More COVID-19 Chronicles - Baking in Place

Note

This post is not about smoking weed while sheltering in place. It’s about actual baking. If you’re a ganja aficionado looking for hot tips on how to score the kindest bud, you’re on the wrong blog. Also, if you’re high right now, I guarantee you won’t make it to the end of this post. Maybe you can half-watch the vlog version, though:

Introduction

As we all shelter in place, it’s natural to think, “There’s must be more to life than working from home and watching Riverdale and Stranger Things.” So why not learn to bake? In this post I provide advice on how to source your ingredients during these trying times, and then I’ll walk you through some tried and true recipes and share some expert techniques.

Stocking your pantry

Stocking up on baking supplies is going to be very difficult during the pandemic due to all the hoarding that’s going on. The entire baking aisle has been ransacked … no flour, no sugar, no yeast. As if people even knew how to bake! This is what happens when everyone’s garage is packed to the gills with extra toilet paper but they still feel like they need to do something.

If you can’t find cake flour but do have all-purpose, here’s a neat tip from The Joy of Cooking: 

Cake flour is made of soft wheats, and their delicate, less expansive gluten bakes to a crumblier texture. Although you will not get the same result, in emergencies you may substitute 1 cup minus 2 tablespoons sifted all-purpose flour for 1 cup cake flour.

Note bene: it says right there, you can only make this substitution in emergencies. Well, guess what? The US has been formally declared to be in a state of national emergency, so you may make the substitution! Nobody will come after you … you are within your rights. 

But what if you can’t even find regular flour? Just keep looking! And do not, in desperation, resort to gluten-free flour. With all this coronavirus craziness, haven’t you suffered enough?

Finding unsalted butter is going to be a particular challenge. You have two options (beyond showing up within minutes of the store’s dairy delivery):

1. Go ahead and buy salted butter. How bad could it be? Surely a little salt never hurt a baked good? Just use less added salt in the recipe, and if it doesn’t call for any, just add more sugar. (Note: I haven’t actually tried this.)
2. Take off your damn surgical mask for a few seconds, let your glasses un-fog, and then stare really hard at the supermarket shelves. Look all around, scanning first left-to-right and then in an expanding spiral. After your eyes have roamed around long enough, they’ll get so tired you’ll be unable to focus and you’ll just sort of zone out, like looking at one of those Magic Eye autostereograms, and then suddenly you’ll see it: a block of super-fancy Irish unsalted butter that costs like $9 for half a pound. In fact there are two boxes left. Buy them both. Yes, it’s a ripoff, but remember, your 401(k) has lost like $300K in the last two months. It’s all Monopoly money now. Get that butter.

Now, yeast can be even harder to find right now. There are two ways forward. Option one: you could phone your mother-in-law and she’ll actually mail you some. This puts her at risk, though, as she must brave the post office because her mailman doesn’t pick up outgoing mail.

Option two: you could borrow some yeast from a neighbor. Remember, though, you can’t just walk over there and ring the doorbell. You’ll have to stake the place out. Stand in the driveway for as long as it takes for somebody to come out, knowing this could be days. (I know, that’s crazy—but do you want to bake or not?) If your neighbor doesn’t recognize you, back up an extra six feet and take your mask off momentarily. If you’re still not recognized, it’s because your hair has gone grey for the first time due to the salons being closed. Loudly announce yourself by name (but for God’s sake put your mask back on first, as loud voices more readily transmit the coronavirus)! Instruct your neighbor to leave the loaner yeast on your porch for you to retrieve later.

(Why wouldn’t you just get yeast from Amazon? Think about it. This is Amazon’s finest hour. They couldn’t have engineered a better way than COVID-19 to finally gratify their rabid appetite for total retail domination. Don’t let this pandemic be the death blow to all small businesses. Save that Prime membership for when things are back to normal!)

Now, if you run out of baking powder, that’s actually not so big a deal. You can make your own! It’s even easier than homemade hand sanitizer. All you do is substitute, for each teaspoon of baking powder, ½ teaspoon of cream of tartar, 1/3 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda, and 1/8 teaspoon salt. But don’t try to store this—use it right away. And don’t get all clever and add some Drano or Comet thinking that’ll protect you from the coronavirus. It won’t, and your baked goods will taste like store-bought.

Okay, enough about ingredient sourcing. It’s time to explore some classic recipes.

Gold layer cake

2 cups cake flour (remember, subtract 2 tbsp if using all-purpose!)

2 tsp double-acting baking powder

¼ tsp salt

½ cup butter

1 cup sifted sugar

3 egg yolks

1 tsp vanilla

¾ cup milk

Lemon custard or raspberry jam

Whipped cream (not from a can!)

2 small children

Have all ingredients at about 70 degrees, except the children, who should be at about 99. Sift the flour. Resift with the baking powder and salt. At this point in the preparation the two children should come running through the kitchen, fighting as they go, and knock the mixing bowl from your hands. About half the dry ingredients should end up on the floor. Using the kind of right-brain, gut-fueled math that chickens employ when they bob their heads while walking, figure out how to add back in the right combination of dry ingredients to replace what you lost. Now cream the butter, work in the sugar and egg yolks, add the vanilla, and mix together all the ingredients, gradually, in 3 parts, alternating with the milk, though at this point you’re too furious to really follow these directions very carefully—everything has frankly become a bit of a blur. 

Stir the batter until smooth. Bake in two greased layer pans about 25 minutes at 375 degrees. When both you and the cake have cooled off, use a long serrated knife to slice off the convex part of each layer, so they’ll be flat. Take the part you cut off and shovel it into your mouth. “Holy shit,” you’ll say, “that’s amazing.” This will be the best cake ever, trust me. Your kids will run over and start cramming cut-off bits into their mouths too, and nobody will be able to believe how phenomenally good this cake is. As if it were even necessary at this point, assemble the cake layers with the lemon custard or jam between, and coat it with the whipped cream.

Now, if you don’t have two small children, and don’t dump half your dry ingredients on the floor, and just follow the more basic recipe, will the cake still turn out? It will be … okay. Just okay. For it to work right, you need the accident to happen. Don’t ask me why.

