A Cookbook for Poor Poets and Others, or I Wish I Could Eat Blini Everyday, But...

Approximately a zillion years ago, when the old (now closed) Yale Co-op had an estate books section, I found a copy of a cookbook called A Cookbook for Poor Poets and Others. Priced at one dollar, this little paperback which I bought on a whim turned out to be one of the smartest book acquisitions I ever made. Years later, when in a proper used-and-rare bookshop I found a hardcover copy (with a handsome dust jacket on it), I snapped it up. Ten dollars, it cost me: money well spent.

Only one book of food writing (to speak broadly in terms of not just cookbooks but food literature) that I can think of cites or refers to this little book, which is a small masterpiece, but John Thorne -- who else would it be, but John Thorne? -- knows what's what, and he refers to it in his recent work of genius, Mouth Wide Open. He's exactly the sort of person who would have found this little book by Ann Rogers and said, "Ah-fucking-HA!"

Rogers' book is, unpretentiously, realistically, and charmingly, about maintaining culinary morale when it might not be so easy to come by. It's reminiscent of MFK Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf in that regard, but Rogers isn't inspired by things like food shortages in wartime (though she could be read with that in mind, easily). She's talking about frugality. How do you eat well, really well, with real food, when you're really looking to spend incredibly small amounts of money on each meal. Her book was written before microwaves had penny-pinching students nuking up bowls of ramen, so it shows its age in that regard. Strangely, though, reading the book today, so much of it is practically posh and sophisticated by today's standards, because it is, at heart, about eating simple food made with fresh ingredients. It's about buying groceries carefully and preparing them carefully and making them last long and well.

I've owned at least one copy of this book for something like twenty years, and I thumb through it periodically because the prose is just as enjoyable as the food. But I was moved to pick it up again this week because -- like so many people -- Miss Edith is looking to feed herself and Notarius on a slightly sterner budget than before. We are fine, don't worry; I just want to see if I can discipline myself a little more. There is a genre of cookbook which is meant to inspire the home cook to work with inexpensive ingredients and be all humble, but I gotta say, I think most of them are bullshit. Either the author's concept of "humble" and "inexpensive" bears no relationship to my own feelings on the subject, or -- more frequently, and scarier to me -- the author's concept of what is food is just fucked. I am not interested in saving money by using Campbell's soup instead of a white sauce. I can make the white sauce out of things I already have in my kitchen, thank you very much; why should I buy an inferior product to make something I essentially already have? Well, true, it might save time. But time, I have. And white sauce can be made while you're mincing your veggies or doing some other prep work (yes, you do have to pay SOME attention to it, but it's not like you have to be a slave to your white sauce). So I'll pass by the canned soup section, thanks, and save myself money that way. Ann Rogers would nod in agreement, I think. A reasonable woman, Ann Rogers.

I recently had occasion to describe my beloved Laurie Colwin -- another food writer who understood kitchen frugality extraordinarily well, though she seldom wrote about it per se -- as a pragmatic but serious home cook. This is how I would describe Rogers, and the kind of person for whom A Cookbook for Poor Poets will be a great comfort in these nerve-wracking times.

The book was originally published by Scribner's and is sadly out of print (though if Simon and Schuster has the rights, I'd urge them to rush a new edition into print). (If they don't have the rights -- David Godine, this is a perfect project for you.) However, used copies can be found online, and I urge you, savvy and hungry reader, to go hunt one down.

Nothing Says Loving Like Not Really Following the Instructions and Making a Huge Mess

Yesterday Miss Edith had a guest come visit for lunch; very delightful company, a young woman of exceptionally high quality. Smart, vivacious, and she has one important leg up on Miss Edith, which is that she knows how to dance. (Miss Edith is better known for sort of sauntering, which doesn't require actual physical skill.) Our guest enjoys a good cup of hot chocolate, and since it was a grey cold day, I felt moved to produce some for her.

I used a product I'd never tried before, some Nestle Abuelita. These are chunky tablets of cocoa and cinnamon which you melt with hot milk in a blender. What could be easier? (Well, lots of things, but this promised to be better than the easier things. Let's move on.)

I heated the milk and poured it over the tablet in the blender and pressed "puree" or some such button and instantly bespeckled my lovely orange-and-blue-and-green-on-an-ivory-background embroidered tablecloth -- oh yes -- with light brown splotches of hot Abuelita. Hot chocolate on the credit card bills on the kitchen table. Hot chocolate on the estimates we'd gotten for having our beloved cat's teeth cleaned. Hot chocolate on Miss Edith's pink oxford cloth shirt that had the cuffs turned up just so. Hot chocolate on the floor by the water bowl for aforementioned beloved cat. You've never seen hot chocolate in so many interesting places.

"Shit," I said eloquently.

I pressed the blender lid down more tightly and reached for a dishtowel to cover it with while I pressed a less aggressive button. No further disaster ensued, and I poured the frothy mix into mugs, which we enjoyed thoroughly. '

Later, as I began to clean up the blender and hot milk pot and put things away, I noticed a line in the Abuelita instructions which I'd neglected to note before:

"Cover blender lid with towel when blending and only blend on low speed."

Ah.

From the Annals of Idiosyncracy: One Card Catalogue -- The Handwritten Catalogue of the Institute Library

One of the oddities of one of my favorite oddities (The Young Men's Institute Library) is their catalogue.

This library barely has a telephone, so, no surprise, the catalogue is not computerized. No: it is still written on little cards which are stored in those wooden cabinets that now get tossed by more serious institutions. (Incidentally, if anyone has one of those and wants to give me one, let me know. I've always wanted a card catalogue of my very own.) The Institute Library's card catalogue doesn't use the Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress system; rather, it uses its own system, which was devised by god knows who, god knows when, but has never changed since the library was founded in 1826. It is my understanding that there is one other library in the world that uses this same arcane system, and it's in India, and the reason that that other library uses it is that some poor schmo saw the Institute Library's catalogue, said, "Great!" and, without doing further research into the matter, went and built his library in India.

So if you want to find a book at the Institute Library (or, I guess, at this place in India), you can either learn their strange, idiosyncratic system, or ask a librarian for help. Having an MLS will do you no good in this joint. Years of service in the British Museum wouldn't do any good here. The Institute Library is just determined to paddle its own way in deeply murky waters.
My method of dealing with the catalogue, which I view as useless, though gorgeous, is to skip it entirely and just browse the shelves. Though the cards in the catalogue are minor works of art (some of the libarians had really remarkable handwriting), I peruse them not for their supposed usefulness, but for their own beautiful sake.

Nicholson Baker would, I hope, approve.

Shamless Hussy Press

Miss Edith has always been the kind of gal who trawled bookstores looking for trouble, and it comes, of course, in various forms.

One pocket-sized piece o' trouble has long been AWOL from Edie's collection -- and it's a crying shame -- but she thinks of it often and has decided to pay tribute to it here.

The novelist George Sand once wrote a little story entitled "Lavinia." Shortly after Edie began to read Sand (this was in 1990), she was in a bookstore in Washington DC (KramerBooks) and, at the counter, noticed a little display of the most adorable little paperbacks, including one which was "Lavinia," Just one short story, bound in an inexpensive yet incredibly charming way -- a little nothing, if you will, but pocket-sized. The publisher was called Shameless Hussy.

As you can imagine, Miss Edith reached for her wallet immediately.

I read "Lavinia" several times, and it came with me pretty much everywhere I went, at the time. What's funny is, I can no longer remember a word of the story, but I know it was Significant to me in the early '90s... and sadly, I cannot revisit its significance to me without making real effort, because my cherished copy of "Lavinia" has been missing since sometime in the mid-1990s. I think it was about 1995 that I lost it. I'm not sure, but I moved around a lot in those days, and pretty much anything is possible. I know that I had tucked into my copy a little drawing that a friend had given to me. So if you're cruising a used bookstore and you find "Lavinia" and it's got this little drawing in it, that's my copy, and please, return it to me...

But my real point here is that I knew nothing, at the time, about Shameless Hussy Press. I assumed it was some kind of vaguely punk-cum-grad studenty enterprise someone had come up with. I turned out to be very wrong: it was an early feminist imprint borne out of the women's movement in California in the 1960s, and about as uncool (by Miss Edith's twenty-year-old lights) as could be. I mean, these people were earnest.But you know what? Edie's aged, she's mellowed, and she wants to say, she's all for Shameless Hussy Press, whatever they printed, whenever they did it... My hat is off to you, Alta. Better late than never?

