THE MUTED SCHWEIN HOCK

As I wait, just a little anxiously, for publication of the new Thomas Pynchon novel Bleeding Edge, I’ve been rereading The Crying Of Lot 49,  Pynchon’s short, pithy, intermittently playful, second novel, the one that even Pynchon skeptics can just about manage to get through.

Since Pynchon’s concerns are so broad it’s hardly surprising that he has things to say about eating and drinking, but I hadn’t realized quite what a smorgasbord of foodie reference Lot 49 actually is.  Everybody remembers the opening paragraph in which Oedipa Maas returns “from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue, to find that she, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul.”   She ponders the significance of this “through the sunned gathering of her marjoram and sweet basil from the herb garden herb, reading of book reviews in the latest Scientific American, into the layering of a lasagna, garlicking of a bread, tearing up of romaine leaves, eventually, oven on, into the mixing of the twilight's whiskey sours against the arrival of her husband, Wendell ("Mucho") Maas.”  

And then there’s the dandelion wine made by Mike Fallopian, who says, "I picked the dandelions in a cemetery, two years ago. Now the cemetery is gone. They took it out for the East San Narciso Freeway.”  And then, "It's clearer now," he said, rather formal. "A few months ago it got quite cloudy. You see, in spring, when the dandelions begin to bloom again, the wine goes through a fermentation. As if they remembered."

Phyllis Gebauer a lifelong friend, who knew Pynchon back in his Seattle days writes in a “mini-memoir,” "Tom at the time was working on The Crying of Lot 49,' and when that book came out and I read about his heroine -- Oedipa Maas -- 'layering lasagna' at the beginning of Chapter One, well, I can't prove it, but hey -- I'm sure that was our lasagna!"

        

Soon on the road Oedipa (rather than Phyllis) meets the lawyer dealing with the case, Metzger, who seduces her, by means of a bottle of illegally imported “French Beaujolais,” then tequila, eschewing salt and lime, saying that’s just for the tourists.

Oedipa attends a Yoyodyne stockholders' meeting, in a quonset building painted pink and about a hundred yards long, actually the Yoyodyne Cafeteria.  “Around them all, Negroes carried gunboats of mashed potatoes, spinach, shrimp, zucchini, pot roast, to the long, glittering steam tables, preparing to feed a noontide invasion of Yoyodyne workers.”

The novel also features a bar called The Scope, where they hold jam sessions for electronic musicians, a rather more mind-blowing concept then than now, a gay bar called The Greek Way, and at one point Oedipa finds herself in a 24-hour Mexican greasy spoon in San Francisco, where she runs into one of her old acquaintances, “idly stirring his bowl of opaque soup with the foot of a chicken.”

But of course The Crying Of Lot 49 isn’t a really a book about food and drink.  It’s a book about communication systems and postal cartels, whether run by governments, or by more or less sinister private organizations.  There’s a good deal about the Thurn und Taxis family, once imperial couriers to the Holy Roman Empire, with monopolies throughout Europe.

When I first read the book I wasn’t sure how much, if any, of the Thurn und Taxis stuff was “real.”  The name sounded as preposterous as any of Pynchon’s made up names.  But it was indeed real, a fact I confirmed in part by seeing pictures of Gloria Thurn und Taxis in various fashion magazines and in this photograph by Helmut Newton, aboard her yacht L’Aiglon. 

What I didn’t know until about two days ago was that for a long time the family was also in the beer business, and still is at least nominally.  The family's brewery was sold to the Paulaner Group in the 1990s, but beer is still produced under the Thurn und Taxis name, as these photographs show.

The lady there is once again, Gloria.  And what exactly is she eating?  It looks like a schwein hock to me.  I’d never really have had her down as a schwein hock eater, but good for her.  
Thomas Pynchon I believe was fond of pigs (he named one of his major characters Pig Bodine), possibly of eating them too.  Here is the front endpaper of the copy of Gravity’s Rainbow, that he signed and dedicated to Phyllis Gebauer and her husband.  (Phyllis died in 2011, the photograph is by Carolyn Kellogg.) 

Word is, the connection between Pynchon, the Gebauers and pigs was established when they bought him a pig-shaped piñata, though in what circumstances I’m not sure.  And here, incredibly (incredible in the sense that it’s just floating around the Internet, and has been for a couple of years) is a picture of Phyllis with that very Pynchonian piñata.  And that hand giving the peace sign from behind the door is apparently the man himself.

POLITICAL, INNIT?

“He who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.”  Traditional.  (And I’d say he 

probably needs a long knife too.)

 “We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use 

different spoons.”  ― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask.  (It's trick many of us can't quite pull off.)