Sugarless chocolate cake

10.5 oz unsweetened chocolate

10.5 oz unsalted butter (or regular butter in a pinch)

6 eggs

½ cup almond flour

1 cup powdered erythritol (C₄H₁₀O₄)

Melt the butter and chocolate. Beat the eggs until foamy, then add the sweetener, and mix. Add the butter and chocolate, along with the almond flour, and stir just until combined. Bake in a greased pan at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes. When it has cooled, dust with cocoa powder and then throw the whole thing straight into the garbage. When your kids protest, shriek at them, “People are dying, and you’re all broken up about not getting to eat a stupid cake that’s totally disgusting anyway, due to having no sugar?! Really?!” That ought to teach them a lesson. The little bastards.

Scones

Sift together in a large bowl:

   1¾ cups sifted all-purpose flour

   2¼ tsp double-acting baking powder

   1 tbsp sugar

   ½ tsp salt

Cut into these ingredients, until the size of small peas, using a pastry blender or 2 knives:

   ¼ cup cold butter

Wait a second. Cut into them? Size of small peas? Two knives? Sounds like a lot of hassle! And look at the ratio of ingredients: a single tablespoon of sugar, and a quarter cup of butter? Scones are ridiculous. If you think these things are worth the inevitable heart attack, why not just peel a stick of butter like a damn banana, and eat that? Go ahead. You’ve earned it.

Uncle Max’s 2D biscuits

Sift together:

   1 ¾ cups sifted all-purpose flour

   ¼ tsp yeast

   ½ tsp salt

   2 tsp double-acting baking powder

   2 tsp sugar

   ½ tsp baking soda

Cut in:

   ¼ cup lard (yeah, baybee!) or 5 tbsp unsalted butter

Add and lightly mix:

   ¾ cup buttermilk

Turn the dough onto a floured board. Knead it gently for 30 seconds. Pat the dough until it’s ¼” thick. Cut with a biscuit cutter. Bake 10-12 minutes. Note that the biscuits will not rise, due to the yeast being dead. It expired in 2012. What the hell were you thinking? Didn’t I give you two perfectly good strategies for obtaining fresh yeast? These biscuits will be so flat, you’ll practically lose sight of them when turning them sideways. Serve them anyway and tell your family it’s matzo.

Mom’s amazing boule

Note: these ingredient quantities are for a 4 quart Dutch oven (i.e., the kind of shallow, enameled, cast-iron covered pot that costs like a gazillion dollars). If you don’t own one of these, now’s a great time to buy one online. I mean, what else are you gonna spend your money on right now?

3 cups white flour

½ tsp non-dead or undead yeast

1 ½ tsp sea salt

1 ½ cups warm water

Dissolve yeast in water. If you’re not sure it’s alive, take some more of it from the package and put it in warm water with a little sugar, and wait 5-10 minutes. It should get all bubbly. (This is called proofing.) If it doesn’t bubble up, your yeast is dead! Damn it, how could you let this happen again?! Go back to the earlier step of hustling up fresh yeast wherever you can. Then, combine dry ingredients, and add the water/yeast solution and combine well. Cover with plastic wrap and a damp towel. Let sit at room temperature for 18-24 hours.

Heat oven to 450 degrees. Place Dutch oven with lid in (actual) oven to heat up. Transfer dough to floured surface—it will be almost sticky—and form into a round boule. Use as little flour as possible! Place round on a piece of parchment strewn with coarse cornmeal.

When Dutch oven is hot—after about 1/2 hour—take it out, carefully, using a proper potholder that your mom sewed, not one of those stupid knitted ones you got at the middle school craft fair, because with that knitted kind your thumb will go right through it and you’ll burn the crap out of yourself, causing you to drop the Dutch oven on the floor, barely missing your foot due to your catlike reflexes but denting the hardwood floor because the Dutch oven weighs like a gazillion pounds. When you’re done cussing and running cold water over your thumb, place dough with parchment into Dutch oven, replace lid, and slide into oven; reduce heat to 425 and bake for 30 minutes. Remove lid and bake for another 15 minutes until nicely browned. Cool on rack; cover with towel. Eat with good butter—salted, perhaps, just to use it up because that’ll give you a smug feeling, knowing you can buy more salted butter easily, though deep down inside you’re wondering: how did we get to this place, where we can get a smug feeling just from eating butter?!

Other notes: did I forget something? Like, kneading the bread? Who ever heard of bread dough you don’t need to knead? Believe it! You really only knead this for about 10 seconds before forming it into the round. Also, you can slash the dough in a pattern just before baking if you wish. Optional: give it a second rise of 2-3 hours before baking, and/or add 1 tbsp vinegar to dough before first rise. If your Dutch oven is larger than 3-4 quarts, adjust recipe accordingly so your bread is not too flat.

By the way, I feel honor-bound to point out that the photo below is from my mom (as is this recipe). I’ve never baked bread in my life. (But the burned thumb due to knitted potholder? Yeah, that was me.)

Calzone

Follow the instructions in your favorite pizza recipe, except when it’s time to move the unbaked pizza from the cutting board to the heated pizza stone, fumble it completely so it is not longer even remotely disk-shaped, but more closely resembles a deflated basketball. Cover any gaping holes with bits of dough, performing dough-grafts by harvesting from other parts of what is now, let’s face it, a calzone. Lower the oven heat because this bad boy is going to have to bake slowly for a long time so the middle isn’t raw. Would it help to try to stuff some ricotta in there? No … I think you’ve caused enough damage already.

Virtual baking

Binge-watch The Great British Bake Off while practicing calligraphy.

Flourless chocolate cake

This is a great recipe for when you can’t buy flour, duh!

¾ cup unsalted butter

12 oz. bittersweet baking chocolate

6 eggs

1 ¼ cups sugar

1 tsp salt

1 tsp vanilla

Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream (because it’s just about the only brand left with real vanilla and no “natural flavors” by which the food industry means “artificial flavors”)

Brandy or chocolate liqueur

Chop chocolate into ½” pieces. Put in saucepan with butter and cook over low heat until melted. Let this cool until it’s room temperature. While it’s cooling, beat together eggs, vanilla, salt, and sugar, using an electric mixer at full blast. It should be thick enough to form little crests, more like waves than dunes. Gently mix with chocolate mixture but don’t overdo it. Pour into darling little ramekins that you’ve buttered generously. Bake for about 20 minutes. Be sure to test the mini-cakes for doneness by putting a fork in them. If the fork comes out clean, it’s time to take them out of the oven and serve them warm with vanilla ice cream. Actually, you baked the little cake-lets way too long and they’ve turned into little hockey pucks. You’ll know you’ve failed when your small children only pick at them, and/or try to lever them out of the ramekins and hide them under a napkin.

