A Monster worse than Hitler

 

A monster stalks London. It’s 1939, and the Blitz is raining bombs and terror down on central London. But the monster is worse, more dangerous, and less comprehensible. The characters in Francis Spufford’s novel Nonesuch have to deal with this combination of horrors. There’s a very good monster, and believable innocents caught up in a world they don’t really understand. The main character, a woman who was working in a broker’s office, takes charge of the struggle, and a dramatic struggle it is!

The book is pretty good with a combined war story and horror theme, but somewhere in the last 100 pages it takes a long-winded turn, with tons and tons of detail about bombs in London. At this point I had to force myself to keep reading. And when I finished, I felt a bit cheated because the ending… well, it’s not exactly an ending. It leaves the reader unsure, I think. (Maybe I just don’t get it.)

Reading this Week

An old book by Ursula Le Guin 

As I read Ursula Le Guin’s space travel book The Dispossessed, my mind was filled with the
images from the real trip around the moon that took place last month. I picture the story by imagining the view of the earth from near the moon in this live photo, transmitted by the astronauts. However, I didn’t really enjoy Le Guin’s carefully composed details of 1974 era space fiction, and didn’t finish reading it.

A New Book by Francis Spufford

Nonesuch: A Novel by Francis Spufford interests me because I enjoyed one of this author's earlier books, Cahokia Jazz, which is an alternate-history-detective novel. At the time: December 2024, I wrote a very brief review: "What would the area around St. Louis (where I grew up) be like if all post-European-arrival history had been different? Here's a speculative -- and suspenseful-- fiction about the answer." Now I’m reading Spufford’s next book, and it’s amazing and quite different. I’ll post a review of it when I finish reading.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Good Fiction

 Elif Shafak

There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak relates a tale of several rivers and the people who are fascinated by these rivers. Throughout the novel, one metaphor comes up over and over: that a drop of water has a memory that can connect these disparate individuals just as their personal fascination with rivers connects them. We hear a lot about their experiences with the rivers of London in the 19th and 20th centuries; the rivers of ancient and modern Mesopotamia; and also a bit about the rivers of Paris and the bodies of water around Istanbul. Metaphorically their experiences are reflected in a single drop of water that lasts through the ages. 

I was especially interested in the author’s use of the water-drop metaphor, because it’s based on a completely discredited scientific theory, specifically that of  “the French immunologist Jacques Benveniste, who developed the theory of ‘water memory’ at the cost of his career and professional reputation.” (p. 475)  What fascinates me is that a scientific disaster like this one can make a good literary device! Other novelists,  poets, dancers, musicians, and narrative writers, have also used this bad science as a good artistic metaphor.

The Lamassus

Each of the characters in the novel has a relationship with the ancient mythical hybrid creatures called Lamassus. 

The author explains:

“Lamassus are protective spirits. Hewn from a single slab of limestone, such sculptures have the head of a man, the wings of an eagle and the hulking body of a bull or a lion. Endowed with the best qualities of each of their three species, they represent anthropoid intelligence, avian insight, and taurine or leonine strength. They are the guardians of gateways that open on to other realms.” (p. 7) 

 

Ancient Times: King Ashurbanipal 

Ashurbanipal was the king of the Assyrians in the seventh century BCE. He collected clay and stone tablets on which were written both mundane records of crops and accountancy and also tablets with verses from the epic poem Gilgamesh. Eventually, archaeologists were fascinated with finding these tablets and reconstructing this ancient poem. Here is an image from that era showing Ashurbanipal and his wife:

“Ashurbanipal and his wife are drinking wine and enjoying a picnic in an idyllic garden, whilst from the boughs of a tree nearby, amidst ripe fruits, dangles the decapitated head of their enemy, the Elamite king Teumman.” (p. 7)

 

Born in 1840: “King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums” — From the Thames to the Tigris River

Brought up in the most desperate poverty, the fancifully named “King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums” was a young man with some very unusual gifts of memory and recognition of patterns. Although without formal education, he grasps the meaning of the writing on the clay tablets — once owned by Ashurbanipal, now in the British museum — and becomes a scholar, eventually traveling to the site beside the Tigris River where he hopes to find some of the missing verses of Gilgamesh. Here are his thoughts as he approaches the site where he hopes to search for the clay tablets:

“If he closes his eyes he can imagine an utterly different view from thousands of years back and see his surroundings as if looking through cut glass: gardens lush as paradise, palms and grape vines, edible and ornamental plants; pine, olive, juniper, cypress, pomegranate and fig trees all around. Parrots gliding about among the branches, while tame lions roam below. Fruit of all kinds, luxurious orchards and, spreading far out into the distance, grain fields on four sides. All of it possible because thousands of slaves, their bodies tattooed with the identification marks of their owners, labored with pickaxes carving channels to bring water into this barren landscape, diverting the river from the mountains all the way into Nineveh. They were here, the kings and the canal builders. It all happened here—the ambitious dream of King Sennacherib, continued and expanded by his grandson King Ashurbanipal.” (p. 312)

 

Born in 2005: Narin in Turkey and Iraq

Member of a long-persecuted Christian minority in Turkey and Iraq, the child Narin seemed doomed throughout the chapters that described her life. The events she experienced took place in 2014, both in Turkey and later in the same area where King Ashurbanipal once reigned and where Arthur conducted his search for the missing verses of Gilgamesh. At age nine, she wants to know why her people are reviled, but her grandmother instead offers her food:

“Sensing her disappointment, Grandma opens another bag. Inside, wrapped in a cloth to keep them warm, are flatbreads—each spread with sheep’s milk butter and filled with herbed cheese. The old woman makes these every morning at the crack of dawn, settled on a stool in the courtyard. She pats the dough into round pieces, slaps them against the tandoor and bakes them until they are crisp and puffy. She knows how much the girl loves them.” (p. 42)

