Stop Clowning Around

 Do clowns ever stop being weirdly decorated middle-aged men in stupid clothing who appear at birthday parties to perform sad acts of trickery for crying children, like some bad acid trip made flesh and blood, in order to demonstrate in the most visceral way possible the awful toll that years of hallucinatory drugs have on your brain cells, and start being simply terrifying?

Why must parents encourage their offspring to enjoy the attention of adults dressed up in furry outfits (Santa, the Easter Bunny, Mascots, Chuck E. Cheese, Disney Characters, Sesame Street Puppets, Clowns)? Doesn’t it just inculcate a knee-jerk response to laugh and point at people who look “different”? Isn’t the thought of a giant talking rodent inherently revolting? Why are clown’s hats so very very small while their shoes are so very very big?

It is with these considerations in mind that we now turn to this birthday cake featuring the troubling antics of three drunken clowns, two of which are sliding off the cake in an intoxicated stupor, while the other nurses his hangover leaning up against some blocks which spell out the word “UG.” Perhaps the clowns have fallen off the cake and are trying to climb back up. Perhaps they seek to rescue their fallen comrade before he vomits blood all over his lap. Oh, wait, he’s already done that.

One can only hope that Ug, whoever he is, will not suffer permanent mental scars from this portrayal of the degeneracy of contemporary life in frosting with which his parents have used to celebrate his life.

Easy Cake Decorating Cookbook, Mildred Brand, 1980

Also from this book: Frosting The Snowman, The Ephemeral Gladys LeBlanc, Thomas Kincade: Painter of Cakes

Mutton Chops

Does anything announce the presence of a man of extraordinary virility more than a luxuriant display of facial hair? The fashion for men’s facial grooming has undergone significant changes over time, with the prevailing vogue an easy indicator as to the era in which it was popular.

The Victorians, so fussy about other aspects of their appearance, seem to have focused all of their expression of personal style into outrageously coiffed facial hairstyles, their bushy, waxed and pomaded whiskers practically screaming for attention. World War One put a quick end to all of this, in the form of chemical warfare and the need for gas masks to affix to the face with an airtight seal. Mustaches survived this assault, though they experienced a severe blow by their association with certain abominable dictators of the World War Two era.

Today it is rare to see a gentleman sporting the mutton chops of his great-great grandfather’s era, though to flaunt such a startling and archaic style is to signal one's masculinity and confidence very publically. It is the province of the butch gay man, (and) or actual butchers. To sport mutton chops is to defy social norms (and perhaps women) by deliberately looking old-fashioned — therefore they are best cultivated alongside a preference for pinstriped shirts, suspenders, and trousers. Boots and leather-uppers only, sneaker-wearers need not apply.

Ambrose Burnside

The sideburn is a corruption of the name “Burnside,” the Civil War general whose own flew like giant wings from his face, drawing attention away from his vastly receded hairline. Another Civil War buff who has proudly and defiantly worn mutton chop sideburns probably since he was a toddler, is a certain Ian Kilmister, or as most know him, Lemmy. If your nickname is Lemmy, you are required to get aggressive with your face. 

Elvis kinda-sorta went there towards his late period, but never committed to them as much as he did to the flamboyance of his lapels, an extension of his facial hair rendered in polyester.

Lemmy

Any perusal of the mutton chop on the internet provides some alarming examples, most of which make their wearers appear to look demented, despite evidence to the contrary (see Friedrich, Caspar David, and Darwin, Charles). Also check out Century of the Beard)

Oh, hang on. You meant mutton chops, as in chops of mutton. That’s something completely different.

A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes, Charles Elmé Francatelli, 1852

Also from this book: What Pluck!. Heads, Plucks, Shanks and Scrag-Ends, How (Not) To Make Coffee, Take A Deep Breath..., Stuffed Up, Bee Stings, How To Make The Most Of Your Pig Before It Is Killed, Faggots

What The Dickens?