After a reasonable period of mourning—perhaps a week is enough since pandemic time crawls by so slowly—try again with a whole new batch of ingredients. This time, take the little cakes out of the oven a lot earlier, so they are almost still a liquid. They should jiggle just a little. Again, serve them warm. Now they’re underdone but you’ve already added the ice cream so it’s a little late to put them back in the oven. Instead, drizzle them with 2-3 tbsp of brandy or liqueur, and then drink a large tumbler of it, neat. See? Your stupid cake is getting better already. Next, leave your rapidly puddling dessert on the table, abandon your family sitting there, take the bottle of brandy or liqueur with you to the living room, and binge-watch Tiger King. There. Now you’re sheltering in place!

More reading on the pandemic

• Shelter-in-Place FAQ
• E-Book Options During COVID-19 Lockdown
• Is Cycling Safe During the COVID-19 Pandemic?
• The Toilet Paper Hoarding Conundrum
• When Will the Pandemic End?
• What Are Hospitals Like During the Pandemic?
• How to Talk to Your Cat About COVID-19
• Teleworking During the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Why Don’t The Dutch Wear COVID Masks?
• Travel Tips During the COVID-19 Pandemic
• COVID Wristbands

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

More War of Words

Introduction

I’ve long envied syndicated columnists, because a) they make money from writing, and b) people actually write to them with questions and comments, from which the columnist can often wring a whole column.  He can get past writer’s block by performing a kind of alchemy, turning a mere reader’s humble feedback into literary gold.

Of course, this blog doesn’t bring about many useful comments.  The percentage of albertnet pageviews that have resulted in comments stands at 0.36%.  Occasionally I take on the role of the reader and write in myself (e.g., Ask Dr. Beer, Ask Dr. Pasta) but of course that’s cheating.  At other times, as with my recent “Grammar Wars” post, I write something provocative and hope for the best.

I was not disappointed in the case of “Grammar Wars.”  A friend of mine, Trevor, posted not one but two comments, comprising a number of contrarian statements.  (Ah, that last sentence was satisfying ... a boss of mine once argued that “comprising” cannot be used this way—that you can only say “comprised of”—and it hurt me to subjugate the truth of my position beneath the greater truth that you must not alienate the guy who controls your salary.) 

I have waited awhile before countering my friend’s arguments, to see if anybody would come to my defense (as happened with an incoherent and profane attack leveled at my British Faucet post).  Nobody has, though a mutual friend posted a simple “Wow,” most likely in response to the comments rather than the post.  Knowing that Trevor’s comments were deliberately (if playfully) pugnacious, I will give him the honor and satisfaction of a thorough rebuttal.

But first...

It’s tempting to get right to it, and if you’re growing impatient, just scroll down to the phrase “Shibboleths and marketing” right now.  But if you enjoyed “The Deer Hunter” and feel that all the pre-Vietnam exposition was worth the trouble, stay right here because I’ve got a couple of asides to get to.

First, I must point out that debating Trevor in a public forum feels a bit like an insurrection, like Obi Wan Kenobi deciding it’s time to give Yoda a real beat-down.  This is because for the first couple years of our friendship, Trevor and I observed a strict pecking order:  he was the star cyclist on our UC Santa Barbara cycling team, and I was the mere domestique (i.e., selfless helper).  It was I who nicknamed Trevor “Red Five,” after Luke Skywalker; I came upon this nickname while giving Trevor a lead-out, sprinting just ahead of him well before the line and pulling off so that he’d be in perfect position to win (“You’re all clear, kid!”).  Here’s a picture of one such lead-out, at the National Collegiate Championship criterium.  I’m the third guy, having already done my work and pulled off; the second guy, Dave, has just finished his pull, and Trevor is about to launch.  (Did he win this sprint?  Of course.)

One more thing.  You may be curious about the last thing Trevor wrote:  “[Heh.  For those of you who know Dana really well, this is the proverbial birthday cake covered in ants.]”  This comment establishes—in fact, celebrates—Trevor’s appreciation of how much I love a good showdown.  It refers to the tale I told him of a gorgeous, perfect chocolate layer cake I almost lost.  I grew up in Boulder, some 5,000 feet above sea level, where it’s basically impossible to bake good cakes, because they rise to much and become fluffy and tough.  So I was really excited about a cake my mom baked at my grandfather’s house in the Napa valley, down here at sea level.  To draw out our enjoyment, we put the cake one of those old-fashioned covered cake pedestals and went for a two-hour appetite-inducing walk.  When we returned, the beautiful cake was absolutely teeming with red ants.  They were all stuck in the frosting, either battling to get free or in the throes of a sugar orgy.  For a moment it seemed all was lost and I could have just wept.  But then anger took over, and I decided to get Keyser Söze on their ant asses and just eat the cake anyway.  It filled me with the deepest satisfaction to give those ants a terrible death, matching their rapaciousness with my own.

Shibboleths and marketing

“I've been duped!” Trevor writes in his first comment.  “Where’s the grammar?!  Shibboleths and marketing!”

Well, I can’t argue this point:  my “Grammar Wars” post was as much about spelling (“just desserts”) and pronunciation (“process-ease”) as it was about grammar.  In response to “where’s the grammar?” I can at least offer up the “who” vs. “whom” tale, because grammar is at the heart of that (specifically, the issue of whether a certain pronoun replaces an object or a subject).  I’m not willing to call that a spelling error because nobody spells who “whom.”  What would other misspellings be?  Whobever?  Whonever? 

Meanwhile, “shibboleths” really threw me.  This is one of those words that I always have to look up, and then after understanding and appreciating its meaning I promptly forget it, and then the cycle repeats.  The gist of “shibboleth” is judging somebody by how he speaks; in an Old Testament tale, “pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish Ephraimites, whose dialect lacked a /ʃ/ phoneme (as in shoe), from Gileadites whose dialect did include such a phoneme.”  The consequences of mispronunciation were dire:  Gileadite soldiers would detain and quiz suspected Ephriamite war refugees, and “If anyone said, ‘Sibboleth’ because he could not pronounce ‘Shibboleth,’ then they would seize him and kill him.” 

