STIRRING STUFF

I’ve been sifting through the Psychogourmet Archive and once again I saw this image which has been in the flies for a good few years.

It raises a lot of questions and I don’t have many of the answers, but it is, apparently, an image from a German propaganda leaflet titled Lightning News, dropped on Allied troops on the western front in 1944 – the leaflet is dated October 31^st.

My source for this information is the website psywarrior.com and an article titled “Sex and Psychological Operations” by Herbert A Friedman.

But the questions I have relate to the original source of the image.  First, I wonder where it's an extant photograph or one taken specially for this purpose.  And I wonder if it's German or American.  It would be good if we could read the labels on the bottles but the online image isn’t high enough res.  In either case, if it was extant, where did it come from?  Who was the photographer?  Who was the model?  Was it perhaps a “dirty postcard” – the nudity is explicit, but certainly not obscene, the model looks very cheerful and that message “Gee, it would be swell to be back home and mix a few cocktails with her,” seems quite mild by propaganda standards.

So many wartime propaganda images show the decent girls back home being corrupted and ravished by various kind of scoundrel; and of course anxieties of class, nationality, and race often come into it.  This kind of thing:

The lady on the couch has been besmirched, and willingly at that, if the message on the rear is to be believed, although the barman is still shaking merrily in the background.  He may of course be in the woman's fantasy.

Poking around the internet, doing various word and image searches, has left me no wiser about that Lightning News photograph, but I did find this image, one of a number, of Bettie Page behind a bar - no cocktail shaker in use.  It's obviously post-war, the hostilities are over, and what model has ever looked more cheerful, and less corrupted, behind a bar or anywhere else, than Bettie Page? 

MORE CEPHALOPOD FUN

Well, my birthday was coming up, and being a hard man to buy for, I wandered into Pier One and saw they had a cocktail shaker with an octopus design, and I said OK, I’ll have one of those.  I might have said that even if it hadn't been my birthday.

It never looks quite as photogenic as I feel it ought to, and the octopus head does look like something from outer space, but I’m not saying it like that’s a bad thing.

And then curiously, the very same day, I was in the local Vons supermarket and I saw they had octopi for sale – they'd never had them before - so obviously I bought one.

Now, I have cooked octopus quite a few times – it has been discussed elsewhere on this very blog - how to avoid rubberiness is always the problem. We know that Jiro (the one who dreams of sushi) has his staff massage the critter for an hour or so, but I knew I wouldn't be doing that.  So instead there was marinating, and a longish boil at which point it looked like this:

And then a quick fry.  So that it came out looking like this:

It tasted pretty good.  Texture-wise it was perhaps just a little bit soft, though that’s better than being rubbery, I think.

 And then, developing a small obsession, I was in a Japanese supermarket a few days later and I saw they had two kinds of octopus for sale, both according to the label, perfect for sashimi.

The one with the small suckers seemed to be cooked already, and could have been eaten straight out of the pack.  The other one with the giant suckers (I had never seen suckers like that) was raw as raw could be and needed work, though I wasn’t sure quite what – a good boil and a deep fry is what it got.  It was OK, not rubbery but perhaps a bit chewy -  I think there’s a difference.

There is, of course, more than one way to deal with an octopus, as this image from Nobuyoshi Araki (my main man) undoubtedly proves.  I hope they ate it afterwards: