Did and Didn't

[ChiTownScion]

When you live near the water, you eat fish. It doesn't matter if you like fish or not, you eat fish -- fried fish, baked fish, poached fish, fish chowder, fish cakes, fish fish fish. And when we weren't eating fish we were eating shellfish. Meat -- usually pork or hamburger, never steak -- was a treat. I don't remember ever having a steak until I was in my twenties.

Reminds me of a meal I had in my early 20's. My dinner companion was a young lady (art education major) who confessed to me - as we were just being seated in a family owned Greek restaurant- that she had never tasted lamb before. She grew up in a family with nine sibs- the family wasn't poor, but lamb would have been deemed "exotic." So she got to try lamb souvlaki on a nice bed of rice pilaf that night. She said she enjoyed it. But it struck me then that a lot of what people like regarding food is imbedded within childhood experiences.... or lack thereof, as the case may be.

"Fish, fish, fish..." And shellfish. I would have thought that I'd died and gone to heaven! But I know that it isn't for everyone....like my wife, for example. She's not particularly fond of it. When we visit Boston, I have to do my seafood meals when she's attending her continuing ed seminars.

 

[Nobert]

Hospital corners. Very easy to do, and if you do it right, very secure. I don't own any fitted sheets, because they wear out faster than flat ones, and I never have any problems with the bed coming apart.

Hmm, I may have to give this a whirl. I don't know if it will work, I'm the sort of person who seems to wreak havoc with bedclothes, but the corners are always coming off of my contour sheets. My mom just told me that when they first came out, even the top sheets were fitted at the bottom two corners, and that didn't work out, apparently.

 

[sheeplady]

But it struck me then that a lot of what people like regarding food is imbedded within childhood experiences.... or lack thereof, as the case may be.

When I went to college, I discovered that when I mentioned I almost exclusively ate "lamb" (as farmed meat) growing up individuals made many assumptions about me. Surprisingly, despite me going to a University with an agricultural college (and being enrolled in and taking courses in said college), they were never correct that I grew up on a sheep farm.

I always assumed that this was part of the "upward mobility effect" by which I mean the presumption that basically everyone in the college environment is upper middle class; even though many are not.

I wonder if I had said pork if anything would be much different; lamb has a cache that a lot of other land meats do not have. But on a side note, most lamb that one can buy is not worth buying, it isn't tasty. The same with chicken and beef compared to home grown.

 

[Stearmen]

In military at basic camp. I was taught how to make the bunk bed in a certain way.
I'm wondering if this is the same as "hospital corners"...[huh]

Yes!

 

[2jakes]

[/B]

Yes ? [huh]

Yes ????? :rage:

That's ...SIR...YESSIR ... Loud & Clear ! :rage:

 

[Shangas]

The "Great Leap Forward" (pun intended) in Chinese food in the US came after Nixon visited China in 1972. Mandarin and Szechwan restaurants began to pop up everywhere, and the Americanized cuisine you spoke of (often mislabeled as Cantonese at the time) became passe'.

In a similar vein: we befriended a really nice couple from mainland China about a decade ago, and they took us out to a place owned by a friend of theirs. We ordered what they suggested, a dish that wasn't on the English language menu, in order to try something "authentic." We were served a stew-type dish that our friends raved about : personally, I was not impressed. Putting it as diplomatically as I can here: the worst meal that I was ever served in Ireland was worth at least two Michelin stars compared to what I ate that night.

Most Chinese food does at least have ORIGINS in China. But that said, Chinese food you get in China, and Chinese food you get in Chinatown is markedly different. And not all types of Chinese food can be found everywhere, obviously.

Yes, some foods were Chinese-Western crossovers. But most can at least trace SOME sort of origin back to China.

'Chop Suey" is often believed to be some cheap, Oriental stew that the Chinese created in America in the 1800s.

And so it might be. But it's based on a stew which originated in China. After large parties (weddings, etc), all the leftovers were thrown in a pot and boiled up in a soup or stew. This was the origin of the ORIGINAL 'Chop Suey'.