This shibboleth concept is a nice way to explain why grammar, spelling, and pronunciation matter:  because whether you like it or not, well-educated people will judge you by these things.  So perhaps I should have called my post “The Shibboleth Wars.”  I’m not sure that would attract much of an audience, though.  It sounds to me like the name of the next installment in the “Star Wars” series, continuing along the descent-into-boredom trajectory set by “The Phantom Menace.”  But why does “The Grammar Wars” connote marketing in Trevor’s mind?  Is “grammar” a sexy word?  I don’t think so, and  I deny the suggestion that I deliberately duped Trevor the way a marketer would, simply because I give my blog post titles very little thought.  “War of the Words” probably would have been better, but it’s too late now.

Artisanal

Trevor argues quite rightly that “artisanal” is not only a legitimate word, but is a very useful one in identifying “that certain type of Bay Area hipster pretension that we love to hate.”  Most of the paragraph he devotes to this matter is useful and persuasive, and ties in nicely with his earlier mention of shibboleth.  But I cannot abide his opening sentence, “The suffix -al is perfectly fine and acceptable to form adjectives, nouns, and verbal actions.”  There is an admirable air of authority about this bold declaration, bringing to mind the breezy but ironclad rules set forth by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White in The Elements of Style.  Unfortunately, Trevor’s sentence is only sometimes true.  You can’t just slap “-al” on any old word you please; if you could, we’d have words like craftsmanal and mavenal.  Also, how do you form a noun using the suffix “-al”?  Were “bacchanal” and “finial” formed this way?  I think not.  And verbal actions?  What verb ends in “-al”?  Total, as in “I totaled my parents’ car?”  Okay, the more standard “corral” is a legitimate verb (and noun), but again, I doubt it was built out of “core” + “-al.”  Neither was “coral,” I might add.

Process[ease]

Trevor has no problem with “process-ease.”  He suggests that this pronunciation often has a purpose:  to differentiate between the noun and verb forms of this word:  “Those who say process[ease] almost always reference the noun and not the verb.”  It’s sweet to think that people are this helpful, but a) in my experience people aren’t that helpful, b) the English language relies heavily on word order, not pronunciation, for meaning, and c) it would be pretty hard to confuse the noun and verb forms of this word anyway.  Can you think of a single example of a sentence where the meaning would be hard to distinguish through context alone?  “Tom processes the invoices carefully” is not likely to have anybody wondering, “What are ‘Tom’ processes, and what do they do?”

Now, one thing I didn’t so much as mention in my post is the matter of the “o” in “processes.”  Trevor suggests that somebody might say, “This device pr[aw]cess[es] widgets by different pr[oh]cess[ease] depending upon which buttons you press.”  Whoa, whoa, whoa. 

I don’t have a big problem with the long “o” in “pr[oh]cess,” it being a perfectly valid pronunciation and the norm in the UK.  (I fact-checked this with a British friend of mine, and though he validated that he’s heard only “pr[oh]cess” over there, he was quick to add that he can’t speak for the whole nation.  This is exactly the kind of timid priggishness America’s founders came here to escape.) 

I sometimes say “pr[oh]cess” myself, though only when talking to my kids (and mimicking the British female robot voice of a talking ATM from which I first heard this pronunciation).  But I don’t think I could bring myself to say “pr[oh]cess” in other situations because, to my mind, a British pronunciation from the mouth of an American smacks of affectation.  I grow increasingly aware that a British accent, especially in business, connotes intelligence, sophistication, and global savvy.  Many years ago I worked with a customer who, to my surprise, turned out to be an idiot despite his strong British accent.  It didn’t seem possible for an idiot to speak that way.  Since then I’ve been less naive and have discovered that a British accent doesn’t actually guarantee intelligence or education.  In fact, I’m suspicious now when I hear a British accent; I ask myself, “Could this person have risen this high in corporate America for no other reason than that cool accent?”

With all this in mind, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to hear an American saying “pr[oh]cess,” and the kind of American who strives to sound fancy and intellectual by saying “process-ease” is exactly the kind who would affect the long “o.”  But I cannot imagine there’s anybody who mixes the British and American pronunciations in order to help differentiate between noun and verb forms, as Trevor suggests with “pr[aw]cess[es] widgets by different pr[oh]cess[ease].”  This kind of mix-and-match usage would be almost as absurd as the flat-top mullet I talked a barber into giving me back in the 1980s.  I know it’s impossible to prove a negative, but I hope to God there aren’t really people out there mixing British and American pronunciation of a word within a sentence.  If anybody reading this has heard such a thing, let me know.  (If there’s anybody reading this at all.  Hey, you, there in the back ... wake up!  Have you heard this kind of British/American pronunciation mash-up?)

I wish I could stop now—I feel like I’ve eaten three or four large pieces of ant-infested cake—but I’m not done yet.  I still have to deal with a sentence so inflammatory I almost wonder if it was consciously designed to sacrifice logic and Truth for the sake of pure provocation:  “The noun [process-ease] is frequently used in some quasi-scientific context and the [ease] is consistent with the pronunciation of the plural forms of analysis, neurosis, prognosis, and so on.”

First of all, citing the frequency of a pronunciation is no justification.  Should we also accept “nuke-yoo-lar” and “ree-la-tor” just because lots of people pronounce “nuclear” and “realtor” that way?  And how does “some quasi-scientific context” deserve my support?  To me, “quasi-scientific” brings to mind disgraceful ideas like the Atkins diet (don’t even get me started on that). 

As for the second part of that statement, the “process–ease” pronunciation only seems consistent with words of Greek origin like analysis, neurosis, and prognosis.  As the American Heritage Dictionary points out, “’process’ is not of Greek origin, and there is no etymological justification for this pronunciation of its plural.”  Proceeding from analysis/analyses to process/process-ease is no more valid than saying “gen-WEE-nee” for “genuine” while pointing to “linguine” as justification.  And we don’t say “van-EE-ah” for “vanilla” even though you could claim it’s consistent with the pronunciation of “tortilla.”

