Ludwig Boltzmann's Steak Tartar

That Will Be That: Ludwig Boltzmann’s Last Meal, September 4, 1906, Duino, Italy

Ludwig stares at the wooden platter in despair.

On it, with utmost care, has been arranged steak tartar —

several small dishes of condiments surrounding

a rounded heap of raw minced beef into which

a single egg yolk has been dropped.

It’s a treat from his wife, who’s thought to combat

his dour mood of late with a dish from the Old Country

that he used to love. They are at the Hotel Plas,

on the Adriatic coast, for a spot of R & R

to shore up his unstable state of mind

before the lectures he’s due to give.

But all Ludwig can see are his brains,

the yellow egg throbbing at the center

like the restless nucleus of an atom,

more dense than he can imagine,

more, even than the rye bread

his wife is breaking apart with her bare hands.

She points to the anchovies, the salt, the capers,

but he’s imagining they’re electrons, protons, neutrons, entropy,

the Second Law of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.

He’s watching his daughter Elsa scoop up some meat,

dip it in parsley and eat, oblivious to the fact

that while there’s less on the platter, it’s not really gone.

“Don’t sweat the small stuff,” a therapist once told him,

but the small stuff is his life’s work,

something his colleagues don’t even believe exists.

He dips his fingers in and chews it over: tomorrow,

when his wife and daughter go for a swim,

he’ll hang himself, and that will be that.

The Cooking of Germany, Time-Life Books, 1969

Also from this book: Sauerkraut Stuffed Pineapple, Potato Pancakes, A Fate Worse Than Death, When The Wheels Fall Off

The Saddest Wedding Cake That Ever Was

The Saddest Wedding Cake That Ever Was

Once upon a time there was a wedding cake which was made for the nuptials of a young couple who had met at a bus stop and fallen in love. It had seemed to the girl that she would never find a beau, and had given up looking. People, she knew, called her “homely,” which was a euphemism for someone who rode the 61 into town at 4:30 pm to begin her working day as an office cleaner. The young fellow usually rode his bicycle in to work, but it had a flat tire and so he’d taken the bus instead. They’d gotten off at the same stop and found themselves waiting for the 61 again later that night, alone together under a streetlight in the light drizzle.

One thing had led to another fairly rapidly, and a wedding was required. The young man wore his best pair of trousers and trimmed his beard; his bride put on blue eye shadow and a smile. Her aunt had made the cake “on the cheap,” as she said, due to the lack of advance notice, and felt she couldn’t be blamed for it. “You get what you pay for,” she was often overheard claiming, as if this explained most things.

It was necessarily a small reception, things being what they were — just a few photos of the happy pair, and a few of the parents too, the groom’s father grimacing for the camera. They held it in the pub’s back room before the evening crowd piled in. There were drinks of course — pints of bitter, mostly — and a small bowl of mixed nuts. The bride’s mother popped next door for a bag of bon-bons to liven things up when it looked like the nuts would go a bit quick.

The wedding cake wore a tulle-covered heart made from two pipe cleaners, and a sugar bell atop cement-like icing which had been applied with what could only be called a heavy hand. It was plain sponge, without vanilla, because the aunt had run out and not realized until it was too late.

The saddest wedding cake that ever was sat on the bar while the wedding party drowned their sorrows in beer. All except the bride, that is, who sipped at a glass of orange juice, Doctor’s orders. Every now and then she ran her hand over her belly self-consciously, just in case it had all been a dream.

Eventually, the bar became noisy, and smoky, and someone, no-one knows who, accidentally stubbed out a cigarette on the top tier. Someone else poked a finger into one side, and still another drew an obscene picture in the icing with a cocktail sword.

It was only after the married couple roused themselves at noon the next day that they remembered the cake. But by then it had considered itself abandoned, and thrown itself away.

The End.

 Pies and Cakes, Better Homes and Gardens, 1967

Also from this book: Déclassé Pie

New Cabbage Slaw

Derek opened his eyes and let them rest in the dark of his cupped hands for a few moments after finishing the prayer. He usually prayed before dinner in the manner of his parents, resting his head in his hands, elbows on the table. He knew other families who offered a prayer before dinner by simply holding their palms together in front of themselves, or by holding hands in a circle, but they all closed their eyes. You had to close your eyes. If you didn’t, Derek knew, the prayer didn’t count. It was a sacred minute where he felt it was possible for God to enter the room and change things without you looking. Every day, before partaking of the evening meal, he thus played a game of hide-and-seek, and every time, like a child, he wanted to prolong the possibility that a miracle had in fact occurred, no matter how small. Lately it seemed that he kept his eyes closed longer and longer, as if giving the Almighty extra time to fix things — things, Derek knew, he would never be able to see.

It was a thought he pondered while driving to work, sitting on the freeway. It was, he figured, the essence of faith. His limitations as a mortal man would prevent him from ever knowing for sure if God had been at work in his life (or his dining room), or not. If the traffic was particularly bad, this line of reasoning led him invariably to the uncomfortable thought that he was trying, in his closed-eyed silence, to out-maneuver God, to catch Him in the act, and thus validate his beliefs. That made him feel like a cheat. By the time he reached the office, he couldn’t wait to get to work to take his mind off it.