Born in the 1980s: Zaleekhah in London

Zaleekhah Clarke is a scientist who studies rivers. In 2018 her life is in flux as she has just moved out of  the apartment she shares with her husband, and moved to a houseboat docked in the Thames, another significant river. Her relationship with her uncle, who comes from an unspecified part of “The Levant” includes her views of many rivers in both London and the Middle East. Here is just one example of the water drop that remembers — a tear that she sheds as she first sees her new home, the houseboat:

“A tear falls on the back of her hand. Lacrimal fluid, composed of intricate patterns of crystallized salt invisible to the eye. This drop, water from her own body, containing a trace of her DNA, was a snowflake once upon a time or a wisp of steam, perhaps here or many kilometers away, repeatedly mutating from liquid to solid to vapor and back again, yet retaining its molecular essence. It remained hidden under the fossil-filled earth for tens if not thousands of years, climbed up to the skies and returned to earth in mist, fog, monsoon or hailstorm, perpetually displaced and relocated. Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.” (p. 77)

 

So Many Interesting Stories

My introductions to these major characters are very brief and I haven’t really showed you how interesting they are, maybe just that they are quite intriguing. It’s difficult to capture what really appeals to me in this novel, which is so different from the others I’ve read by Elif Shafak.

I’ll end my very selective and digressive review by quoting the passage about the water drop from the beginning of the novel:

“Dangling from the edge of the storm cloud is a single drop of rain—no bigger than a bean and lighter than a chickpea. For a while it quivers precariously—small, spherical and scared. How frightening it is to observe the earth below opening like a lonely lotus flower. Not that this will be the first time: it has made the journey before—ascending to the sky, descending to terra firma and rising heavenwards again—and yet it still finds the fall terrifying. 

“Remember that drop, inconsequential though it may be compared with the magnitude of the universe. Inside its miniature orb, it holds the secret of infinity, a story uniquely its own. When it finally musters the courage, it leaps into the ether. It is falling now—fast, faster. Gravity always helps. From a height of 3,080 feet it races down. Only three minutes until it reaches the ground.” (p. 4)

Review  © 2024 mae sander for maefood.blogspot.com

Two Exotic Mystery Tales

The Talented Mr. Ripley

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995)

This novel from 1955 still reads in a remarkably contemporary way, despite many details that mark it as having been written so long ago. As everyone says, Highsmith’s account of the remorseless interior thoughts of the con man and murderer Thomas Ripley is a tour-de-force in the creation of a thriller. I totally enjoyed reading it, and I admired the subtlety of the other characters as well. 

When the book begins, Ripley had already broken the law in some unspecified way. The plot begins when the father of a vague acquaintance inquires if Ripley has any information about his son, who has inherited a regular income, and thus can afford to live in a beautiful (fictitious) Italian seaside village. The son, he makes clear, has no desire to return to the US, but Ripley manipulates the father to pay him to go to Europe to convince his son, Dickie Greenleaf, to return home. 

Ripley hates the Americans that he meets in Europe: he feels that his peers -- or those who should be his peers -- have all the advantages because of their money, and they treat him that way. Ripley (as all the reviewers say so this isn't a spoiler) realizes that he is the same size, has similar skin and hair color, and very much resembles Dickie, whom he has become very close to. He plots the murder and kills Dickie in a very dramatic way and assumes his identity with great pleasure and cunning. Of course, as he gets deeper and deeper into this deception, a complicated psychological thriller unrolls.

I have always remembered seeing the French/Italian film Purple Noon, which is based on the novel. The vivid scenes on the Italian coast, the deep blue of the Mediterranean, and the dramatic murder scene and its aftermath made an indelible impression, as did the ending of the film. After all these years reading about Patricia Highsmith and later film versions, I finally decided to read the book. 

Purple Noon: Film Version, 1960

I have an amazingly complete memory of this film, which I saw when it had recently been released.

Directed by René Clément
Starring Alain Delon, Marie Laforêt, Maurice Ronet, Erno Crisa
Screenplay by Clément and Paul Gégauff

“As the sun beats down on a boat in the Mediterranean, two men loll back: scapegrace playboy Maurice Ronet and hanger-on Alain Delon (“My perfect Ripley” – Patricia Highsmith), sent by Ronet’s dad to bring him back. Which one’s going to leave that boat alive? And can he get away with pretending to be the other man? Delon’s star-making thriller smash, adapted from Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.”

Purple Noon, a French/Italian production, was the first of many adaptations of Ripley to the screen — the most recent is a current Netflix series. I have not seen any of these, though I’m tempted to check them out.

The Murder of Mr. Ma

The Murder of Mr. Ma (published April, 2024)

 

Judge Dee was a famous detective in China in the seventh century, and many mystery lovers like me are familiar with his exploits thanks to a series of novels by a Dutch mystery writer named Robert van Gulik. Judge Dee has been reincarnated into the twentieth century in this recent novel by seasoned mystery writer SJ Rozan, collaborating with novice writer John Shen Yen Nee, a publisher and media producer. SJ Rozan is the author of 20 books, especially a series about a woman detective named Lydia Chin and Lydia’s partner Bill Smith — I’ve read several of them.

It’s 1924 in London, as The Murder of Mr. Ma begins.  A Chinese professor named Lao She has the challenging job of making university students appreciate Chinese language, history, culture, and literature. In reality, a Chinese professor and author by that name actually did live in London in 1924. In fiction, he is the narrator of a very suspenseful and violent mystery story, and he quickly meets the updated version of Judge Dee.