Spaces after a period

Trevor goes on to write, “And since we're bringing it, do my poor eyes deceive me or are you adding two spaces after every period? From Robert Bringhurst’s ‘The Elements of Typographical Style,’ which I highly recommend:

In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography and type design, many compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit.

At first blush, this instruction seems compelling.  I have blogged at length about how the limitations of early typewriters have created the terribly awkward QWERTY keyboard that society is still bound to.  Having put forth the considerable effort required to abandon that layout, I would be happy to switch to a single space after each period, if I were to agree that this practice was based on a long-ago design principle that is now defunct.  What I’d like to ask Bringhurst is why compositors were encouraged to add extra space.  What is meant by “dark and inflationary” age?  What is the link between the behavior and the equipment?

I do add two spaces after a period, because I was taught to do so by my junior high typing teacher, Mr.  Todd.  This wasn’t his idea, of course; it was right there in the textbook.  The idea is that the extra space helps the reader identify the end of a sentence.  Sure, we have a period for that, but periods exist within sentences, too (e.g., when you see an abbreviation like Mr.), and, given how fast people read, two indicators is arguably better than one.  Thus, it is not obvious to me that there’s anything quaint or obsolete about this practice.  Meanwhile, given the sacrifice Mr. Todd made for his students—he lost most of his hearing because he shared a classroom with thirty roaring Selectric typewriters for so many years—I feel compelled to honor him by continuing to put two spaces after a period.

The American Heritage Dictionary

Trevor comments, “Oh, and the American Heritage Dictionary? Total crap. I looked up ‘irregardless’ in it, found it, and then threw it away. ‘Bungled affectation’ is only legitimate if you can successfully defend ‘irregardless.’”  When I quoted this dictionary in my original post, I was almost sure I’d draw Trevor’s scorn, as he’s lambasted this dictionary before.  In terms of eliciting a response, dangling this citation out there was practically entrapment. 

I’d say that before we go picking on this dictionary, we should establish whether or not it’s the sole offender.  I consulted the Webster’s Unabridged Third New International Dictionary and it also defines “irregardless,” however briefly:  “adv [prob. blend of irrespective and regardless] nonstand : REGARDLESS.”

So it looks like Trevor, if he maintains his position, will have to throw out Webster’s too—but I suspect he wouldn’t discredit this noble dictionary, since (I happen to know) Trevor highly regards Vladimir Nabokov, whose favorite dictionary is Webster’s, as described here.  (This discussion, of a barbed public dispute that Nabokov had with the critic Edmund Wilson, reminds me somewhat of this very post, except that for Wilson and Nabokov the stakes were high.  After all, those two actually had readers, and relied on their literary reputations for their livelihood.  In comparison, what you’re reading here is trivial, all in good fun.)

Here is Nabokov with his beloved Webster’s dictionary.  (Not shown:  the word “irregardless,” which is most certainly in there.)

Frankly, I think the American Heritage Dictionary does a much more thorough job than Webster’s does with “irregardless,” by providing a useful commentary about it:

The problem with a dictionary simply leaving the word out is that it leaves arguments unsettled.  Let’s suppose Trevor gets in an argument with some idiot about whether or not “irregardless” is a word, and together they look it up in Webster’s.  The idiot may feel that he has won, because the word is in there, and “nonstand” doesn’t do much to discredit it.  Now suppose they look it up in Trevor’s Oxford English Dictionary and it’s simply not there:  this doesn’t provide closure on the issue, any more than the lack of “artisanal” in my American Heritage Dictionary does.  Isn’t it better to include “irregardless” in order to fully disparage it, rather than just leaving the matter open to endless moot debate?

Conclusion

There’s no real conclusion, of course—there can never be.  I’m sure I’ve left myself vulnerable, in these 3,000 words, to further assaults on my own grammar, rhetoric, and reason.  I don’t have a proofreader, nor the time to scrutinize my work for typos.  There are even logical flaws that I can’t bring myself to fix, like saying “I decided to get Keyser Söze on their ant asses.”  This statement practically begs the reader to say, “Obviously this is an allusion to ‘The Usual Suspects’ and the bit where Keyser Söze’s enemy is holding Söze’s family hostage at gunpoint, and how Söze shoots his own wife and child just to show his opponent how illusory his leverage really is.  But ‘getting Keyser Söze on their ant asses’ is a ridiculous metaphor, as merely eating ants is nowhere near as bold as killing your family, particularly given that eighty percent of the world’s population eats insects on a regular basis.”  (Ha!  Beat you to it!)

There is, however, one more thing I’d like to point out.  You may be under the impression that I consider Trevor an opponent in a verbal “war.”  In fact, that’s not at all the case.  The real opponent is the guy who couldn’t care less about proper language (or worse, the guy who “could care less” about proper language) and who, when confronted with a question of spelling, grammar, or style, simply says, “Whatever.”  Such flaccid, passive word slobs are the real enemy.  Their apathy wages a silent war on our language, with precision, order, and grace all hanging in the balance.

The Food of London

Introduction

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Food is a big deal to me. When I’m not cooking or eating food, I’m either working to make money to buy it, or riding my bike to burn it off. Not surprisingly, many of my friends are also foodies, and some have asked how I liked the food in London during my recent vacation there. To those who haven’t asked my opinion, well, here it is anyway.

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I will point out up front, though, that I’m not going to pretend I could give an overall account of how good English food is, or try to compare it to what we eat in the Bay Area. In London I was a clueless tourist with no idea where to go, and judging English food by the random restaurants I blindly stumbled into would be no more fair than judging San Francisco food by the humdrum fare you get along Fisherman’s Wharf.

Bacon
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For some reason, the members of my bike club (http://www.eastbayveloclub.com/) are inordinately fond of bacon. Numerous group e-mail threads have been devoted to bacon-related topics, and I’ve even enjoyed a taste of a bacon chocolate bar courtesy of a teammate. There has even been talk of bacon icons on our jerseys or socks for next year. And when I mentioned I was going to London, there was much chatter about bacon butties and the merits of English bacon over American. So I’ll get right to the bacon here.

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Here’s a picture of English store-bought bacon before and after I cooked it:

As you can see, their bacon is much, much leaner than what we have here. In fact, it looked more like a pork cutlet than bacon. You can also see how much of it was left after cooking; that amount of American bacon would have largely disappeared into liquid fat. And the taste? Delicious. Salty and briny like bacon should be, and though obviously less fatty, still satisfyingly decadent.

