MINNESOTA FATS (AND SPUDS)

I’m sure we did it all wrong in Minneapolis.  We should have gone across the river to Saint Paul, to the International Marketplace, a “Hmong barbecue paradise” according to Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, writing in the Minnesota Monthly.  There we might have had chicken wings stuffed with noodles, papaya salad with fish sauce, larb, black rice, mustard flowers, lemongrass sausages, and so on.  But we didn’t.

And we might certainly have gone to some well-thought-of, high-end places like Lucia's, Piccolo, Heartland, or La Belle Vie.  Heartland features bison ribeye, and Piccolo offers scrambled brown eggs with pickled pig’s feet.  We were sorry to miss them, but we did, because of a combination of sloth and distraction.

We did at least manage to eat walleye, which is the celebrated local freshwater fish, and when breaded and fried in butter it was very good indeed, but then, when fried in butter, what isn’t?  

And we did have some excellent tapas at a Spanish restaurant named Solera: a mass of small plates that included their own dry cured duck breast, “beluga” lentils, rabbit with red beans and chorizo, grilled octopus with poached fingerling potatoes.  We were certainly sorry we’d be gone by the time of Solara’s “wine and swine” night a few days later.  The waiter, who obviously appreciated our appreciation, offered us a 25% discount, and that was a great offer, but it really was a long way to go back from Los Angeles.

However, our foodie adventures took a very specific turn because we were in town at the same time as the Minnesota State Fair.  I’ve been to American county fairs, but this was my first State Fair with all the higher status and expectations that implies. If you want to see many, many pigs, geese, rabbits, chickens, cows, all raised by local kids: this is the place.  If you want all the milk you can drink for just a dollar: ditto.  If you want to see “the miracle of life” – that’s pigs, cows and sheep giving birth in a hot sweaty barn while people sit on bleachers, gawking and cheering them on – then it’s the place for that too.  I really didn’t want to see this at all, but many others obviously did.

In the food line there was a lot of the usual deep fried this and deep fried that, various things on a stick – cheese, hotdogs, pork chops – but we were looking for more local fare.  Given the large local Scandinavian population we were delighted to have the Swedish potato sausage – there’s pork in there too - seen below though rather obscured by mustard and sauerkraut.

And we were very glad to be able to try the lefse which is a Scandinavian pancake made from potatoes and flour.  We had it plain with butter, wanting to get the taste of the thing itself, but I can’t help thinking it would have been better with blueberries, which was another option.

Potatoes were in abundance, and we were certainly tempted by the tornado potatoes on sale, but we decided you could have too much of a good thing, and we saved ourselves for the (OK, deeply inauthentic, non-local) Australian battered potatoes.  I am something of an Australia-phile but I’d never thought they could come up with something like this:  huge flat slices of potatoes, maybe an eight of an inch thick, battered, deep friend and then doused with liquid cheese and ranch dressing.  You could feel the sin, you could feel the arteries hardening, and you know I thought, hell, it’s worth it.

We were certainly keen to try one particular local delicacy: Minnesota cheese curds, often the basis for poutine, but here battered and deep fried.  They’re supposed to squeak against your teeth as you eat them, and these certainly did, but I’m not sure that tooth-squeaking really added to the experience.  They tasted great though.

And finally we went into the arts and craft building.  There were many finely knitted sweaters and portraits done in seeds (one featuring the host and hostess of What Not To Wear) but it was the food that really caught the eye: jams, preserves, cupcakes, cookies, breads.

Now it so happened that the previous day I had been to the Mill City Museum in Minneapolis (it's about the history of the flour industry - yes, yes, I lead a very exciting life), and I’d seen a wonderful display of fake food including bread (that’s it above) and now behind glass at the fair was the real thing. It was hard to say which looked more authentic.  But it all looked pretty appetizing.

I can’t absolutely swear that there was no walleye to be had at the fair but I certainly didn’t see any.  I did however see lots of people wearing hats, or actually more like a headband, in the shape of a walleye. I really did want one, but I suspected that the locals could already tell just by looking at me that I wasn’t one of their own, and wearing a walleye would have been a kind of blasphemy.  I would never wish to blaspheme in Minnesota.

THE FULL STOMACH

Before we entirely leave the subject of edible stomachs, here's a display that I saw at the Minnesota State Fair last week.  More about that later.  There in the diary building was a fascinating model of a cow's stomach, with explanatory notes, and a small boy who might or might not have been trying to guess the breed.  (It's clickable if you want to see more detail).  I know that some early haggis recipes did indeed feature cow stomach rather than sheep. Given the size, you could have had yourself quite a feast.

ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT THE LAST WORD ON HAGGIS

An anonymous commenter asked which of the sheep’s 4 stomachs is used for haggis.  He thought it was the omasum.  I had no idea.  Research is amazingly tricky here.   My knowledge of sheep stomachs is growing exponentially but not all of it tells me what I want to know.  The general word (including Alan Davidson) is that it’s “the big stomach” that's used, though you can obviously find online dissenters.  There's a commercially available "Lamb's Traditional Haggis" which claims to use "the smaller stomach," whatever that might mean.  Here’s an anatomical diagram.

That image comes from this website:

http://www.sheep101.info/cud.html  

There you will also find this handy chart:

Capacities of digestive tract of mature sheep
.       Compartment	.      Capacity
Reticulum          Rumen          Omasum          Abomasum	1.2 to 2.0 quarts         5.0 to 10.0 gallons         0.5 to 1.0 quarts         2.0 to 3.0 gallons
Small intestines	2.0 to 2.5 gallons (80 ft)
Large intestines	1.5 to 2.0 quarts

The site tells us that the reticulum is honeycombed, so I think we can definitely rule that one out.

So it appears the rumen is the most likely. It’s certainly the biggest stomach, though a ten gallon haggis would be a fearsome object and I certainly don't think I've ever seen one that big, though I'd definitely like to.

NICHOLSONS & COBBLERS

I’ve been reading Nicholson Baker’s filthy new novel House of Holes.  Above are respectively the UK and US covers by which you might judge it.  It certainly contains lots of sex and madness, but not much food, and mouths are generally involved with things other than eating.  Still the book reminds us – if you need reminding - that a sherry cobbler was served to Charles Dickens when he made his speaking tour of America in 1842.  Baker, or rather his characters, also tell us it was the first drink made with crushed ice, that Dickens loved it and had his character Martin Chuzzlewit drink one, and that in 1850 Dickens bought five pounds’ worth of Wenham Lake ice, the transatlantic ice trade then being big business.

The passage from Martin Chuzzlewit runs as follows.  It seems the term ice cube had yet to be invented.

He produced a very large tumbler, piled up to the brim with little blocks of clear transparent ice, through which one or two thin slices of lemon, and a golden liquid of delicious appearance, appealed from the still depths below, to the loving eye of the spectator.

 ‘What do you call this?’ said Martin.

But Mr. Tapley made no answer; merely plunging a reed into the mixture — which caused a pleasant commotion among the pieces of ice — and signifying by an expressive gesture that it was to be pumped up through that agency by the enraptured drinker.

Martin took the glass with an astonished look; applied his lips to the reed; and cast up his eyes once in ecstasy. He paused no more until the goblet was drained to the last drop.

“There sir,” said Mark, taking it from him with a triumphant face, “If you should ever happen to be dead beat again, when I ain’t in the way, all you’ve got to do is, to ask the nearest man to go fetch a cobbler.”

         “Go and fetch a cobbler!” said Martin.

A character in House of Holes also says, “You know the English talk a good game, but they’re such hypocrites.  All that business about how vulgar it is to have ice in drinks.” This, as the English would say, is bollocks.  They English are not hypocritical about vulgarity: they’re proud of it.  It’s true that the English use less ice than Americans, and the Scots very definitely don’t want ice in their whisky, but it’s got nothing to do with any imagined vulgarity, it’s because they don’t want their booze diluted.  It’s the same reason that Americans don’t want ice in their martinis.  But hey, the English don’t need me to defend them.

It seems the sherry cobbler did indeed enjoy a vogue in the late nineteenth century.  Recipes, of course, vary, but a typical one involves 3 oz sherry, 1/3 oz triple sec, 2 oz soda water, 1/4 oz sugar syrup.   I can’t say it really gets my juices flowing, but an awful lot is going to depend on what kind of sherry you use.

What Dickens actually wrote in American Notes was this:

“The planter’s house was an airy, rustic dwelling, that brought Defoe’s description of such places strongly to my recollection. The day was very warm, but the blinds being all closed, and the windows and doors set wide open, a shady coolness rustled through the rooms, which was exquisitely refreshing after the glare and heat without. Before the windows was an open piazza, where, in what they call the hot weather — whatever that may be — they sling hammocks, and drink and doze luxuriously. I do not know how their cool rejections may taste within the hammocks, but, having experience, I can report that, out of them, the mounds of ices and the bowls of mint-julep and sherry-cobbler they make in these latitudes, are refreshments never to be thought of afterwards, in summer, by those who would preserve contented minds.”