To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

Thereafter my life was one of hardship and misery, characterized by the deaths of all the women I ever loved or who loved me, and the abandonment and imprisonment of anyone who could be said to be a father figure. I was beaten, starved, and sent to work on cruel gulags full of child wretches similar to myself, unwanted by society except as beasts of burden. I wore rags, slept on the dirt floor, shivered in winter, ate scraps I wrestled from the greedy clutches of rats, and bore the scars from such a number of flea bites as cannot be counted. I fairly crawled with lice and weeping sores, my young teeth either knocked out or blackened, snot and tears having carved permanent rivulets down my face. I reeked of urine and cabbage, a stench my vocabulary is not broad enough to describe.

Nevertheless I was once served this splendid pie made from the leftover bits from a Sunday chicken along with some vegetables that had been stolen from the kitchen of a banker, whose cook had carelessly left the door open. She was duly whipped and let go on the spot. As you can see, it is baked in a crude pastry shell fashioned by a one-armed prostitute who took pity on me. It was the first meal I had ever been served.

I am sad to report that it lacked the toothsome mélange of flavor I expected, having heard on the street so much about this fabled dish. The crust was a tad too thick and undercooked in places, and the peas and carrots were singularly unimaginative additions. As for the sauce, it suffered an excess of salt, and I detected beneath its floury notes a surfeit of nutmeg to balance the heavy-handed use of marjoram. Not to bemoan a point, or be too critical of my erstwhile savior’s meager resources, but I feel compelled to add that the choice of metal dish in which this delicacy was baked and served set entirely the wrong tone for the tenor of the occasion.

In short, it was the most disappointing event of my life to date. I may never recover from the shock to my sensibilities this pie occasioned, and find that I am now forced to re-evaluate my whole misguided and sentimental appreciation for the cooking of what can only be described as the urban peasantry of Victorian England.

Dear Reader: do not make the mistake I have made. If someone offers you this pie, refuse gently but firmly, and return to take comfort in your stale crust of bread.

Low-Cost Main Dishes, Family Circle, 1978

           
Also from this book: Floundering, All Trussed Up And Nowhere To Go, Adventures in Salad

Floundering

To the confusion and delight of those learning the English language, the word “fish” is both a noun (an underwater creature usually with fins) and a verb (what you do to procure yourself one for supper). If something “smells fishy,” it either means that literally, there is an odor of fish in the air, or as an allusion to the briny stink, that something suspicious is going on.

“Flounder” provides a similarly tasty bit of linguistics. A flounder is a type of fish, as well as a behavior. The behavior — to thrash about clumsily or wallow ineffectually — is perhaps a characteristic misinterpretation of the fish, which, as a flatfish, burrows under or lays on the loose gravel on the ocean floor, camouflaged perfectly so that it disappears against this backdrop. It then bursts to life when lunch swims by. It has developed a unique answer to the problem of being a flat fish — that of only being able to see with the eye facing upwards — by moving one of its eyes around so that both are on the same side of its head. Flounder are the marine equivalent of a Picasso painting.

Flounder don’t flounder at all. The same cannot be said for the culinary genius behind this dish, however, which would benefit both from disappearing into the background and by being prepared by someone with an eye on each side of their head.

Low-Cost Main Dishes, Family Circle, 1978

Also from this book: What The Dickens?, All Trussed Up And Nowhere To Go, Adventures in Salad

Peppy-Sauced Meat Loaf

You’re in the stands watching a thrilling fight to the death. It is hot, dusty, and the crowd about you is rapt, following the artist’s every move, swaying in their seats.  He is resplendent in black pants, huge white ruffled blouse, a thin pair of suspenders barely able to reach across the great expanse of his deep shoulders. He holds a large red kerchief — his muleta — in one hand, occasionally to mop the ocean of sweat from his brow, mostly to exaggerate his gesticulations.

For someone so large, he moves with surprising agility, appearing, perversely, to be both matador and bull at the same time. Sometimes, he stares down his interlocutor with an intense gaze as if he is preparing to go in for the kill by hypnotizing her; sometimes she is the one who mesmerizes him. They dance around each other, weaving an epic narrative of life and lust, extremes of desire and loss. He tosses his long scraggly mane about like the masculine stud he is. His flesh wobbles with his exertions. 