Olive Editions: For Those Who Miss Those Edward Gorey Anchor Covers, Maybe

Miss Edith admits to being just pretentious enough that she has hoarded, over the years, a certain number of those paperbacks that Anchor did, aeons ago, with cover art by a relatively young Edward Gorey.
Not only have I hoarded them, but I actually have four of these covers inexpensively framed and they are hanging in a room where they are, take my word for it, rather inappropriate.

While many publishers since then have developed paperback lines that appealed to me because of their design -- those 80s chic Vintage Contemporaries spring to mind (you remember them: think of your ancient copies of "Bright Lights, Big City" or "Bad Behavior" or "I Look Divine"), as well as those way cool Black Lizard paperbacks (reprints of classic mystery/thriller crap from Jim Thompson and David Goodis and that crowd) -- it's been quite some time since I could think of a publisher that had come up with a paperback format that really struck me as being something special. The most recent ones I can think of are those Penguin paperbacks with the letterpress-feeling covers -- the Great Ideas series. I sold a zillion of them when I worked at Atticus two years ago; they had a nice edition of "Why I Write" by George Orwell which was very popular, but my own personal favorite, which I never read but adored for the title, was Hazlitt's "On the Pleasures of Hating." Maybe I oughta read that someday. Penguin also did this concept again with little travel-oriented writings, but since I don't care so much for that genre I pretty much ignored it; plus, by the time they released them, I'd stopped being a bookseller. But the Great Ideas series, man, that was marketing genius.

Another snazzy line is those paperbacks of lost classics that get reprinted by the New York Review of Books. Now, they've got a very handsome line of paperbacks, which I admire in concept a lot more than in practice (the truth is, most of what they reprint, I don't give a fig about, though I have bought a handful of titles over the years). Perhaps almost more important is the series of reprints they've done of children's classics, which includes the Jenny the Cat books (way important, people).

So, let's sum this up: within the last ten years, say, there've been two lines of paperbacks where the design of the objects struck me as being important enough to make me pay attention to the books themselves. Now, let's add to that the Harper Perennial enterprise of Fall 2008, the Olive Editions.

The Olive Editions really do remind me, immediately, of those Edward Gorey Anchor paperbacks. (To be fair, many of the Anchor books had designs and typography by folks other than Gorey -- good people, too; it's just that I'm partial to the Gorey.) The typeface on the covers is just similar enough. And there's something about the size of the books: they're a mite larger than a mass market paperback and not nearly as bulky as a trade paperback -- so you really could wedge one of these into your coat pocket, say, the way I wedged my Anchor edition of "What Maisie Knew" into the front pocket of my leather jacket as I was heading out to a Ramones show one night many years ago. (That's a true story, by the way.) These are friendly-looking books. Not trashy. Friendly. Appealing. The kind of books, like the New York Review Classics series, that makes you want to see a zillion of them all lined up on your shelves, maybe organized by color or something.

I'm aware of three books published in these editions so far. One of them, by Jonathan Safran Foer, is a title that I pledged years ago I would never read, so I won't be acquiring that. Another of them is Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I admired sort of when I was about eighteen but wouldn't dream of re-reading now (I'm too busy re-reading books about materialistic New Yorkers, but thanks anyway). Still: it would be right and just, I think, for today's eighteen year olds of a certain stripe to pick up the Olive Edition of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and give it a roll; it's worth it for the bits about how you can have sex with anyone, but sleeping with someone is another matter entirely.

And then the last book I know of in the series is The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, the first novel by Michael Chabon.

This book knocked my socks off when I read it -- again, when I was eighteen, when it was first published. I remember working in a bookstore and forcing it into people hands, saying, "This is the best thing since "Catcher in the Rye."" I know everyone worships Chabon now, what with Kavalier and Clay (which bored me so much I never finished it) and all that, and I know I ought to be a little more respectful. But basically, when it comes to Chabon, all I care about is that first novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and then Wonder Boys, which came out a few years later, and which I think is just remarkable (movie, too).

So look, people. These Olive Editions maybe be badly bound, I don't know. But they're really handsome, in a cute way; and they've got quality text printed on them thar pages; and for God's sake, they're cheap! Ten bucks! So humor Miss Edith, please: if you've never read it before, or if you read it a long time ago but have lost your browning old trade paperback, please buy The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and go get yourself a cappucino and just... revel in the moment.


Thanks, Harper Perennial. What will the new editions of Laurie Colwin look like?

A Modern Mystery off of a Box of Grape Nuts

Miss Edith is a fan of Grape Nuts cereal; she even likes Grape Nut pudding, which almost no one else does as far as she can tell. So there are often multiple boxes of this unfashionable Post cereal around the house, sometimes as many as seven boxes stuffed in the pantry if there's been a sale.

So with all my admiration for Grape Nuts in mind, I'd really like to know what the hell the people at Post were thinking of when they developed this truly god-awful sounding recipe, even the name of which leaves me scratching my head:

Grape Nuts Tabbouleh Salad

1 pt. cherry tomatoes, quartered
1/2 cup finely chopped yellow or white onion
1/2 cup finely chopped green onion
1/2 cup finely chopped fresh parsley
1/4 cup prepared Good Seasons Zesty Italian Salad dressing mix (for fat free dressing)
2 tbs. lemon juice
4 1/2 tbs. finely chopped fresh mint
1 cup Post Grape Nuts cereal


We were going okay until we got to the Zesty Italian salad dressing; no good-thinking tabbouleh salad lover is gonna quibble with the tomatoes or the onions or the parsley. But how hard would it be, really, to just say "olive oil and vinegar"?
Then, okay, the lemon juice and, in particular, the mint -- nice touches. Very authentic. Claudia Roden would be proud.

But then... then... Grape Nuts? And no actual tabbouleh? Have the people at Post lost their collective minds?

Has anyone on god's green earth actually prepared this? And if so... why? I'm dying to know.

The Story of Harold: What the Hell, Pt. II

Reading Terry Andrews' The Story of Harold has left me rather discombobulated, and, simultaneously, eager to re-read all the George Selden books I cherished when I was a child -- and to never, ever look at them again.

The battle has already been lost, however: I'm already re-reading The Genie of Sutton Place.

I finished reading Andrews' novel about sex, death, and drinking Scotch while attending a wedding in the Adirondacks this past weekend. Notarius and I hauled ourselves up to this tiny resort town, which was mostly shut down for the year (McDonald's was "closed for the season" -- has anyone else ever heard of such a thing? a McDONALD'S that's open SEASONALLY?), and we spent some time celebrating the nuptials of dear relatives, yes, but we also spent a fair amount of time hanging around our hotel room, which meant that I read while Notarius cruised the cable TV channels to catch up on everything we miss because we don't have cable at home. Fine with me; I just wanted to get this book over and done with anyhow.

Perhaps I would feel differently about it if I had more of a personal interest, shall we say, in anal sex, specifically in fisting; perhaps I would react differently to this novel if I were just male. But I dunno. Miss Edith read the book and came away from it feeling slightly.... soiled.

The Story of Harold is, in many ways, a remarkable document -- certainly an artifact of its time -- and I can honestly say that I have never read anything else quite like it. I would recommend it, even... but the thing is, I cannot imagine who would actually find this an enjoyable book to read. (Let me amend that: I can think of precisely one person I know who would probably enjoy The Story of Harold. And I will send him a note to tell him to read it. But only one out of oh-so-many friends -- that's a statement.) The Story of Harold is an impressive novel that has to be acknowledged as an acquired taste. Perhaps, like Scotch itself, it's just not for everyone, but for those who like this sort of thing....

I'm glad I read it, and I will be glad to return it to the library from whence it came.

The Institute Library: Books You Don't Need in a Place You Didn't Know Existed Even Though It's Right There, For Fuck's Sake

The title of this piece, which was composed entirely off of my (French, elegantly linked) cuff, is not merely an allusion to the Book Mill, a charming used bookstore in Massachusetts, though it is that. I'm really just ripping them off in order to open a tribute to what has to be one of the most obscure places in my beloved New Haven: The Young Men's Institute Library.

