THE GURGLING COD

Cookbook Action

With apologies to Action Cookbook, whose newsletter you certainly subscribe to. 

The repetitive grinds of pandemic cooking, literally and figuratively, have me thinking about cookbooks, and more specifically recipes in cookbooks. This might seem redundant, but I don't think it is. As the existence of the just the recipe plz Twitter mob* suggests, recipes and cookbooks are different things. Recipes can be written on walls, on index cards inside empty tins of maple syrup, on your phone, printed out from the web, etc. 

Books can also take different forms, but in the current book market, we have pretty clear ideas about what cookbooks look like. If you don't believe me, take a look at the Penguin Classics edition of Elizabeth David's book. To some degree or another, they are supposed to look like coffee table books -- attractive, with pictures, and so forth. They also have to be a certain size. I am not aware of anyone in the market who has figured out the cookbook equivalent of the short story, novella, EP, or mixtape, which is a shame. 

It is a shame, in that as cooking ideas become cookbooks, they have to take on a bookshaped form,** which often means there has to be padding -- IE not every recipe in every cookbook is worth cooking, and in some cases, I suspect the author is hoping that you will skip some of the recipes. 

I am thinking about this, b/c there are a few ways this stretching can happen. For the sake of this argument, consider two distinct kind of cookbooks -- the one that celebrates a chef or promotes a restaurant, and the cookbook focused on a particular dish, ingredient, or technique. The question, I guess, which I might return to, would you trust the one bread recipe in a book from a restaurant that is meat-focused, or would you trust one of dozens of bread recipes in a bread-focused? The potential for padding is there in both cases, but it seems worth thinking about a little bit. More and more specific on this soon, if you are nerdy enough to read this far. 

 

 

*J/k - no such thing as a Twitter mob. 

**Would love to see some words from noted print culture theorist and gastronome @jsench on this. 

Bread Don't Lie

Back in the early days of the pandemic, baking was big. It was hard to find flour or yeast at the grocery, and there were stories about how it was cozy, and one very pissed off mom who was mad about the bandwagon jumpers making it hard for her to find the flour she needed. 

As the pandemic closed in on a year, and then went past a year -- s/o to folks staring down birthday #2 in lockdown, by the way -- I found myself getting more interested in baking. I can't go to Miami, but I can make a decent Cubano* at home. I can't go to New Orleans, but I can make a decent poboy at home. I can't go to New Orleans, but I can make a decent muffaletta at home. I can't go to New Orleans, or New York, but I can make a decent banh mi at home. There may be a pattern emerging. 

All of these iconic sandwiches are controversial, like any good foodstuff, but I will argue, and I will be correct, that the easy part of most all sandwiches is the filling. All it takes is patience, and maybe a willingness to ignore government advice on sodium intake. Not all of these sandwiches are the same, and better fillings are better than bad fillings. I am looking forward to trying a Cubano with a thin slice of Alan Benton's finest in it, for instance. But the bread is the thing that makes or breaks the sandwich. The Cuban bread they sell at Publix is great for Cubanos and fine enough for poboys. I have not found a recipe for poboy bread that has seemed promising. But the KAF muffaletta bread recipe, oddly enough, is really solid, as far as the bread goes anyway -- the olive salad vs. gardinere conversation we can wait for an afternoon in the Quarter and four to nine beers. The Andrea Nguyen bread recipe in her banh mi book is very serviceable. 

Recipes for the right bread are important, b/c there is nothing worse than a recipe for sandwich fillings that presumes you live in some sort of place with access to the correct bread. My friend Jack McKittrick coined the phrase "bread desert," and that's where I live, basically. 

So I got more interested in bread so I could make sandwiches that would make me feel a little less trapped in the Upstate. Along the way, friend of the program Trillis also got the baking bug. He very kindly dropped a copy of the Forkish book on me. There are cookbooks that are designed to spark your creativity, and then there are cookbooks that tell you exactly what to do to get the desired result, and if you fuck up, it's your fault. Forkish is the second kind. It can be exhausting to cook out of this kind of book -- see also Judy Rogers' legendary Zuni book -- but if you put in the work, you get the outcome you wanted in the first place. It's not quite like asking if you'd rather play for Wayne Fontes or Bear Bryant, but it isn't not that.

What I find very reassuring about baking bread is that it is about following instructions, rather than being creative. You might decide to go off-script and use Maggi instead of Worcestershire in your Caesar dressing, and it will probably be fine. For all of the mystique around baking, baking is, in a word, science. You count, measure weights and temperatures, and time things. Outcomes driven by empirical observations are hard to come by during a pandemic. My employer insisted it was going to "follow the science" on plans for the fall, until it didn't like where the science was going, and opted for a more "holistic" approach. I could go on. One leadership technique popular here is ghosting/gaslighting when you ask questions about university officials appearing unmasked at various ceremonies. More generally, in the words of the always estimable Holly Anderson, the prevailing ethos for those in power during the pandemic has been "they wanted to, so they did." 