'Chop Suey' comes from 'Za Sui'. Which means 'bits and pieces' or 'assorted pieces'. Basically - leftovers. The leftovers of whatever you were eating the night before, boiled up into a stew or soup.

I personally love stuff like dimsum / yumcha. Or just ordinary, old Chinese staples. Nothing fancy. Most Chinese dishes are rustic and simple. Some have gone up-market (Peking Duck, for example), but most Chinese food is simple, unpretentious homecooked stuff.

Yes ????? :rage:

That's ...SIR...YESSIR ... Loud & Clear ! :rage:

Yes, my liege.

 

[Fading Fast]

I always assumed that this was part of the "upward mobility effect" by which I mean the presumption that basically everyone in the college environment is upper middle class; even though many are not.

My university experience was attending Rutgers University - the state university - and the average student was not upper middle class and many were not even middle class. If you've seen "The Wonder Years" you have a sense of how I grew up - very basic middle class, nothing fancy, no luxury, but food and basics were always there. It was eye opening to me how poor some of my fellow student were. Now looking back on it, I see that Rutgers was for me and them, a great opportunity to get a university education at an affordable price (I worked year round and was able to pay for it myself without acquiring any debt).

 

[ChiTownScion]

[/B]

Yes ????? :rage:

That's ...SIR...YESSIR ... Loud & Clear ! :rage:

"I am not a 'sir.' I earn my pay."

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Fish, fish, fish..." And shellfish. I would have thought that I'd died and gone to heaven! But I know that it isn't for everyone....like my wife, for example. She's not particularly fond of it. When we visit Boston, I have to do my seafood meals when she's attending her continuing ed seminars.

Most of the kind of fish I like you can't get in restaurants, and if you try to order it they look at you funny. The best way to cook fish is to slap a couple of smoked haddock filets in a pan, dump half a can of Carnation milk over it -- do *NOT* add flour or water or do anything else to the milk -- and then poach it in a medium oven until the milk boils and starts to turn brown. Good eatin'.

Other seafood advice: never eat shrimp in a restaurant. The only good shrimp is bought from a truck at the side of the road run by a smelly guy in a rubber apron. The truck should have signs that say SHRIMP CLAMS LOBSTER - FOOD STAMPS EXCEPTED and should have at least one fender that doesn't match the rest of the body. Shell it, cook it, and eat it the same day you buy it.

The only mackerel worth eating is caught off the town dock with a dropline. Cut thin and fry it in its own grease.

 

[Fading Fast]

Other seafood advice: ...The only good shrimp is bought from a truck at the side of the road run by a smelly guy in a rubber apron. The truck should have signs that say SHRIMP CLAMS LOBSTER - FOOD STAMPS EXCEPTED and should have at least one fender that doesn't match the rest of the body. Shell it, cook it, and eat it the same day you buy it.

My girlfriend, who spent part of her childhood in Maine, would agree and grumbles every time she has to (and I quote) "pay these insane, crazy, stupid, ridiculous [and a saucy word or two usually gets tossed in here as well] NYC prices for shrimp [or lobster] from these overprice vendors when I could buy better and fresher for less from a guy selling from the side of the road in Maine."

Depending on how incensed she is, I will agree (if I sense the boiler is about to blow) or mention that it would probably not be cost-effective if we added in the cost of driving back and forth to Maine. This does not evoke a smile.

 

[emigran]

Great thread... Lizzie I don't know how you got to know all these factoids... but well done...!!
As long as we're talking about food... I recall very well regularly eating brains as a kid in the early 50's. My mother would prepare them with garlic and breadcrumbs and broiled perhaps a little fresh lemon squeeze... quite good and rich tasting. We also had oven broiled "chops" ( don't recall if they were calf or lamb) that contained cross-sections of kidney. Haven't seen either of these since that time...

 

[Hercule]

"Fish, fish, fish..." And shellfish. I would have thought that I'd died and gone to heaven!

Boy do I miss living in New England! I almost cried watching Andrew Zimmern the other night eat a scallop the size of a baseball.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Living on the Gulf Coast has certain advantages (such as not having to shovel sunshine), and fresh shrimp is one of them. Whether in the market or in a restaurant, getting ones that were swimming/crawling an hour ago is pretty easy, though not as cheap as the farm raised/previously frozen stuff. The difference between fresh shrimp and everything else is astounding.