The first thing Derek did once he sat at his desk was to place, very carefully, so as to make no noise, his bagged lunch in the garbage bin. He never looked inside the brown paper bag; he didn’t need to. He’d prefer not to know. After he did this, he uttered a quick prayer for forgiveness, and fired up his computer.

Derek had met his wife at church; they had been set up on a blind date by mutual friends — a married couple who not long after Derek and his wife married, fell apart spectacularly — in ways Derek often thought guiltily about. There had been wild alcoholic binges, pills, rumors of prostitutes. Derek’s new wife thought it best that they, like others in the church, stopped taking this couple’s calls. That was years ago now, and Derek sometimes wondered what became of them. He remembered them in his prayers, and at night, when he couldn’t sleep, often found himself re-living outings and dinner-dates, searching his memory for clues as to the cracks in this couple’s relationship. He came up empty. There was nothing to point to; they had seemed perfectly happy. Derek lay there staring at his ceiling, listening to his wife’s breathing, wondering if anyone else would think that of him. Probably, he thought. They probably would.

Every day, at the dinner table, Derek gave thanks for the food, and for the Lord’s bounty, using the same words he’d recited from childhood. His children said them too. Everyone was hungry.

Then, when he opened his eyes, he gazed at the coleslaw his wife had served in a carved-out cabbage, and knew that his prayers had not been answered. God had not intervened; he was being tested, yet again, by a force greater and with more tenacity than Derek could comprehend. He smiled and held out his plate, and even as the words “that looks lovely, Dear” escaped his lips, he blasphemed loudly in the depths of his heart. 

Salad Book, Better Homes and Gardens, 1958

The Big Squeez

Here at Kraft we dislike the letter C. Normally, the word “craft” is spelled with C, but we spell it with a K instead. We hate C’s so much we dropped it from the word “snak.” There is no logic to our spelling. We just think certain letters are superfluous, that’s all. Take the word “squeeze.” It does not need that final E. Some of you might argue that the word “snak” could be mistaken for “snake,” but that would be plain wrong. We are advertising something that is long and wiggly. OK, that sounds a lot like a snake. We do not recommend you squeeze snakes. That’s dangerous. We’d prefer you squeeze some of our delicious Squeez-A-Snak onto a cracker. Or an egg. Or anything you have lying around. You can squeeze it straight into your mouth if you like, though that might be uncouth. No matter; we don’t judge. What you do in the privacy of your own home is your business. Squeeze all the snakes you like. Go crazy. After all, our motto is “A good time is only as good as its food.” That’s not really true, but it sounds good. Actually, it sounds awful. It makes no sense whatsoever. We had a contest in the office to see who could come up with a motto that used as many O’s as you could squeeze in. This is what won. That should tell you something about the caliber of people we have in the office. Don’t apply for a job here. No-one can spell, there are absurd rules about not using the letter C and they feed you this stuff all day long. I saw a guy squeeze some out onto his pencil and lick it off. I think he was preparing to stab himself with it just to get out of a meeting. He might have been the guy who came up with that motto. Clearly he needs help. Psychological help. Only someone about to fall into the abyss of despair could think that a good time is only as good as its food. What if the food sucks? You could be on a hot date with a pretty woman and eat shitty food, but it would still be a hot date. No-one cares about the food. You could go home and squeeze snakes. Also, why is it called “process cheese spread”? The cheese has been processed. Past tense. There is no such thing as process cheese, at least in grammar. Besides, it’s not real cheese, if you want to know the truth. It’s nothing like cheese. But they have to call it something. It’s more accurate to call it cheez, which you’d think they’d be all over, but no. They let that one slip through. Maybe the pencil guy was off that day. Maybe he was on a mental health break. This whole thing is depressing. No-one needs a chart to figure out what to do with this stuff. It’s in a tube; you cut a hole in one end and squeeze. It’s not difficult to figure out. It’s the thing you buy at the 7-11 when you’re drunk at 4am on your way home to balance the beer. Or maybe after your date, when you’re still starving because the food was so bad. Come to think of it, maybe pencil guy was on to something. He was just telling it like it is. If the ad is anything to go by, you’ll have a really bad time eating this food. You’ll stand there holding a tube of it in your hand in your empty kitchen with your box of crackers and no wife, no kids, no money for a pizza, no hope of ever scoring a hot date, and you’ll think to yourself: I’m a complete failure, I might as well off myself. You’ll think: my career consists of designing charts to show people what they can do with a tube of Squeez-A-Snak because we assume they are so profoundly stupid they can’t figure it out for themselves. You will use goo squeezed out onto a cracker four times on the same page and hope no-one notices that this isn’t four separate ideas just because you use a different shape cracker each time. Your own mother will tear out this ad from the magazine and show all her friends what her son does for a living. They will ask her why he can’t spell, given his expensive college education, and she will say maybe no-one will notice. Someone will point out the thing about the letter C. Next time she calls you she will relay this information and ask if you’ve been on any dates because she’d like grandchildren to spoil before she dies. You consider stabbing yourself in the neck with a pencil. But I digress. What was it you were saying?

Family Circle, 1973

More Yuckylicious ads: Behold The Versatronic, Gold Medal Memories, What A Douchebag, The Seven Year Itch, You Say Carat; I Say Carrot (Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off), Mad Men, It’s The Real Thing (What Is, Exactly?), Putting the Special in Special K