The most memorable feature of The Murder of Mr. Ma is incessant hand-to-hand fighting, using Chinese martial arts. Reincarnated into the twentieth century, Judge Dee changes from a rather staid figure to an amazing street fighter, who propels himself along the roof tops and swings from lampposts, from stair railings, and even from chandeliers. Wearing a kind of superman disguise, he fights multiple thugs at once, knocking them out with sweeping blows from his skilled hands and feet. You would think you are reading a film script (maybe you are).

The Murder of Mr. Ma has a point to make beyond the usual mystery story: it is very much about the lack of respect for Chinese people and their culture shown by the Londoners in the story. The indignation of Professor Lao She is expressed in a variety of ways throughout the novel. In addition, the authors introduced  two very real historic figures into the novel, depicting both of them as friends of Judge Dee. The first of these is Bertrand Russell, the mathematician, philosopher, and author of a book titled The Problem of China, which attempted to overcome the prejudice and disregard for China of that era. The second historic person who appears in the novel is the poet Ezra Pound, who admired Chinese culture and published translations of Chinese poetry. Lao She says of Pound: “In truth I found Pound’s translations of classical Chinese poetry took rather too many liberties, but the man was inarguably a great poet in his native tongue.” (p. 72)

While I found the never-ending fight scenes a bit much, I generally liked this novel for its unusual cast of characters, its very good plot, and the many scenes in Chinese restaurants, where the food on offer seemed very much like the menu in a current Chinese restaurant now, 100 years later. In fact, some of the dishes were the same ones that Lydia Chin and Bill Smith eat in the frequent restaurant scened in SJ Rozan’s earlier books. Would these same dishes have appeared at the very few London Chinese restaurants in 1924? I don’t know but I don’t have a problem with any of this — it’s good reading! 

Review © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Paris in July for the French film

Tucci's "Taste"

"The Muscoot was named after the reservoir it was adjacent to, one of many reservoirs in upstate New York that supply the drinking water for New York City. Built in the 1920s, it was a narrow, dilapidated shack of a building with a floor that sloped like a perpetually keeling ship. It was dark and dingy, with a battered wooden bar and about twenty checkered tablecloth–covered tables. Cold beer on tap, Miller High Life or the like, was served in scratched glass pitchers for about $2 each. Iceberg lettuce salads were served in those small flimsy 'wooden'  patchwork bowls that still grace tables in certain diners all over America. However, regardless of the crumbling surroundings and I believe a multitude of health violations, the place did a hearty business, because the thin-crust pizza was delicious. ... My family would go to the Muscoot maybe two or three times a year as a special treat, and besides a hamburger at the Mount Kisco Friendly’s after our annual doctor’s checkup, that was my experience of dining out." (Stanley Tucci, Taste: My Life Through Food, p. 50).

Stanley Tucci is an accomplished actor and director with a long list of movie and other acting credits. He also loves to eat and has written two cookbooks. His memoir, Taste, My Life Through Food, (published 2021) reflects this thought: "food was not just a huge part of my life; it basically was my life."  (p. 277). 

The book begins with descriptions of Tucci's Italian-American family and of the remarkable food prepared by his mother and grandparents, who gardened, bottled tomatoes, preserved other produce, raised chickens, went fishing in the polluted Hudson River, and more. Above all, they were very skilled cooks. Tucci's memories resemble those that have been shared by many Italian-American food writers, but he makes everything vivid by documenting just how his mother and grandmother made a number of dishes, and how his mother managed her home and family.  He also includes descriptions of his later domestic life and how he cooked and ate with his two wives (of whom the first died quite young) and many children.

Anyone who picks up this book will hope for some sort of description of what it's like to be a famous movie star. Tucci doesn't disappoint the reader. He drops lots of Hollywood stars' names -- and apologizes for it. He includes meals at lots of famous or just fabulous restaurants all over the world. But the best of the movie star description was about the catering operations that were put in place to feed the actors and workers on movie sets. The food supplied for these very high-profile people was for the most part terrible. While big budget films have big-budget high quality food available to the workers, Tucci writes less enthusiastically about the rest: 

"On most films there is one truck with a few beleaguered caterers doing their best with minimal funds to keep a cast and crew well fed and vaguely happy. The caterers, who are actually the first to arrive, at some ungodly hour, begin cooking two meals for a minimum of about fifty people every day. The quality of ingredients isn’t usually of the highest caliber, and their resources (and unfortunately often their talents) are stretched to the limit attempting to provide a variety of dishes every day for what could be up to an eight-week shoot." (pp. 160-161). 

As a lifelong fan of Julia Child -- and also of Norah Ephron -- I enjoyed reading about Tucci's feelings about playing Paul Child in the film Julie and Julia. His enthusiasm for this role connected to the fact that his mother had loved Julia Child's cooking shows on PBS, and he remembered watching them when he was a child. Besides his description of the film, Tucci also created a wonderful description of a meal at a small French restaurant in Deauville, Normandy, where he, Meryl Streep, and a few others made the extreme mistake of ordering the infamous French sausage called andouillettes. (If you don't know about this dish, you should read his description!)

The final chapters of Taste aren't as upbeat as the ones about his earlier life. A few years ago, Tucci was diagnosed with a very nasty cancer, and he had to undergo agonizing treatments that prevented him from eating, much less enjoying any food as he always did. The description is also agonizing to read, but very well presented. After relating this experience, Tucci also presented how he lived during the covid lockdowns in London, where he makes his home with his current wife and his children of various ages. Let's just say he didn't enjoy it any more than the rest of us did!

My next adventure, I hope, will be watching at least one more of Tucci's films. I loved Julie and Julia, and look forward to seeing Big Night, which somehow I missed although it's 25 years old. There are a few others that I also have missed, though I did like Tucci's role as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Just for fun, and to give you an idea of how he writes, here's Tucci's list of what he ate on any given day when he was a teenager:

Breakfast: Two or three bowls of cereal with milk, Rice Krispies or similar; two pieces of toast with butter and jam or jelly (usually Welch’s grape jelly, which is really like sweet purple aspic); some orange juice.