You know every note, are familiar with every nuance of his performance, but tonight he is drenched in Peppy Sauce and will be giving the performance of his career. It is 1978.

Like a bat out of hell he’ll be gone when the morning comes. But tonight, at the Rockpalast bullfighting arena, the moonlight’s shining, and like a sinner before the gates of Heaven, he’s crawling on back to you.

If you close your eyes, you can taste it, the notes melting on your tongue.

Ground Meat Cook Book, Better Homes and Gardens, 1969
Also from this book: Top-Notch Turkey Loaf, Cooties Especial, Hamburger Helper?, Meaty Surprise!, Ham Strata, Tangiers Hash, King-Sized Balls

Not Buttered Toast

The authors of The Home Book of French Cooking, which used to be titled Simple Masterpieces of French Cooking, declare that “No cuisine in the world is as delectable or as exciting as that of France.”

Perhaps they can stand by this outrageous claim because of their definition of “simple.” For example, their simple-sounding recipe for Buttered Toast appears at first glance to be a joke: who needs a recipe for buttered toast? But the recipe calls for 6 slices of bread and 2 tablespoons of butter at room temperature.

Simple enough.

But no. The directions are as follows:

Toast the slices of bread. Spread them with the softened butter. Place the buttered toast on individual plates. On each slice put a hamburger, with the egg on top. Spoon a little of the sauce over each portion. Serve immediately, with the remaining sauce in a sauceboat.

Huh?

It is only then that you realize that the buttered toast is not actually a recipe, but part of a much larger meal called Hamburgers Créole on Toast.

What should be simple is made far more complicated by bad book design:

in this case, a little bait-and-switch. Prominently advertising “Over 500 fabulous French recipes” on the cover makes it seem like you’re getting 500 actual recipes — but you’re not; some of those are only parts of recipes.

Tut tut tut, as the French would say.

The Home Book of French Cooking, Crest Books, 1955

Complètement De Fromage

This pretty charmer is not, as it may be supposed, wielding a machete in the manner of someone about to stab an unlucky suitor to death because he has stolen her cheese. Instead, she is operating the lever on a machine that forces long nails into said cheese so that it may be perforated to receive the spores that will riddle its insides with the mold that will make it a Roquefort cheese.

Behold the glee with which this happy peasant performs her thankless task in the dank and rank cave where the cheese is made. Note her dark hair glistening with a feminine pomade, used, in most likelihood to keep stray hairs from falling into the vats of curds and whey. Today, such shiny tresses are kept at bay underneath the ubiquitous and gender non-specific plastic hairnet of the food service industry.

This saucy wench spends her days driving nails into great wheels of rotting cheese, but look — she’s wearing a wedding band on her dainty finger, so tonight she will go home to an appreciative husband and perhaps even children, to bestow upon them one of her beatific smiles as pictured here.

Maman, they will cry, trembling with excitement in a dusty corner, clutching each other for dear life, tell us once again of the years of hardship and misery your apprenticeship as a cheese-nailer entailed, for it fills our hearts with joy to be born of a woman such as you, whose very loins could crush bullets as they lay snug in the chambers of a gun, like bee larvae in their comb.

Regarde, she will tell them, her voice as shrill as the metal upon metal of her nailing machine, Learn to speak French you little bastards, like normal people, because I can’t understand a word you’re saying.

Completely Cheese, Anita May Pearl, 1979

How D'You Like THEM Apples?

Propagation

It is deep midwinter at Woolsthorpe,

and the widow Hannah Ayscough is feeling all askew.

The baby isn’t due but is anxious to be born

so that he may get to work —

and there is so very much to do.

Not on the farm, like his dead father,

but in the classroom, something for which

his laboring mother has no particular regard.

She knows she will have to marry again,

but cannot find a new husband with a child

pulling at her hem. She will give it to her parents,

a remnant of her past they will not be ashamed to raise.

When he arrives, he’s so small he’d fit into a quart jar,

but he thrives. She names him after his father, Isaac Newton,

this boy who should have been the apple of his parent’s eyes.

