Idiom of the day: go to pot

Elaine and I wondered about the pot in go to pot . We had three guesses between us: a chamber pot, a cooking pot, and a pot for a plant.

The kitchen wins. The idiom “dates from the late 1500s and alludes to inferior pieces of meat being cut up for the stewpot.” Source: Christine Ammer, The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

I suppose that if something wasn’t good enough for the stewpot, it might have become hogwash.

Word of the day: hogwash

As found in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849). Hortense, indignant, reports what Sara said about the choucroute. Go ahead, Hortense:

“That barrel we have in the cellar — delightfully prepared by my own hands — she termed a tub of hog-wash, which means food for pigs.”

Yes, it does, or did.

The Oxford English Dictionary: “kitchen refuse and scraps (esp. in liquid form) used as food for pigs; pigswill. Now chiefly historical.“ The dictionary’s first citation is from circa 1450. Its most helpful citation is the most recent one, from Judith Flanders’s The Victorian House (2004):

Cooks who were not thrifty put all the kitchen leavings into a bucket. The content was called “wash,” and the washman visited regularly to buy it: he then sold it as “hog-wash,” or pigswill.

By 1610 the word acquired a “depreciative” meaning: “any liquid for drinking that is of very poor quality, as cheap beer, wine, etc.” I like this citation, From Thomas Boyd’s Through the Wheat (1923):

“Wine? You call that red hog-wash wine?”

And later, a third colloquial meaning originated in the United States: “nonsense; esp. worthless, ridiculous, or nonsensical ideas, discourse, or writing.” The dictionary’s first citation is from Mark Twain, writing in The Galaxy (1870):

I will remark, in the way of general information, that in California, that land of felicitous nomenclature, the literary name of this sort of stuff is “hogwash.”

In OED citations, it’s sometimes hogwash, sometimes hog-wash. In our time, the hyphenless form is vastly more frequent. As perhaps is hogwash itself.

“Heritage”

This is a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country! #MAGA2020

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2020

He won’t be happy until there’s a second civil war.

Pizza with sardines

[From our kitchen. We prepare all dishes with a vignette filter.]

The war is on. Germany has invaded France. The unnamed narrator of Anna Seghers’s novel Transit has fled Paris. Stuck in Marseille, he lives on cigarettes, coffee, pizza, and rosé. Pizza for him is new:

Back then I was surprised to find out that pizza wasn’t sweet but tasted of pepper, olives, or sardines.

A sardine pizza? Our household’s curiosity went into overdrive. I found a recipe that called for baking the crust once (fifteen minutes) and then again (eighteen to twenty minutes). Huh? Elaine decided to do her own thing.

The ingredients:

1 teaspoon dry yeast
¾ cup water
1 tablespoon olive oil
½ teaspoon kosher salt
Bob’s Red Mill whole-wheat pastry flour
    and King Arthur white flour, equal parts

2 onions, sliced
1 tablespoon butter
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
some black pepper
1 can skinless and boneless sardines
    in olive oil, drained and chopped
8 oz. finely shredded Italian cheese
    (the usual supermarket offering)

The directions:

Dissolve yeast in water. Add olive oil and salt. Wait a few minutes; then begin stirring in flour. Knead, and let dough rise in a towel-covered bowl for 50 minutes. Elaine says you’ll need to knead to know how much flour you might have to add. It’ll vary with the weather. She adds flour half a cup at a time.

Melt butter in a pan. Add onions and salt. Caramelize the onions on medium heat.

Roll out the dough and assemble the pizza — sardines first, then onions, then cheese. Bake at 400° for about twenty minutes.

The result was spectacular: savory, fishy, absolutely satisfying. Very Mediterranean. We added some red pepper flakes at the table and drank some cheap rosé. Elaine had a few leaves of fresh basil with her slices. I found the basil took too much away from the taste of the sardines.

In 2013 New York Review Books published Transit (1944) in a translation by Margot Bettauer Dembo. In 2018 the novel was adapted for the screen by Christian Petzold. I recommend the novel, the film, and this pizza with great enthusiasm.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[There’s nothing missing from the recipe. It’s a sauceless pizza.]