"Lunch: Three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread, usually Wonder, or half a loaf of Italian bread filled with veal cutlets, eggplant parmigiana, or whatever was left over from the previous night’s dinner; a piece of fruit; a packaged store-bought sweet—Twinkies or the like. 

"After-school snack: One or two American cheese or Velveeta (is it still made legally?) sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise, or three or four open-faced peanut butter sandwiches, often layered with sliced banana; a few glasses of milk; another packaged sweet; some fruit. 

"Dinner: Two or three bowls of pasta and three or four chicken or veal cutlets, or two pork chops, or two helpings of London broil (I have only ever seen this cut of beef in America. Never in London. I must find out where it got its moniker), or a lot of whatever other entrée my mother made; vegetables; green salad; dessert. 

"Late-night snack: Two of any of the aforementioned sandwiches, or a large bowl of leftover pasta, or any of the leftover entrées, probably sandwiched between two pieces of Italian bread." (p. 62-63)

It's a fun read. Thank you to all my fellow food-bloggers who recommended it.

Review © 2022 mae sander. 

“The Strange Journey of Alice Pendelbury”

Marc Levy is a best-selling French novelist. This is the first of his books that I have read. I was disappointed for the same reason that very popular historical fiction often disappoints me: it does too good a job of meeting my expectations. As a result, books like this don't seem to offer any new insights about its historic time and place, and often portray their characters with 21st century social and cultural attitudes.  

The Strange Journey of Alice Pendelbury begins in London  in 1950, just after the war. Most readers would have some expectations about this setting: the neighborhoods that are not yet restored after the severe bombings, the lives that are affected by loss of loved-ones, the shortages and rationing of food and clothing that are still in effect, and the feeling among Londoners that the rest of the world is healing more quickly. These are cliches. And the author relies far too much on these cliches: it’s too predictable. Amidst these conditions, Alice Pendelbury, the main character, lives in a studio apartment all alone. She has a few friends and no family: they died in the bombing. 

On page 15, a fortune-teller discerns a very unexpected future for Alice. Because of her visceral reaction to the fortune-teller’s prediction, Alice soon afterwards travels to Istanbul with her next-door neighbor. The rest of the novel is a quest to discover the truth of the prediction. It’s a long quest, which many readers probably find quite suspenseful and enjoyable, but again, I found it a bit too full of cliches. (I’ll forgo presenting plot details since you might want to read it and find out for yourself.)

All in all, I found Alice’s story to be a kind of over-the-top melodrama. The descriptions of Istanbul seemed mostly the sort of thing that you could find in a 1950s guidebook. Alice’s air travel from London to Istanbul was presented with all the expected details from the early days of commercial plane travel. On arrival, Alice and her travel companion checked into the Pera Palace Hotel — which was the major high-end place for famous European visitors from early in the twentieth century until the end of World War II. By 1950 when the novel takes place it was actually a bit run down because of political choices made by the Turkish government (its Greek owners were expelled and it was given to a native/Moslem Turk), but the decline doesn’t seem have happened in the book. And on and on.

There were also some questionable details — small ones but they bothered me. For example, Alice’s traveling companion brings her a beautiful evening gown to wear to an event at the British Embassy. She says it’s lovely and he says:  

“It’s a French model called the ‘New Look.’ They might not be much at the art of war, but I have to admit that the French have an undeniable genius for dressing women ... .”  

Remember, the novel is set in the year 1950. Dior’s “New Look” debuted in Paris in 1947 and was a sensation, noted throughout the world. To show you how famous this was: the term “New Look” was coined by Life magazine. So the characters’ unfamiliarity with the style by 1950 is a bit off. This is a detail, but the kind of detail that disrupts my trust in a a historical novel.

Alice Pendelbury’s distinguishing feature was her acute sense of smell:

“Alice had a rare gift: she was a ‘nose.’ Her sense of smell was so acute that she could distinguish and memorize the slightest odor. She spent her days alone, bent over the long wooden table in her flat, blending different essences to obtain combinations that might one day become a perfume. Every month she made the rounds of the London perfume shops, offering them her new creations.” (p. 6)

Throughout the book Alice is highly aware of aromas and the way they trigger her memories. She seeks out unusual combinations of fragrance that create a characteristic ambience, and she designs perfumes and other aromatic products. Normally, I would find this a very compelling theme in a novel. Unfortunately, I thought that like many things here, the depiction of smells and the memories they elicited was presented in a formulaic and mechanical way. Again, I found this a source of disappointment.

Similarly, the descriptions of food in this novel seem done by rote. The scarce groceries in London, the cups of coffee, the Turkish breakfasts, and the fine restaurants were all described in a way that I found too predictable, too superficial, and  too close to what I’ve read in many other accounts of travel. I was also a little skeptical about the accuracy: for example, eggs, meat, and bacon were rationed until 1954, but the characters seem to find at least some of them in the shops. Maybe they had ration cards or something for the small quantities they bought; this wasn’t mentioned and again is only a detail.

I’m sure my reactions to this novel are eccentric: many readers obviously find this author very compelling. Sorry to be a malcontent. This book was one of 10 free books offered on Kindle this month. The author was on my “maybe read” list so I went for it. I hope I more throughly enjoy the others I chose.

Blog post © 2021 mae sander.

How to find a bad restaurant

Right now, restaurants in London, Paris, and most big US cities are dark and dismal places, closed temporarily or unfortunately, often for good. Restaurant critics -- along with chefs, waiters, sommeliers, and so forth -- have had to find other work. The future might hold better luck for them and for us. Maybe we will be able to eat out again in the not-too-distant future, maybe even while traveling to England or France where I've definitely enjoyed many good meals. Meanwhile, I have books to read.