Miss Edith grew up -- yes, Miss Edith was, once, a child -- in downtown New Haven, a mere, what, six blocks from the site of the Young Men's Institute Library. And yet she knew naught of its existence until she was in her twenties -- and her late twenties, at that. It's ridiculous, but true.

A young man, a Yale student, who was a customer of Edie's when she worked in a rare book shop, once asked Edie if she knew anything about the place. By this point, I'd noticed the sign, but knew nothing about the joint, and she was honest about this to the Yalie, who was sort of a pal of hers. "If you ever work up the nerve to go in there," she said, "Let me know what it's like."

Months later, he reported back: he'd finally gone in. "It's kind of horrible and wonderful at the same time," he said. It was, he said, a private library. He had not joined. I was left to continue my lurid imagining about what the place must be like. I had decided, on the basis of the name, and by freely interpreting the Yalie's reaction to the place, that the Young Men's Institute Library must once have been a grand place which was now reduced to being a hangout for chickenhawks and the men who enjoy their company. (Not, Miss Edith hastens to add, that she had any serious reason for thinking this would be the case.)

The Institute Library -- as its sign read -- remained pretty much a mystery to Edie until she and Notarius finally got hitched, at which point a dear friend gave them a membership as a wedding gift. It turned out to be a remarkable gift.

The Institute Library -- which is located at 847 Chapel Street in downtown New Haven, literally a few yards from the city's Green -- turns out to be exactly as the Yalie had said. Standing almost at the corner of Chapel and Church Streets, tucked among a bunch of low-end jewelry shops and bank offices, it is horrible and wonderful at the same time. The library owns the building it's in, which is a narrow brick structure built in the 19th century: it has the high ceilings and incredibly tall windows that one expects of such buildings. You enter the Institute Library through a very unremarkable front door and immediately go up a long flight of stairs; there's a sensation not unlike how I imagine it would feel to go to the second floor office of Sam Spade or some other 1940s detective. There's no cigar smoke hanging in the air, but it wouldn't surprise you if there were. It's just that kind of space.

Basically, you've entered a time warp.

Once at the top of the stairs, you go through another set of doors, and suddenly you're in this huge, grand space, a very long room, with ludicrously high ceilings -- one's first thoughts include, "How do they heat this place?" -- and worn old tile or painted wood floors and rows and rows of books. There are two librarians, polite, sweet lady librarians, who greet you cheerfully and then leave you utterly alone until you request their assistance. And that's fine, because what you want to do is just walk around and look at the shelves.

The books in the Institute Library are not the point of joining this place. By and large, in a word, the collection is crap. But it's also completely amazing, because it's such a snapshot of what people have actually been reading for the last century. The Institute Library has never had pretenses toward being a serious research library -- no reason to, I suppose, with Yale's domineering presence only a few blocks away -- and so the Institute's collection is really centered on whatever crap its members liked to read in their down time. Additionally, the library is very, very lazy about deaccessioning. As a result, browsing the shelves is a stunning experience. You see books you heard of but had never seen a copy of. You see books you've never heard of, and never will again, but which were bestsellers in 1954 or 1978. You see copies of titles that are now absolute classics which were purchased when the title in question was brand new; in many cases, these are books which, if they weren't raddled old library copies, would be worth real money in the world of modern firsts. As it is, though, the collection is pretty much without retail value.

But part of what's remarkable about the Institute Library's collection is that, precisely because it was never intended to be a "serious" collection, the collection is, in fact, something that would be valuable to people researching American middlebrow reading habits. MLS candidates looking for a thesis topic: consider doing research on the Institute Library's collection. I can promise you there is nothing else like it anywhere.

The Institute Library has the requisite old leather chairs, worn but comfortable; the requisite massive wooden tables where you can spread out your newspaper to read; it has a no cell phones rule, too, so it's absolutely quiet even though it's in the middle of New Haven's business district. Entering the Institute Library is really like leaving this moment in time and going back to an era when things were... slower. Different from how they are now. People can go to Sturbridge Village or Colonial Williamsburg and see re-enactments of How It Was Then... or, for way less money, people can drop by the Institute Library, and take a deep breath, and slow down, for just a moment or two. Or an hour or two. For a few hours, a few days a week anyway, the weird, charming, shabby calm of the Institute can be enjoyed by anyone curious enough to walk up that old staircase.



The Institute Library is open four days a week, Monday through Thursday, from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. As of this writing, a one year membership costs a mere $25.00, and I can promise you it'd be money well spent. For a membership application, please contact the library at 203-562-4045 or drop Miss Edith a line. I'll be happy to assist you.

The Story of Harold: What the Hell, Part I (I assume there'll be a Part II when I finish with this one...)

I think it was maybe two years ago that I discovered that one of my favorite children's book writers, George Selden (Cricket in Times Square, Genie of Sutton Place) had written, in the 1970s, a novel for adults entitled The Story of Harold.

How I'd reached my thirties without knowing this was beyond me; it was precisely the sort of thing I should have known already. But Miss Edith has flaws, and she admits them.

Naturally, upon discovering the existence of this novel -- published under a pseudonym, Terry Andrews -- I began to hunt for a copy to read. Copies for sale online, of which there were very few, cost more money than I was prepared to pay, and so I tried libraries. To my astonishment, there were so few copies of this thing around -- but one of them, to my considerable luck, was here in New Haven at the Yale University Library, in Sterling.

The hitch was, I didn't have library privileges, and I wasn't about to jump through Yale's hoops to get my paws on it.

Well: through a set of circumstances that Miss Edith doesn't want to go into right now, I now have library privileges at Yale, and the very first thing I did after getting said privileges was to go to Sterling and find their copy of The Story of Harold.

This is not a book for children.

This is not a book for people who want to maintain some kind of sweet image of George Selden.

I am only on page 55 of this thing, but I am floored by the experience of reading it.

One thing that surprises me, in poking around online looking for information on the novel, is just how little there is written about this book. Perhaps I am naive? Perhaps I expect too much of my fellow readers? Perhaps I'm just more obsessive than I realize? I don't know; but I really would have thought that there would be, I don't know, entire websites devoted to this book. Yet I found none. Scattered references here and there, yes -- and, to my pleased surprise, some reviews of it on Amazon.com, which were sort of interesting to scan -- but nothing like what I would have expected for a book like this, a book with a history and background like this.

More as more, darlings.

Edie.

I ought to have acknowledged this the other day, but Edie Adams, who played a major role in American popular culture (even though the kids today won't know a damn thing about her), died this week.

A nice tribute to her can be found here, written by Chris Arnott.

Martin Tytell

Life, my friends, gets creepy sometimes.
I wasn't planning to dwell on this recent Ian Frazier kick anymore, but fate had other ideas. A few days ago, the subject of one of Frazier's best essays, Martin Tytell, a typewriter repair man of extraordinary gifts, died.
Every obituary I read about him mentioned Frazier's essay.
A fascinating life, and I was so pleased that obituaries of him ran in just about every print newspaper of magazine of note. Please find here a link to The Economist's obituary.

I'm Only Sorry That I Procrastinated...

Miss Edith admits to a weakness for checking FoxNews.com more often than is healthy.
It paid off today when she found a piece about an elderly woman who fell down a "baggage shoot" at an airport.
I thought, "Damn, I should post that at Edith Says." But then I got distracted. And by the time I sat to write this, and post the link, the brainiacs at FoxNews had corrected the error (in both the headline and the text).

But for the record, folks:
bamboo shoots; baggage chutes.
If baggage shoots, we're all in really, really big trouble.

Filet Mignon: A Couple of Bucks Per Pound

I've been meaning to write this down for a few weeks now but it keeps slipping my mind and then I'll remember it at an inopportune moment when I don't happen to be anywhere near a computer.

Miss Edith, who needs to revamp her "occupation" listing as "housewife," since she doesn't seem to have much else going on in her life these days, finds herself cooking the overwhelming majority of the meals she and Notarius are eating these days.