I don’t know what he means.  Is his mind discontent because he can’t recreate the drink?  Surely he could.  Or does he think the drinks are so vile that the mere thought of them sets his mind in a whirl?  Perhaps there’s a deliberate ambiguity.

And yes, that “planter’s house” is a giveaway - Dickens was on a slave plantation, though he says of the owner,  “I believe that this gentleman is a considerate and excellent master, who inherited his fifty slaves, and is neither a buyer nor a seller of human stock; and I am sure, from my own observation and conviction, that he is a kind-hearted, worthy man.”

Incidentally when Dickens made his second visit to the United States, in 1867, Charles Ranhofer of Delmonico’s in New York, created a number of dishes bearing his name, including “veal pie a la Dickens” and “beetroot fritters a la Dickens.”  There was also a dinner at Delmonico’s in his honor where “timbales a la Dickens” was served, though not the veal pie or the beetroot.  The menu, which appears in Ranhofer’s book, The Epicure, makes no mention of sherry cobbler.

THE HAGGIS AND I

I have discovered that the haggis is an endangered species.  I should probably have known this already.  Of course, in America the haggis has scarcely ever lived.  A true haggis contains sheep lung (part of the “pluck” – along with liver and heart) which is illegal here, dismissed as unfit for human consumption.  There were some reports in 2010 that the ban was to be lifted but it came to nothing, and frankly I never expected it to.  Most Americans seem to be untroubled by this situation.

But even in Scotland there are problems, apparently, and they are, wouldn’t you know, caused by global warming.  Because the Scottish climate is now less icy and windblown than it used to be, the lungworm parasite that affects sheep is suddenly thriving.  The rest of the sheep remains good, but the lungs become inedible.  Consequently Scottish butchers are importing lungs from Ireland; though I must say I’m slightly baffled by that.  Has global warming not affected Ireland?  Is Ireland now colder than Scotland? Or are their sheep simply more resistant to lungworm?

I didn’t know about these development when I recently bought a haggis in one of those American shops that specializes in all things English, from Branston Pickle to models of double-decker buses.  These places always make me uneasy – but where else are you going to buy a haggis?

You could certainly argue that the thing I bought wasn’t a “real” haggis.  As you see, it came in a can for one thing, and it was “skinless”  i.e. it was just the filling, without the stomach, though how else would you be able to can it? And despite calling itself “Scottish Haggis” it was actually “prepared in the USA” for Stahly Quality Foods, of Fife.  Still, beggars can’t be choosers.   I bought it, took it home, and only then did I start wondering how, and if, they’d got around the problem of the illegal lung.

Well, a quick look at the list of ingredients told me they’d managed to avoid the issue completely.  There was lamb heart and lamb liver in there, but no lung.  That, of course, made me wonder how authentic it was going to taste.  I mean with any haggis it’s not as though you sit there eating it, savoring the heady taste of lung: the contents are ground up and largely unidentifiable, but I wondered if the lung might be a vital component of the overall flavor, or indeed “flavor profile.”

         Other ingredients included pork, pork fat, oats and “natural flavors.”  Authenticity seemed to be flying out the window here, and yet, and yet. Maybe it wasn’t the best ever, and of course I couldn’t enjoy the Burns Night ritual of piercing the stomach with a dirk, but all in all it was very good, meaty, oaty and peppery in all the right ways.  And with neeps and tatties it made a meal for which you didn’t need teeth.

         Actually, when I was in Scotland a few years back, well before the lungworm scare, I had a surprisingly hard time finding haggis.  I ended up going to a fancy restaurant that served “ostrich haggis” which was very good, but Rabbie Burns would surely have had a fit.

          Having eaten my canned “Scottish Haggis” I read a couple of the “serving suggestions” on the label.  The most improbable was “Haggis Jacobean” – a couple of ounces of haggis in an individual serving dish with a teaspoon of whisky added, heated up, then served with fresh cream. 

         As far as I can tell, this dish is an invention by the food technicians at Stahly Quality Foods.  A browse through my books on the history of British cooking didn’t bring up anything remotely similar.  I did however discover the wonderfully named “Haggis Royale” (sic).

         Fans of Pulp Fiction will naturally think this involves the addition of cheese.  But no.  I found the recipe in Antony and Araminta Hippisley Coxe’s Book of Sausages, and they claim it comes from The Cook and Housewife’s Manual by Meg Dods, which it does, though she calls it “royal” not royale (Antony and Araminta were getting a bit fancy there).  