I decided to read the book Dishing it Out: In Search of the Restaurant Experience by Robert Appelbaum, published in 2011, because it had a chapter on Grimod De La Reynière, whom I've been trying to learn about. On the whole, Dishing it Out is dull, pretentious, and full of social science jargon, pedantic literary critics' jargon, superior-minded self-promotion,  and at the same time a strange sort of naivety. The chapter on Grimod wasn't great either. Nothing in the book is as clever as the title -- though several other books on amazon.com are also called Dishing it Out! 

Briefly: not a good book. Appelbaum's focus is how a variety of authors, beginning with Grimod, have written about food. He judges the works of professional restaurant critics through the ages, and also writes about recent amateur internet-published restaurant criticism. He analyzes novels like Sartre's Nausea and Isak Dinesen's Babette's Feast; journalism like that of Michael Pollan; statements of foodies like Alice Waters, and others. He loves words like "civilization" and "culture." Sorry, his insights are not very interesting. 

While Appelbaum denies that he's a restaurant critic, he does describe several experiences that he and his wife had trying to find good restaurants in London, Paris, and other French cities. Mostly, he complains because the combined food, service, and atmosphere never live up to his expectations. This is a bit tedious.

He does accomplish something: his method of picking out restaurants could be a lesson on how to eat badly in London and Paris and probably lots of other places. Here are a few of his documented approaches to ensuring that he will be disappointed:

• Go to a neighborhood in the chosen city where there might be good restaurants. Or maybe to a neighborhood that had good ones in the past and is now touristy, like Montmartre or the Left Bank in Paris. Wander around until you are becoming exhausted and your wife is complaining because her feet hurt. Finally choose a restaurant in desperation even though you don't think it will be great. It won't.
• Go to a restaurant with a good reputation, or at least a pretty good one. Order the cheap tourist menu. Make your wife order it too. It will turn out to be poor quality. As you suffer with each bite, watch the other diners in the restaurant -- they are locals who ordered à la carte, and who are enjoying truly delicious and well-prepared-looking dishes.
• Go to a restaurant that was famous at some time in the past. You might find out that it is now owned by a faceless corporation and it's no longer out-of-the ordinary. Just predictable. 
• Go to a restaurant in an ethnic community (say, Chinese or other Asian), but order the dishes that are intended for timid non-ethnic customers.  This is probably a route to disappointment anywhere, even in small US cities.
• Go to a very expensive and highly respected restaurant. You will have very high expectations but a lowish budget. Order your food carefully, but let the waiter manipulate you to order wine and extras that run up your tab to way past what you hoped to pay. You may have enjoyed the food, but you'll regret the experience.
• Pick a restaurant that has been decorated to look like it has a distinctive historical identity, for example, one that's based on the famous bouchons of Lyons, France. In Lyons or maybe even in Paris itself, there are still restaurants that preserve this tradition -- Appelbaum, however, goes to a fake bouchon in a completely inappropriate area that has completely different traditional restaurants. Try this: you might be lucky with the food. You might not. 
• Above all, don't follow the advice of guide books or mainstream restaurant critics because, as Appelbaum warns, they are inferior writers who deserve to be analyzed, not used as expert recommenders. Don't research reputations or current status of restaurants -- don't ask local friends where they eat -- don't do anything that would maybe get you a good meal that you could afford!

This snarky review is © 2021 by mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com.

Where Would I Like to Be?

With little hope of travel soon, all New Year's plans are pretty glum. We don't know when vaccine distribution will reach us, or will reach enough people to make travel possible. Here are a few places I would love to go when the moment arrives -- all photos from earlier blog posts, © 2021. 

Where I want to be:

In Evelyn's back yard, Fairfax, VA.
Above all, I want to see my family!

On a Lindblad cruise!
Top of the wish list: Iceland. We were booked to 
go there in the summer of 2020. Didn't.

In Paris!

In Japan! I've only seen Mount Fuji once from far away.
I would like to see it again.

In Hawaii! This is the native Hawaiian owl, the Pueo.
Birding in special locations is one of the activities we miss greatly.

An an art museum anywhere! This is the courtyard of
the Art Institute of Chicago.

UPDATE: London.

Jeanie  said to add London. Here are the bridges along the Thames from the Milenium Bridge.

The Great Fire of London

Exactly 334 years ago, September 2, 1666, fire broke out in London and raged until September 6, 1666. Destruction was total in the center of the city, and the vast majority of inhabitants lost their homes. Saint Paul's Cathedral was the most famous building that was lost.

The Great Fire raging from London Bridge (left) to the Tower of London.
Saint Paul's is in the background. (Source)

The Ashes of London, published 2016.

Author Andrew Taylor's mystery/suspense novel The Ashes of London begins as the fire is burning, and continues for several months afterwards.

Characters in the book include members of two fictitious families along with a number of historical figures, including the King of England, who had been restored to the throne in 1660 after the death of Oliver Cromwell; the architect Christopher Wren, who was involved in the project to rebuild St. Paul's Cathedral; and several court figures. The details of the lives of the two principal characters, James Marwood and Catherine "Cat" Lovett are especially interesting.

I found the plot of The Ashes of London extremely well-thought-out and enjoyable. The tension portrayed between Charles II, the restored monarch, and the former, treasonous supporters of Oliver Cromwell is fascinating. Some of the recriminations about the failure of the authorities to stop the fire reminded me uncomfortably of political recriminations about our current "raging fire" -- the coronavirus epidemic.