Since Notarius is a serious and devoted carnivore, who ardently believes that vegans and vegetarians are really just kidding themselves that what they eat is food, Miss Edith's been going out of her way to procure nice meaty items for Notarius to ingest. A few months ago, we discovered the pleasures of blade steaks, an inexpensive cut of red meat that we can usually find, even at a local overpriced market, for very little money. The beef is tasty, it's quickly cooked, it takes wonderfully to marinades, and really the only flaw is this stripe of tough connective fibers (whatever it is, I don't know what it's called) that runs down the middle of each steak. If you cut it away, you've got some really nice meat there. Three or four dollars and we can get usually two good meals out of those steaks: it's a bargain.

So I went to my local overpriced Italian gourmet food shop and asked for a package of blade steaks; the nice young woman behind the counter reached into the cooler, held up a package holding two steaks, and asked, "Is this okay?" I said, "Sure! Great!" and tossed the package into my basket. The price? $3.54.

I marinated the steaks in a Zlploc bag: some Pickapeppa sauce, some olive oil, some salt and pepper. Maybe I tossed in some mustard, I can't recall now. To be honest, i wasn't paying close attention; I just wanted to add a little bit of savor, a little oomph to the meat. A few hours later, I got to work. I sauteed onions in a pan, and then removed the onions and sauteed sliced mushrooms. When the mushrooms were starting to crisp up a bit, I removed them from the pan and then I tossed in the steaks. I didn't pay close attention, again; this was really just a quick, down and dirty meal. The steaks cooked in a few minutes, and I called Notarius in to eat.

We sat down unceremoniously at the kitchen table. "This is really good," my beloved said, cutting into the beef happily. "Cheap dinner," I said modestly. About thirty seconds later, Notarius observed that these steaks weren't blade steaks.

"Sure they are," I said. "That's what I asked for and that's what I bought."

We continued eating, talking, and enjoying our meal, which really was better than I'd thought it would be. When we were nearly finished, Notarius said again, "This isn't blade steak. Look, there's no little strip of gristly bit left over." I looked down at my plate and realized that he was right, that I'd eaten every scrap of meat I'd put on my plate. "You got filet mignon," he said. I gawped at him. "No," I said. "I mean, I paid $3.54. Look," I said, walking to the garbage can. The paper wrapping for the meat had the price written on it in grease pencil. "You don't get filet mignon for $3.54."

"Well, apparently you do," Notarius said.

I wonder if the butcher counter clerk ever figured out her mistake. I wonder if the market owner chewed her out. I hope not, because it was an innocent mistake she made. But I wanted to thank her, because she inadvertently provided us with the makings of an exceptionally fine dinner, apropos of nothing. We'll never have that kind of luck again.

The Romantic Comedy is Not Dead

Today's Wall Street Journal has a sad little piece by JoAnn Anderson about the supposed death of the romantic comedy, which is basically Miss Edith's favorite film genre. Miss Edith will sit through fairly abysmal romantic comedies because, in her experience, even terrible ones will have some single scene that strikes a chord, or has some particular sweetness to it, or has some other redeeming quality. So Miss Edith read this article with considerable interest, and found herself disagreeing with it more strongly than even you would expect.

The article posits that the genre has basically died because of the sexual revolution and because folks just aren't as witty as they used to be. I don't agree with this at all. I think the genre has been altered by the sexual revolution, and that it's certainly harder to find a genuinely well-written romantic comedy, but that the genre is far from dead.

The article cites "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail" as being among the best examples of the genre in recent decades. This made me want to tear my hair out. I like "You've Got Mail" in spite of myself -- this is a subject for another day, I'm afraid -- but I have always thought "Sleepless in Seattle" was beyond overrated. The idea that these Nora Ephron projects, which are both essentially remakes of earlier movies, are truly the best of the genre in recent years, could only be put forth by people who really haven't been looking. They've been looking for romantic comedies in all the wrong places, my friends, and overlooking movies that, okay, maybe didn't do well at the box office, but which I really believe have legs, or gams if you will.

Please, people, have a gander at these movies. They're all of relatively recent vintage and maybe you can't stand Hugh Grant or whatever, that's fine... but don't forget that these movies are little gems that I really believe can stand on their own two feet. Four feet. (It takes at least two people to make a good romantic comedy.) Whatever.

I present this list in no particular order, and will probably add to it as I remember worthy contenders...

Intolerable Cruelty (George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, a Coen Bros. production)

Music & Lyrics (Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore -- thought this would suck but you know, it's really grown on me)

Four Weddings and a Funeral (how this didn't get mentioned by JoAnn Anderson is beyond me)

Bridget Jones' Diary (Renee Zellweger, who I generally loathe, and Hugh Grant, and Colin Firth -- and yes, I even enjoy the sequel very, very much)

Moonstruck (for Christ's sake: neither Cher or Nicolas Cage have ever done anything else in their film careers to hold a candle to this perfect movie)

Flirting with Disaster (an early Ben Stiller movie, with Patricia Arquette, Lily Tomlin, Alan Alda, George Segal, Tea Leoni, and Mary Tyler Moore)

While You Were Sleeping (an early Sandra Bullock vehicle, completely charming, with Peter Gallagher and Bill Pullman and some great character acting)

I've got a madcap life to lead, right now. If anyone else would like to contribute to the list, feel free.

Incidentally: it's not that I think the list of movies they showed at the Ethics and Public Policy Center -- which was the inspiration for Anderson's article -- is a bad list of movies; not at all. I just think people aren't giving credit where credit is due.

By Request: Biscuits

Hello, readers. Reader. You know who you are.

I am, to be honest, a little surprised that I've been asked to provide a recipe for biscuits, but what the hell; maybe you know you don't like the one you've got in that big fat cookbook collecting dust on the shelf. Or maybe you just don't own a cookbook. Maybe you know you could look it up online, but are worried that the recipe wouldn't be up to Miss Edith's exacting standards.

Have no fear.

Now, this biscuit recipe is posted to go with the previously posted Tomato Pie recipe, which is from Laurie Colwin's More Home Cooking. In that essay, she actually gives a biscuit recipe, but I'm going to admit something sad: there's another recipe I prefer. And so that is what I will share with you.

The following is from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, which is really the best basic cookbook from the last twenty years at least -- The New Joy of Cooking is also excellent, but I count that as being in a different category, really. JoC is required. Bittman isn't required, but it would be a really, really, really good investment, and I cannot recommend a cookbook more, with this one caveat, which is that the desserts never seem to work out for me. But every other chapter is BRILLIANT.

Anyhow: biscuits.

2 cups all purpose or cake flour, plus more as needed
1 scant tsp. salt
3 tsps. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
2-5 tbs. cold sweet butter
7/8 cup plain yogurt or buttermilk

Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl or food processor. Cut the butter into bits and either pulse it in the processor or, if working by hand, cut it into the dry ingredients. You can do this by using two table knives, cutting the butter into tiny pieces and coating them with flour, acting as if you're somehow scimitaring the stuff, or you can use a pastry knife thingy, which is fine but a pain to use, or you can do it by hand, which is easiest and probably fastest, but you have to watch out that your hands' warmth doesn't just melt the butter. What you want is for the butter to lightly coat the dry ingredients -- you want a final product that looks like very coarse bread crumbs, say. The fat is what's gonna make for flakiness here, so the slightly uneven distribution of butter is key -- if you wanted uniform distribution, you'd melt the butter, and then mix, but just don't do it, ok?

Thank you.

Now: with a large spoon mix in your yogurt or buttermilk and stir until you've got a ball of dough. Place the dough on a lightly floured surface and knead ten times. You may add a little flour if the dough seems unbearably sticky but don't let it get too dry.

For tomato pie, divide into two parts -- I generally have the bottom layer slightly thicker than the top layer, so halving the dough wouldn't be quite my routine -- and then continue on with your tomato pie recipe.
For biscuits, cut into shapes as your heart desires. Bake at least 7 minutes in a hot oven (450 deg.) for a pale biscuit; longer baking time will make for a darker crust.

These are excellent Sunday morning biscuits, by the way. And you can do things to them to make them snazzy for parties or something -- put in some cheese, or herbs, or little bits of pimento, or whatever floats your boat. Tasty.

Irony: 9:30, Sunday morning. New York Times Readers: RU Believing This Shit?

Miss Edith slept late this morning, but she is so moved by an article in the front section of today's New York Times that she's sat down here to share a little outrage.

