Toklas

Reading journal continues.

3. The Elder Scrolls wiki page for Breton (Skyrim)

I picked a Breton character sort of at random when I created a character for Skyrim. Mentioning I was a Breton to a friend—who was also in the midst of a Skyrim campaign—he said, "Oh, the half-elves."

I wasn't sure how he knew that. I didn't remember reading anything about it on the character creation screen. Befuddled, I went to the internet and found confirmation.

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4. Murder in the Kitchen by Alice B. Toklas

Two notable things about this long essay on Alice B. Toklas's education as a cook and her relationship to food.

1) The recipes are provided in a more narrative form than one gets from a contemporary cookbook. There is no ingredient list prefacing the description of the cooking of each dish. No number of steps or multi-paragraph format to break the steps up for ease of use in the kitchen. She writes about cooking a dish the way she learned about cooking a dish. She stood and watched the dish being made. She relays what she saw happening. She tells the story of the making of each dish. She does not always tell the reader how much of a certain thing is needed in the dish. (This ambiguity is most common when she talks about butter. Butter, it seems, does not come in exact amounts for Alice B. Toklas in the kitchen. Butter is in "large pats," or "a lot of"s. Which makes sense. It's butter. Butter is too important to be measured. It just needs to be there. In large amounts.)

2) Gertrude Stein is always referred to by her full name in the book. She appears throughout, but is never diminished as "Gertrude," and never honored as, "Ms. Stein." She is, always, "Gertrude Stein." Like butter. Always there and always in large amounts, but never entirely quantified. Driving their many (named) cars. Eating and conversing with Alice. (Never are the details of any of their conversations relayed.) Finding mushrooms. Though Toklas is the lens through which we experience everything in the book, Stein is the foundational figure. She looms in the book.

Which, really, is something Getrude Stein does anyway. So it seems appropriate.

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5 & 6. The Wikipedia page for Alice B. Toklas & Gertrude Stein

Just to refresh my memory.

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7. The Allmusic review of Funeral at the Movies by Shudder to Think

Funeral at the Movies is significant probably because it includes the first version of "Red House," on of Shudder to Think's best songs. It's relevant here because it includes the song that gives the album its title:



You can sort of hear Craig say, "What a beautiful day for a funeral," at the beginning of the song in the video embedded above. The source of that line is the 1968 Peter Sellers comedy "I Love You Alice B. Toklas," which has its charms, if you're into that sort of thing.



I quite like this record, and disagree with the lukewarm review offered by the Allmusic reviewer. (I admit, though, it is not as good as Get Your Goat, or Shudder to Think's major label debut, Pony Express Record.

[And how about Pony Express Record? During that weird moment in the '90s when major labels were reaching into the indie world and seemingly indiscriminately scooping up large handfuls of post-punk bands in hopes of finding another Nirvana, did any band respond with a more difficult {and beautifully weird} record than Pony Express Record? A lot of bands tried to alienate while they cashed in—tried to remain loyal to their loyalist—but no one fucked with the pop rock hegemony with the ease of Shudder to Think's Pony Express Record. {Let's not talk about 50,000 BC.}])

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8. The Wikipedia page for the Cheesesteak

Read on my phone in a small (non-chain) restaurant in a mall that was serving something for Happy Hour (ALL DAY SUNDAY) they called "Cheesesteak Sliders," after my girlfriend and I returned ill-fitting Christmas sweaters. Needed to confirm that there are certain places where they believe the proper cheese on the cheesesteak is Cheez Whiz.

An annoyance: I tend to agree with the purists who insist a "slider" is not merely a way to refer to any small sandwich, but instead a small hamburger that is cooked on a griddle covered with a bed of onions.

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And here's what you probably want. (Note that this recipe apparently originated not with Alice, as it tends to be reported, but with Bryon Gyson:

HASCHICH FUDGE
(which anyone could whip up on a rainy day)

This is the food of Paradise—of Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises: it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies' Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR. In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of hot mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter, ecstatic reveries and extensions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost antything Saint Teresa did, you can do better if you bear t5o be ravished by un évanouissement réveillé.

Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 avergae sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds, and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of canibus sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.

Obtaining the canibus may present certain difficulites, but the variety known as canibus sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognized, everywhere in Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called canibus indica, has been observed even in city window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green.

Cheers.