¶ Matins: Oh, dear: an all-day lunch. The wonderful afternoon on the balcony has left me rather envying the Spanish gent in the photo. Or perhaps it was emptying all those bottles of wine that did me in.

It wasn’t as though we could have gone to the Oak Room. Not yet.

¶ Tierce: IRS agents are turning to YouTube for evidence of improper pastoral politicking.

¶ Sext: In a curious dispatch, the British Government has pronounced the Irish Republican Army’s ruling council “redundant.” This stops a shade short of official disbandment, and it may not satisfy the Unionists who are currently standing in the way of full devolution from Westminster to Stormont.

¶ Vespers: The charming short films of M Ward, at vimeo. In KUBM, Bennett Miller (Capote) co-directs a film with Judd Apatow (Knocked Up). Not in this lifetime.

¶ Compline: Devin Cecil-Wishing is the son of a friend from undergraduate days who has recently found me. Over the weekend, I received a link to the artist’s site, and I have to say: I want one. Be sure not to miss the lustrous works in the “Miscellaneous” category, one of them an album cover.

(more…)

The new Brie Cloister, at the Cloisters.

¶ Matins: Ah, the Chinese mists in this paragraph:

Although the McCain campaign said that Mr. McCain had known about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy before he asked her mother to join him on the ticket and that he did not consider it disqualifying, top aides were vague on Monday about how and when he had learned of the pregnancy, and from whom.

¶ Tierce: The long weekend continues chez moi. I’m hosting a luncheon at one. Not that you’d know it — I haven’t even done the shopping. Katie Zezima’s story about lobster makes me wish that I could change the menu (a breeze from Mrs Crum), but Fossil Darling hates the king of crustaceans.
(more…)

Morning

¶ Sore Bear: You can cluck and tsk all you like, but Russia’s invasion of Georgia is driven by very high-octane belligerence, distilled from humiliated pride. Ideology not only has nothing to do with the case on the Russian side, but is empty rhetoric in the mouths of Westerners who preach that duly elected democracies are blah blah blah. The foolish expansion of NATO has finally met with Vladimir Putin’s freeze-dried resistance.  

Noon

¶ Lunch: Nom de Plume asked  me if I was free for lunch, and Migs asked what I’d be having. Here’s an idea!

Night

¶ Nada: Hey, it’s August. Nothing is going on — niente. That’s why God (in the person of E L Kersten, PhD) invented Despair.com, which, as my friend George wrote to tell me, has changed its Web site a lot since the last time we visited.

(more…)

Morning

¶ A6: Page A6 of today’s Times (a/k/a “International Report”) features three stories. The one without a picture discusses the “covenant” that the Archbishop of Canterbury has coaxed from his colleagues at the Lambeth Conference. The one with a black-and-white picture concerns the legacy of the reviving Zeppelin industry in Friedrichshafen — one so complicated that I long to read a book about it. The story with the horrific picture, showing a stairway littered with colorfully-clad dead people, recounts the melee that broke out at a hilltop temple in Naina Devi when rumors of a landslide set off a stampede, killing 150 — or 148, at the newspaper’s presumably more up-to-date Web site.

Noon

¶ Pie/Sky?: Two stories (CNN, ABC) about really cheap source of power.

Night

¶ Smooth Guide: BBC’s Jennifer Pak presents video guides to getting around in Beijing, in case you’re going to the Games. Even if you’re not, you can see how spanking everything — and hear about how hot it is.

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Years and years ago, I learned from one of the Silver Palate cookbooks that there’s a very convenient way to make lots of bacon. Simply lay the slices on a rack over a pan and roast them in a 400º oven for twenty minutes. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner, but it’s an excellent* way to make any amount of bacon, even just enough for a  BLT. Oven times differ notoriously, so I wasn’t surprised that mine took half an hour to do the job. It’s also true that, instead of a rack and a roasting pan, I used the more massive, cast iron Victor grill pan. Turning the bacon over after twenty minutes (when I discovered that twenty minutes wasn’t enough time) turned out to be a good idea.

Store any extra bacon in a wrapping of paper towel, tucked into a sealable plastic bag.

* Cooking bacon in the microwave is almost always not only not excellent, but downright disappointing.

Morning

¶ Posh: My good friend Yvonne just tipped me off to a fantastic send-up of cooking shows, starring Richard E Grant at his twitissime, “Posh Nosh.” The show is a hundred years old, so you’ve probably see it already…

Noon

¶ Mad Max: Poor Max Mosley — so to speak. For my part, I can’t imagine anything more in keeping with Formula 1 racing than recreational sado-masochism. One does wonder, though, what Lady Redesdale would have said. “Every time I see “Peer’s Daughter” in the newspaper…”

Night

¶ Cartographic: Is it or isn’t it? An optical illusion, that is. How big is England?

