SUPPIN' WITH SLATTERNS

Why are foreign translations of food terms and menus so gosh darned hilarious? We know that mockery is very bad and wrong, and anyone who’s ever tried to learn a foreign language has made some stupid, glaring howlers.  And, yet how can you not hoot with mirth at this pack of Japanese instant noodles?  Soup for sluts - “cheap fast and easy” indeed.

At the risk of second-guessing the Japanese translator, I assume there was some confusion here between the modern sense of slut as simply a sexually promiscuous woman, and an older meaning of slut as a woman who isn’t very good at, and really doesn’t care about, domestic chores, cooking being one of them.   I guess “slattern” would be the more current word, but my Word dictionary considers this offensive too.  

Still, slut was certainly used in the title of a book that quite a few women had back in the day: Erin Pizzey, The Slut’s Cookbook, and Erin Pizzey certainly didn’t mean to offend.  Her website glosses it thus: “A slut is a much maligned human being. It is usually quite wrong to assume that a slut is promiscuous - nothing is further from the truth. A slut is always in control of every situation she is in,”  though I imagine there are one or two things that are a little further from the truth.

Well, sluts and slatterns, and indeed whores, have to cook and eat just like the rest of us, and of course the Italians have the term putanesca - “whore style.” The concept supposedly dates back to the 1950s, devised by one Sandro Petti, of Rancio Fellone, a restaurant and nightclub on the island of Ischia.  That’s him below, and I think that's Gina Lollobrigida with him, though I could be wrong:

One evening near closing time a group of customers asked for a meal but Petti had run out of ingredients and told them he didn't have enough to make them a meal.  Just what kind of restaurant and nightclub was this, you may ask.  The customers said,  "Facci una puttanata qualsiasi” (Make any kind of garbage), puttanata here meaning something worthless. derived from puttana. This seems to be an insult both to chefs and whores, and perhaps is a bit of an urban myth, but Petti concocted a sauce with what he had: tomatoes, olives and capers.

Nigella Lawson has a recipe that she calls Slut’s Spaghetti. And she writes,  “Well, how could I resist this translation of pasta alla puttanesca, whore's pasta as it usually is described in English? The general consensus seems to be that this is the sort of dish cooked by slatterns who don't go to market to get their ingredients fresh, but are happy to use stuff out of jars and tins. I hold my hands up to that. Or maybe one should just attribute the name gamely to the fiery tang and robust saltiness of the dish?”   Well maybe.

And if whores have to eat, so do porn stars.  There are various references to this volume floating around the Internet, The Pornstar Cookbook.  It’s attributed to someone or something called Nicotext, and was allegedly published in 2007, running to 640 pages.  Whether this book actually exists I’m not sure, all the sources that claim to sell it declare it to be unavailable or out of stock.  I admit that I haven’t put too much energy into finding it.

All of which brings us to the notorious book by Carol J. Adams titled The Pornography of Meat.  Her previous book had the less zesty title The Sexual Politics of Meat.  I hesitate to paraphrase the book’s argument, being part of the patriarchy, but I think it is that women are sometimes (Adams might say always) treated like pieces of meat, and that this is obviously bad and wrong: and who could disagree?  But I think she ultimately believes that treating animals as meat is every bit as wrong too.  Vegetarians suffer under male hegemony just as much as women do.

She’s particularly against the presence of knives in food advertising.  She writes, “the knife is a popular implement in the pornographic script: women are shown mutilating their own genitals; a smiling young woman is shown thrusting a large butcher knife into her vagina, blood spurting rom the wound.” Well she obviously sees very different pornography than I do.

She particularly has it in for a restaurant in Ithaca named John Thomas, which I agree is a dodgy name for a restaurant. though I gather it is named after a real man who lived nearby. 

She writes, “With John Thomas’s establishment we have several reminders of the accessibility of women’s bodies to men.  First of course is the double entendre of the word strip.  Then, the knife as a phallic symbol represents all those John Thomas’s who want a piece.”  She is referring to DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which John Thomas is the nickname of gamekeeper Mellors’ penis.

'Say goodnight! to John Thomas,' he said, looking down at his penis.

'He's safe in the arms of creeping Jenny! Not much burning pestle about

him just now.'

And he put his flannel shirt over his head.

This is the ad Adams particularly objects to: and I do think she probably has a point.  Stripping at knife point really isn’t very right on. (Sorry the image quality is so poor - it's a scan of a scan.)

Elsewhere I’m not so sure: “Vagina is the Latin word for sheath. A sheath is a case for a knife blade.  In pornography, women’s sheaths receive not only knives, but daggers, razors, scissors swords, hooks, jackhammers, axes, ice picks, cigarettes, needles, pokers.” 

Well, if you say so. But of course the sheath is not slashed, not even damaged, by the knife or sword (it would be useless if it were) anymore than the vagina is slashed by the penis.  She also claims that knives are used to intimidate vegetarians, but who needs that?  Why not just wave a pork sausage at them; but not a pork sword, definitely not a pork sword.

DONNA TARTT: SANDWICH WOMAN

For “professional” reasons I’ve been rereading Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History.  She has a new book coming out this autumn The Goldfinch.  Actually, it’s so long since I first read The Secret History, that I often felt as though I was reading it for the first time.  I certainly remembered that the characters, a bunch of decadent classics students, did heroic amounts of drinking, and Tartt’s descriptions of hangovers are so powerful they can make you feel queasy even when you’re otherwise feeling right as rain.  And I did remember a certain amount of fine dining, but I’d never realized how sandwich-positive the book is.