The tale's suspense, involving murder, political intrigue, hypocrisy, financial trickery, and more is very well built up, which I won't spoil! Male characters in the book include noblemen, masons, architects, draftsmen, inn keepers, printers, politicians, and others. The female characters, consistent with the customs of that era, didn't officially have a trade, but several of them are very strong, ambitious, and accomplished women. The details of daily life created a highly readable narrative. (I have no idea of how historically accurate these details are, but they seem convincing.)

For example, the first introduction to Cat and her guardians, an aunt and uncle:

"Power, Cat thought, resides in small things. 

"If anything confirmed Uncle Alderley’s position in the world, it was the fact that, while the City was burning to ashes on his doorstep, he himself was dining at home quite as if nothing were amiss. The food was as good as ever when he entertained a guest he wished to please, and the servants just as attentive. They used the best cutlery, the two-pronged forks and the knives with rounded handles that fitted snugly in the hand; Aunt Olivia had insisted on having them; they had been imported from Paris at absurd expense. ...

"In Sir Denzil’s honour, there were three courses. To his credit, he responded manfully to the challenge. He dug deep into a fricassee of rabbits and chickens, returned again and again to the carp, ripped chunks from the boiled leg of mutton, and swallowed slice after slice of the side of lamb. The food passed through his mouth so rapidly that he seemed hardly to chew it at all. ... Two pigeons, a dish of anchovies and most of a lobster went the way of everything else. By this time Sir Denzil was slowing down, though he compensated by increasing his consumption of wine, revealing an unusual capacity for canary, of which he must have drunk close to half a gallon. By this stage, his colour was high and there was a certain glassiness in his eye that reminded Cat irresistibly of the carp as it had been when it first arrived in the kitchen. (p. 36-37)

For various reasons, Cat becomes a servant in various rooming houses, where she often has to help with scrubbing and laundry, mundane tasks that aren't frequently described in historic fiction. For example:

"‘You can begin with the scullery floor this morning,’ Mistress Davy said to Cat as the yard boy was closing the gates. ‘You skimped the corners yesterday.’ 

"Later in the day, Cat was sent to take in the washing as the light was fading. Beyond the yard, with the stable and wagon shed, was a vegetable garden with a pigsty. Beyond that was an orchard, the trees stripped and bare, waiting for winter. 

"It was already very cold. There would be a frost tonight. The shirts, nightgowns and stockings were almost as wet as they had been when she and the eldest girl had hung them out. Now the clothes were stiff with cold as well." (p. 383). 

Or laundry preparation by a servant in Cat's aunt and uncle's house:

"He was in his ordinary clothes and preparing lye, the mixture of ashes and urine that was used for soaking badly soiled laundry. It was a woman’s job usually but the washerwoman had lost the two girls who usually came in to assist her; presumably they and their families were somewhere among the flood of refugees." (p. 44). 

The smells of London, especially the smells of the fire and its aftermath, contribute to the vivid descriptiveness of the book. The sections of the book about James Marwood are told by him in the first person: here are some examples of his mention of smells.

"I shouted at him to stop. The fire swallowed the sound. I swore and went after him. The heat battered me. I smelled singeing hair and charred flesh. My lungs were on fire." (p. 10). 

"The cellar smelled strongly of burning, as everywhere did now, as well as of sewage and damp." (p. 63). 

"The cloak was grey, made of wool but lightweight – not for winter use. It was on the shabby side. Frowning, I walked over to it and fingered the material. It smelled of burning, as did almost everything at present." (p. 156). 

In contrast to the usual depressing London atmosphere, there are a few outdoor country smells:

"It was cool outside, and the air smelled of the river. A light rain was falling, soft as a caress. The stars were out." (p. 158).  

"Even I could see that the place was a sad tangle of branches and bushes and fallen trees. The air smelled of rotting vegetation. The path we followed was muddy underfoot, and slippery with dead leaves. It looked as if deer and foxes used it far more than humans." (pp. 206-207). 

"The river was something to be heard, felt and smelled rather than seen." (p. 370).  

Much later in the burned-out St. Paul's, Marwood prepares to climb an nearly-destroyed staircase:

"I smelled burning. Someone had recently come up or down the stairs with a light. My nose had become so miraculously acute that it could distinguish between the smell of my lantern and this other smell, which seemed to me to have a faint but disagreeable hint of old fish." (p. 438).

Throughout the novel, the first in Andrew Taylor's series about the Restoration era in London, the details of ordinary lives support the complex plot and the emerging relationship and significant history of the many characters. A very good read! I discovered this book from a blog post reviewing the second book in the series, The Fire Court (link) I'm grateful to the blogger at this blog, Rhapsody in Books, for making me aware of these books!

Review © 2020 mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.

Flowers for May Day

What is May Day?

May First in England, from Medieval times until the early twentieth century, was celebrated with a wide variety of customs, differing from village to village. Young people in many English towns created garlands of foliage and flowers to decorate houses and doorways. Superstitions varied from town to town about which decorative plants would bring good luck, and which would bring bad luck. School children would parade from house to house, displaying elaborate flower arrangements including a china doll, and asking for gifts or money from householders. A young girl would be chosen as the May Queen. Industrial cities in the 19th century had no flowers so people used ribbons instead.

Sometimes the May Day activities were a bit less innocent. Couples and groups of young men and women stayed out all night -- sometimes enjoying themselves in otherwise prohibited pastimes!  In some places, rowdy and disruptive traditions also developed from the merry-making customs, leaving the Puritans and later the Victorians a number of reasons to suppress May Day festivities. In the book Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, historian Ronald Hutton catalogued the many and varied May Day traditions and customs.

The most famous custom was dancing around the May Pole, described thus, in the 1580s:

"They have twenty or forty yoke of oxen, every ox having a sweet nose-gay of flowers placed on the tip of his horns, and these oxen draw home this Maypole… which is covered all over with flowers and herbs, bound about with strings, from the top to the bottom, and sometimes painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred men, women and children following it with great devotion. And thus being reared up, with handkerchiefs and flags hovering on the top, they strew the ground around about, bind green boughs about it, set up summer halls, bowers and arbours hard by it. And then they fall to dance about it." -- Quote from Philip Stubbes, 1580s. Cited by Ronald Hutton, Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (p. 234).

Hutton didn't mention any special foods for the English May Day festivities, but an article in Smithsonian magazine suggested a few traditional beverages and cakes for May Day and the previous night:

"In Northern Europe, related festivals have merged with the feast day for St. Walpurga. Called Walpurgisnacht in German and Vappu in Finnish, the night before is often celebrated with bonfires, student pranks and other mischief, and the following day with picnics. Maiwein, or May Wine, is a traditional beverage flavored with the herb sweet woodruff. In Finland, a version of mead called Sima is the drink of choice. May Day fritters, called Tippaleivät, look like miniature funnel cakes and are a customary Finnish treat for the holiday." (source)

In much of Europe in the twentieth century, May Day has been a celebration of workers -- a completely different tradition. Our one May Day experience in Paris was that shops and bakeries were even more totally closed than on Christmas. And who could forget the news photos of enormous military parades in Moscow on May 1 during the Communist era? Today, I'm more interested in the flower customs.

Violets were my mother's favorite flowers, often blooming on May Day.

I remember my mother saying that in her childhood, kids would put flowers on neighbors' doorsteps, ring the doorbell, and run away. Or maybe she was just telling us something she read about in a book, and didn't experience it herself. I wonder which it was.

Spring may finally be here in Michigan now, and we have all these flowers I've been photographing. Have a happy first-of-May!

Blog post and photos copyright © mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.

"The Bloomsbury Cookbook"

Virginia Woolf, 1917. Photo by Ottoline Morrell. National Portrait Gallery.
Perhaps the most famous member of Bloomsbury.

What did the famous men and women of the Bloomsbury group eat? In The Bloomsbury Cookbook, author Jans Ondaatje Rolls used letters, memoirs, kitchen notebooks, interviews, and many other published and archived writings by the members of the group and by their cooks to answer this question. With every recipe, the author includes fascinating historic detail from the writings and art of the group. We learn how Virginia Woolf might walk into town to buy a chicken, we hear how they gardened or even hunted game, and there's occasional analysis of how Virginia Woolf used food imagery in her innovative writing.

The Bloomsbury Cookbook covers the Bloomsbury activities from the late 19th century until 1956 when the few survivors had their last meeting, and extends with a few notes about the group's grandchildren. Much to my liking: the many recipes in the book are mainly from the notes of the subjects or from contemporary cookbooks -- some handwritten recipes are reproduced as illustrations in the book.

To get a feel for the level of wonderful detail in the book, let's look at a single passage about the meals at Charleston, home of Vanessa and Clive Bell, in the 1930s:

"Anne Olivier Bell recalled that 'lunch on the whole was usually ham or some salads and bread and cheese and possibly some beer.' But a letter from Angelica Garnet reveals a more varied lunchtime diet: on Sundays, heavenly aromas of roast Southdown mutton, sirloin or ham wafted through the house and mingled with the sweet smell of hot apple pie, treacle tart, roly-poly pudding, spotted dog or queen of pudding. On Mondays, they ate the leftovers from the Sunday roast (always carved by Vanessa) together with a mixed salad (usually dressed by Duncan [Grant]), baked potatoes and pickled walnuts. On Tuesdays, there was fish -- haddock or cod -- and on Wednesdays, lamb or mutton. Grace [the cook] made a shepherd's pie on Thursdays. On Fridays, she made sausages and, on Saturdays, her half-day off, it was eggs and bacon. Harveys beer, or water, was available to drink, and a freshly brewed pot of strong coffee was always enjoed at the table at the end of each midday meal." (The Bloomsbury Cookbook, p. 272-273) 

Evidently the Boomsburys loved food and made it an important part of their very active life socializing and discussing the art, literature, and culture of the day, as shown in this and many passages in the book. For me, the illustrations, which appear on almost every page, are even more exciting than the recipes. Several of the Bloomsbury participants were highly recognized artists, such as Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Dora Carrington, and Vanessa Bell, and all of them painted still lifes and other food scenes. Here are two of my favorites:

Dora Carrington, "The Servant Girl," 1917. The Bloomsbury Cookbook p. 99.

Vanessa Bell, "The Kitchen," 1943. The Bloomsbury Cookbook p. 173.

In the early days of the twentieth century, their upper-class and upper-middle-class way of life included cooks and housemaids who cooked their meals, did the grocery shopping, and more importantly did the heavy lifting such as carrying coal and pumping water for kitchens without modern conveniences. After the first World War, kitchens improved but social changes made it less likely to have many servants. (Another book on the topic is Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, which treats this topic in even more detail: blogged here: Virginia Woolf's Kitchen.)

By organizing the book chronologically, Rolls manages to introduce the core Bloomsburys who met at Cambridge University around the turn of the twentieth century, and then to introduce the many other great writers, artists, and so on who were part of the group. The Cambridge students were all men: the Stephen brothers, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, and several others. The Stephen brothers introduced their fellow-students to their sisters (always said to be stunningly beautiful): Virginia and Vanessa, later known as Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. If you have read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, you know that she very much regretted and resented that she had not been given the opportunity to study at Cambridge, but that's the way it was.

Duncan Grant, "Helen Anrep in the Dining Room at Charleston," 1945. The Bloomsbury Cookbook p. 339.