Today's Times has an article about literacy online ("Literacy Debate: Online, RU Really Reading?") versus what I think of as, you know, actual fucking literacy. The article interviews a young woman named Nadia Konyk, who lives in Berea, Ohio, and who I'm sure is a lovely young woman. She is, however, seriously missing some points when it comes to think about her reading habits and her future.

Ms. Konyk feels that her habit of reading fanfiction online (a category of writing that Miss Edith admits she has generally little respect for, even though friends of hers engage in it; she also has friends who go to Ren Faires, an activity she has pretty much nothing but scorn for, because she is a snobby bitch) counts as real reading. She isn't particularly interested in reading real, printed, bound, typeset books, for reasons that seem weak to me. "You could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be," she explains about reading fanfiction online. "So like in the book somebody could die, but you could make it so that the person doesn't die or make it so like somebody else dies who you don't like."

How true. And if we all rewrote The Great Gatsby so that Gatsby wound up with, say, a budding Hollywood actress named Norma Jean, the world would be a better place. Right.

"Nadia also writes her own stories," the article says, and tells us that she's posted one called "Dieing Isn't Always Bad."

This was where Miss Edith began to choke slightly on her iced coffee.

Even as I typed that title into Blogger, here, the word "dieing" got one of those squiggles of red underneath it indicating that something isn't spelled correctly. We all know -- don't we? -- that often those squiggles are really wrong, and that the computer program just doesn't recognize a perfectly real word (such as a proper noun or a term from a foreign language) but I'm distressed that Ms. Konyk didn't have the ability to correct her story so that the title read "Dying Isn't Always Bad." I would lose some respect for Ms. Konyk on this point alone, but the next paragraph in the article left Miss Edith's head spinning (bracketed text is mine):

"Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college [!!!!!] and someday hopes to be published [join the club, sweetie; even real published writers, even people who know how to spell, keep hoping that they'll be published]. She does not see a problem with reading few books. "No one's ever said you should read more books to get into college." "

That last sentence is enough to make Miss Edith want to hang herself. Ms. Konyk is young and doubtless has no idea of just how stupid her statement makes her sound, and I will try to cut her some slack, but.... heavens to mercy, people. College is supposed to be just precisely about reading books, and, yes, my darling, the more books you read -- good books in particular, by which I do not necessarily mean Faulkner or Melville, because "good" covers a wide, wide range of material -- the more likely it is that you will get into college. And by "college" I mean a respectable liberal arts institution where the professors encourage reading real books so as to encourage the students to engage in lucid critical thinking.

Ms. Konyk may end up going to Harvard or Yale, for all I know -- she's fifteen years old and anything is possible for her, after all -- but if she does go to a good liberal arts college where she majors in English, I suspect she will be shocked by how many of her peers there already know that "dying" is spelled with a "y" and that books are not to be pooh-poohed just because the author of the text has already determined for the reader who dies, who marries, and what happens in the end.

I would say that this was an appalling article, but it wasn't. What was appalling was the attitude of many of the article's subjects. Please read this piece and then try very hard to not bash your head against the nearest brick wall.

TBS: The Language Police Are Paying Attention To You

Miss Edith knows perfectly well that this is a losing, stupid battle she's about to fight, but this is really pissing her off:

TBS is running -- constantly running -- these ads for itself that boast something like "More TV, Less Commercials." To be honest, I'm not sure I got that right; my brain is perhaps a little fried in this heat wave. But I know for sure that the second part of it is "less commercials."

Here's the thing, folks: you, my loyal readers, surely will agree with me that those jackasses at TBS oughta change it to the correct "fewer commercials."

FEWER commercials, damnit. Is it too much to ask? (I mean, syntactically speaking, here; I don't expect them to actually reduce the number of commercials they air. That'd be unthinkable and even Miss Edith knows it...)

I don't see the point in sounding stupid unless it's artfully done. TBS, which is presumably a company with scads of copywriters and editors and all kinds of people like that who have writing experience, college degrees, and maybe even things like MFAs (god help me), really ought to fucking know better.

Thank you.

An Unexpected Post: More on Ian Frazier, Buying Hardcover Books, and the Wall Street Journal

Last evening found Miss Edith present at yet another social gathering, this one much less hectic than other recent moments of note on her social calendar, but just as enjoyable. When the evening was finished -- the last glass of wine drunk, the final brownie snarfed down -- I curled up in bed to polish off the Ian Frazier collection I've been reading, Lamentations of the Father. You may remember I'd mentioned it a few days ago. Spoke rather highly of it.

Last night's readings included an essay entitled "Downpaging," which begins with a quotation from an old Daily News article, a tip on saving money: "Check books out of the library instead of buying them... New releases of hardcover books cost $25 and more these days. If you buy just two a month, that's $600 a year."

Frazier's essay then leaps into the comments of people talking about how they just have the hardest time managing their money because of their addiction to hardcover novels. "Right now it's costing me forty-five dollars to fill up my 4Runner, which is about two novels," says one interviewee. A mother mourns her inability to purchase for her teenage sons all the novels they crave: "How do you tell a youngster that he can't have that just-released Modern Library edition of the complete Sinclair Lewis he's been dreaming of? But I guess that's what I'm going to have to do; I don't see any option."

Frazier's piece was funny to me in a sort of dark way, naturally, what with Miss Edith's history of bookselling and all. The truth is that Miss Edith herself has never had the budget to allow her to buy all the hardcover books she's wanted over the years. I have always been a frequent patron of the public library. These days this is even more true than ever before, and I very, very seldom buy new books, particularly hardcovers, because they really are just so gosh-darn expensive. (I hate to sound like a Pollyanna but it's not even worth it to me to use a proper expletive there.)

But part of what's so funny about the piece to me is that, you know, it would be like a wet dream if I could remember the names of even five customers who bought two hardcover novels in a month. I had many customers who would purchase one paperback novel a month -- even one noteworthy woman, a smart lady of some means, a widow, who would come in once a month and purchase five novels. But if I had a customer, in about twenty years of bookselling, who came in often enough that he or she would purchase two hardcover novels a month, I think I would remember that person, and I can't. I can not. So it's sort of a "don't I wish!" situation from the bookseller's perspective and then, of course, from the publisher's perspective. (Not to mention the writers of all these hardcover novels.)

Miss Edith considered reading passages from this essay aloud to Notarius (who happened, I shit you not, to be lying in bed reading a hardcover edition of a Faulkner novel; this speaks, so to speak, volumes about our reading habits) but I did not annoy him. I figured, "Let him have his Faulkner. He wouldn't give a crap about this anyhow." I finished the book, began to re-read the title essay, and went to sleep.

This morning's Wall Street Journal, which I perused over a second cup of coffee, has a column which is precisely about this matter of saving money by not buying hardcover books.

If I wasn't sitting there, completely wide awake, holding that fucking newspaper in my hands, I'd've sworn it was a practical joke.

The article, by Neal Templin, begins, "When did Barnes & Noble replace the public library?" An excellent question, but not, I'll posit, for the reasons he thinks.

If Neal Templin would like to get in touch with me, I'm sure I can put him in touch with quite a few booksellers who'd like to smash his head in right now. It is certainly true that there are many, many, many books out there on the market in new book bookstores that are not worth buying. But there are quite a few that are definitely worth buying. Even in hardcover. EVEN IN HARDCOVER, buddy. Sometimes it is worth it to splurge on a hardcover. "The Wild Party," a poem that was illustrated by Art Spiegelman and reissued maybe ten, fifteen years ago? If you buy the paperback, it's a fun book, don't get me wrong... but if you bought the hardcover, you got to experience these red velvet endpapers that just make reading the book a totally different experience.

Reading the Wall Street Journal is often a depressing experience, but I hope that if Ian Frazier saw it this morning, he laughed just as dryly as I did.

Acidophilus

Many years ago Notarius and I observed that once you leave elementary school there are certain words you just don't hear anymore. They seem so important -- essential, even -- when you're ten years old, and then... they just cease to be part of your daily life. The word that got us thinking about this was "irrigation". Seemed to us that when we were kids, we were always hearing about, reading about, writing reports about irrigation. And now we're adults, and we hardly ever think about it. Huh.

