A Bit of Obit and a Lot of Lady

I've been reading obituaries and have found their structure unduly formulaic. Life and language is mostly formless so why is it that we force our posthumous celebration of it into tiny plotted out packages stacked together in the columns of the New York Times. Is the most important thing about a life it's obvious plot lines, she had three children, she received a Ph.D. and published a book? In reading about Karen Hess, a food historian who died on May 15th of this year I am compelled by her spirit and peculiar projects.

First and foremost, I have to acknowledge that Hess herself might see this blog post as a disservice considering I never met her myself. Hess was an adamant believer in primary sources. She believed or rather knew that history was made in the moments in between books, in between victories and defeats, in between meals. She also spent a good part of her career updating or interpreting old cookbooks such as "Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery." I admire the intention to not lose antiquated texts but instead to adapt them to us as we adapt to the world around us. So here I wish to celebrate Hess with some of here words in some less stagnant structure. I may have never met Karen Hess but her words provide me a little insight into the beacon that she was. How immediate her message still is. Can most Americans be wrong? Need we say more?

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Living on the Edge... with a Goat

A few months ago, I was reading Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods. This is the bible of fermented cuisine by Sandor Ellix Katz. Mixed into the recipes for mouthwatering ciders, tempehs, yogurts and vinegars are stories about life in the Short Mountain Sanctuary—"a queer intentional community in the wooded hills of Tennessee".

The first thing I wondered while reading this book is, why don't I live in a queer intentional community in the wooded hills of Tennessee? The second thing I wondered was whether I had the power to create something immortal. My brief quest for a life beyond death was inspired by the chapter on bread. I read there that, "with a little attention, your sourdough starter can live forever."

Of course, I tried. But my own sourdough starter did not live forever. Most distressingly, it kind of…exploded.

Sandor Ellix Katz had never mentioned that combustion was a potential property of the sourdough. I was stunned. My kitchen table was ruined. I thought briefly of a career in international dough terrorism.

Then I remembered the warnings. About how to ferment "live-culture" foods is to cultivate the volatile hyperactivity of certain microorganisms. To whip them into a frenzy. To drive them bananas. And at this point—who knows? You might get a sauerkraut. You might get a cheese. You might—if you're me—get a bomb.

Based on the stories that Sandor Ellix Katz tells, Short Mountain Sanctuary seems like a very friendly place. I imagine it must be. Because where else would permit these crazy experiments? The bread bomb was probably due to my own incompetence at work, but Sandor Ellix Katz takes it way further than a jar of bread dough.

He tells one story in Wild Fermentation about how he once pickled a goat in the community kitchen.

For two weeks, "it bubbled and smelled good."

Then he roasted it. "As it cooked, an overwhelming odor enveloped the kitchen… There was some swooning and near fainting… Perhaps a half dozen of us tried the meat… My fellow communard Mish absolutely loved it. He hovered over the pan for a long time picking at the meat, praising its strong cheesy aroma, and gloating over the rarefied "acquired taste" that only he and a few others could fully appreciate."

I am appalled and yet fascinated. I certainly will not attempt a goat until I have mastered the immortal sourdough. In the meantime, my friend Johanna suggested that someone (else) ought to brew their way through the whole of Wild Fermentation. If anyone is up for this, let me know! I will sniff and taste your concoctions, however moldy and otherwise unstable. I will find a happy home for all of the sauerkraut, kombucha, and beers that you produce. If you are feeling frisky, I will even find you a goat.

By Maya Joseph

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For Girls and, as it turns out, Everyone Else

Stand too close to the counter and you'll miss it. But stand back a bit and brush away the few lingering coffee grinds and there it is, six odd shelves of sugar, colorings and nostalgia. On the top shelf you'll find an assortment of quaint old-fashioned gum. Teaberry, Blackjack, Beachies packaging seems deliberately unchanged since our parent's parents bought them at the Five and Ten cent stores for just as much. Then there are the gummi snacks (burgers, fries, pizza), licorice wheels, Lemon Heads and Red Hots. Below that are Chimes Ginger Chews, in an attractive tin canister, Art Bars chocolate and El Bubble gum cigars in light pink or baby blue. And lest we forget, the selection of British candy bars: the Lion, Crunchie, Yorkie and Curly Whirly.

One may wonder why such a section even exists at Marlow's, a bastion of good eats and healthy ingredients. I wondered the same myself when asked to write a little something about our eclectic assortment of confections. The candy section is the equivalent of a grocery line impulse-buys, it serves as a last minute moneymaker and pacifier for unruly youngsters.

But why do we need a candy section? We certainly could do without the sugar and artificial colorings. And store sales wouldn't be too badly hurt without these last minute purchases. I've given this question a lot of thought and I've realized that aside from a sugar boost and a sweet taste in our mouths, the candy section, whether we realize it or not gives us comfort.

And I don't mean by featuring comfort food, though who can't resist a smile when biting into a Yorkie Bar or chewing on a gummi sea creature. No, the kind of comfort offered by the candy section is in the colors on the box or the name of the candy itself. They remind us of our childhood, a hometown candy shop or an aunt who always had an ample supply of a certain gum or hard candy. It's certainly not the taste of those licorice wheels that keep me coming back for more. It is the fact that they taste like the black jelly beans that I used to find in my Easter Basket as a kid. And I couldn't care less for Swedish Fish, except that their smell reminds me of riding back from Harper's, newsstand and local candy outlet, on my bike, a paper bag full of an allowance-worth of little reds in hand.

For everyone, a candy store or section reminds us where we're from. In America we have Snickers, in England, Cadbury, and so on. You know you're home when you see your country's sugary products on the shelves. Our Italian customers are delighted, even proud to find that we sell Brooklyn Chewing Gum (Italy's version of Trident), and our British patrons can never seem to get over the fact that we sell their favorite chocolate bars from the motherland, sexist as the Yorkie bar may be.

I realize that these products may be sugary, full of preservatives and likely to give you cavities, but it's a satisfying feeling to know that when a customer slaps a pack of Teaberry gum or a Lion Bar on the counter, they're going to go away with more than just a satiated sweet tooth. They're going away with a taste of their past, their identity and their home.

By Lindsay Debach

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Words for the Week

Whoever looks at a beehive should actually say with an exalted frame of mind, "Making this detour by way of the beehive, the entire cosmos can find its way into human beings and help to make them sound in mind and body."
-Rudolph Steiner

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The Scanner broke and I had to think a lot about commas today...

This is what I learned:

"The en dash is slightly longer than the hyphen but not as long as the em dash. (It is, in fact, the width of a typesetter's letter "N," whereas the em dash is the width of the letter "M"—thus their names.) The en dash means, quite simply, "through." We use it most commonly to indicate inclusive dates and numbers: July 9–August 17; pp. 37–59."

And then I learned that there is no en OR em dash on the contemporary keyboard... only a hyphen. Unless, of course, you use the subtraction key.

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