But apples don’t come true — only grafts make sweet fruit

unless some miracle of God’s handiwork makes it so —

at least, that’s how the thinking goes,

before Watson and Crick undo all His seams and see

that the art of apples lies in the perfect marriage of genes.

Young Isaac will never be a father to anything

other than Calculus, the gravity of which

he is too raw a fresh-born pip to appreciate

on January 4, 1643, as he comes steaming into the world

with his eyes wide open and a snarl curling his lip.

Grafts of Newton’s apple tree can be purchased from Brogdale Farm.

A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes, Charles Elmé Francatelli, 1852

Tits

Human beings have been applying their mouths to boobies since we crawled out of the primordial slime, and while this sort of behavior is considered acceptable by the very young of our species, it becomes frowned upon when engaged in by adults who continue to practice the nuzzling of the mammary glands for purposes entirely unrelated to caloric nourishment.

This does not mean, however, that the teat should not continue to make an appearance in our diets. Once a beast of burden’s udders have ceased to be of use as the primary source of food for their young and thereafter for milk for us, their bearer may be slaughtered and the udders cut off and cooked for a tasty treat.

Here are two recipes for udders, one savory and one sweet, should you be in the mood to feast on something really maternal and, to most modern American shoppers, highly exotic. Try asking your supermarket butcher for some for an entertaining few minutes before you are escorted from the premises by store security.

Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary, John Nott, 1723

Also from this book: Blood Pudding, Sugared Plums (Ouch), Mead, Scurvy, Scourge Of The Seas, Quackery, Gastropub / Gastropig: Eating High on the Hog, Pigeon à la Française, This Little Piggy...

Cooking By Encyclopedia

If you want a quick glimpse into American social mores, crack open a cookbook. Recipe books have always reflected the lives of the people who compose them — whether it reveals the importance of summer fruit preservation in 17^th century family cookbooks, with their page upon page of nearly identical recipes for making marmalade (in order to allow the rare ripe oranges from southern Europe to last the winter in the north), or the newly hip shabby chef attitude brought to the kitchen by today’s Dads (see Jamie Oliver).

The ability to publish large books for a reasonable price allowed books on cookery and household management to find their place in the homes of literate women, who were able to expand their repertoire of dishes beyond those which had formerly been passed down within the family. In addition to the recipes for food, certain ideas about how to run a home —how to manage a household economy, how to decorate, how to entertain — became codified according to this new source of knowledge from experts.

In Victorian England, the young Isabella Beeton became an authority on all things related to the feminine art of household management (from mistress to maid), launching the ascendency of women into an area of expertise (cooking) previously limited to men.

As late as 1970, the same sorts of ideas about how to run a kitchen were being reproduced in Better Homes and Garden’s Encyclopedia of Cooking. In the front, there is this rather lackluster photograph of the food editors engaging in one of their evaluation meetings which determine the suitability of a recipe for inclusion into their cooking Bible. What an unhappy and joyless bunch they are.

These ladies might be wearing the latest in feminine fashion, but they are still relegated to the kitchen, rather than the boardroom. The introduction states: “Within the Encyclopedia of Cooking are dishes to delight the lady who wants to stay slim or help her husband and children to eat right.” Is that all? Is that an acceptable sentence construction?

Sadly, something intrinsic had been lost in the move from cookbooks written by individuals to ones written by committee — passion and a vocabulary as rich as the food and personality of the person cooking it. Antique cookbooks feature quaint instructions that lend the dish a flavor of their own, especially the 15^th century recipes which all seem to end with the requirement that one “serve it forth.”

There is something honorable in that particular intonation that implies all that the Encyclopedia has to spell out — there was no need to stay slim or help a family “eat right” back then. There is a difference between simply putting the dish on a table and serving it forth. Is it a coincidence that it comes from the same era of self-serve everything and the TV dinner?

Encyclopedia of Cooking, Better Homes and Gardens, 1970

Also from this book: It’s A Green, Green, Green, Green World, Teddy Bear’s Picnic, Seafoam Cantaloupe Pie