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Of course, there is more than one kind of bacon in England. This snack bar sandwich had their “streaky bacon.”

This bacon was more like American, but its pairing with arugula on this simple sandwich was a nice touch. (Over there arugula is called “rocket.”)

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Bacon makes a guest appearance later in this post, and if we back up and consider pork in general, stay tuned because the very best thing I ate in London involves the almighty pig. If you love pork but you’re in a rush, and/or have an MTV attention span, skip ahead to the “highlights” section.

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Local specialties

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We never did try a bacon butty during our trip, but we did make an effort to try some of the more famous English culinary offerings. Baked beans on toast didn’t figure in because we breakfasted at the house, and never felt like making this. As much as I love starch, I don’t get the dual-starch thing (e.g., potato calzones). So, the very first thing we ate in London was fish & chips:

I really like the format here of a single giant piece of fish. It was crispy and greasy in the best possible way and I enjoyed it. Note the side of “mushy peas,” which we frequently saw paired with fish & chips. Mushy peas: what a strange name. “Mushy” seems pejorative rather than merely descriptive, like if they’d said “gross peas.” (Speaking of unflattering terms, during the trip I frequently announced to the kids that for dinner we were having “greasy bloaters” or “cabbage and potato sog,” both phrases from the brilliant kids’ book How Tom Beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen, which I think should be required reading for all children and their adults.)

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So, you’re wondering, how were those mushy peas? Our panel of tasters declared them disgusting. But mixed with a little malt vinegar, salt, and some crème fraîche we stole from another entrée, they were actually quite tasty. I should also point out that the pub we ate fish & chips at has been around for about two hundred years old, with some very groovy ambiance.

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Another local specialty we wanted to have in the UK was a proper high tea. This we did at the Orangery restaurant in Kensington Gardens. Being a little confused, we described this outing to the kids as “taking tea at the palace.” (I see no harm in letting them continue to think of it that way.) We waited over forty-five minutes for a table, but the experience was very grand indeed:

The little sandwiches were tasty, and the scone was better than any I’d had before. Another item I have saved for my “highlights” section below.

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Alexa says this was one of her favorite memories from the trip. I'm glad, because this little snack cost about $80, and I could have put every single food item in my mouth at the same time and still had room for tea. Of course, it’s not like I worked hard to find a high-value venue for our high tea experience.

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It would have seemed silly and frankly irresponsible to spend two weeks in London without having bangers & mash, so I did: I love the contrast between comically ornate American menu descriptions (e.g. “served with a turnip, radicchio, and bruised parsnip salsify”) and the barebones English term “brown sauce.” No, they’re not telling us exactly what’s in it, nor even what animal(s) it derives from. Thus, this may have been my only exposure to the infamous English beef during the trip. (Note that I’m not uniquely suspicious of English beef; I generally eat only grass fed beef in the U.S., preferably local.) Anyway, the bangers & mash were quite nice, especially the mash.

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World cuisine

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When at home in California, we don’t focus on American food (and what would that be, exactly, anyway? Dennison’s chili? Ball Park franks? Or Native American fare like, uh, corn and acorns and Thanksgiving food? Or would it be New York or Chicago style pizza?). So in London, we eagerly tried out English renditions of other countries’ foods. At an Italian place, I had this risotto:

It tasted about how it looks: like a pile of rice with some ham and peas in it. There was no magic there—the dish was nothing more than the sum of its parts, and the Earth didn’t move for me. Truth be told, I’m seldom impressed with risotto; it’s so often an insipid, gloppy mess. But I had it at the California Culinary Academy when I took a cooking class there, and it was fantastic. I don’t remember exactly how we made it (I was fairly absorbed in babysitting the Bolognese ragu at the time), but I remember the chef/instructor, a real Italian and rather stout, tossing pat after pat of butter into it, long after the amount in the recipe was exceeded. I asked him what he was doing and why, and his response—the subtlest shrug you could imagine—tacitly told me, “Shut up—you know nothing.”
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This fettuccine alla carbonara at another Italian restaurant was a fair bit better:

The bacon involved was great stuff, and the pasta itself was perfectly cooked. Eight more servings just like this one would have made it perfect for me (look how much plate is showing).

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We had a goal of eating a lot of Indian food in London, but (not knowing where to go) we ended up trying only two restaurants. Both of them were good. Here is the samosa appetizer I ordered at the better of the places:

I’m not actually a big fan of samosas and don’t often order them, because they have that dual-starch thing going (pastry plus potato). But I just had a, uh, gut feeling it would be good here, and I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, the best samosa I’ve ever had, and decked out with other hearty, groovy stuff.

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And here is the thali that Erin ordered:

She loved it. By the time I tried it, I was pretty sated from eating much of my kids’ food and my own, and my mouth was already on fire from my noodles, so I wasn’t particularly receptive to its charms. As for those noodles, I’ll get to them later in the “Kids’ menu” section of this post.

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One night we had American food. As I said before, I’m generally not sure what American food even is, but in this case we were notified right off the bat this was bona-fide American:

There’s a frozen pizza brand in the Netherlands called “Big American,” and I had to laugh it its conception of what “American” pizza is like. The “California,” for example, has corn and tuna on it. US Pizza has some charming “lost in translation” menu offerings as well:

I was relieved to see that “EAGLES PREY” was topped with relatively humdrum toppings rather than the rodents, birds, and carrion the name suggested. And the name “WILD CAT FEAST” startled me as well. Meanwhile, I love that the “FAVOURITE” and the “CLASSIC” have exactly the same toppings. I’ll also point out that their “SEAFOOD ULTIMO” is the first pairing of tuna, prawns, and BBQ sauce I have ever seen.

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Here is the pizza itself:

It was exactly as good as it looks, and actually pretty authentic. (I had them hold the corn—local color be damned, I won’t eat corn on pizza. That would be almost as bad as whole wheat crust.) Of course the US Pizza didn’t rival my favorite pizzas in the US (see http://www.albertnet.us/2009/03/little-star-vs-big-zachs.html), but as far as run-of-the-mill pizza-delivery places it was just fine (and a fair bit better than Domino’s, except for the Domino’s we ate at in France back in ’03, which totally rocked, vindicating me somewhat for having bought it at all). Full disclosure: I like almost all pizza, even bad pizza, even (usually) frozen pizza.

