Category: Culture

Our own fresh taste of the 14th Century


The Covid-19 virus. Source: Wikipedia

By historical standards, this plague has been a mild one. So far, worldwide, about 2.3 million people have died from Covid-19. The most fatal pandemic in recorded history was the Black Death, which peaked in Europe between 1347 and 1351. The Black Death killed between 75 million and 200 million people.

Covid-19 is not the first plague that seniors like me have lived through. Even today, the World Health Organization estimates that there are 10 to 20 million survivors of polio worldwide. AIDS has killed up 40 million people worldwide, and the peak year for deaths from AIDS — 2004 — is only 16 years behind us. Hundreds of thousands of people still die each year from AIDS.

There is much here to reflect on, including our vulnerability to the dark and primitive side of nature, no matter how modern we think we are or how dazzled (and coddled) we are by our technologies. Nor can we forget that the dark and primitive side of human nature is still with us. When I was a poll watcher during last year’s election, a woman who refused to wear a mask said, loudly, because she wanted as many people as possible to hear, “God’s got me covered.” And just this morning a former friend posted a link on Facebook about how Covid-19 was caused by a global “criminal elite,” including Bill Gates, George Soros, and the Rockefeller family.

Though I think there is such a thing as the arc of justice and slow moral progress, we have plenty of grounds to wonder just how much fairer today’s world is from the world of the 14th Century. Covid-19 reminded us that viruses are just as fatal to the high and mighty as to the poor. But the poor are more exposed, and they’re usually the last to get help.

I feel slightly ashamed to report that, three days ago, I got the first dose of the Moderna vaccine for Covid-19, because my state (North Carolina) is now vaccinating people over 65 as the available vaccine is allocated to risk groups. Meanwhile, teachers can’t yet get the vaccine, nor can younger people with pre-existing conditions. In the U.S., only 28.9 million people have had at least one dose of the vaccine so far. At that rate, according to the New York Times, we won’t reach 90 percent of the U.S. population until Dec. 15.

It’s surprising that I’m just now getting around to reading Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book, in which a 21st Century historian time-travels to 14th Century Oxford to do historical research and accidentally arrives during the middle of the Black Death pandemic. Now seemed like a good time to read this book, the better to appreciate not only how some things never change, but also how much better off we are — or could be if we really tried.


Source: Wikipedia

Having mentioned the 14th Century, I should also mention Barbara Tuchman’s classic (if somewhat controversial) book, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, published in 1978, which I have read twice.

Horowitz in Russia

In 1986, near the end of the Cold War, Vladimir Horowitz, then 82 years old, agreed to return to the Soviet Union for concerts in Moscow and Leningrad. The performance was recorded on video. PBS’ Great Performances draws on this historic video for the documentary “The Magic of Horowitz,” which was broadcast on Jan. 22. The program also is available for streaming, here.

Concert videos are one of my favorite genres — often more entertaining than movies. But this one is extra special, because it’s an important little piece of Cold War history as well as a glimpse of Russian culture, as the camera frequently moves around the hall to catch the responses of the audience. They adored Horowitz. President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev arranged the concert, as the U.S. and Russia moved toward détente.

The camera often watches Horowitz’ hands on the keyboard. Musicians will want to take note of Horowitz’ unusual hand positions — wrists low, fingers often almost flat. This is not how pianists are taught to use their hands. At times, Horowitz’ hand positions look almost amateurish and awkward. One wonders how he did it.

The documentary is narrated by Peter Gelb, who was Horowitz’ manager. Gelb has interesting stories about Horowitz’ personal peculiarities, such as what he ate, as well as Horowitz’ recovery from a dark period in which he never played in public.

Eat more barley ( … and sugar cake)


Barley risotto

I sometimes hear the voice of Michael Pollan in my head: “Eat more leaves.” To that I might add: Eat more barley.

Wheat, of course, will always be regarded as the monarch of grains, because we can make beautiful breads out of it. But for second place, I would nominate barley — humble, healthy, sustainable, and versatile (after all, you can make ale and whisky out of it.)

Pearled barley is much easier to find, but pearled barley is not really a whole grain. Hulled barley is the real article. If you cook hulled barley thoroughly, it’s just as good as pearled barley, and healthier. I was thinking, as I had this barley risotto, that, even though I like the chewy texture of barley, if barley risotto spent a few seconds in a food processor, you’d almost think it was a hearty form of mashed potatoes. It’s a comfort food, for sure.

Before Covid-19, it was easy to find hulled barley, in bulk, at Whole Foods. At least in the Whole Foods store that I shop, the bulk foods section has been greatly diminished for safety reasons. My last batch of hulled barley was ordered from Amazon. It’s organic, and it was grown in western North Carolina.

This afternoon my nearest neighbor appeared on his ATV bringing a box of Moravian sugar cake from Dewey’s bakery in Winston-Salem, to thank me, he said, for being such a good neighbor. To those who live in or near Winston-Salem, Moravian sugar cake is a holiday treat. It’s made here year round, though. Winkler Bakery in Old Salem, which still bakes in colonial-style wood-fired ovens, makes the best version. (Winkler Bakery is currently closed because of Covid-19.) The recipe and concept, no doubt, were brought here 250 years ago by German settlers. Dewey’s makes a close approximation of the colonial article. Those in this area will know about Old Salem. To those who live elsewhere, Old Salem is a restored colonial town much like Williamsburg in Virginia. (I was shocked to see all the corporate logos on Old Salem’s home page. Times must be hard for them.)

Mincemeat pie

Mincemeat pie is not part of my heritage (Southern American), so I disclaim all expertise and experience having to do with it. Not only did I never have mincemeat pie as a child, I don’t remember ever hearing about it. As an adult, I was not curious about making it, just because the name is so ugly — mincemeat. Both halves of the word are equally unappetizing.

But when you’ve got good organic apples, it seems like a shame and a waste to peel them for pie. And yet, if you leave the peelings on, then you spoil the texture of the pie with little strips of leathery apple skin. To make apple pie and preserve the skin, I reasoned, it would be necessary to chop — or mince — the apples. That sent me to Google looking at recipes for mincemeat pie. Most recipes for mincemeat pie don’t have any meat in them. Minced apples — skins intact — are the main event, plus other fruits such as raisins, currants, and even cherries. Some call for suet; some call for butter. Rum seems de rigeur. Almost all the recipes required making the filling, then leaving the filling in the refrigerator for at least three days, but up to six months. That made me wonder whether, especially in the days before refrigeration, the filling for mincemeat pie was allowed to ferment. Does anyone know?

In any case, it was a very good pie. But I would have to say that my first mincemeat pie would never beat my apple pies in a baking contest.

Note 1: In Erma Rombauer’s 1943 edition of The Joy of Cooking, she seems to take the “meat” part seriously in one of the recipes, which calls for ground beef. Gross. Hold the meat. I’ll just have the mince.

Note 2: I thought that, as long as rum was on my mind, I might as well flambé the pie, since it has been a long time since I had set any food on fire. But I couldn’t get the rum to light in the evening breeze out of the deck, so I just had the rum.

Babylonia

Ancient Astronomy and Celestial Divination. Edited by N.M. Swerdlow. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1999. 378 pages.

Babylonia: A Very Short Introduction. Trevor Bryce. Oxford University Press, 2016. 142 pages.

I confess that I don’t find the history of Babylonia very interesting. But I think there’s a reason for that. It’s that we don’t know enough about Babylonia to satisfy my historical curiosity, much of which is about imagining what it might have been like to live in that time and place.

What I find most interesting about Babylonia is how scientific they were. They were pretty darn good at mathematics. Their base 60 math, for example, is still with us today, because we divide circles into 360 degrees, and we divide minutes into 60 seconds and hours into 60 minutes. And Babylonian philosophy probably set the stage for Greek philosophy.

Most of what we know about Babylonia has to do with kings, dynasties, and wars with Babylonia’s neighbors. Yawn. Archeology has revealed surprisingly little, partly because one city was built on top of another, and the water table now stands above the level of the oldest ruins. We have some literature, such as the Gilgamesh epic. But I personally find the Gilgamesh story too old and too remote to mean much today.

So, to my lights, the most interesting part of the history of Babylonia is its astronomy. The earliest astronomy though, should really be regarded as astrology. Its chief purpose was divination to guide the decisions of kings. In the last centuries of Babylonia, though (around 500 B.C.) the study of the stars became truly mathematical and scientific. And astrology became more democratic, so that ordinary people, and not just kings, could have their astrological fortunes told.