I loved reading this cookbook, including in many cases reading through the recipes -- though I haven't tried any of them so I can't speak to their usefulness. I feel as if I could really sense the presence of those cooks 100 years ago or so, in their maybe-inadequate kitchens, working on delicious meals. I've been a fan of Bloomsbury for a very long time, and I love the way that the core members challenged so many of the stodgy moral and intellectual constraints of Victorian England and broke out into a new way of living, including -- to some extent -- their meals. Note: my fellow-blogger and Bloomsbury fan Sherry did try recipes from the book. See this post: Chocolate Angelique.

As a very young woman, Virginia Woolf tested middle-class norms when she roomed with men who were not her relatives, having moved to the Bloomsbury area of London that gave the group its name. She and her sister violated many of the strictures of Victorian life and sexual mores. Virginia also baked bread, an activity she loved, as well as founding a publishing company where she set the type herself: both things that maybe a woman of her social class wouldn't have done a generation earlier. This book covers the social revolutions of the twentieth century in an absolutely wonderful way -- and it's totally readable!

A page from the book.

To conclude, here's a very apt quote from Dorothy Parker about the lives that are documented in this book: the Bloomsburys “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.”

Book review © 2020 mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com.

Photos credited to their sources.

What did T.S.Eliot Eat?

I am definitely no expert on the poet T. S. Eliot, but I did invite a real Eliot scholar to dinner recently, and discussions with her have propelled me to try to find out what he liked to eat. Though an expert on Eliot, she didn't provide me with any clues. Naturally, I started with google. Actually that's all I did: just google.

Eliot, if my search is any indication, wasn't much of a foodie. His most famous reference to food was "Do I dare to eat a peach?" from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which also refers in a rather superior way to other foods (like oysters or "tea and cakes and ices") and of course "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."

I dare to eat peaches all the time!

Like almost every word Eliot ever wrote, interpretations of what the peach means are numerous, including quite a few rather abstract ones, such as a reference to Adam and Eve's fruit or fear of aging or fear of sexuality (source). My favorite interpretation seems to view the peach rather literally: from a review of the book titled The Duchess of Malfi's Apricots and Other Literary Fruits by Robert Palter:

"But why does T.S. Eliot's Prufrock wonder if he dares to eat a peach and not, say, an apple or plum? Palter's answer displays poetic and pragmatic insight: because 'on the one hand, the sensuous experience might be too unsettling for him, and, on the other hand, he might make a spectacle of himself because of the messiness involved in biting and masticating something so juicy.' Still, he adds, another 'possible explanation for Prufrock's hesitation about eating a peach might be the rarity and high cost of the fruit in the England of 1911.' Even after World War II, he continues, peaches were scarce in England: Ted Hughes claims that he first tasted one in 1955, the year that Sylvia Plath arrived in England as a Fulbright Scholar." (Review by Michael Dirda, 2003)

If the peach is the most famous food quote in Eliot's poetry, maybe his second-most-famous one is from The Wasteland:

"The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins." 

But what did the poet actually eat? From later in his life, Eliot's pocket calendar (also called a diary) offers a few clues about his food recommendations or preferences:

"Like many of us, Eliot made odd notes in the back of his diaries, in particular, recommendations – of books, places to eat, food and drink. In 1936, Eliot noted ‘Rakørret with Swedish brandy’ – Rakørret is a Norwegian dish of salt-cured trout which is left to ferment for several months. Eliot was not shy of trying less-palatable dishes – he recommended a Norwegian cheese, Gammel Ost, ‘made of reindeer milk and then stored for years under the beds of Norwegian farm folk’ to his friend J. D. Aylward. Leaping forward to 1960, he has made a note of two cheese recommendations (here for more on Eliot’s love of cheese)– a Portuguese number ‘Caixa d’Estrella’ and ‘Boursault (?)’, a French cheese recommended by D. Herbert ‘who recommends also "Make me an offer' by Wolf Mankovitz" (a story set among the Jewish community of London’s East End of the 1930s)." (From "A first look at Eliot’s pocket diaries")

Eliot also wrote an article (mentioned in the quote above) praising Stilton cheese, and promoted the idea of a "Society for the Preservation of Ancient Cheeses." (Link "For the Love of Cheese.")

My hands, carving a duck à l'orange that I cooked in 2008.

Duck à l'orange is the specific food most often mentioned when Eliot's dining preferences are mentioned, especially a version of this dish that he enjoyed at a dinner given by the right-wing antisemite organization L'Action Française.

“A private room in one of the best restaurants – fifteen people – and the most exquisite dinner I have ever tasted...I remember the canard aux oranges with permanent pleasure."

From the same source, I learned that he and his wife entertained at home rather than at restaurants, mainly at lunch to save money because they didn't have to serve meat to guests at lunch. The following paragraph adds what seem to be few food memories:

"T.S. Eliot once asked his messenger boy what he would do with £5,000. “I’d have a good dinner,” the boy said. 'Duckling and green peas, gooseberry tart and cream.' Having just moved to London, Eliot was impressed by the boy’s expensive taste. 'Such is the society I move in in the city,' he wrote, where even 11-year-olds know their food." (source)

Maybe food was really more of an abstraction and a spiritual rather than a physical symbol for Eliot, at least as far as writing was concerned. I find the following paragraph from a biography of Eliot rather interesting:

"One of his last essays, a British Council pamphlet on George Herbert (1962), explores a belated turn to natural happiness, much like his own, and it concludes movingly with Herbert’s poem, ‘Love: III’ with its blessed sense of forgiveness: ‘Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guiltie of dust and sinne. / … You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat: / So I did sit and eat.’" (source)

NOTES:

• Full disclosure: I mainly didn't read any poems, but I once read them in high school.
• I have obtained a copy of The Duchess of Malfi's Apricots and plan to read it soon.
• This blog post written and copyright © 2019 by Mae Sander for mae's food blog. If you are reading other than at maefood dot blogspot dot com you are reading a pirated edition.