Dods claims she got the recipe from “the Minutes of Sederunt of the St Ronan’s Club.”  In any case it bears almost no relation to a traditional Scottish haggis.  You mince three pounds of mutton, add the crumbs of an oatmeal penny loaf, suet, marrow, egg yolks, anchovies, red wine, cayenne pepper, wrap the whole thing in a veal caul and roast it.  There are no lungs whatoesever.  You could legally eat it in America.

SHAKING LIKE FLYNN

And speaking of Ernest Hemingway, I found the terrific (low res) picture above of Hemingway with Errol Flynn. Flynn used to be a major obsession of mine – faded slightly now – and of course Flynn appeared in the movie of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, though this picture was taken at the El Floridita in Havana in 1959, presumably while Flynn was in Cuba filming his last movie, Cuban Rebel Girls.  

Yes, that's right, Beverly Aadland was his "protege." There are, as with Hemingway, various cocktails around with Errol Flynn’s name on them.  One is equal parts cognac and grand marnier, another is a fizz involving rum, lime juice, and egg white.  Who’s to say Flynn wouldn’t have approved? I’ve always had the impression that Flynn would drink pretty much anything that was put in front of him.  He seems to have been primarily a vodka man – Zubrowka being his favourite brand - though apparently he did have a “gin period,” and as you see below he was happy enough to shill for Heublein.  I’d lose the hat if I were you, Errol.

The story goes that when Errol Flynn was in one of his cleaner periods, or at least trying to give that impression, he used to appear on set carrying oranges – the oranges having been injected with vodka, which I can’t imagine ever fooled anybody. I don’t think that really qualifies as a cocktail, nor does the concoction he served to Peggy Salterlee, one of the victims in his statutory rape trial.  This is her, below with Jerry Giesler, Flynn’s attorney.

 When she was cross-questioned in court by Giesler, she testified that she’d been out with Flynn, and was drinking a glass of milk with her dinner. She went to the bathroom and when she returned Flynn had put a shot of rum into the milk.  She asked him why he’d done that and he replied, “Because it’s good for you before going to bed."

Which reminds me just a little of the Loved One’s grandmother who, alas, I never met.  I’m told she always used to have a beer for breakfast but she put an egg in it because she said it was important to start the day with some protein.

Anyway, there's really no doubt that Flynn had sex with Peggy Satterlee: it was statutory rape because she was 17.  In fact Beverly Aadland was even younger when she  started having sex with Flynn, 15 seems to be the best guess.  Here's a picture of them, also from 1959, at the Lido Club in London. 

 People always bang on about how terrible Flynn looked at the end of his life because of all the drink and drugs, but I don't think he looks so bad here.  It is the last year of his life, and OK, he doesn't look as good as he once did but he still looks better than most of us ever will. And whatever ever age we are, very few of us ever get to date the likes of Beverly Aadland: you may decide for yourself whether that's a good or a bad thing.

(These Flynn/Aadland images come from a wonderful website: www.nickelinthemachine.com )

NAKED AT THE SCREENING

These are strange, virtual days indeed.  There was a time, not so long ago, when if you wanted to see any of the early Andy Warhol movies you had to go to the ends of the earth, to some dank “art space” or “film co-op” in a bad part of town.  I went eagerly to such places, and of course I admit that the difficulty, the seeking out, was part of the attraction, but I never managed to see Nude Restaurant.  That’s it above and below.

         But now, as I have just discovered, you can go on Youtube and, at the click of a cursor, watch Taylor Mead and Viva in Warhol’s Nude Restaurant, and I have to say I’m rather charmed by the pair of them.   I suppose Viva and Taylor were never exactly going to be Hepburn and Tracy but at least in Nude Restaurant Viva seems to be trying vaguely to stick to the subject.

         She talks about going to a restaurant on a date, “this horrible, horrible expensive rotten ... something like the Delmonico Grill” where she “isn’t aware of the procedures” and she orders clams on the half shell which come with lemon slices wrapped in gauze, and because she’s stoned the lemons look “like a little baby bunting ... like Christ in his swaddling clothes.”  Then she goes off on a tangent about who was the real author of The Story of O.

         Stephen Koch, author of Stargazer, the first book length study of Warhol’s movies, absolutely despises Nude Restaurant, writing, “I cannot think of a single inch of footage ... that is worth looking at.”  The movie was shot at the Mad Hatter restaurant in Manhattan, in October 1967.  Apparently there was another version shot the same day - all nude, all male – and this was only ever shown in a porn theater, to what response, I don't know.