(more…)

Although I’m trying to work up a page on my trip to Los Angeles last week, here I am talking about food again. The Juice of Eleven Lemons figures slightly in what follows, but only in a supporting role. This entry is really about my Cuisinart.

D’you remember when Cuisinarts were special, and only rich people had them? I still recall Kathleen’s smoldering, furiously, at a hostess who told her that salmon mousse is “no problem” with a food processor. We didn’t have a food processor in 1981. And Kathleen didn’t cook, either. Actually, she cooked more then than she does now, which is not at all.

Yes, I know; Cuisinarts are still expensive. But so are cars and houses. You buy a Cuisinart (just as you buy a KitchenAid stand mixer) because it is an essential kitchen appliance. You expect to last at least as long as the car, if not the house. You buy the Cuisinart because you have grown beyond the American idea that pots and pans are cheap. What will happen when every man, woman, and child possesses an All-Clad sauté pan is hard to imagine, except for the easy part: those sauté pans aren’t going anywhere. (more…)

Morning 

¶ Croque: I divide restaurants into two groups: those that serve croque monsieur, the great if not grand French ham-and-cheese sandwich, and those that don’t. Guess which group gets more of my business. Alex Witchel coaxes a recipe from Bar Boulud.

Noon

¶ Ray: Our friendly ichthyologist, Mig Living, reports today on the cownose ray. As usual, some of the “little-known facts” are more whopping than others.

Night

¶ Madeleine: Remember Madeleine White, Jodie Foster’s character in Inside Man? It was, without a doubt, the most intoxicating role that I have ever seen the actress play, because, instead of pretending to be the usual ordinary schlub, Ms Foster was a glamorous fixer who could arrange almost anything with a few phone calls. Now I know where she trained. 

(more…)

My ambition is to get Joe of JMG to recite Ruth Draper’s monologue, Doctors and Diets, for one of my uptown soirées. Joe claims to know the routine by heart, and my heart pounds to hear him say “the juice of eleven lemons,” stumbling, as Draper’s Mrs Grimmer does, over “eleven.” You try saying it.

Meanwhile, here’s my recipe for summer lemonade, involving, yes, the juice of eleven lemons. You can squeeze ten or twelve, but if you present the pitcher with a bowl of ice and a slew of handsome tumblers and say, “It’s my mother’s Eleven Lemon Lemonade” (I recommend practicing!), you’re sure to make imitators very unhappy even if their lemonade tastes just as good. How does he make his voice do that, as Firesign Theatre used to ask.

Ingrediments:

The juice of eleven lemons.
One cup of simple syrup.
Water to taste.

Method:

Having squoze the lemons, boil a cup of sugar and a cup of water until the sugar dissolves (see? simple!). Kinky cooks will allow the “water” to brown slightly; this is called “caramel” in French. Don’t overdo it. Cool the syrup with a tray of icecubes, reserving the tray for another use. Combine the syrup and the juice in a pitcher and add twelve ounces of water. Serve forth.

Leftovers will keep in a well-sealed bottle for longer than you might think.

Morning 

¶ Oregano: Having seen Melvin Frank’s A Touch of Class when it came out, in 1973, and liked it very much, I remembered two things about the film very clearly: the assignation that Steve Blackburn (George Segal) and Vicki Allessio (Glenda Jackson) achieve during a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh, a symphony that ever since has trailed a rather unwonted allure. The other was “oreGAHno.”

Noon

¶ Apron: There’s a movie, don’t you think, in Dan Barry’s story about the West Virginia Mason who was expelled because he advocated reforms that would put an end to archaic discriminatory practices.

¶ Gidget: George Snyder — whom I hope to spend Thursday with, in Los Angeles — sent me a link to Peter Lunenfeld’s delightfully polymathic look at Gidget, in The Believer. Who knew she was Jewish?

Night

¶ Tornado: If you haven’t seen the most amazing close-up of a tornado ever, be sure to check out Lori Mehmen‘s ticket to the photographers’ hall of fame. (via JMG)
(more…)

Morning

¶ Regime Change: For the rest of the week, at least, I’ll be feeling my way with the Summer Hours version of the Daily Office entry. Two changes already in place: the entry will be posted at 10:30 every morning (instead of at 1:30 AM), and the first sub-entry of the day will not include a link.

Noon

¶ Orthodoxy or Death. How about an opera set on Mount Athos? Chorus of monks; fleet of St Ursula’s virgins, bound for sex slavery rather than martyrdom, foundering upon the rocky coast; rainbow bridge at the end leading to the newly-built Convent of Mount Pathos. Harry de Quetteville reports.

