Last night, after dinner, I thought I’d go through some catalogues that had arrived in the day’s mail. At long last, I would put into practice some painfully-acquired wisdom about the transitory nature of worldly things, especially sharp shirts and sweaters that appear in catalogues. They go on appearing in the catalogues (jammed in a basket with other catalogues) long after they disappear from the merchants’ warehouses. I must have confused catalogues with reference works. Well, no more.

Having ordered two shirts and a sweater from Westport Big and Tall, I moved through the rest of the pile, and tore out pages showing things that, if I was still interested in a day or so, I’d order even though I would no longer have those vital Customer and Source codes that appear in blue and yellow boxes on the back of every catalogue. By the end of the evening, I was able to throw most of the catalogues away.

There were two or three catalogues that I leafed through with a strange dispassion, an odd new feeling that there couldn’t possibly be anything in their pages that I might actually need. No, it was stronger than that; it was a prickle of self-criticism that would have been uncomfortable but for the after-dinner atmosphere. Page after page offered handsome photographs of items that I already owned. For the most part, I actually did use these things (pots and pans especially — I have lots of pots and pans, but I use them all, I really do). But there were dubious gadgets, and even more dubious baking pans. Someone, I forget who, was touting a baking pan in which you could cook for individual-sized pot pies, complete with lids to help brown the top crusts. This reminded me of the individual deep-dish pizza pans that I bought at Williams-Sonoma (in the store) last summer. I made deep-dish pizzas a couple of times, and I find that the pans, stacked on my kitchen cart, come in handy for a thousand uses. But I don’t know when I’m going to attempt pizza again, and, when I do, I’m all to likely to buy some new kind of special pan. Kathleen would like me to have another go at baking sourdough loaves, so I’ll probably buy some starter from King Arthur. I’ll have to be careful to avoid topping off my order with one of the many miracle concoctions that, strangely for a firm that claims to be dealing in wholesome, natural ingredieents, litter King Arthur’s pages.

In the Williams-Sonoma catalogue, I came across an astouding recipe, for rigatoni with sausage ragù — a favorite dish of mine. Always on the lookout for tweaks, I glanced at the recipe and was surprised to see that its short list of ingredients began with two kinds of flour. It turned out to be a recipe for making your own rigatoni and dumping on a jar of the store’s sausage ragù. Could anyone be so boneheaded as to follow it? There has never been a bottled sauce that’s really superior to what anyone actually capable of making pasta from scratch could throw together with a little thought; if nothing else, bottled sauces are always too sweet. If you must go to all that trouble, then at least enjoy the pasta with butter and parmesan; don’t wreck it with packaged goop.

There was no Levenger catalogue, so I wasn’t invited to giggle at the reader’s porn. I’ve written about that before. I don’t know how susceptible I still am to Levenger’s blandishments. For one thing, I’ve never been done more writing and note-taking in my life, and I’m unaware of unfulfilled needs for special materials. For another thing, I’m unaware of a cubic centimeter of available storage space. It’s also possible that I’m just getting old, and have lost the hope of ever producing the great literature that Levenger presents as a pricily affordable inevitability.

***

Kathleen and I had a good laugh about the rigatoni recipe; then we took up a discussion of something that we really don’t know anything about, which is the industrial production of pasta in Italy. It seemed to me that, while Northern Europeans inaugurated the Industrial Revolution by stamping out Adam Smiths screws and nails, the Italians, when they finally got round to fiddling with steam engines, began with the extrusion of pasta. Makes sense to me.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2012 at 9:28 am.