Most of what we know about Babylonia comes to us in the form of clay tablets, of which there are a great many. Scribes used a wooden stylus to make marks on wet clay tablets. The tablets were baked. The tablets were regarded as valuable, so over the centuries many of them were preserved.

I have not done a search for historical novels set in Babylonia. But, if I did, I think the most interesting characters would be the astronomers. They constantly watched the sky, day and night. They were supported by the kings, so their observatories must have been nice places — towers, I would hope. And because there was a constant dialogue between the astronomers (or astrologers) and the kings, palace intrigue could help drive the plot.

By the way, this is the first book I have read in Oxford’s series of Very Short Introductions. There are hundreds of titles. I’ll be checking out more those titles in the future. As for the MIT book on ancient astronomy, it’s very technical, and most of the astronomy goes way over my head. However, I enjoy reading books that I don’t fully understand, because there is always something to be learned.

The English Game

“The English Game” is the most recent production from Julian Fellowes, who brought us “Downton Abbey.” It was produced by Netflix, premiered last March, and is available for streaming.

The game is football, which we Americans call soccer. The themes, as with “Downton Abbey,” are class conflict, class reconciliation, and social change. The story begins in England in 1879. Football, developed at places such as Eton College, is regarded as a gentleman’s sport, but football also holds a great appeal to the working class. Two professional Scottish footballers are hired by an English mill owner to play for the mill town’s team. In episode 1, the mill town team first encounters a gentleman’s team in a quarter-finals game at Eton. Class-based unfairness starts up the plot.

Some of the situations are a touch melodramatic, and the series certainly doesn’t have the glamour and appeal of “Downton Abbey.” The cast, though, is excellent. The reward for watching it comes not so much from the plot as from the character development. It’s always a good sign when the cast, characters, and dialogue are good enough for the camera to fill the frame with the characters’ faces.

I’m wondering if I’ll ever be able to properly understand Glasgow accents, though. I’m not the only one. There are many funny YouTube videos about understanding Scottish accents. Strangely enough, I do understand the Scottish MP is this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7G4z5uEQnE

Life in Squares

I would have to watch this BBC mini-series at least twice to have any hope of following it. Those who have recently read up on the members of the Bloomsbury Group, or who have recently read a biography of Virginia Woolf, might be able to keep up a bit better. Still, it’s great fun to watch, because the performances are so good and the post-Victorian naughtiness is so delicious. This three-part series was produced by the BBC in 2015. It’s available for streaming from Amazon Prime Video.

Back in the mid-1970s, I read Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf. That was enough Virginia Woolf to last me a lifetime. I have never been able to finish one of her novels. I find them dull, and I just can’t get the point of them or figure out why they were worth writing. Shortly after I finished reading the Bell biography, a friend asked me what I thought about it. As I recall, I said, “Their lives were much more interesting than their literature.” This BBC mini-series is evidence of that.

In my opinion, for what little it’s worth, of the members of the Bloomsbury Group, I think it was E.M. Forster who matters the most. We must be careful not to give the Bloomsbury Group too much credit, either as writers, rebels, or philosophers. Oscar Wilde was way ahead of them, as were 19th Century heretics such as Charles Fourier or the American writers and theologians who clustered around Harvard University and Concord, Massachusetts.

But the members of the Bloomsbury Group certainly led interesting lives. And I have the greatest respect for them for the progress they made in rebellion against Victorian norms, in the odd ways available only to the upper-crust English who went to Oxford or Cambridge. Today, people such as Stephen Fry have carried this work forward. Fry, I believe, is one of our greatest living intellectuals. I doubt whether any member of the Bloomsbury Group could have claimed such a status in their lifetimes.

According to Wikipedia, the title, “Life in Squares,” comes from a comment made by Dorothy Parker. She said that the members of the Bloomsbury Group “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.” And yes, I would argue that Dorothy Parker, in her sassy American way, out-achieved all of them.

Series like this always make me wonder why the United Kingdom, five times smaller than the U.S., produces ten times as many superb actors and actresses. “Life in Squares” shows off quite a few of those actors and actresses. Fans of James Norton in “Grantchester” will want to watch this.

Fire, smoke, food, and drink


Pie from roasted pumpkin, baked in an iron skillet with fire and smoke

Since it was the week before Christmas, I splurged on a Scotch that cost twice as much as what I usually pay. When I first tasted it, I was a bit shocked at how smoky the Scotch was. I usually prefer a less smoky Scotch. But by the third time I got into it (in three evenings, I confess), I found that I liked it, and the smoky flavor no longer seemed to dominate the other tastes of Scotch.