For some reason, when I think about baking bread, I think about what T. E. Lawrence said when he was asked why he liked the desert. Bread is clean, or at least there are fewer variables. You can treat people -- students, student-athletes, faculty, and staff like that, and maybe it works well enough that you can call it a success. But you can't fuck with flour, water, salt, and yeast like that. The pic at the top is a cross section of two boules from the same batch last weekend. The one on the left turned out with a nice open crumb b/c I proofed it correctly b/c I was paying attention, and following the instructions. The one on the right I overproofed, and it came out of the oven a denser than it should have. I am very lucky to have the time and resources to bake my own bread, and reluctant to turn my bougie hobbies into a parable, but reflecting on the last year or so, I will say that things seem go better when you follow the instructions and the science. 

*Publix makes a very good Cuban bread, which is easier to buy than to make. I am not sure what I will do when I am in the land of better fillings and no Publix. 

 

 

Darla Moore is not a philanthropist

A food post coming up soon, I promise, but the Darla Moore thing keeps churning in my head. 

First, two propositions:

1) Gifts to schools with an endowment of seven figures should not be tax-deductible.

2) Gifts of more than $1,000,000 to a school should be taxed. Energetically.*

I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about charity in various contexts, and a major gift to a rich school is purchasing a luxury good, rather than philanthropy. Feeding hungry people -- I see you, Free 99 Fridge -- is philanthropy, in the etymological sense of the word, in that you love (phil) people (anthro) and you don't want people to be hungry. Making a gift that puts your name on something at a fancy school is just not the same thing. There is a benefit to the school, and possibly even to the students there, but it works more like a brand collab, where it is a mutually beneficial blending of brands. Famously, after Harry Widener died, his robber baron family gave Harvard the money to build Widener Library, so that now, thanks to Harvard's prestige Widener = world class library (one that is hard to access, tho), rather than Widener = hiring Pinkertons to bust strikes. FWIW, Jeffrey Epstein threw a lot of cash at Harvard and MIT in an effort to launder his rep as a pedophile, which worked, ok, for a while. 

Editing to add - Jeffrey Melnick of U Mass-Boston pointed out a while ago when someone made a big gift to Harvard for them to establish the Somebody Center for Urban Something Something, while UMass-Boston had a center up and running that was already doing that, and could have really used the money, but you don't get the same cachet for a gift on the wrong end of the Red Line. 

At the same time, if higher ed philanthropy is about gratifying vanity (which it is), it seems like your dollars would go a lot further at a smaller, poorer school. A six figure gift to Harvard probably gets you a nice note; send the same money to, say, Southern Wesleyan, and the president is your BFF and you are a trustee. 

To return to the Darla Moore thing. Darla Moore is not acting like a philanthropist. Darla Moore is acting like someone who spent a lot of money, and expects exceptional service commensurate with that money. If my friends who work at Twin Farms did not have NDAs, they might be able to tell some stories about that. I am reminded of a friend whose mom was unhappy w/ the service she was getting at the Volvo dealership, sold them the car back on the spot, and Ubered to a Mercedes dealership and drove that car home. Her missive to USC indicates that Darla Moore thought of her payments to the University of South Carolina as something like buying a luxury car, or staying in a Relais & Chateaux inn, in that her cash outlay warranted a certain level of customer service. That's not the same thing as philanthropy. 

*State schools would not have to have this same relation with donors if it were not for the brutal defunding of public higher ed by federal and state legislatures. 

Darla Moore & Sympathy

Not sure how this became a place where I write about boring things like feelings, but this story popped up in my feed, and I keep churning it around. Darla Moore, a major donor to both University of South Carolina and Clemson, lit into USC after her mother died.* 

In a scathing letter sent to the USC board and administration April 5, Moore said her family received “deep expressions of appreciation and recognition from the faculty and leadership of Clemson University.”

The letter went on to rip South Carolina for failing to acknowledge her mother Lorraine Moore’s death on April 1 at the age of 89:

“There is not a university in the country that would exhibit this degree of thoughtless, dismissive and graceless ignorance of the death of a parent of their largest donor,” Moore wrote. “I continue to be embarrassed and humiliated by my association with you and all you so disgracefully and incompetently display to the community you are charged to serve and to whom you look for support.”

Unfortunately, I know a little bit more about grief and about higher ed philanthropy than I would like, and for one thing, both of these things are complicated. A few thoughts. 

1) According to the story, Darla Moore's mother died on Thu. Apr 1, the day before the Easter weekend (like Clemson, USC is a nominally secular institution in an overwhelmingly Christian region). It's fair to say that some staff took Good Friday off, and might not have been as assiduous to check work email, what with hiding eggs and all. Darla Moore sent this email on Apr 5th, or Monday, meaning exactly zero regular business days had elapsed between her mother's death and her letter to the USC board ripping them for failing to send their condolences. 

2) One thing I know about being sad is that you can't be sad at something, so sometimes you get mad at something instead. I suspect that may be happening here. 

3) At a moment of grief and trauma, kindnesses and slights are easy to remember. I can tell you the the name of the student who told me the B I gave them "ruined her Christmas" the semester my dad died. I can tell you which colleague from South Carolina sent flowers to my mom's funeral in VT. This was in 2006 and 2009. The lack of a note from USC may be the slight Darla Moore can process here. 