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Things we didn’t eat

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The main thing we didn’t eat was Mexican food, because it’s almost impossible to find it over there. We’d been prepared for this; before leaving the US I ate Mexican for almost every meal, just as a pearl diver takes a huge breath of air before going underwater.

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In fact, one of our last pre-trip meals was at Mario’s La Fiesta, my favorite Berkeley place. Early in our meal there I realized that at the very next table were seated Mario himself and his wife Rosalinda, having their dinner! A framed photo of them above our table showed them on the day the restaurant opened, in 1959. They’ve held up well, as has their restaurant. We chatted with them, and they described to us how several American expatriate families have a tradition of heading straight to La Fiesta when they come back to the US for a visit. (My brother Geoff, who lives in the Netherlands, always makes La Fiesta a primary destination when he visits.) Mario told how, very recently, one expatriate couple, hearing of La Fiesta’s move from its original Telegraph Ave location, shifted their vacation schedule by a week so they could have one more meal in the original location. (Of course fifty years in business isn’t that long by London standards, but I’ve been eating at La Fiesta for roughly half my life.)

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I missed Mexican food terribly in London; twice I dreamed about it as I slept. One of these dreams featured two different kinds of chile rellenos. Waking up and realizing I couldn’t even find the raw materials to make my own pseudo-Mexican food, I was despondent. How can the English (among other Europeans) live like this? It’s barbaric. If these countries were ruled by evil tyrants who forbade Mexican food that would be one thing, but the fact that there’s apparently little demand there for this glorious cuisine just boggles my mind.

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Okay, enough griping. So, what else didn’t we eat in London? Well, we took a good look at the paella a street vendor was selling on Portobello Road. (The Portobello Road outing was another literary pilgrimage, based on the short story “The Portobello Road” by Muriel Spark. This story contains what may be the greatest sentence in all of literature: “He looked as if he would murder me, and he did.” It’s something of a ghost story.) Anyway, the idea of unrefrigerated shellfish and other unknowns frightened us away from the paella:

We also declined to sample the “doners” at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that we passed every day on the way home from the underground:

I guess “doner” is just too close to “donor.” Shouldn’t the English be similarly bothered by this similarity? Like the manager of this place goes around to other restaurants saying, “I’m running a shoestring operation, do you have any meat you could donate?” And there's a suggestion of "organ donor" lurking in there as well. Beyond that, the food looked kind of gnarly in the picture, and of the very fact of the pictures I consider a liability.
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We also didn’t eat this:

I’m no stranger to lard (my favorite Mexican restaurant in Boulder has t-shirts that say “Praise the Lard”), but lard in a cake? Or are they describing what the cake will do to you? I think a restaurant could be a bit more discreet.

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This problem of suggestive naming also scared us away from an appetizer offered by US Pizza: It’s a pity—the description was actually somewhat enticing—but I just can’t eat anything that calls itself pregnant.

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We didn’t eat much vegetarian food in London. (A friend of mine has commented, “It’s like all of England is on Atkins.’”) I’m not saying we looked particularly hard for vegetarian food (why would we?), but it’s apparently not that common to begin with. We did see a vegetarian offering at the (remarkably elegant) dining hall at one of the Oxford colleges:

Look at the second item from the top: “Mushroom in oats & salsa dip.” What the hell? Is this somebody’s idea of punishing vegetarians for being vegetarians? Wacky. (I’ve racked my brain for an explanation. I thought maybe it was “mushroom in goats,” as in goat cheeses, but there’s just plain no “g” there.)

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A final thing we didn’t eat: most of a loaf of bread that inexplicably became a science project the day after we bought it:

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Kids’ menus

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We were pleasantly surprised by the near-ubiquity and quality of the kids’ menus at London restaurants. I won’t say they were particularly cheap (£5-6, or about $8-10), but they usually came with a dessert and a side vegetable. They were always generously apportioned (which I appreciate, being the family “closer,” who makes sure every plate is clean by the end of the meal). Best of all, these kids’ menus offered sophisticated foods, not just the cop-out grilled cheese, chicken nuggets, or hot dog to which so many American kids’ menus are limited.

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Check out the quality of this kids’ entrée, grilled salmon with vegetables:

And though this next lunch gets middling scores for style points, presentation, and balance (it violates my dual-starch rule), it was fricking huge, and good. The stuff in that bowl hiding under a crust of cheese is macaroni and cheese, and we all loved it. The mashed potatoes were from scratch and perfect. The corn was, well, corn.

This dessert, custard with banana slices, was far too large for a single child. This isn’t a problem in my family, where there as a Parental Dessert Tariff of 25% per parent. The great thing about parenting is that you can create a true dictatorship. Individual rebellions are easy to crush, and kids just aren’t organized enough to challenge the status quo. In fact, perhaps the most British thing about our kids is their blind acceptance of our Parental Tariff. Whereas the founders of the USA rebelled against the whole British taxation-without-representation thing, our kids would always cheerfully slide their desserts over to be taxed, as though this were a simple fact of life. Thus a “free” dessert for them is a free dessert for us, and nobody falls into a sugar coma afterward.

At the especially groovy Indian place, Alexa got to have her own Thali, just like Erin. Look at how stoked she is:

Lindsay opted for the chicken noodles, which sounds like something really basic, like what we got out of a can in our own youth, but what she got really had some flair:

My own chicken and noodles plate looked almost exactly like this one, though it was spicier—too much so, actually. And it was only slightly larger than Linsday’s. I had her hold a box of crayons in the frame of this photo so I’d remember this was the kids’ version of this dish. You’d never know looking at it, huh?

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A note on the crayons, by the way: remember how in the ‘80s it seemed as though every restaurant in America had a salad bar? Almost like it was a law? Well, in the aughts you’d be hard pressed to find a restaurant without crayons and coloring sheets. Waiters have learned not to expect kids to share, so each kid gets his or her own box. The diversion is welcome, of course, unless you believe the parenting books that warn against destroying your child’s creativity by teaching her that “art” means staying within the lines somebody else has created. Meanwhile, the crayons invariably get left behind and thrown out since all kids everywhere have bazillions of crayons at home already. Years down the road we can expect a worldwide wax shortage and Technicolor landfills.

