Be Well

Today's entry is taken directly from the Dictionary.Com Word of the Day.  This is a wonderful and absolutely free service---a little bit of knowledge dispensed daily to your e-mail inbox. 

Wassail is both a hearty beverage and a best wish for the recipient---Waes haeil!  Be Well.

Word of the Day for Friday, October 8, 2010



wassail \WAH-sul; wah-SAYL\, noun:


1. An expression of good wishes on a festive occasion, especially in drinking to someone.


2. An occasion on which such good wishes are expressed in drinking; a drinking bout; a carouse.


3. The liquor used for a wassail; especially, a beverage formerly much used in England at Christmas and other festivals, made of ale (or wine) flavored with spices, sugar, toast, roasted apples, etc.


adjective:


1. Of or pertaining to wassail, or to a wassail; convivial; as, a wassail bowl.

transitive verb:


1. To drink to the health of; a toast.
 Intransitive verb:


1. To drink a wassail.


Christmas often means plum pudding, fruitcake, roast goose and wassail.


-- Florence Fabricant, "Recipes to Summon the Holiday Spirit", New York Times, December 21, 1988


But have you ever tried to spear a buffalo after a hard night at theold wassail bowl?


-- Gore Vidal, The Smithsonian Institution


Wassail is from the Middle English expression of festive benevolence, wæs hæil!, be well!, from Old Norse ves heill, be (ves) well (heill).

'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.]