 

[Bushman]

Other seafood advice: never eat shrimp in a restaurant. The only good shrimp is bought from a truck at the side of the road run by a smelly guy in a rubber apron. The truck should have signs that say SHRIMP CLAMS LOBSTER - FOOD STAMPS EXCEPTED and should have at least one fender that doesn't match the rest of the body. Shell it, cook it, and eat it the same day you buy it.

Heh, that reminds me of the time I went to DC and bought some live crab right off the warf. Took 'em to the hotel, cooked them up right there in the room and ate 'em with a side of butter. Best crab I've ever had.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Heh, that reminds me of the time I went to DC and bought some live crab right off the warf. Took 'em to the hotel, cooked them up right there in the room and ate 'em with a side of butter. Best crab I've ever had.

Right before Christmas I was in Half Moon Bay, California, the week Dungeness crab season opened. Walked down to dock, bought crabs right off the boat, and took them to the restaurant right there at the dock. They cooked them up right then and we sat at the picnic table outside. No butter, just a bucket of beer and crab in the sunshine. I could have done that all day.

 

[jamespowers]

Right before Christmas I was in Half Moon Bay, California, the week Dungeness crab season opened. Walked down to dock, bought crabs right off the boat, and took them to the restaurant right there at the dock. They cooked them up right then and we sat at the picnic table outside. No butter, just a bucket of beer and crab in the sunshine. I could have done that all day.

That works. I have a few cousins who live there and dig clams.

 

[tonyb]

Just this morning I read a Louis Menand piece on the history of pulp paperback books in The New Yorker.

According to Menand's account, paperback books have been around for centuries, and that many millions of small-sized, easily pocketable paperbacks were distributed to military personnel during World War II. But paperbacks in general, and the "pulps" (as we have come to call them) didn't really take off until after WWII, when certain visionaries thought to sell those books on wire racks in drug stores and newsstands and bus and train depots, etc., at prices comparable to what a person might pay for a pack of smokes.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Pocket Books," with a 25 cent cover price, came on the market in 1939 -- these were reprints of popular hardcover books in a variety of genres, and were printed on quality paper with plastic-coated paper covers. They were sold in drugstores and such places, and became successful enough to inspire the "original paperback" trend a few years later. Those books were done on newsprint, and usually had lurid color cardstock covers. Pocket Books kept up its better-quality editions thru the end of the forties, but by the turn of the fifties they had fallen in line with the cheaper trend.

What the "Pocket Books" trend supplanted were hardcover reprints of popular fiction. Since the turn of the century, firms like Grosset & Dunlap and A. L. Burt had specialized in cheap clothbound reprints of recent books at cheap prices, and these books were flooding the market by the twenties and thirties. "Modern Library" came along in the late 1910s with hardcover reprints of "quality" books, and managed to survive thru the 1960s, but the rise of the paperback absolutely demolished the hardcover-reprint market for cheap fiction.

 

[Stanley Doble]

"Candy butchers" were selling magazines and paperback books in railroad cars in the mid 1800s. "Dime novels" and "penny dreadfuls" go back at least that far. There was an explosion in publishing of cheap books, newspapers and magazines when wood pulp paper and steam printing presses became available, around 1850. There was a lot of rubbish printed, but there were a lot of good books, classics, Bibles, and educational books too.

 

[LizzieMaine]

One of the most interesting publishers of this type of material was Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, a Socialist writer who hit on the idea of packaging pamphlet-size editions of all sorts of public-domain works on controversial subjects and selling them for a nickel apiece by mail order, or in bundles for even less. They were packaged in blue card-stock covers and were advertised in all the popular magazines of the day as "Little Blue Books." No subject was out of bounds for Little Blue Books, from radical politics to human sexuality, and many people got their first introduction to the Facts Of Life in the pages of a Little Blue Book. The peak of their popularity was the Depression, when Haldeman-Julius sold millions of copies a year by mail order, but you could still buy them into the sixties. They make for interesting reading even today.