         A quick cruise around the Internet reveals that there are quite a few “nude restaurants” in the world.  The one above is, or was, in New York, but they seem to me everywhere.  I have only ever been to one nude restaurant, at a clothing-optional swinger’s resort in Florida.  It was literary research, OK?  The people there seemed content enough, and in fact after I’d been there about ten minutes I felt pretty much the way I would feel in any in any not so good restaurant anywhere in America.  Which makes me wonder why make a big deal of it?  But chacun a son gout, as they say.

         Personally I think the kitchen is a far more erotic place than a restaurant.  It’s a little more private for one thing, though I know that not everybody demands privacy.  Also, if you insist on cooking naked, it’s more potentially dangerous, with the flames, the boiling water, the spitting fat and so on, and again that may add to the thrill.

        

         Once in a while I see the (ahem) sex educator Nina Hartley (that's her above) in my local supermarket.  I suppose as a true psychogourmet I should have peered into her basket by now, to see exactly what she buys, but maybe that would be a little too creepy.

         However, as you see above, there are some extant images of Ms, Hartley in her own kitchen, making a salad.  Far and away the most fascinating thing in that kitchen is the essoreuse - I’m not sure there’s a good English word for it – it’s the white cylindrical thing on the corner of the counter, a thing that spins round and you use it to dry salad leaves.  Looking at this picture I realized I hadn’t seen an essoreuse for years.  Maybe nobody washes their salad leaves any more.  Or maybe they just don’t dry them.

         But if you’re really looking for cheap, zesty sexual thrills in the kitchen, a salad really doesn’t cut it.  You need a sausage.  Now a sausage is a vaguely lewd and phallic thing in the first place, but if you cook it in the nude you’re guaranteed to get some big, cheap, slapstick laughs.  Only one each, girls!!!

         Incidentally, Warhol also made a movie called Kitchen.  I confess I haven’t seen that one either, neither in a dank art space nor on Youtube, but as far as I tell from the descriptions, it contains neither nudity nor sausages.  Shame.

YOU CAN TAKE THE LAD OUT OF THE LARD …

The most intriguing article in that first issue of Lucky Peach was about Kay and Ray’s Potato Chips, which the author Mark Ibold, says are the best in the world.  That’s a mighty claim, and obviously a provocative one, and I’m always a bit dubious about any claims for the best of anything.  So much depends on who you are and what you’re used to, what condition your taste buds are in and what mood you’re in at the time.  Still, you’ve got to admire the guy’s enthusiasm.

Ibold describes those children on the pack as “Darger-esque” (as in the ludicrous old primitive artist and pervo, Henry Darger) though in fact the kids are Kay and Ray Heckendorm whose dad ran the company in the mid-fifties.  Actually, there aren’t a whole lot of little boys to be found in the Darger oeuvre.

Kay and Ray’s Potato Chips are made in Pennsylvania, a state where the Loved One lived for a while, and she swears they have a special way with potato chips in those parts.  But the real reason Kay and Ray’s Potato Chips absolutely needed to be sought out and eaten is quite simply because they’re cooked in lard.  Lard!  Oh joy.

Acquiring them was a little more tricky than anticipated.  Online ordering didn’t seem to work, but a phone call to the factory got the job done.  We went for the three pound box.  In for a penny, in for three pounds. And the box duly arrived.

We imagined it would contain quite a few small packets of potato chips.  But no.  The box contained one gigantic plastic bag of potato chips.  Thus:

I was sorry not to have the Darger-esque illustration but there’s always something appealing and formidable about having anything in bulk. 

Are these the world’s best potato chips?  Well, I wouldn’t get into a fist fight about it (for the reasons discussed above), but they’re definitely very damn good.  And I have to say, the more I eat, the more I edge toward the Mark Ibold position.

Of course, in a photograph they look pretty much like any other potato chip, though in fact they’re smaller, thinner, crisper, more translucent that most.  Can I taste the lard?  Well not exactly.  The flavor is much lighter and more delicate than you might expect, but it’s very good to know the lard’s there, and it leaves a satisfying oily sheen on the fingertips after you’ve touched them.

