The Earl of Bunwich Folds

It’s approaching six o’clock and the Earl of Sandwich is holding a strong hand. He’s been at the card table since noon, but things have not been going his way; already he’s lost a fancy timepiece, a ship, some silver candlesticks and an entire flock of sheep. He’s starving but can’t afford to stop playing to eat.

The rest of the table has folded, and only his nemesis remains: the Earl of Bunwich, who rather fancies getting his paws on the jewels his mistress wears, and for that matter, also his mistress’s jewels, which even now threaten to spill from her décolleté. His stomach rumbles loudly, prompting Sandwich to remark that he’s a bit peckish.

In order to show off, Bunwich calls his servant over and asks him to bring him some food. The servant hesitates; this is a highly unusual task. What shall he bring? Bunwich leans back in his chair and with growing flourish requests a bun, cut in half, with some loose ground meat, a pickle, some green beans, a tomato and a slice of cheese. The servant looks alarmed. Insert the top half of the bun halfway, between the pickle and beans, Bunwich adds, only make it upside down.

Not to be outdone, Sandwich calls his servant over and asks for a sandwich. A sandwich, your honor? the boy replies, puzzled. That’s what I said, the Earl replies.

I bet everything I own that my dinner will be imitated for generations to come, offers the Earl of Bunwich, certain his opponent is bluffing.

Off speeds the boy. When he returns, he carries with him a piece of ham stuffed between two slices of bread. Bunwich laughs.

Sandwich merely eats, with his hands. Bunwich looks at the plate upon which his dinner sits. He has forgotten to ask for a knife and fork, and has no idea how to bring the food to his mouth. A long moment passes as dust motes float in the air in the candlelight. 

Bring me one of those things Sandwich has, calls someone from another table. Bunwich stops smiling.

I fold, he sighs.

Family Dinners in a Hurry, Golden Press, 1970

 Also from this book: S'mores, The Arithmetic of Desperation

Goodnight Asparagus

Goodnight board, goodnight knife

Goodnight cheese cut into a slice

Goodnight bread, and the cake of rice

Goodnight mayo, goodnight butter

Goodnight radish and goodnight lettuce

Goodnight cuke and goodnight pickle

Goodnight ham and goodnight Spam

Goodnight chips and goodnight lunch

Goodnight parsley; goodnight mush

And goodnight to the old lady whispering “hush”

Goodnight table, goodnight chair

Goodnight sandwiches everywhere

Cooking For Two, Better Homes and Gardens, 1968

Also from this book: Have A Coronary, Pizza Burger

Crisco Fever

In cooking, B.C. refers to the year 1910 and stands for Before Crisco. In all of human history up to that date, if you wanted a solid fat you had to rely on an animal for either lard or butter, both of which worked well but came with the kind of problems city dwellers have: they don’t keep well. If you lived on a farm you could feasibly make your own butter and gather your own lard as and when you needed it, but for the large numbers of new urban tenants for whom refrigeration was not always at hand, spoilage, especially during the summer months, was a problem.

The answer was hydrogenation — adding hydrogen molecules to fats to keep them solid at room temperature. Early on it was known as crystallization, and originally applied to cottonseed oil (which was far more common than soybean oil) for the purpose of making soap. The folks at Procter & Gamble Company — the detergent kings of Cincinnati — took a keen interest and because hydrogenated cottonseed oil was not inherently toxic, decided it could be a hugely profitable food that would solve the nation’s melting problem.

Crisco (short for crystallized cottonseed oil), was introduced to the market in 1911 and because it was a brand new invention, had to be sold to cooks who had only ever known animal fats. P&G cleverly gave away small cookery books with every purchase featuring familiar recipes in which any use of butter or lard was replaced with Crisco. Much space was given to explaining this new scientific wonder and its advantages to the modern cook and kitchen — including the welcome news that because of its high burning point (455 degrees), Crisco could be used for frying without creating smoke, and that because it was “pure” vegetable whose chemical composition was not affected by cooking, was easily digestible.

This of course was in the era before we knew the dangers of trans fats and their role in clogging arteries and raising blood sugar. Crisco was cheap to manufacture and could be done in fully automated factories to ensure a uniform and predictable product. Because it didn’t spoil, it leant baked goods a longer shelf life, enabling the rise of pre-packaged foods. The language in these early cookery books introduces the housewife to stearine, a fatty acid which gets its name from the Greek for tallow. Indeed, stearine’s solid waxiness lends itself to soap-making. Stearic acid can be found today in almost every aisle of the supermarket, in edibles and non-edibles alike.