THE PHEASANT OUTLOOK

My old university college sometimes served pheasant stew, or I suppose casserole, for dinner.  If this suggests we undergraduates were a sophisticated and libertine crew, it’s worth saying that the number of complaints (none of them from me) was quite astronomical.  Many of them were about the presence of shot in the flesh.  This caused plenty of derision among the dons, with the suggestion that the college just wasn’t getting the caliber of students it once had.

When I lived in Suffolk, long after I’d left Cambridge, pheasants used to roam in my garden, but I didn’t shoot of them.  I bought most of my meat at a butcher in Halesworth High Street, CA Palmer and Son, been there since 1947.

They had rabbits and partridge and pigeon too, but pheasant was my go-to game. I cut my pheasant into portions, fried it in flour and cooked it with bacon, apple, onions, carrots, a bit of brandy, red wine and a lot of herbs.  It was pretty good (though it wasn’t as dark or as rich as the version from my college), and I’ve been trying hard to remember whether I ever found any shot in it. 

I just looked up the Palmers website and they say their game is “locally grown by our trusted local suppliers,” and that all their meat, poultry and game is “home killed.”  Well I suppose if some local farmer shoots a pheasant in his own field that’s pretty much the definition of home killed, but it all sounds to me as though the wording is deliberately unclear.

When I started living in America I assumed there’d be pheasant, and indeed every kind of game, available everywhere: venison, possum, bear why not?  So many Americans have guns, so many Americans hunt (certainly compared with the English) surely game meat would find its way into every local butcher.

Leaving aside the problems of finding a local butcher in the States, it seems that the Food and Drug Administration is fiercely against the buying and selling of game meat unless it’s been farmed.  This is done in the name of both public health and conservation.  Remember the buffalo. The picture below is "Taking the Hump Rib" by Alfred Jacob Miller.

On the other hand if you shoot something yourself it seems you’re free to eat it to your heart’s content, and as far as I can tell, it’s perfectly legal to give meat to friends, or even complete strangers.  When I lived in upstate New York, a neighbor once showed up on the doorstep with a bloody bag of venison freshly cut (you couldn’t exactly say “butchered”) from a deer he’d just shot.  It made half a dozen pretty good meals.  These days I live in suburban Los Angeles, and I just don’t count enough mountain men among my acquaintances.

Anyway you can imagine my delight when someone, knowing my love of game and of sandwiches, sent me this wonderful ad from a World War Two magazine, celebrating the American Red Cross Canteen, based in the railway station at Aberdeen, Milwaukee.  It turns out that more than half a million service men and women ate pheasant sandwiches as they traveled through Aberdeen.  Pheasants were "donated" by locals,  sometimes a thousand at a pop.

We even have the recipe: cooked, chopped pheasant (the chopping was very important – it was never to be ground), chopped hard boiled eggs, chopped carrots, grated
 onion, chopped celery, sweet pickle relish, salt and pepper,  mayonnaise or salad dressing. 

I have to say that the sandwich in that soldier’s hand looks as though it really doesn’t have very much filling.  But hey, there was a war on.  Holy smokes indeed.

BLOODY AVA (AND I MEAN THAT IN A GOOD WAY)

I see that Julie Burchill (above), a journalist who recently wrote an article with the headline “Tell us to drink 'moderately' and we'll just crack open another one,” has been interviewed by the BBC about Ava Gardner.  She said, “A woman with no temper is like a Bloody Mary with no Tabasco.”

Personally I’d say that a woman with no temper is like a Bloody Mary with no vodka, but I sure wouldn’t want to get into an argument with Julie Burchill.  And the fact is people put all kinds of stuff into a Bloody Mary: there are a few bars in New York where they lay out the ingredients so you can make your own recipe.  Ktchn, on West 42^nd Street offers 20 extras including black-lava salt, capers, peppers and bacon.  This is what one version looks like (which to me looks like a Bloody Mary with a fruit and veg cocktail in it):

 I’ve been poking around trying to find a picture of Ava Gardner with a Bloody Mary in hand, and I’ve failed, though there’s no shortage of her sipping on other beverages.

However, thanks to the late Peter Evan’s Ava Gardner: the Secret Conversations, we know that she did indeed drink Bloody Marys at least once in a while, with moderately disastrous consequences.  She was dating, and drinking and arguing with her then boyfriend Howard Hughes. Hughes punched her in the face, dislocating her jaw, and she picked up an onyx ashtray and smashed it over his head.  Long after the event she said, “There was blood on the walls, on the furniture — real blood in the Bloody Marys.”

Now there’s an idea.