Characters regularly order sandwiches in bars and at lunch counters, which comes well within the bounds of naturalism, but sandwiches somehow do seem to have a more than naturalistic significance:

“While the twins played cards at one end of the table, and Henry worked at the other, Francis sat curled in the window seat with a plate of little sandwiches in his lap, reading, in French, the Memoires of the Due de Saint-Simon …  Bunny lay on his stomach on the hearth rug, doing his homework; occasionally he would steal one of Francis's sandwiches ... ”  Yes, Bunny is a bad lot.

The twins referred to above are Charles and Camilla (yes really, prophetic I guess), who indulge in incest, and favor cream cheese and marmalade sandwiches, and I really do think there’s meant to be some correlation between transgressive sex and putting odd fillings between slices of bread; although cream cheese and marmalade doesn't strike me as really all THAT odd.

But most crucially of all, a grilled cheese sandwich features at the heart of the plot.  These young classicists are trying to arrange a Bacchanalia for themselves.  Preparations involve various purification rituals, including a three day fast.  Bunny is seen eating a grilled cheese sandwich and is therefore excluded from the festivities, which sets a large chunk of narrative in motion.

        

Well, I don’t want to make too much of this, but the fact is, Tartt does choose to make the offending food a sandwich, not a slice of pizza, not mac and cheese. And yes, there is something absurd and comical about a Bacchanalia being sabotaged by the eating of a sandwich, it’s easy to think of far more absurd and comical foods; pork pies, kebabs, Fruit Loops ...

Then I found an interview with Donna Tartt in which she says, "Actually, my very favourite things are books. Certainly I didn't give a hoot about shoes when I was a child, or about food either - would have lived off olive sandwiches, if I'd been allowed.”

        

Now, I know I had a deprived childhood, but I don’t think I even knew what an olive was, and certainly hadn’t tasted one, until I left home and went to college (yes, I was making my own bid for decadence).  In any case I’m inclined to think that a child who wants to live on olive sandwiches isn’t exactly someone who doesn’t give a hoot about food, but rather a child of remarkable and fascinating sensibilities.  I would have expected nothing else from Donna Tartt.  Just another reason to love her.  Here she is apparently miming the shape of a giant sandwich.

SWEET AND SOUR SPUDS

Every time I go to India Sweets and Spices, my local Indian supermarket, I end up buying some kind of subcontintental potato chip/crisp.  This seems a reasonable thing to buy, since the Indians obviously have a pretty good way with potatoes, whether it be Bombay aloo or sukhi bharji or wada pav.

That’s a wada pav above (spellings vary), essentially a potato sandwich, and to those of us who grew up in the north of England eating chip butties, it seems both natural and comparatively sophisticated.

The Indians also have perfected the aloo paratha: unleavened dough into which spicy potatoes have been incorporated, then rolled out and cooked on a griddle   with butter or ghee.  That’s the “proper” method anyway, but I once had a version in an Indian Restaurant in London, that was an ordinary unstuffed paratha that had simply been folded over and heap of mash shoved inside.  I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing.

So yes, I’m always optimistic when I buy my Indian potato snacks, but they always turn out to be strange and disappointing. 

Take those curious little suckers above - Anand Potato Chips (Masala), masala being a term that doesn’t meant much more than mixed spices, and spicy they were, in fact they were so hot that the aftertaste was as though you’d shaken chili pepper directly into your mouth.  But at least they had a crispness about them.

Another attempt was Mo’pleez Spicy potato chips (above), masala again, which delivered the experience of eating dry, tasteless crackers that had been left in a drawer for a couple of months.  Mo’pleez is a terrific name but my real feeling and that of people I shared them with was “no mo’ ever again, thank you.”

Still hope springs eternal, and when I had the chance to try three different varieties of potato “wafers,” manufactured by Balaji Wafer Pvt. Ltd, based in Gujurat, and according to their website, “In year 2003 Balaji Group took pride to introduce this biggest fully automated Potato processing machinery plant in India which can process 4500 kg. potato and make 1200 kg. of chips per hour.”  Impressive.

         The three flavors, as you see, were Simply Salted, Cream and Onion, and Magic Masala (of course).  Simply salted was a little too simple for my tastes, and perhaps lacking in salt, and the Cream and Onion was not bad at all, though common or garden all-America sour cream would have been zestier.  But the Masala: oh my, I’d never tasted anything quite like it.

I’d try one and think, what is that flavor, Mint? I’d try another.  Was that sugar? Chutney? Well, there was no mint, but sugar was third on the list of ingredients, after potatoes and vegetable oil, and I think the thing that was mostly responsible for the taste was the dry mango powder.  I found the result sort of cloying and vaguely unpleasant.  We know that mango chutney is a staple of Indian cookery, and something that by and large I like with an Indian curry, but not so much as a coating for spuds. 

Still, they are no doubt made with local Indian tastes in mind, and if there seems to be something vaguely absurd about potato snacks that have had to travel 9000 miles (the locavores would be horrified) no doubt there are many Indian immigrants in LA who think these snacks are worth every bit of the effort.

In general I’m with the local lobby, nevertheless, having been down to the (somewhat) local branch of World Market I’ve just bought a six pack of exotic beers and ciders from around the world (sold for a pretty reasonable $1.99 each.  Consequently I’ve been enjoying some Einstock Olgero, Icelandic white ale, featuring “the complex flavors of a classic Witbier, including orange peel and coriander.”   I couldn’t detect the coriander but the orange was definitely there, and I was pretty happy with that.  The mavens over a RateBeer.com don’t seem to like it a whole lot but I thought it was pretty good, though that may have had something to do with the tequila chaser, made by Sauza, a company located in the municipality of Tequila, in the state of Jalisco in Mexico.  The tequila glass, incidentally, was bought in Jalisco, in Guadalajara.  How international can you get?