February 25, 2016

Dinner Diary: Broiled Loin Lamb Chops

Oh shit.  I forgot to take something out of the freezer for dinner.  What now?

February 18, 2016

Dinner Diary: Grilled Chicken Cutlets

I didn't feel like cooking today....

February 11, 2016

Blog the Thirthy-fifth: One potato, two potato, three potato ...

... Four potato salads.

You know how when you have one kid who is good at everything, and another who is good at only one thing, you have to make a really big deal about that one thing, and act as if he’s the family maven when it comes to that thing? That’s how it is with Italians and potatoes. It would be untoward for us to claim potatoes too. Brotherliness requires ceding to the putative peoples of meat and potatoes that putativity.

But if the truth may be told—and why else do you read this blog if not for that? and why do I remain putatively anonymous if not for that?—my father loved to say, “I love potatoes but your mother never makes them for me,” whenever she made them, which was regularly, so that his point was not “never” but “never for me,” as if to say, granted she cooks them all the time, if not for you too she would not make them for me alone. Whether that is a distinction without a difference, I leave to you to decide. In any case, Italians in fact eat lots of potatoes, even if not every night, and they like to—it’s not as if some British-induced famine forced them to eat them. Of course, one of the ways they make potatoes is with pasta, but it’s not the only way and not the usual way, and so that Irish crack about pasta e patate counts as an ethnic slur, and all you libs should note that down.

But you have a much bigger problem to deal with here than Irish wise-cracks about pasta e patate. The Italian way of making potato salad calls into question the very meaning of the English word “salad”. Historically speaking, English and Italian are, if not first cousins, at least second cousins by remarriage. That heavy tonguing of Anglo-Saxon by Normandized Latin was followed by a couple centuries of literary Italophilia, and nearly a score of academic Latinophilia. So you might well think as ordinary a word as “salad” would more or less translate. But I fear that it does not.

Italians call many vegetable preparations insalata that English-speakers would not call “salad”. I mentioned in my post on “broccoli lemony” (an English alias for insalata di broccoli) an episode when my colleague’s drunk wife (won’t mention the ethnicity) offered my dinner guests wry exclamations on the conveniences of my serving my steamed broccoli “cold” (i.e., at room temperature). Her rightly embarrassed husband rose to the defense of his host’s cold broccoli with, "It’s like a salad." Notwithstanding his apologetic, his wife remained wry. Notwithstanding her wryness, she got me wondering: how did her husband’s comparison aim to excuse my broccoli before the Gentiles? What exactly do Gentiles mean by “salad”? 

(Gentiles make me wonder a lot.)