4) One thing I know about higher ed philanthropy is that like Eric B said, no mistakes allowed. Putting USC on blast like this means that someone will probably lose their job, which seems like rough chuckles for not cranking out a condolence note over a holiday weekend. 

5) The folks who work in higher ed development are usually very good at this kind of thing. When my dad, Exeter class of '56, and occasional very light donor, I guess, and who sent both his kids to Exeter's rival, died, I had a note from Exeter within about a week. I did not send any money, but I respect the hustle. 

6) I have written about how institutions of higher ed attempt to simulate affective labor. The trouble is, being institutions, they are not very good at even pretending to care, because that is not how institutions are wired. As the wise Pete Coviello once said, "The institution will never love you back." There is some of that here with the Darla Moore situation, I think. One of the heartbreaks of working at a big institution are the emails that come through, all too often, alerting us that a student has died. There is a factotum in Student Affairs whose job it is to make a comment in the email we get, and I really sympathize with the challenge of having to say the same thing every time, but not being able to use the same exact language each time. 

7) At a moment when institutional instagram posts are on my mind, I am wondering how little would have sufficed to defuse this situation. If the U of SC insta account had posted a picture of flowers, and captioned w/ sympathy to Darla Moore's family, would that have stopped the letter? 

8 And here, maybe, is where it gets chewy. The letter reads:

There is not a university in the country that would exhibit this degree of thoughtless, dismissive and graceless ignorance of the death of a parent of their largest donor. 

Here Darla is straight up insisting that she is entitled to a bigger helping of institutional sympathy than the run of the mill USC grad, because she has given the university more money than anyone else. As scholars think about whose lives are grievable, and by whom, I am pretty confident that the conclusion has not been that you should be more sad when rich people die. The word entitlement gets used a lot these days, but there are certainly students, faculty, staff, and custodial staff who have given more of themselves to the University of South Carolina than Darla Moore. I have friends who have worked there their entire careers. I can't help but think that Marcus Lattimore's leg is worth something, too. And there are folks, alive and dead, whose names we will never know, who gave their whole lives to USC, just like there are at other schools. 

*No idea how this dodgy website was how this story got on my radar. 

Dogwoods & Depression

I have been thinking about this thing in our yard that I noticed the other day. I was not quite sure where to put it -- Facebook seemed wrong, so did a Twitter thread, and the other blog (more on that soon I hope) wasn't right, either. This is also a weird thing to be writing on Easter Sunday, but maybe not, since pretty much all of the familiar trappings are absent this year. 

Anyway, I saw this in the yard. It's the beginnings of a dogwood blossom. It's spring where I am, and things have been happening for a while. Daffodils and stuff. It's nice, I guess. Even after many years here, in SC as a transplant from New England it astonishes me every year how early everything pops off in Zone Seven, soon to be Eight, probably. One of the best things about flowers and plants is that they allow lots of room to cultivate relatively harmless prejudices -- loving yellow roses, but not red, etc. My mother would not allow gladiolas, b/c she insisted that they were for Mafia funerals. (She also loved The Sopranos, but that's another story.) Dogwoods are a favorite of mine, and we are lucky to have several trees where we live. One of the things I love about dogwoods is that they allow me to have a contrarian take, which is a hobby of mine. The hot botanic take is that dogwood foliage in the fall is better than dogwood blossoms in the spring. I will die on this hill, preferably in the fall, but I will admit that when the white blossoms appear to float in the dusk off of our deck, it's pretty magical. 

I saw this blossom the other day, and it simply did not compute. I recognized it, but it did not make sense, in the way that seeing a bus from the wrong city driving down the street does not make sense. I realized, to my sorrow, that I processed it intellectually, but could not do the emotional math of seeing something that will soon be beautiful, that evidence of something I would look forward to was not something I could process cognitively. I have been lucky in this pandemic, so far. I did not have any child or elder care responsibilities. I had a loving and understanding partner. I had the time and money to be pretty comfortable in our home. I did not have to risk my life to earn a paycheck. But so much of my world disappeared, and has been gone for more than a year now, that I have forgotten how anticipation and joy work. 

I was lucky enough to make it over the vaccine hurdle, and am, I guess, as good to go as I will be for the foreseeable future, whatever that means. My partner will also be fully vaccinated soon. But the question of what this freedom is, or what to do with it, continues to gnaw at me.  With a year practice, I had gotten pretty good at being withdrawn from the world, except for trips to the grocery store and walking the dog. Speaking of dogs, the idea of rejoining the world that seems to have continued in my absence makes me feel like one of those dogs they rescue from a lab, who is afraid of grass b/c they have never encountered it. 

The implacable beauty of nature through this past year plus has been a solace, when it has not been disconcerting. I was lucky enough to be in Vermont during the foliage season for the first time in many, many years. I took a lot of pictures, and I put some of them on Instagram, but it never really felt like they registered, or triggered the delight they should have. It would be nice to conclude this whatever it is with some sense of the comfort spring brings, or that the blossom of a smile on a friend's face brings, and I certainly hope that day comes, but for now, I just want to register how this picture reminds me how the pandemic has broken my brain in ways I hope time will fix.