And I have, once again, been thinking about the connection between pigs and peasantry, and now potatoes. There is some crucial link between pork and potatoes, isn’t there?  Vegetable oil was pretty much unknown in my family as I was growing up: we had a tiny bottle of olive oil in the house, that my mother swore was a cure for earache. The chip pan was filled with lard; and lard was used to roast potatoes.  Using fancy oils for cooking would have seemed downright pretentious.  And now lard itself has become a sort of delicacy, or at least a specialist item.  Supermarket potato chips are now all sunflower and safflower oil.  I wonder how long it will be before we need to order another three pounds of Kay and Ray’s Potato Chips.

THE MEALS LESS EATEN

Back in the days when I had a New York publisher who thought I was going to be the next big thing, I was invited to the Big Apple and feted.  Dinners were given, parties were thrown, drinks were had.  I was delighted, and truly grateful for all this, and when my editor suggested I might like to go to a fancy, old school cocktail bar it was a choice between the Rainbow Room at the Rockefeller Center, and Windows on the World, in the World Trade Center.

For no particular reason, I chose the Rainbow Room.  It was just great, up on the 65^th floor with a cinematic view of Manhattan, and as I recall, helicopters kept buzzing past the windows like giant insects.  I believe I may have ordered a Manhattan cocktail just to feel part of it all.

As we sauntered out, with a happy buzz on, we said, “That was great.  Next time we’ll go to Windows on the World.”  And then I started living in New York, and I still had every intention of going to Windows on the World, but there didn’t seem to be any rush.  I figured it would always be there.  And then there was no Windows on the World anymore, a very tiny part of a much bigger tragedy.

In fact I just discovered (though it happened a while ago) that there’s no Rainbow Room anymore either.  They closed it in 2009 in a welter of scandal about unreasonable rent increases, unpaid bills and tax evasion.  I suppose if I’d really been a regular there, I’d have been aware before now, but it was enough to know, or at least believe, the place was there.  I miss it, even though I only went once.

And frankly that’s how I feel about a lot of bars and restaurants.  We know that all is flux, and that the catering trade is more fluxable than most things.  But I remember feeling a terrible pang a few years back when I heard there was no longer an Eros restaurant in Cambridge.  It was a pretty rough Greek restaurant, mostly for students, but it was the first even vaguely grown up restaurant I ever went to without my parents.  I felt quite the sophisticate, though since I usually ordered moussaka and rhubarb crumble, this was obviously a delusion.

Likewise I thought there’d always be a Manzi’s fish restaurant in London.   That’s now been taken over by Fergus Henderson, though there are worse things that could have happened.  The image above shows one of Manzi's mirrors now on sale at an architectural salvage yard.

Marian’s in the East Village (above), which used to win all kinds of awards for best martini in New York, has gone.  The Sonoran Café, where novelist Steve Erickson took me to lunch on my first week in LA,  closed a couple of years back and the building’s just sitting there empty.  I regard both these closures as personal disappointments.  Meanwhile tons of the world’s mediocre restaurants, you can name them as well as I can, stay in business.

And last week I was walking down Vine Street in Hollywood, a street which is certainly undergoing many spasms of redevelopment and property speculation, and I saw that Molly’s Charbroiled Burger House had closed down.

Now this is a place I’d walked by maybe hundreds of times.  It looked a bit down at heel, just a shack really, but there was something appealing about it.  There were always people sitting on the stools outside and they seemed to be enjoying themselves.   I always thought it would be a great place to go if you wanted a greasy sandwich in the middle of the afternoon, and maybe it was, but I never went there and so I’ll never know.

Now, if I’m reading correctly Robert Lowell’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” he’s saying that you end up in pretty much the same place regardless of the route you take to get there, which I think is essentially true, but I’m willing to consider alternatives.  If the universe can be changed by the flapping of a butterfly’s wing, it can surely be changed by eating a good grilled cheese sandwich.

And just a final strange footnote to the Windows on the World saga.  Improbably, despite the destruction of the Twin Towers, a partial place setting of Windows on the World china survived: it had been taken to the restaurant owner's home for a private event.  I find the salad plate just heartbreakingly beautiful.  It looks like this:

EAT OF DESCEND

I have no idea what’s going on here, but the image and text have been haunting me for days.   The photograph is from a series titled Mixed Emotions and it comes from the website Tokyo Undressed, by the photographer and artist Rikki Kasso, and I assume he took the picture from his own TV.  I can’t imagine what language the subtitle is from, some European language translated into Japanese and then into English?  Who knows?  It would obviously help if I recognized the actress but I don’t, and I would be happy to be enlightened.  As for what the subtitle means, well that remains even more inscrutable, but I feel fairly certain that the actress is saying something about food, sex, obsession and the madness of the mouth.  I could, of course, be wrong.