So the last few weeks, I've been pondering a similar situation regarding the word (and concept) of acidophilus.
When I was a child, I had a little friend who, for reasons I never understood, had to drink a special kind of milk that said "ACIDOPHILUS" in big letters (in a funky 1970s graphic style) on the side of the carton. She couldn't drink normal milk. I never knew why. I thought it all seemed kind of silly. And yet the word "acidophilus" was everywhere; I was ten years old and it seemed like everyone around me was talking about this complicated, scary sounding kind of milk. And then... it went away. I don't remember thinking about acidophilus milk at all as a teenager, or at all during my twenties. Soon I will be forty, and I can't recall the last time I saw the word "acidophilus" on the side of a carton of milk.
(OK, Miss Edith won't be 40 years old for another few years, but, you know, she's definitely getting on.)

I've decided that acidophilus milk, whatever it is, must have been the "lactose intolerance" of the 1970s. That is to say, it was a trendy medical issue that marketers jumped on. And that as millions of people today go around coyly saying that can't eat this or that because they're lactose intolerant, people in the '70s were probably just as annoying about acidophilus, but I was too young at the time to appreciate how annoying they were, because I was probably just too annoying myself to dwell on anyone else's awfulness.

(Those who are likely to get het up about my making fun of health problems, by the way, should just please go away and read another blog, or maybe just another entry by Miss Edith; you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time, here.)

I want to know: is anyone still thinking about acidophilus milk, whatever it is? Or has it just become a really good Scrabble/Scrabulous word?

A Conversation Overheard: There's No Money In Gamba

Three people are seated in a comfortable living room, drinking wine, discussing the musical training of a child. The child in question is all of maybe one month old.

"I think she should take Suzuki bass," says the father, a double bass player.

"Sure, that's good," says the father's friend, a trombone player. "But you should probably start with piano. Start with the basics."

"Bassoon, maybe?" ponders the father. The mother rolls her eyes and has a sip of her drink. The baby is asleep.

There follows a diverting discussion regarding the social clout of different musical instruments -- flute players: are they as hot as violinists? This passes a few minutes, and then the father of the newborn veers back toward his daughter's future musical instruction. "The thing is," he says, "She may not have any musical talent."

The trombonist scoffs, "Sure she will; her parents are musical. She may not become a professional musician --" [which the trombonist is: Julliard trained, he has always made a living from performing or teaching music] "but she's very likely to be somewhat talented. She doesn't have to make a living at it, she should just, you know, learn it to enjoy it at first."

The mother speaks. "We could sign her up for lessons on the viola da gamba."

The trombonist has a sip of his drink, shakes his head. "No," he says, "There's no money in gamba."

Reflecting on Ian Frazier: A Vague Appreciation

In 1986, Miss Edith was 15 or 16 years old, and in those days Miss Edith bought, on pure whim, an awful lot of books that would prove to be rather important to her decades later.
Ian Frazier's Dating Your Mom was one such book.
I remember buying it at the Yale Co-op; there was no particular reason why. It was cheap, and I suppose I thought it looked funny. I read it and to be honest very little of it appealed to me. But I never tossed the book away or lent it to anyone. I think I had this suspicion that one day, one day, I'd find the book on my shelf again and somehow it would suddenly make sense.
This is, in fact, what came to pass, though I cannot recall exactly when that was. I just know that years later -- probably a decade after I'd first purchased the book -- I was scanning my shelves for something light to read, came across it, and thought, "Oh, what the hell." And suddenly it just... worked.
No, wait. I know that this happened less than a decade after I bought the book, because I remember that it was the first essay in the collection ("The Bloomsbury Group Live at the Apollo") that suddenly struck me as being hysterically funny, and that I was re-reading the piece during the height of my record collecting years. That would make it between 1988 and 1994. Any humor connected to the liner notes of records would have appealed to me tremendously then... and that particular essay of Frazier's is a doozy.

I am thinking about Dating Your Mom and Ian Frazier again because last week at the public library I picked up a new collection of Frazier's essays, Lamentations of the Father, thinking, "Man, I haven't looked at a book by Ian Frazier in I don't know how long." I took the book home and have laughed out loud while reading it at least six times. Additionally, I've been driving Notarius crazy by insisting on reading passages aloud to him at least ten times.

Most of the books I take out from the library are titles that I'm curious to read but don't wish to actually own... but I have a distinct feeling that one of these days I will break down and buy my own copy of Lamentations of the Father. I don't want to bore anyone or risk ruining the book (for those of you who might actually scout out a copy) by quoting from Frazier or going into it much further than this... but please, people. Find the title essay, at least. Read it. And enjoy...

And if you're in a used bookstore and stumble on Dating Your Mom, buy it. Just buy it, all right?
Thank you.

Hummerstag 2008

Miss Edith and Notarius have a friend who, eight years ago, decided that every year we three must celebrate a holiday known to us as Lobster Day. In Germany it is known, of course, as Hummerstag. It began when Notarius and I were grocery shopping one summer day and noticed that lobsters were on a deep sale. "Hey! Let's have lobster for dinner!" we said. Little did we know what we were getting into. Our friend joined us for dinner that night and said, "This is great! Let's do this every year! Lobster Day!"

Hummerstag is held on a different date every year, as far as I can tell; Hummerstag is a kind of moveable feast, and its date is determined by something to do with when the Red Sox are playing the Yankees. Miss Edith knows not and cares not how the date is determined; her job is simply to cook. So as long as the groceries are obtained in good order, Hummerstag can take place any old time. But it's usually sometime in July.

The Hummerstag menu revolves, of course, around lobsters, which are obtained at a local supermarket and then killed with pomp and ceremony and ruthlessness by Notarius, who grew up on Cape Cod and is unafraid of lobsters. "Here, Bug, Bug, Bug," he'll croon as he opens the noisy paper bag holding the lobsters. We used to have a ceremonial Harassment of the Kitty every Hummerstag (our cat is, surprisingly, afraid of lobsters) but now he's old and we just leave him be. He sleeps through Hummerstag and that's fine: he's earned it.

The menu for Hummerstag has evolved over the years. Initially it was lobster, corn on the cob, potato salad with red peppers and scallions, and maybe some green vegetable as another side dish if I was feeling guilty about serving so much starch.

Then it was lobster, corn on the cob, caprese (fresh tomatoes sliced and served with fresh mozzarella and basil, a dish easily created here in the summertime since we live within spitting distance of several fine Italian grocery stores), and couscous salad.

Then we dropped the corn on the cob because, frankly, boiling the water for the corn made our house far too hot. It was bad enough doing one pot for the lobsters; two pots was just murderous. To tell you the truth, I miss the corn -- I love corn on the cob -- but the kitchen is much more comfortable now that we only worry about one huge pot of boiling water and not two.

It's true you have to boil water for couscous, but not so much, and not for very long, and you can do it well in advance of cooking the lobsters. So I don't mind that at all.

Historically, dessert on Hummerstag has been either ice cream sandwiches (bought at the local supermarket) or brownies (made by Miss Edith), but this year we broke with tradition and served chocolate sorbet. This was a great success. I intend to teach myself to make my own sorbet one of these days -- Notarius received an ice cream maker for Christmas from someone, I can't think who, and I ought to learn how to use it -- but since I wasn't up to it this past Hummerstag, we sated ourselves with pints of Ciao Bella sorbet. If you haven't had this stuff, please go out now and buy some. I know it's expensive, but listen, darling: it's worth it.

Bottles of Prosecco go perfectly with Hummerstag meals. They must be very cold.

I've come to think of Hummerstag as a kind of summertime Thanksgiving that only we celebrate. I cook and cook and cook; we spend days shopping in preparation; there's always a ton of dishes to wash; and every year, even with all the work, I'm always so glad we did it.

And then Sunday, the New York Times Magazine talked about lobster... it was a Lobster Day Miracle.

Tomato Pie

As I write this, tomatoes are getting kind of a bad rap because an outbreak of salmonella is being blamed on them. People in many states have gotten sick, and it's not good, and I don't want you to think I'm encouraging you go to out and contract salmonella. But we're thinking about summer cooking these days, and to me that means tomato pie.