Night

¶ Information Age: Robert Darnton, in The New York Review of Books, makes the plausible argument that the Internet has not really changed anything on the “information” front. There has always been too much of it, and it has never been as reliable as we’d like it to be.

(more…)

¶ Matins: A look at this week’s Book Review, which is just about as disappointing as last week’s was inspiring.

¶ Tierce: Is there anything as compulsively readable as oral history? Florent, the pioneering restaurant in the meatpacking district that has finally, some might say, reaped what it sowed, will be closing late next month, and a number of habitués, including Calvin Klein and Roy Lichtenstein’s widow, join Florent Morellet and members of his staff at Frank Bruni’s microphone.

¶ Sext: How about a $150 burger? (Price subject to market fluctuations.) Where but at the Wall Street Burger Shoppe would you expect to find ground Kobe-style beef?

(more…)

¶ Matins: On her train ride to Albany, Kathleen missed Sing-Sing. I told her to keep her eyes peeled, but the windows were so dirty that she was glad that she hadn’t brought a camera.

¶ Tierce: RACE STILL A PROBLEM IN US, according to American Presidential Campaign. Barack Obama dissociates himself from Rev Jeremiah Wright. (The New York Times, Front Page.)

¶ Vespers: Alone for dinner tonight, I’m tempted to make a peanut butter and bacon sandwich. Here’s a recipe, in case anyone should need such a thing.

¶ Compline: If I’ve got an excuse for not writing (much less posting) this week’s Book Review review until the tail end of Wednesday, I don’t know what it is.

(more…)

Kathleen’s Aunt Marcia peered into my kitchen a few years ago and said to me, “I don’t know how you cook all that in here.” My father-in-law still says the same thing.

Today, I said it myself. We had Julia Child’s mushroom soup; a Hollandaise course (salmon soufflé with steamed asparagus); roast leg of lamb, with Mrs Crumb’s “mint jelly” and a rice dish that might have been a risotto but, by the time I served it, was more of a soubise; and chocolatey desserts from Greenberg’s.

(Damn! I forgot to divvy up the chocolate chip cookies! )

I tried to defend my having gone to see College Road Trip — Fossil Darling called it (my having gone) a “disgrace” — by arguing that I have to compensate for “these snobby things” that “I have.” Megan almost burped. “‘These snobby things’? You make it sound as though they could be contained!”

We did have a lovely afternoon, and I am the luckiest father of the bride in the world. That’s to say that Megan is very lucky — at least as lucky as I was when I met Kathleen.

A display of Mozartkugeln at Schaller & Weber

At first, the table was set for eight. Then for seven. Finally, for five. Within the space of half an hour, Ms NOLA and Megan called to cancel lunch, Ms NOLA for herself and Megan for herself and Ryan, who was the ailing party in that household. Ms NOLA had sent me a note on Thursday saying that she was in bed with a very bad flu, so I wasn’t surprised by her call. After Megan called, I thought I’d better ask Kathleen: should we cancel? Or proceed? Kathleen voted for the latter course, and we ended up having a very jolly time of it. M le Neveu came down from Columbia, with some promising good news, and he and Kathleen had a chat while LXIV and I bored Fossil Darling silly with “reminiscences” of the ancien régime at Versailles.

Although it was too bad that the purpose of the luncheon — introducing Ryan to Ms NOLA and M le Neveu — didn’t happen, I was not consumed by disappointment. In fact, I shrugged it off almost at once. For once, I had planned for it. Not on it, but for it. For one thing, I hadn’t knocked myself out with an elaborate menu. Nor had I allowed preparation to supersede all regularly-scheduled activities.* Most important, I had reminded myself at every turn that the luncheon must be a pleasant event for all concerned, not a command performance at which the private feelings of those present were of no account.

We shall try again in a month of so, not long enough for me to forget all the little astuces that I picked up in the course of preparing yesterday’s meal.

* Just one or two — the Friday Front, for example.

Now you know why there is no kitchen table in my kitchen. There is, in fact, no kitchen. What we have here is a walk-in closet with appliances. All that shelving in the distance took me years to dream up, and who knows when it’s going to fall down (not that I had anything to do with putting it up!). Seriously, there are nineteen-foot sailboats with larger galleys.

Okay, maybe not.

In 1963, when our building was put up, kitchens were a thing of the past, especially in Manhattan, where there were (and are) coffee shops on every corner, and caterers were affordable. Nobody knew that kitchens were also a thing of the future, the central room, in fact, of today’s better flats.  Correction: this room here is a pantry with appliances. That’s why I paid so much to have the swinging door installed. (The apartments in this building come with cute louvered half-doors that are beyond useless.) It’s not the heat of the kitchen that I wanted to hide, but the scullery.