I am by no means a connoisseur of Scotch, though no doubt I’m more experienced with Scotch than most Americans. Having toured the distillery at Oban, I knew about how barley is malted and dried before fermentation. But, after tasting The Balvenie Scotch, I Googled to try to better understand why some Scotches are much smokier than others. I came across this article at Whisky Advocate — Science Can Explain Why You Like Smoky Whisky—Or Not. The article includes this interesting statement:

“… [U]ntil relatively recently in our ancestral timeline—within the last 200 years—all cooked food would have tasted of smoke.”

That got my attention, because it certainly seems to be true. It follows that, particularly for those of us who are interested in what antique cookery — even Iron Age cookery — might have been like, smoke is something that must be kept in mind.

As I looked around the kitchen for a bold experiment with smoke, I settled on one of my little pumpkins. The usual name for the little pumpkins is “Long Island cheese squash.” You can buy seeds from heirloom seed companies such as Baker Creek. A friend gave me my seeds, though, and I have been growing little pumpkins for about five years now, with seeds that I save over to the next year. My first thought was to make pumpkin soup, and I will, later. But I quickly changed my mind to pumpkin pie, because it’s almost Christmas.

One of my dreams is to have an outdoor range and oven, built of brick and fired with wood. For now the best I can do is to use my propane grill, which is on the deck and convenient to the kitchen. I threw in little chips of apple wood to create smoke. (Note to the abbey groundskeeping department: when fruit trees have to be trimmed or cut, save the wood for making smoke.)

One might suppose that a pumpkin pie with so much exposure to smoke and so much brown roastedness might taste like ashes. But that wasn’t true at all. The pumpkin flavor remained dominant, followed by cinnamon (of which I used only half a teaspoon), followed by smoke. It turned out to be an excellent pie, with the smoke acting as a kind of umami. It was no surprise that the pie went well with Scotch.

I hesitate to confess this because it makes me sound like an American bumpkin, but peat smoke to me smells a lot like coal smoke. (In fact, peat would turn into lignite coal if left in the ground.) I’d probably be able to tell the difference in a smoke-smelling test. But the connotations of peat and coal are worlds apart. One speaks of moor and bog, rock and gull, wind, and sea, and water. The other speaks of industry, trains, mines and black dust. I suppose I need to retrain my nose. Lacking access to either peat smoke or coal smoke here in the Appalachian woodlands, I will be obliged to turn to Scotch to train my nose for the scent of peat smoke.

Here in the Appalachian woodlands, we do not lack for smoke. We have many smoke flavors to choose from. If my dream of an outdoor range and oven ever comes true, then I think there ought to be a special woodpile just for flavor — hickory, persimmon, apple, pear, pecan. Even pine might have its uses.

Lapwing: a Glasgow Christmas

The Herald of Scotland has a story today about two schoolteachers whose Christmas song is climbing on the charts. The video is shot in Glasgow.

The Herald writes: “‘It’s really hard for the grandparents,’ said physics teacher Mr. Kwant, who has two young children. ‘Not getting to see their grandkids is a big thing, and I almost sing it from their perspective.'”

Amateurs?

I came across this video on Facebook. A friend posted it with the comment, “Give it a listen. You will be surprised.”

These two look like such amateurs — even hicks — that I expected my ears to hurt. But I was surprised.

I am repeatedly astonished at the musical sophistication of which children are capable. What is required, though, is that musically sophisticated adults communicate to children what music (not to mention Italian) should sound like. If children are exposed to that, then they seem to acquire music as readily as they acquire language. And watch out! The language they hear is the language they will acquire.

This girl has the voice of an angel.

Quando sono solo
Sogno all’orizzonte
E mancan le parole
Sì lo so che non c’è luce
In una stanza quando manca il sole
Se non ci sei tu con me, con me
Su le finestre
Mostra a tutti il mio cuore
Che hai acceso
Chiudi dentro me
La luce che
Hai incontrato per strada

Time to say goodbye
Paesi che non ho mai
Veduto e vissuto con te
Adesso si li vivrò
Con te partirò
Su navi per mari
Che, io lo so
No, no, non esistono più
It’s time to say goodbye

I cannot find any good English translations. I’ll keep looking, or have a go at it myself.