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Okay, back to the food. The real pièce de résistance of the UK kids’ menu was the “Big Mussels ‘n’ Chips” that Alexa ordered at our last restaurant meal of the trip, in a posh restaurant in Bath. I was not just surprised to see mussels on the menu (what American kid would ever order them?) but frankly a bit hesitant to let Alexa have them. For one thing, no less bold a diner than the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain warns against mussels, on illness-avoidance grounds (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/aug/12/features.weekend1). Besides, I wasn’t sure Alexa would even like them. But she was adamant, and here they are:

Alexa admitted later that she had been a bit leery of her first mussel (“it seemed gooey and jiggly on my fork”) and had to close her eyes before putting it in her mouth. But once she tasted it, she loved it right away, and on the basis of her yummy noises Lindsay became envious and begged for some mussels of her own. Here is the result:

Once she’d tasted mussels, Lindsay lost interest in her salmon. Things got a little dicey there—it was a good thing Alexa’s serving was so generous.

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Weirdness

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Dining out in London was occasionally a little weird. In one case it wasn’t the food but the service that was weird. At the really good Indian place, there was a little comment card, and Erin decided to fill it out. Now, I think we generally assume these comments are anonymous, but to our surprise the manager came out, plucked the card off the table, and questioned us about it. “Why only ‘very good’ in the service category?” he asked. Erin pointed out that my entrée came ten minutes later than everybody else’s. The manager acknowledged this, but still seemed a little hurt. Erin continued, “C’mon, I gave you almost all ‘excellents,’ I have to ding you on something.” He continued to go through the card. It was a pleasant enough dialogue, but what if we’d bagged on the place? The only comment card I’ve ever filled out was at an Arby’s in Boulder near my junior high school about twenty-five years ago. Being a snotty teenager, I rated the ketchup quality “poor” and undor “Arby’s Sauce” I wrote in “ketchup.” What would the Arby’s manager have said?

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Okay, back to food. I ordered the linguine alla vongole at an upscale restaurant (the place in Bath that served the mussels), hoping for the best. I make this dish at home, albeit with canned clams, and it’s pretty hard to screw up. (I used to enjoy it at I Fratelli, which was Erin and my favorite Italian Restaurant in San Francisco back when we lived there. On my deathbed I’ll still be regretting not eating there more often; it’s gone now—actually, it moved and hideously mutated and still exists in evil-twin form as Tre Fratelli in Ghirardelli Square and it’s awful). Anyway, here is the linguine alla vongole I was served in Bath: The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s really small. Probably fewer calories than in Lindsay’s plate. And I don’t need to point out that the pasta is like Noodle Roni. Why would they cut the noodles for me? It’s insanity! What isn’t evident from the photo is that at least half of those clam shells were empty. WTF!?

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Also not visible is how totally over-spicy this dish was. I’m no pansy—I like my salsa good and hot—but clams have a subtle flavor. Why drown it out? Okay, maybe you think I’m just a whiner and all these complaints are nit-picky. Fine—but bear with me, because here’s where the entrée gets really weird: every third or fourth bite had tiny shards of what must have been broken clam shell in them. Each time my teeth crunched on these rock-hard shards I would wince, cringe, wither inside and then (as the English motto goes) “keep calm and carry on.” After all, my kids were enjoying themselves.

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But what of Erin? Was she enjoying herself? Probably, but her own entrée wasn’t helping. She had ordered the plaice:

Now, some people might be put off by the mere sight of this fish. Not only is the head attached, but it looks like the fish equivalent of a slashed tire. That said, Erin and I are adventurous eaters, and I think Erin was still enthusiastic as she set about eating it. To say this is a flatfish is an understatement—it was practically two-dimensional. The fish opened up like a manila folder and all that was inside was bones. Hundreds of them, and virtually no flesh whatsoever. You could get more calories from the crumbs between your sofa cushions. It was a joke. She was done “eating” it within about sixty seconds. In all my years of dining out I’ve never seen anything like it. Again, I didn’t complain. We had a train to catch, and the salmon and mussels were great.

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Highlights

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As you’ve doubtless gathered, we had some really great food during out trip. Here I’ll share with you the “best of’ items—a little food porn, if you will. Baked goods were invariably delicious. At a very basic snack bar at Kew Gardens, we shared this simple pound cake:

It’s a good thing we divvied it up ahead of time, because otherwise we might have ended up in quite a fracas. It was really, really good. I think they added heroin or something. But better yet was this Belgian chocolate cake we had with our high tea at Kensington:

This was unbelievably good, I mean eyes-rolling-back-in-your-head good. The cake was more dense, more moist, richer and better-tasting than cake ever gets to be. And that stuff next to it? Clotted cream, baby. It’s like what regular whipped cream might be like if you could freebase it. As for entrées, we particularly liked this leg of lamb: The leg of lamb technically belonged to Erin, but it was so rich I got to eat a fair bit of it, including the marrow from the bone. It’s pretty hard to screw up a leg of lamb, but this place did an especially good job. It was the kind of food that makes you (or at least makes me) whimper with pleasure. But the very best thing I ate in London was this pork belly:

This was the first pork belly I’d ever had the opportunity to eat. Why is that? How come the pork belly has become the quintessential example of a tradable commodity, and yet you never see them on menus or at the butcher shop? What do Americans do with all their pork bellies?

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My God, this thing was exquisite. I won’t lie to you, it wasn’t lean whatsoever, but neither was it just a big pile of fat. It had the best characteristics of a pork cutlet and of bacon. It was like The Other Dark Meat. The skin was on it, all crackly and chewy. I was reminded of what my friend Mark said about a plate of pasta alla Bolognese: “This is so good it’s making me angry.”

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This pork belly … where had it been all my life? (A quick look at chowhound.com yielded only two recommendations, though I sensed a kindred spirit in the seemingly almost desperate person who started the thread: “What are your favorite restaurants to get pork belly in the city? I don’t care how it’s cooked. I don’t care if its in a salad, sandwich, app, main, or even dessert.”) The side dish this pork belly was served with was good, too: roasted potatoes and slices of apple in a light curry. Brilliant.

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Dang, thinking back on that meal has made it almost impossible for me to think. So, I think I’ll call this post done, and go fix myself a snack. Cheers!