Kathleen’s Aunt Marcia said after one of my very ambitious dinner parties of the Eighties, “I don’t know how all that marvelous food came out of that tiny kitchen!” Yes, and you wouldn’t want to, either. The sad fact is that most food preparation on our island home occurs within truly remarkable proximity to live human beings. At least you don’t have to wonder how many of them there are in my kitchen. There’s only room for me!

It occurrs to me that the madeleine is no longer too radioactive to write about. Nobody will expect me to (a) explain what a madeleine is, (b) relate how the French novelist Marcel Proust made the madeleine what it is today,* (c) go into raptures about how the taste of a madeleine dunked in tea (Earl Grey, of course!) takes me right back to the dorm room in which I first read Swann’s Way, or (d) say anything at all that hasn’t been said already in most of the better-known languages. Nor is anyone likely to think that I’m trying to be recherché, either.

Madeleines are, above all, delicious.

The tins in the picture have been mine-all-mine since the early Seventies, when, amazingly, my mother actually granted a request and brought them back from a trip to Paris.

¶ Madeleines.

* Or how long it took.

Jour de Ick

Why didn’t I think of this sooner? It’s the ultimate comfort food — made from humble ingredients, but first cousin to a grand dish. Replace slices of tenderloin with ground beef, and you have Hamburger Stroganoff.

One thing’s for sure: the results are not photogenic.

¶ Lowdown.

Where have all the cars gone? The city seemed unnaturally quiet all weekend. There were plenty of people on the sidewalks, but vehicular traffic, at least up here in Yorkville, was light — or at least we thought so. Kathleen asked at one point, “Was there a headline that we don’t know about?” Not that we’re complaining about reduced traffic!

I had to admit today that I have been running at full throttle for much longer than usual. It is glorious to feel purposeful all the time, but I am a bit pooped. I had a few recipes to write up for today’s kitchen column, but I hadn’t got them earlier and I couldn’t bring myself to fuss. In fact, I couldn’t bring myself to the computer until seven in the evening. As promised, I fixed breakfast in bed for Kathleen, so that she could sleep in. Also as promised — to myself — I made pancakes. For well over a year, I’ve been relying on Eli’s terrific frozen croissants, which really do bake up as nicely as almost anything that you’d find in a bakery. It was time to check my pancake mojo. That wasn’t all I tested today: I also baked a quiche, making pie crust for the first time in the second Bush administration.

People ask from time to time for my pancake recipe, but I tell them that the recipe is not the important part. Almost any cookbook will offer a few good recipes, and my advice is to go for anything that calls for buttermilk. What matters with pancakes, though, is the griddle. If your stove has one, great. If it doesn’t, then you’re going to have to invest in something rectangular and large enough to span two burners. (I’m crazy — this will come as no surprise — about my non-stick All-Clad.) You want a non-stick surface, and you want it to be hot before you pour the batter. Because pancake batter is mixed very quickly, I recommend firing up the griddle as soon as you’ve measured your quantities but before you combine anything. Trust me — a good griddle is all there is to pancakes.

Oh — and heat the syrup. Just zap it (briefly) in the microwave.

Add coffee, orange juice, melon, scrambled eggs* and sausage, and you’ve got a great breakfast. Amazing how quickly it will disappear!

* Making scrambled eggs on the griddle involves childhood-caliber play. You must work the eggs with a spatula to keep them from running off, and of course you have to keep adding raw egg quickly enough to keep the scrambled egg from drying out. The possibilities for disaster are fascinating.

Stack the finished pancakes to one side of the griddle and the sausages or bacon to the other. Beat the eggs in a spouted bowl so that you can pour them very slowly onto the griddle, just a bit at a time.

For fancy footwork, turn one burner down to low before pouring on the egg. This will give you some variation in temperature, once you find out how to feel your way.  

Rump of pound cake, baked in a brioche mold.

Right after this pound cake came out of the pan, I took what I thought were a couple of nice pictures. But someone had fiddled with the camera (I wonder who), and although the camera flashed it didn’t capture any visible images. By the time I figured all that out, I was left with this (still tasty) rump, which I’ve gobbled down in preparation for our departure this morning for Thanksgiving break.

Having a pound cake on hand, especially during the cooler months, is a great virtue. Just looking at the thing will fill you with a sense of well-being. But don’t look too long: cut yourself a slice and enjoy it with a nice cup of tea. Stare out the window and refrain from multitasking.

Although no one will admit it, pound cake and madeleines are extremely similar.

¶ Pound Cake.