Depression cuisine

Jane Ziegelman:

“Freshness was not necessarily a virtue in the 1930s. This sort of infatuation that we have with food that’s fresh, just off the farm and crisp and sweet — that didn’t really hold much water for Depression-era cooks, who were more entranced with modern, frozen foods. That was the miracle food.”

From an interview (my transcription) with Jane Ziegelman and Andy Coe, who have written A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression. Listen: “Creamed, Canned and Frozen: How the Great Depression Revamped U.S. Diets” (NPR).

Thanks, Rachel, for pointing your ma and pa to this interview.

[Note to self: must read.]

Bobby Hutcherson (1941–2016)

The vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson has died. The New York Times has an obituary.

Here are three Hutcherson performances of his “Little B’s Poem”: 1, 2, 3. I first heard this tune as recorded by Tete Montoliu and have loved it ever since.

elementary OS

[Click for a much larger view.]

The screenshot above shows an old (2007) MacBook now running elementary OS, a rather Mac-like variety of Linux.

When I tried starting up this MacBook recently (curiosity, curiosity), I found myself getting nowhere. The hard drive was fine. RAM cards, fine. But my Mac could last only a minute or two before freezing up. I tried reinstalling OS X (why not?). But the problem remained, and remained a mystery.

Time to experiment: I added some RAM (4GB, $30) and installed elementary OS (wiping out OS X in the process). Installation was easy: I downloaded the 1.15GB file, burned it to a DVD, booted the old Mac from its optical drive, and followed the prompts. (The computer is too old to boot from a USB device.) In a couple of hours, I had a new-old spare laptop for basic computing.

If you visit the elementary OS website, you may too quickly conclude that the operating system is for purchase only. Not so: like other varieties of Linux, it’s available at no charge (add the custom price of “0”). Wikipedia’s article about elementary notes that the “Purchase elementary OS” strategy is controversial. If I find myself using elementary OS with any regularity, I’ll be happy to make a contribution. My greatest problem in using elementary OS thus far: forgetting that familiar key combinations (⌘-S, ⌘-T) don’t do what I think they’re going to do.

Invaluable in getting elementary OS to keep its cool, at least on my old MacBook: indicator-cpufreq. Adding it as a startup program makes a world of difference.

Mystery actor

[Click for a much larger, more mysterious view.]

Do you recognize her? Do you think you recognize her? Leave your best guess in the comments. If necessary, I will add a hint.

*

11:50 a.m.: A first hint: this actor is best known for a television role.

*

12:50 p.m: A second hint: the actor and that television character have the same first name.

*

1:10 p.m.: The answer is now in the comments. That’s Marion Ross as Katy Fuller in Teacher’s Pet (dir. George Seaton, 1958). Ross went on to play Marion Cunningham in Happy Days (1974–1984).

More mystery actors
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

[Garner’s Modern English Usage notes that “support for actress seems to be eroding.” I’ll use actor.]

NBC, sheesh

“Germany has played flawless.”

No, flawlessly . There is such a thing as a flat adverb — “an abverb that has the same form as its corresponding adjective” — but flawless isn’t one. Fast and slow are.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

[Definition and examples from Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016).]

Corn, dropped

Verlyn Klinkenborg:


“August,” The Rural Life (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002).

Related reading
All OCA Verlyn Klinkenborg posts (Pinboard)

Smoke and ink

Walter Benjamin:

If the smoke from the tip of my cigarette and the ink from the nib of my pen flowed with equal ease, I would be in the Arcadia of my writing.

“Fancy Goods,” in One-Way Street , trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).

Other Walter Benjamin posts
Benjamin on collectors : Handwriting and typing : Metaphors for writing : On readers and writers : On writing materials

Zippy pens

[Zippy , August 12, 2016.]

Seminar then moves on to mechanical pencils. He prefers them to wooden pencils. Does Softlite? “I guess so . . Now get your hand off of my thigh.” By the third panel, they’re married, with two children. It turned out so right, for strangers on a train.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[The saddest writing-instrument sight: a cup of uncapped ball-points next to a cash register.]

Green beans, from an old family recipe, such as it is, or was, or may have been, remembered and recreated long after the fact

Elaine and I have been tending to a friend’s garden. Thus we have an embarrassment of green beans on our hands, or in our refrigerator. And so I remembered a dish that my mom used to make, green beans in tomato sauce. Very simple:

Chop an onion and brown in olive oil.

Add tomato sauce and oregano.

Add cooked beans and let them simmer for a while.

Thus green beans are made not only edible but delicious. The oregano is the secret. Exact proportions? Who knows? One 15 oz. can of tomato sauce and two or three teaspoons of dried oregano will take care of a good number of beans. I use no-salt-added sauce and add pepper and just a little salt.

I have always associated this dish with Brooklyn’s Hamilton House, a wonderful restaurant of my childhood. (London broil, anyone?) I always thought that my mom was recreating the Hamilton House dish. But no: as she told me a couple of days ago, she was making a dish that her mother made.

If you search for green beans tomato sauce , you can find much more complicated recipes. Perhaps something is missing from my ingredient list, but I don’t think so: my grandmother leaned to recipes with a handful of ingredients.

If you, too, are beset by an embarrassment of green beans, tomato sauce and oregano might be of help.

[Embarrassment is the collective noun that applies to green beans. Embarrassment : green beans :: gaggle : geese.]

Some sardines run through it

A fish fight! Norman and Paul Maclean (Craif Sheffer and Brad Pitt) comes to blows over sardines in A River Runs Through It (dir. Robert Redford, 1992).

I know the name Skeezix from the comic strip Gasoline Alley . And now I know why he has that name: skeezicks means rascal. The word skeezicks is older than Skeezix.

Back to fish.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)