Perusing cookbooks

Strange drunken woman on his
roof refuses to come down
unless he gives her more beer.

Obama opened a web site to elicit questions from American citizens. Was the most asked question about the war in Iraq? No. Was it about the economy? No. Was it about gun control? No. Was it about gay marriage? No. Give up? It was, will you consider legalizing marijuana? It appears that a lot of Americans are fed up with our ridiculous laws respecting marijuana and want it legalized, grown and sold, taxed, and decriminalized. Obama’s staff is supposedly preparing answers to the questions. I can hardly wait. Can we at least hope that the new “car czar” will know more about cars than our drug czars have known about drugs?

I don’t know about you, but I find thumbing through cookbooks and cooking magazines to be terribly frustrating, for a variety of reasons. My wife works as a sous chef and has a lifetime interest in cooking. As a result she is a truly excellent chef/cook and has a large collection of cookbooks and cooking magazines. I cannot claim to be much of a cook, but I love to eat and even thinking about eating. Mind you, what I am about to say here is not to be taken as complaining. No, indeed, I count my blessings every day about how lucky we are to get such terrific organic food here in our remote corner of the world, both animal and vegetable. The problem is that what we can get is somewhat limited. It is the things we can’t get that annoy me. For example, in a recent magazine, dedicated to the art of roasting, I came across a recipe for a six rib veal roast. Alas! Your chances of finding a veal roast here are fewer than being struck twice by lightening in the same week. Not only could you not expect to find one, unless you are very rich indeed you wouldn’t be able to afford it anyway. The picture in this magazine just sits there making me drool while I am completely helpless to do anything about it. First of all, people here don’t eat veal. There seems to be no tradition of eating veal in this neck of the woods. When our Supermarket first opened they had veal a couple of times. No one bought it. I don’t think this was because it was too expensive, but that no doubt had something to do with it. If we go across the border into Canada we can sometimes find veal, but only thin veal cutlets. I have never solved the mystery of what happens to the rest of the veal. I guess they must send it someplace where people can afford it. The other problem with veal is that we cannot bring it into the U.S. when we buy it in Canada. Mad cow disease, you know. Of course it is common knowledge that a cow has to be three years old before it can have mad cow disease, but that doesn’t matter to those who control these things.

There are apparently no wild boars in North Idaho. I find this rather strange, given that they are exceedingly numerous in places as heavily populated as Germany and Italy. So the delicious boar recipes I read cannot be used. Once in New York City, walking down the street, I saw whole wild boar displayed in a window. What a lovely sight! I’ve never forgotten it. We do, of course, get venison, but you can’t buy it. We have friends who hunt and the deer here are so thick they are basically just pests. Venison is not considered a delicacy.

We don’t get much in the way of seafood either. This is partly understandable due to our distance from the ocean. But the fish we can get are limited, and the market doesn’t go in for anything that might be considered exotic. For instance, again, when the market first began, they once had squid. It was wrapped in cellophane so it was visible. The woman at the check-out stand refused to touch it and professed to not even know what it was. I was apparently the only person to want to buy it. They have never had it again. They do occasionally have clams and mussels, but never octopus or cuttlefish or geoduck or snails or anything remotely of that ilk. Once in a while we can get arctic char in Canada, and lately we can sometimes find frozen smelt (imported from Peru!). Mostly however, around here, it’s just salmon and halibut, salmon and halibut.

Strangely, at least it seems strange to me, they don’t eat rabbit here either. I have never seen rabbit for sale here in our town. We can travel to Canada and buy rabbit once in a while, but they want $25 for a single frozen rabbit. I cannot understand this. I know rabbits are easy, even eager to breed, and I also know they are not hard to dress (or undress as the case may be). So why the exorbitant price? I have no idea, but it is maddening..

Until just this past year it was also very unusual to find lamb here. There was apparently no tradition of eating lamb, just beef and pork. Lately we can get lamb, but of course it is expensive. One year, around this time of year, one of our butchers ordered some lovely racks of lamb. That was three or four years ago. He has never ordered them since. I innocently asked him once why not. He became noticeably upset and told me it was because no one would buy them until he had marked them down so far he was losing money. So we don’t enjoy rack of lamb very often, only when we buy a whole lamb and have it butchered, which we now do every year. We have had quite an influx of new people moving here in the last few years. I think this explains why we now see lamb in the market.

When you read about all kinds of wonderful food but can’t have it, it is upsetting. This is not my only problem with cookbooks, however. For example, I do not consider chicken breasts to be an edible substance. While there are literally hundreds of chicken recipes every year, you would be amazed at how many of them start out with skinless chicken breasts. I now just skip these after the first mention. There also seem to me to be a plethora of recipes for things like grits, okra, and eggplant, People tell me they actually eat these things, but personally I wonder why they even bother to include them. Of course I most usually only read the seafood and meat recipes anyway so I guess this doesn’t matter too much. Happily, here we never run out of pigs’ feet, pig hocks, sidepork, liver, heart, gizzards, drumsticks, tongue, ox tails, and other such staples. Things are not all bad. Pigs, especially, are our friends.

LKBIQ:
A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.
Arnold Bennett

TILT:
W. C. Fields was born William Claude Dukenfield. He died on Christmas Day, 1946.