A pocket notebook sighting

[From The Devil and Miss Jones (dir. Sam Wood, 1941). Click any image for a larger view.]

John P. Merrick (Charles Coburn) keeps careful notes. He’s gone undercover in the department store he owns, working as a shoe clerk while seeking to identify union organizers. The shoe department is a hotbed of agitation.

Contexts for these notes: Merrick didn’t do well on the intelligence test given to prospective employees. Miss Jones (Jean Arthur) gave him money, thinking he didn’t have enough to buy himself lunch. Elizabeth (Spring Byington) maybe kinda sorta likes the snarky section manager (Edmund Gwenn). Thus the deleted question mark.

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : Cat People : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Time Table : T-Men : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once

Is it treason yet?

From the Associated Press:

Top officials in the White House were aware in early 2019 of classified intelligence indicating Russia was secretly offering bounties to the Taliban for the deaths of Americans, a full year earlier than has been previously reported, according to U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the intelligence.

And from Carl Bernstein:

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials — including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff — that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.

Milton Glaser (1929–2020)

The graphic designer who gave us I♥︎NY. The New York Times has an obituary.

I almost forgot: Milton Glaser’s “The Things I Have Learned,” a 2001, is useful reading. Et

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

Black Legion (dir. Archie Mayo, 1937). Humphrey Bogart plays a machinist, embittered when a promotion he thinks should be his goes to a “foreigner.” And so he joins up with the hoods and robes of the Black Legion. Based on contemporary events and disturbingly of our own time, with warnings about “anarchists” and cries of “America for Americans.” The supporting cast includes Dick Foran (later a regular on Lassie), Charles Halton, Samuel Hinds, Ann Sheridan, each of whom, I have to say, is a better actor than Bogart. ★★★

*

Fright (dir. W. Lee Wilder, 1956). A chance YouTube find that we had to watch, because Nancy Malone. It’s her first movie role, and she does just fine in a bizarro story of past lives and hypnosis. Other viewers might want to watch to see Eric Fleming, who would soon star in Rawhide. A bonus: fans of The Honeymooners should watch for Frank Marth, branching out to play a serial killer. ★★

*

Night Must Fall (dir. Richard Thorpe, 1937). Look past the staginess (it’s from a play by Emlyn Williams) and you’ll find a deeply suspenseful story of a young psychopath (Robert Montgomery) who ingratiates himself with a wealthy invalid (Dame May Whitty) and her niece (Rosalind Russell). The principals are excellent, and if you know Whitty only as Hitchcock’s Mrs. Froy, you’ll be surprised by her performance here. And speaking of Hitchcock: this film would pair well with Shadow of a Doubt. There’s even a hint of the twinning that unites Uncle Charlie and his niece Charlie. ★★★★

*


[Source: IMDb.]

Devotion (dir. Curtis Bernhardt, 1947). Incredible: a movie about the Brontës that seems not to have mentioned the Brontës in its American advertising. Charlotte (Olivia de Havilland) and Emily (Ida Lupino) form an improbable love triangle with a fusty cleric (Paul Henreid, complete with his accent), as Anne (Nancy Coleman) is kept off to the side, her writing coming in for no attention. Branwell Brontë (Arthur Kennedy) is here in all his dissoluteness, and there’s an inchoate but unmistakable suggestion of incestuous desire at work in this reclusive family. Lupino to my mind is the star (her Emily is the ur emo-kid), but Sydney Greenstreet as William Makepeace Thackeray threatens to steal the show. ★★★

*

Riffraff (dir. J. Walter Ruben, 1936.) Love, labor trouble, and canned fish. Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow play Dutch and Hattie, fisherman and cannery worker. At key points the story requires the suspension of disbelief — painfully so. Joseph Calleia, Una Merkel, and Mickey Rooney provide some comic relief. The best performance by an actor I’d never heard of goes to J. Farrell MacDonald as a wise, compassionate fisherman known, rightly so, as Brains. ★★★

