1882)

Decomposition, Or, "Maggots Already"

This blog showcases composition and seeks to foster creative activity through the reading, collecting,  exhibiting, and curating of "pollen"  as food for thought and the inspiration for future productions.  It is therefore quite odd to be offering a quote that showcases decomposition and yet may still inspire the same sort of reflections.   

Today's quote is taken from Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild (which was also made into a film released in the fall of 2007) which documents the life and untimely death of the young Christopher McCandless, who ventured into the Alaskan wilderness in the early summer of 1992 and died three months later.    Krakauer's book offers deeper insights than the film into Chris's own writings.  In this scene, Chris describes his futile efforts to preserve a moose that he has killed. The appearance of the maggots indicates his failure and he second-guesses his slaughtering of the moose. In these diary entries he appears as earnest yet youthfully idealistic.  The maggots appear as a naturalist convention in this work, underscoring the harshness and struggle that survival in the wilderness entails--and, perhaps, the inevitability of our own decomposition.    The selection begins with Krakauer's words and moves into the diary entries:

"Alaskan hunters know that the easiest way to preserve meat in the bush is to slice it into thin strips and then air-dry it on a makeshift rack.  But McCandless, in his naivete, relied on the advice of hunters he'd consulted in South Dakota, who advised him to smoke his meat, not an easy task under the circumstances.  'Butchering extremely difficult,' he worte in the journal on June 10.  'Fly and mosquito hordes.  Remove intestines, liver, kidneys, one lung, steaks.  Get hindquarters and leg to stream.' 

June 11: 'Remove heart and other lung. Two front legs and head.  Get rest to stream.  Haul near cave.  Try to protect with smoker.'

June 12: 'Remove half rib-cage and steaks.  Can only work nights.  Keep smokers going.'

June 13: 'Get remainder of rib-cage, shoulder and neck to cave.  Start smoking.'

June 14:  'Maggots already! Smoking appears ineffective.  Don't know, looks like disaster.  I now wish I had never shot the moose.  One of the greatest tragedies of my life.'    "

---Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (1996)

Bonbons in Abundance

Today's quote is rich.

     "A few days later, a box arrived for Mrs. Pontellier from New Orleans.  It was from her husband.  It was filled with friandises, with luscious and toothsome bits--the finest of fruits patés, a rare bottle or two, delicious syrups, and bonbons in abundance. 
     "Mrs. Pontellier was always very generous with the contents of such a box; she was quite used to receiving them when away from home,  The patés, and fruit were brought to the dining-room; the bonbons were passed around.  And the ladies, selecting with daity and discriminating fingers and a little greedily, all declared that Mr. Pontellier was the best husband in the world."

---Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)

Summer Epiphanies

As promised, I am reprising my focus on artist Joseph Cornell.  Today's quotes come once again from the superb volume of Cornell's letters and diary entries edited by Mary Ann Caws.   Whereas the last set of quotes focused on dreams about food, these will focus on the experience of summer and its relationship to the artist's inspiration.  This season, while represented most commonly by the image of the hammock, also suggests the hum of mental activity, of progress in art.  When Cornell writes that he has a "very warm feeling at night" it's clear that he is not referring to the temperature of his room or of the outdoors.  As Caws clarifies, the asterisk (*) denotes those days on which Cornell experienced an epiphany. Summer is a season of discovery and wonder.

*On the weather beaten gray picket
fence running along the old red
Barn vibrant blue morning glories
entwined.
     ---Summer 1945


August 1946 *
during hot days gathered examples of Golden rod grasses on bike--threshed them down to pulverized
essences for OWL boxes--the pungent odor filled the cellar with Indian summer~very warm feeling at night.


7/17/56 Tues. at home
drop of water too deep for sun so-so day in box work~glistening in sun around 3 PM sunny after rain etc. yesterday grasshopper on side of house
bumblebee in the snapdragons


Friday August 29, '58 Labor Day weekend
[...] scent of mint (atomizer) brings the Adirondacks back* with that poetry of memory and surprise


--Joseph Cornell, Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files, edited by Mary Ann Caws (2000)

Potatoes = Buried Treasure

One good turn deserves another and so today's brief quote will once again showcase Tasha Tudor's Garden, this time in a self-explanatory quote that illustrates the role of the imagination in enlivening daily chores:


" 'I love to dig potatoes.  It's quite satisfying, you know, like searching for buried treasure.  Although it can be irksome when your spade slices a plump, promising potato in two.'  The naughty corgyn, always out for a lark, go running off with potatoes in their mouths and gnaw them ruthlessly to pieces before rushing back to steal more tuberous victims. But there are plenty of potatoes to spare..."

--Tasha Tudor's Garden, Text by Tovah Martin with Photographs by Richard W. Brown

Heirlooms

Today's quote comes from Tovah Martin and Richard Brown's whimsical book Tasha Tudor's Garden.  Text and image come together in this biopic to afford the reader/visitor intimate access to Tasha's world and the inspirations for her art.   Her rustic home in southern Vermont was modeled after an 18th century farmhouse and created by her son Seth with hand-tools.  Tasha's  rootedness in the past is manifested in the roots of her garden and gardening practices as well.  It is difficult to determine whether it is most accurate to describe Tasha as "out of sync" with the time period in which she was born or simply highly skilled at hitching historical time to the present. Her life seems to bear few of the "seams" of a reenactment of the past (in which one is always conscious of the closeness of the contemporary world--often jarringly so.)    If time in the garden is cyclical, heirloom plants and heirloom practices confirm the linear nature of time by underscoring the importance of repetition in promoting remembrance. Yet the very concept of the heirloom also acknowledges the passage of time.  The heirloom garden allows us to experience the excitement of the appearance--and reappeance of the past.  Curiously, heirloom plants are relics of the past but also made brand new ...over and over again.


"If Tasha's garden is a fantasy, its vision is rooted in the past... She plants varieties that would have been perfectly comfortable in a cottage garden several generations ago. The oldest roses nearly extinct dianthus cultivars, heirloom narcissus dug from her mother's garden---these are the sorts of plant[s] that find their home with Tasha....we are bound together by a mutual respect for heirloom plants.  Tasha lures her friends up to ther garden with descriptions of seldom-seen primroses, peonies, lilies, and cinnamon pinks.  And we come to discover those plants and more combined with inspired artistry.  We wander among divine daffodils framed in a lacework of crab apples and along forget-me-not paths disappearing into flowery glades.  We become transfixed by this place lost in time.  Then we tarry by lamplight until late in the evening, listening spellbound to stories of eccentric uncles with incredible green thumbs and chimney campanulas stretching nearly seven feet tall.  We come to share the fantasy."

--Tasha Tudor's Garden, Text by Tovah Martin, Photographs by Richard W. Brown (1994)

Horoscope

The word "horoscope" derives from the French words for "hour" and "season" as well as the Greek word for "observer." To locate destiny in the alignment of celestial bodies is nonsensical and yet enticingly dramatic.


Those who favor this quote will know that it was also chosen by Lucy Maud Montgomery for her book Anne of Green Gables. 

"The good stars met in your horoscope,
     Made you of spirit and fire and dew--"

--Robert Browning (1812-1889), "Evelyn Hope"

What Not to Wear

     "On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold-thread, appeared the letter A.  It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony....It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
     'She hath good skill at her needle, that's certain,' remarked one of her female spectators; 'but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy, contrive such a way of showing it!' "

----Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)