Oleine — oleic acid — claimed by P&G to be the healthiest and most easily digestible of the three main fats (the other being linoline) is what Crisco is made from, and sounds familiar because it forms the basis of oleo, which has become synonymous with margarine (which is actually made from margaric acid). Despite its genesis as a vegetable fat, it is now known that oleine (a substance also found in human adipose fat and given off by decaying bees among other things) has been linked to breast cancer, whereas stearine, though it is an animal-based fat, is in fact more completely digested and has a better effect on cholesterol levels.

The inclusion of Crisco in every single recipe persists in cookbooks produced by their parent company today (now J. M. Smucker Co., the jam-makers), and where found in anything outside pastry-making (in which the Crisco replaced the traditional lard) or frying, appears highly suspect, added merely to increase use of the product rather than lend the food any discernable benefit.

Take these sandwich recipes for example. Note how butter is pushed into the barely noticible background as a flavor-enhancer for the bread (and try cutting an eighth-inch slice off ANY loaf!)

Mrs. Neil’s Cooking Secrets, The Procter & Gamble Company, 1924

Also from this book: The Importance of Being Ernest, Let Them Eat Cake

From The Sublime To The Ridiculous

In his book The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan coins the phrase the “Agricultural Sublime” to describe the “satisfactions of the ordered earth” — which is to say, nature being reigned in to unnatural shapes by man. Wherever man has become a husband of the land he has given it geometry, sowing by rows, squares, circles. Thus do grasses become regiments of wheat, oats, barley — while root vegetables are only given their freedom out of sight, underground.

Mastery over nature is ably demonstrated by the French formal gardens at palaces, like Versailles, for example, or in extravagant topiary or bonsai pruning. But it can also be seen in the baize-like lawns surrounding the stone edifices of Oxford and Cambridge universities, a quality tourists admire but cannot hope to replicate, as the wardens are fond of reminding them. Achieving perfection is easy, they say; all it takes is 400 years of watering and rolling.

It’s notable that people presume that should extra-terrestial life ever visit our lowly planet, they would make their presence known via crop circles. They wouldn’t land their spaceships on something large and flat like a North American mall parking lot; no — they prefer to land in the middle of a wheatfield. Even aliens (well, the people imitating them) prefer to leave geometric footprints, it seems. Old-growth forests are an intricate web of haphazard vegetation that adheres only to nature’s intelligent design, but when man cuts them down and re-plants, he does so in great rows as if the trees were the living ribs of a cathedral.

But these physical examples of order are only the ones which are easy to see. Man’s manipulation of nature’s very DNA through genetic modification is hidden but perhaps more insidious. The wildness and unpredictibility of a crop can be bred out, leaving docile, well-behaved, compliant plants who do not complain about growing cheek-to-cheek with their neighbor in ways nature worked for billennia to avoid. Today’s fields produce more corn per bushel than ever not necessarily because the ears are made to produce more kernals, but because more plants can be sown per square foot. Along with proximity comes disease, so they are bred to resist the pitfalls of monoculture. The NewLeaf potato resists its own bugs, and is therefore classified as a pesticide rather than a vegetable. As such, it has transcended yet another boundary ushered along by that architect of the taxonomy of the Agricultural Subline, Linneas.

The boxes into which plants are fitted, each according to its family and species give shape to nature’s messiness, and are just as rigid as a ploughed furrow. Folks like things that fit easily into pre-conceived spaces.

The lunchbox is one such space. Could anything be as far from the complexity of flesh as a circle of luncheon meat? There are people who have never known cheese to come in anything but square tiles of uniform yellow plastic. The deli counter is an emporium of sliceables designed to fit the dimensions of the sandwich loaf. What’s celebrated isn’t so much the flavor they impart but their ability to fit in. We tend to like our edibles to be predictable, reliable, recognizable. We have learned to trust that foods which come in a geometric form are safer than those which don’t — having survived the rigor of the factory rather than the vigor of the farm.

The palatte of animal fats pressed neatly into shape we choose from to layer between two slices of bread (as seen above) might be called the Lunchbox Sublime.

The Lunch Box Cookbook, Book Production Industries, Inc., 1955

Frosted Sandwich Loaf

Imagine the disappointment this lady’s guests will feel when she slices into what looks like a nice, deep carrot cake. After all, she does have her best china out and what looks like a set of gold cutlery. She’s gone to such trouble to decorate the platter with parsley grass, radish flowers and daisies.

But no! underneath that cream cheese frosting lies a giant sandwich!

Her guests better like egg salad, tuna salad and chicken salad, because each sandwich contains all three! Genius!

Just one question: how on earth does one pick a slice up? Isn’t the point of a sandwich the fact you don’t need utensils?

Helpfully, the recipe states that you should prepare each filling in “individual bowls” as opposed to all in the same bowl. In fact, no recipe is needed: the picture gives you all the instruction you need.

Soup, Salad and Sandwich Cookbook, Ideals Publishing Corp., 1981

Also from this book: One Is Such A Lonely Number, Potty Mouth, Penis Salad