*

A Man Called Adam (dir. Leo Penn, 1966). Sammy Davis Jr. as Adam Johnson, a Miles-like musician (cornet, not trumpet, solos by Nat Adderley) living with a massive burden of grief, guilt, and racism. There’s a fair amount of malarkey here: Louis Armstrong has a small role as a has-been purveyor of “true jazz” who’ll soon be going back to “the rice fields” (what?); Cicely Tyson is a civil rights activist but seems to have nothing to do except hang out with Adam; and Frank Sinatra Jr. is a young wannabe following in Adam’s footsteps. I found more to appreciate in the moments between Adam and his pianist (Johnny Brown). Look too for Ja ’Net DuBois, Lola Falana, and Kai Winding — and Mel Tormé, who gets the last word. ★★★

*

The Devil and Miss Jones (dir. Sam Wood, 1941). A Capraesque fairy tale of happy times for labor and management. Charles Coburn shines as a cranky department-store owner who goes undercover in the shoe department to root out union organizers. Jean Arthur shines as a clerk who takes for him a fellow without money enough to afford lunch. Spring Byington, Bob Cummings, Edmund Gwenn, and S.Z. Sakall shine — and these working folks, they’re not so bad after all, eh, Mr. Capitalist Big Shot? ★★★★

*

Illegal (dir. Lewis Allen, 1955). I’m impressed again and again by Edward G. Robinson’s range as an actor. Here he plays a DA who unknowingly sends an innocent man to the chair, falls apart, quits, and ends up working for the mob, with startling results. Nina Foch plays Robinson’s prosecutorial mentee, in what might be her best role. Television fans will like seeing DeForest Kelley and Edward Platt. ★★★★

*

Fear in the Night (dir. Maxwell Shane, 1947). And speaking of DeForest Kelley, this film is his feature-length debut, with a strong assist from Paul Kelly. The premise: a man dreams he’s committed a murder and wakes up with objects from the scene of the crime in his possession. Two crucial questions: did he really kill someone, and more importantly, had we seen this film before? Alas, the eeriness diminishes as the story develops and we figured out that yes, we’d seen it before. ★★

*

Politics (dir. Charles F. Reiser, 1931). Wives and mothers take action to combat gangsters and bootlegging. I saw a few minutes on TCM and mistook the movie for a variation on Lysistrata, but the women’s strike — an effort to withhold “everything,” meaning “Yes, everything, parlor, bedroom, and bath” — is but a small element in the story. What’s here, really, is a vehicle for two great comediennes I’d never seen before: Marie Dressler as a mayoral candidate, Polly Moran as her pal and supporter. Another welcome presence: Karen Morley, whom I think I know only from King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread. ★★★

*

Mystery House (dir. Noel M. Smith, 1938). Ann Sheridan and William Hopper (Perry Mason’s Paul Drake) brighten this movie, in which one person after another dies in or near a hunting lodge. If you discovered that someone in your company had embezzled a fortune, you’d invite all suspects to a remote gun-filled lodge and promise to reveal the culprit’s identity there, wouldn’t you? What, you think that’s improbable? My favorite element in the film: the eerie motto above the fireplace, which comes from the novel that is film’s source. ★★


[“The End of all Good Hunting is Nearer than you Dream.” Mignon G. Eberhart, The Mystery of Hunting’s End. 1930. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.) William Hopper played clean, well-soaped Lal Killian.]

*

The Haunting (dir. Robert Wise, 1963). Based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, in which a small team of psychic researchers seeks the truth about a haunted house. Julie Harris and Claire Bloom (the latter in a Mary Quant wardrobe) give great performances as young recruits; Russ Tamblyn as heir to the house provides comic relief and a dash of sanity; Richard Johnson as team leader is a bit of a bore with his clipboard and pipe and talk about “man” and his superstitions. Davis Boulton’s cinematography adds all sorts of fear and uncertainty to the proceedings. Here’s a real mystery house, in an ultra-scary film that looks back to Poe and ahead to Stranger Things. ★★★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

Some trees

Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849).

Also from Charlotte Brontë
A word : Three words : Jane Eyre, descriptivist : Bumps on the head : “In all quarters of the sky” : Small things

[“Some rocks” are an abiding preoccupation of these pages.]

“Existential”

“Efforts to stem the pandemic have squeezed local economies across the nation, but the threat is starting to look existential in college towns”: The New York Times reports on college towns in the time of the coronavirus.

A related post
College, anyone?