I read about tomato pie in Laurie Colwin's book More Home Cooking; this was in 1993. I didn't attempt to make it until several years later, probably around 1999, when Notarius and I were living together. It's not that tomato pie is so hard to make, but it -- at least this form of it -- is a little time consuming. So let's jump right in, and assume that you, dear reader, have, say, a Saturday afternoon with not much going on and a desire to have something really tasty for dinner.

Basically, Laurie Colwin's tomato pie (which she snagged from a Connecticut teashop called Chaiwalla, which I've been to (is it still there?) and is (was?) a completely charming place) is about tomatoes and biscuit and just enough glop to hold everything together.

Take a biscuit dough recipe and make enough for two layers: one will cover the bottom of a 9" pie pan and the other will be the top crust. Since everyone's got their own favorite biscuit dough recipe, some of which involve powdered mixes or cans, I'm going to refrain from offering a recipe here, but if anyone wants one they can let me know and I'll supply one. My point here is: get some dough together. Put half of it, maybe a little more than half, rolled out in the bottom of your pie pan. Set the other half aside.

Now, here I begin to take some liberties with Laurie Colwin, but this recipe is, as far as I'm concerned, so flexible that almost anything goes. Scatter some cheese (I generally use cheddar but provolone would work nicely too) atop that first layer of biscuit dough. Don't put as much as you'd put for pizza; you just want to sort of lace the dough with enough cheese so that it won't get completely soggy from the tomatoes and then have the finished product be impossible to slice neatly. Take about 2 pounds of really gorgeous tomatoes and slice them thinly. Drain them a little -- this is pie that can get really soggy really quickly, and while that tastes good it makes it a bitch to serve -- and then place a layer of tomatoes on top of the cheese.

Now, here is another place where I vary Colwin's recipe. She has you make a thick layer of tomatoes, scatter some herbs on (she suggests basil, chives, or scallions; I favor scallions), and then she has you put on the last layers of filling, which are 1 1/2 cups grated cheddar and about 1/3 cup of mayonnaise thinned with lemon juice. I have done this, and it's fine. However, my own mode is a little more sloppy. I put one layer of tomatoes, and then scatter some cheese and glop on some of the mayo goop (boy, this is not sounding so appetizing, is it, with all this glop and gloop), and then repeat this process until the tomatoes, cheese, and mayo are all used up. I suppose it depends really on how polished a finished product you're really after.

The top layer of filling, however, really should be cheese.

Once the filling is laid in there, you roll out the second layer of biscuit dough and carefully lay it on top of the filling and seal the edges. Prick a few slashes artfully through the top crust and then bake this at 400 degrees. In my experience it takes about 30 minutes to bake this through.

Colwin discusses the secret to this pie, according to the woman who owns Chaiwalla, which would be to bake it in the morning and then reheat it in the evening when you want to eat it. I think this is pretty sensible, particularly for summertime. The thing is, you'd have to be someone who's organized enough to do all this work in the morning so that you could eat it at night. If you're that kind of person, then: fabulous. HOWEVER, even if you're not, it works out fine, since it's good after only one baking as well. (If you decide to go for the morning workout and then reheat in the evening, you reheat it at 300 or 350 or so -- don't let the oven get too hot because then you'll really slam the biscuit crust, which would be a shame.)

This tomato pie is a messy thing to serve and eat, almost no matter what, but it is incredibly good. I have served it at dinner parties and I have served it to Notarius when it was just the two of us planning to spend an evening in front of the television set. Like a black dress, it can be dressed up or down depending on how artfully you handle the top crust and depending on how you accessorize, shall we say. Additionally, you can vary the tomato pie almost endlessly depending on how you feel about cheese. Goat cheeses are really good in the filling. Those who like Swiss cheeses would probably groove on them in tomato pie, but I'm not a big Swiss cheese fan, so have never tried it... but I could see adding in some crumbled blue cheese, or some Bel Paese, or even maybe Port Salut. Definitely Monterey Jack or Muenster. What you want is something that will melt really nicely.

Laurie Colwin claims that this tomato pie can be made well with canned tomatoes, but on this point I'm afraid that I must respectfully disagree. I have tried it many, many times, but I always feel that the pie suffers for it. To me this is an entirely seasonal dish -- high summer, or not at all -- and to be honest it makes us all appreciate the tomato pies I do make all the more.

Enjoy, enjoy...

TOMATO PIE: the basic ingredients list

1 recipe for biscuit dough (double crust)
2 lbs. fresh tomatoes which do not have to be peeled but should be drained slightly
2-3 scallions, or basil, or chives, or whatever floats your boat
2 or so cups of grated cheddar (or other cheeses as you desire), to be used throughout the assembly process
1/3 cup mayonnaise (I use Hellman's), cut with a little lemon juice (2-3 tbs. or so)

On Picnics, In Earnest

In general, Miss Edith thinks picnics are kind of cruddy. The notion of eating outdoors sounds fun but the reality is, you wind up fighting off bugs, which are attacking either you or your food or both, and you're generally also rather uncomfortably seated on the ground, which is not a good place for resting beverages. (When grassy hills come equipped with cup holders, I guess, then we can talk.)
So don't invite me to a picnic.
But here's the thing: picnic food is often really, really good. I mean, who doesn't like potato salad? Only an asshole doesn't like potato salad.

I vividly recall a day when Notarius and I were courting. In those days he still lived in Boston, as I recall, and the time we spent together was minimal. On a hot summer weekday he managed to get away from Boston and come visit me, and on a whim we drove to Hammonasset Beach, which is in Madison, Connecticut, a town I otherwise have little to do with. As I remember it, I'd made pizzas for dinner the night before, and there was a whole onion pizza left over. We sliced it up, wrapped it in tinfoil, and packed ourselves into the car along with a blanket and something to drink; tragically, I cannot remember if we drank wine, beer, or seltzer -- hell, we might have just had a thermos of ice water. But I remember that the pizza tasted incredibly good sitting on the beach, there; we'd parked the car and then walked a long way down the nearly-empty beach until we found just the right spot. Notarius skipped some stones -- he's good at that sort of thing -- and I egged him on by collecting rocks for him to throw -- and by the time we ate I thought I'd never had a more perfect day.
Miss Edith can be sentimental sometimes.

My point is that picnics do not have to revolve around grilled things or cole slaws from the supermarket (though I do like those) or foods that you're always worrying will be spoiled by the time you unpack them.

Some day I will go on a picnic where I serve bellinis in glass glasses, and where there are little dishes of cornichons and bowls of hulled strawberries with cream, but until then, I'll remember that picnic of leftover pizza with the utmost fondness.

Don't worry. Tomato Pie is up next. Though I don't recommend it for casual beach picnics -- just for the record....

Miss Edith Ponders Picnics

Today's New York Times has a nice thing by Mark Bittman about cooking for picnics. It's one of those pieces that's really just an irresistibly long list. I highly recommend perusing said list when thinking about cooking for picnics, or, for that matter, when trying to figure out what to make for dinner any night of the week during the summer.

I found, as I read the list, that a surprising number of the items Bittman mentions are things we eat here at home pretty frequently in the summertime. Cold peanut noodles, for example -- cold Asian noodle dishes are consumed here at least once a week all summer long. Innumerable versions of rice salads are also consumed. Couscous salads are good, too; I favor Israeli couscous in summer salads, though, over the usual little tiny couscous buds, just because I find the more substantial shape carries its own against coarsely chopped vegetables better. (Bittman doesn't seem to care one way or another, if I remember correctly.)

Anyhow, if you're looking for inspiration, this really does seem like a good place to start.

Bittman does not mention tomato pie, which is a summer staple to me, but then again, it takes longer than twenty minutes to assemble. Maybe I'll talk about tomato pie another time...

On Being Really Grossed Out Last Night

Miss Edith used to watch a lot of pretty lurid movies; she still reads true crime books; and reading horror fiction -- well, Miss Edith cut her teeth on Stephen King, John Saul, and other joyously trashy writers in that category.
It's true she is a little squeamish in real life: Miss Edith can't stand to see or even hear about things going near people's eyes, which is a problem for Edith herself when she goes to the eye doctor.
But I vividly remember an afternoon when I bought a tuna sub, a foot long, and took it home and sat down with it to watch -- happily -- "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer." This was a really, really violent movie, and I placidly watched it while eating my sandwich, and it was only when the movie was over that I realized it was maybe a little bit strange to be able to eat food while watching people get hacked into little bits.

