Wednesday Will: Some of the Bard’s quotes on food
…if music be the food of love.
Literary Recipe: Calvino’s Floating Bucatini (98 years this month)
The windows of the kitchen are foggy now with the steam that has condensed on them while you were cooking. It’s almost 8:30, time for dinner. You take the big serving dish out into the dining room where everyone is waiting. As you serve out the pasta, you notice that the sauce is slightly watery. It’s supposed to be, making the noodles appear to float just above the reddish pools of sauce beneath. And since the individual bowls are translucent black, the reddish pools themselves also appear to float in the bowls above the blackness as if hovering over a void. You sit down at the head of the table. Then you twirl some of the bucatini onto a fork to taste them. After swallowing you realize ‘Hey, I’ve just eaten some of Calvino’s floating bucatini!’
Bucatini Fluttuanti per una Notte d’Inverno di Calvino (98 anni)
Lettore, alzati e vai in cucina. Guardi fuori dalla finestra. Fa freddo, non ti pare? Meno male che sei qui dentro al caldo. Giri verso l’interno e vai a mettere il tuo grembiule. Sicuramente non vorresti sporcare i vestiti. Stasera ci saranno degli ospiti e un po’ d’eleganza non guasta. Ora rilassati, appoggi questo libro – aperto sulla ricetta di Calvino – accanto al lavandino. Stai per preparare i Bucatini Fluttuanti di Calvino. E ‘una buona ricetta e richiede la tua attenzione. Percio’ spegni il telefonino – non vorresti essere disturbato da eventuali chiamate di lavoro o altro – poi afferri un buon coltello. Si inizia il piatto con la pulizia dei fiori di zucca, e affettando il lardo…
Wednesday Will: Mercutio’s Fois Gras
Before opening his now world-renowned restaurant The Mab, Mercutio worked alongside Romeo and Juliet in Verona. He and Romeo were best friends, so much so that Mercutio decided to work for a short spell at The Globe not long after the young couple emigrated from Italy. There, his brilliant juxtapositions of textures and flavors were quickly noticed, prompting local chef and food critic Dryden to note that Shakespeare’s kitchen “show’d the best of its skill in Mercutio.” However, unable to compromise his inventive nature into The Globe’s more structured kitchen, William was forced to dismiss him.
literary recipe (pasta noir): F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Summer Pasta Chicken Salad (125 years this month)
Only an essential, clean sauce can complete an elegant pasta dish as a purple-hued cloud can complete a glorious summer sunset. Not a vulgar sauce like, say, one made with Italian meatballs, those shiny, dirty round mounds of grease that sit glistening on the top of Little Italy restaurant displays calling out to passing Midwestern travelers like sirens to Odysseus’ crew. This dish is closer to the essence of pasta and for that reason I recommend you use only the finest ingredients, Martelli butterfly noodles, the most virgin of Tuscan olive oils, and free–range Connecticut chicken. (Avoid those of New Jersey, as they are often unclean. I know Hemingway thinks such differences are pretentious and without significance but he puts ketchup on his hotdogs. Ketchup. Hotdogs. ‘Nough said.)
Hear ye, hear ye – an autumn sale
Drink, food and laughter in word is on – for ninety and nine cents. Or one hundred cents minus one:
Wednesday Will – 10 Foods From Shakespeare’s Plays That Shakespeare (Probably) Ate Himself
10 dishes Will lkely ate: 10 Foods From Shakespeare’s Plays That Shakespeare (Probably) Ate Himself hteysko@gmail.com A Guest Post from Cassidy Cash In addition to …
Julia Child’s Discourse on Post-Modernism and Pumpkin Ravioli – with Butter and Sage (her 109th birthday anniversary)
I am speaking of the modernists, of course, from Pirandello to Joyce. But the modernists still had a sense of something beneath them, even if they sensed that solidity below might be illusory. Because of that, their relativism was contained, in a way, by the real world. Post-modernists instead had to deal with a present void, the horrors of what had happened, a nothingness beneath that threatened to devour our precarious existence above. So lightness, ‘leggerezza’, as the Italians say, became an important theme in post-modernism, in contrast to ‘heavy’, certain characters and contexts. If the world itself could disappear, what is it we live in?
Wednesday Will – Garlic Pasta Sonnet 116
Garlic Pasta Sonnet 116 Garlic Pasta Sonnet 116“And scorne not Garlicke like to some, that think / It onely makes men winke, and drinke, …
Wednesday Will: The Apothecary’s Stewed Peaches and Fresh Cream
‘This is what happens when your final degree is a Bachelor’s in chemistry. It was either change careers or that teaching job at Faraway Hills High in Arkansas. Arkansas. What they got in Arkansas? Chickens. Lots of chickens. Lots a’ chicken crap. Not to be insulting to Arkansonians but I figured, definitely not my thing. And then I figured: what’d I do most of the time at ASU? I got drunk. So I thought, chemistry, wine, you know, it fits.’