[Sca-cooks] Funeral foods ...

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Apr 6, 2006, at 5:19 PM, Mairi Ceilidh wrote:

> Frivolous but amusing. Tr pb, 160 pp, index, biblio. Ten Speed Press
>
> Doesn't indicate time period, so its usefulness for period use  
> would be a
> crap shoot if one couldn't look at before buying.  The "frivolous but
> amusing" note scares me.

Maybe non-scholarly, but amusing might be better (if indeed that's  
what it is).

"Frivolous but amusing" reminds me of Robert B. Parker's detective  
novel "Looking For Rachel Wallace", wherein appears the line (when a  
character is criticized for the really cheap, smelly cigars he  
smokes), "They're cheap, but they smell bad."

In the non-scholarly (and often downright wrong) but amusing  
department, we have Martha Barnett's "Ladyfingers and Nun's Tummies",  
a compendium of culinary fakelore purporting to provide the back  
stories behind various food names. As you might anticipate, all the  
classic (and probably false) stories about Delmonico's creating  
Lobster Wenberg/Newberg, that sort of thing.

I was given a copy of that recently, and I tried to think of a nice  
way to tell my lady wife not to waste the money, but sometimes you  
just have to grin and bear it.

Adamantius




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04