This week Miss Edith watched a movie called "Requiem for a Dream" which came out a few years back; this is a flick about junkies and speed addicts, and I guess it's a love/hate kind of movie. I found it repugnant but at the same time couldn't stop thinking about it, and yesterday I watched the last half hour of it again. Some of the images in it are just crushingly vivid. I don't think I'd recommend this movie to small children, but for adult viewers it's definitely an experience. I mention the movie because there's a few shots in it (no pun intended) that are really not for the squeamish. "Requiem for a Dream" calls for a strong stomach and the ability to not look away even as you're completely horrified, disgusted, and terrified about what godawfulness will happen next.

So yesterday's mail brought me the latest issue of The New Yorker, and in it is an article about itching. I found this amusing, because just a few nights ago Notarius and I were washing dishes together (well, he was washing, I was drying) and we were discussing the nature of an itch: is it a sensation in a unique category or is it really a form of pain, as scientists have said for some time. (I think we agreed it was a form of pain.) The New Yorker article, which was written by Atul Gawande, reports that scientists no longer feel that itching is a form of pain, so clearly Notarius and I were just full of shit.

I began to read the article yesterday evening, as I was waiting for dinner to be ready. Miss Edith fixed herself a nice gin rickey and sat down at the kitchen table to read. The article was fascinating, and I read happily until I got to a segment of it that just cut me off short. I actually, literally, covered my mouth with my hands and cried out, "Oh my god, oh my god."

The passage I'd read described how a woman who had been suffering from a basically pathological need to scratch an itch on her head had awakened one morning to find strange fluid coming from where she'd been scratching. And it turned out she had scratched right through her scalp, through her skull, and into her brain.

God help us all.

What I'm wondering, now, is how many horrified letters The New Yorker will receive about this article. I cannot remember anything else ever printed in there that struck me as being so graphically disgusting. I thought Gawande's article was great, I really did, but, boy howdy: that paragraph really stopped Miss Edith in her tracks.

Story of My Life

The most recent issue of The New Yorker (June 9, 2008), The Fiction Issue, has a cover that just about broke my heart... another of those great Tomine covers, but this one... well, long-time readers of Miss Edith's commentaries will understand what she means...



Miss Edith has spent a great deal of money at Amazon.com, but... not on books. The largest purchases I have made through Amazon, just for the record, are that of a new vacuum cleaner, and of a number of boxes of Borax and Arm and Hammer washing soda.

I know you needed to know that.

Incidentally.

There isn't much point in apologizing for not having written so much in the last few months. Those of you who know me in real life know that I've been rather busy. To be honest, I'm still rather busy. But these days I'm not as likely to be falling asleep at seven o'clock at night, and, in addition, since I am no longer working any kind of day job, I'm starting to find that I have a small amount of time to devote to keeping Miss Edith's voice out on the airwaves, as Notarius would say... so to speak.

Miss Edith will do her utmost to once again bring you light and joy in small doses now and then... but please be understanding if the posts are erratically timed. Frankly, my entire life is erratically timed these days. But I'm doing the best I can.

I would like to point out that I do know for sure that it is summer: Miss Edith noticed a wasp buzzing around her pristine, sunny kitchen this morning. A better housewife than I would have grabbed some handy aerosol thingy or natural potion to kill the vicious beast. Being Miss Edith, however, I grabbed the first thing I could think of to use to trap it: a shot glass.

I was not effective, and the wasp is still on the loose. But I've left the shot glass out; I think it'll come in handy later on...

A Follow-up to the Earlier Vermont Country Store Posting

Well, some months have gone by, and the Vermont Country Store has graced Miss Edith's mailbox with a summer catalogue, which contains a number of tempting new items. Miss Edith curled up with Notarius on the couch for some serious browsing, and we had a nice time reminiscing about the last catalogue we'd received from them, which inspired a posting here about the, um, intimate products they now carry.

It was with some interest, then, that we flipped to the middle of the catalogue, where we saw that there were indeed new intimate products available. By far the most entertaining of these was a bath pillow that comes with a submersible vibrator tucked into it -- how handy is that? -- but I couldn't help noticing that, as always, when new items are added to the catalogue, old items must be taken out. One assumes that the items that were taken out of the print catalogue were things that just didn't fly. Well, dear readers, cock rings are no longer in the print catalogue for the Vermont Country Store. Instead, we see more items that are clearly marketed toward the female customer. (You can, if you wish, still find the cock rings at the Vermont Country Store's website -- thank god, right?) Obviously, the people who place orders from the print catalogue are overwhelmingly female... or, I suppose, it could be that the men who place the orders are convinced that if they've got problems in bed, it's their mate's fault, and not theirs. Huh.

On a side note, I've observed with much amusement that many of the people who have been reading Miss Edith's ramblings on this, that, and the other, have arrived here by doing searches for phrases like "Vermont Country Store Cock Rings." Presumably they're not unhappy to find this, that, and the other distracting them on the path to having a bit of the other.

The Bryn Mawr Bookshop in New Haven

It has finally happened.
The Bryn Mawr Bookshop has closed its New Haven location. My dear friend Patsy Recchia will no longer be stationed behind the counter, dispensing books, cruel wit, and kind words to those who deserve them. Her dog, Zoe, who's a real sweetie, will no longer be coming out from behind the counter to greet the regulars or to curl up on that beat-up old armchair.

I'm sorry to see it go. Miss Edith has logged a lot of hours at the Bryn Mawr Bookshop. Most people here won't know the difference, now that the store is closed, but I know the difference.

So unimportant, but Miss Edith had to say something...

...so Miss Edith is, you might have guessed, a Parker Posey fan.
As such, she was psyched to watch "The Return of Jezebel James," which had its premiere on the Fox network a few nights ago. Miss E knew it was gonna be a dog, but you know what? We watched it anyhow, Notarius and I, and while he just thought it was silly, I found myself thinking, "Not only is this silly, it's just so badly put together!"
Is anyone going to rally around this ill-conceived show before it gets canceled?
My god!
The laugh track! The strange alterations between episode 1 and episode 2 that make no sense -- like the details relating to Our Heroine's love life -- or the details about the publishing house where she works, which is, suddenly, HarperCollins?!?

And, I have to wonder, exactly where does Our Heroine live that she can, as an editor, afford that apartment? I mean, surely the average children's book editor -- or children's book packager, which really seems to be a more apt description of Posey's character -- doesn't earn enough to get an apartment like that... and yet, I don't see any tv-style indications that she's supposed to come from a wealthy family... so what gives, people?

I am sure that none of my readers care about this, but I wanted to vent about it nonetheless. It's been eating at me for days, and they say that keeping anger bottled up inside causes ulcers... and I've got enough tsuris these days without developing ulcers...

Let's go watch "Party Girl" again, shall we?

The Vermont Country Store

Miss Edith grew up in a household that received catalogues from the Vermont Country Store, a wonderful place in Vermont where you could buy items that seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. As an adult, I have often taken advantage of the company's offerings, obtaining tubes of Boroleum, strange foreign candies, and obscure articles of clothing. There was a kind of Yankee vision of purity in the company's offerings, an innocence, which was dampened slightly when the printed catalogue stopped using only drawings to depict their offerings and began using photogrpahs (and color!). But Miss Edith's loyalty to the company remained undimmed.

Last night we received a new catalogue from The Vermont Country Store. Notarius thumbed through it quickly, ogling the canned foods -- cans of Cincinnati chili, a recent obsession of ours; cans of fried eggplant -- and commenting that we should place an order. I myself sat down with the catalogue with an eye toward acquiring birthday presents for some people we know, and was jarred (not canned) when I flipped a page to come across a number of items which would never have appeared in the Vermont Country Store catalogues of my youth.

Miss Edith doesn't think she's a prude, but... Oh, my.

I handed the catalogue back to Notarius. "I nearly dropped my drink when I saw this," I said. He stared, as they say, uncomprehendingly, at the pages I had open. "Breast lift cream," he said blandly.
"You're not focusing," I said.
There was a pause.
"Oh, my," he said after a moment. "Cock rings!"

So now you can get Boroleum, linen handkerchiefs, flannel sheets, and vibrators, and cock rings, all from one charming Vermont company. Ain't life grand?