The Flavor Thesaurus, Niki Segnit (365 Books, Day 163)

Thrud picked this up for me because she thought it was the most different cookbook she'd seen in a while. I agree that it is-- organizationally, at least.

Segnit has selected ninety-nine separate strongly flavored ingredients, sorted them into categories to make them easier to handle, and then written about the things that can be made with each potential pair. (She decided on pairs because combinations of three or more ingredients would make the book insanely long.) Her goal is not really to provide recipes, although there are some; she assumes you can already cook. Her goal is to help you learn to improvise, to think about different flavors together, to get into the habit of mentally juxtaposing the tastes of all the things in your fridge and seeing what might work.

I really love the organization of this book. It includes combinations I would never have thought of but that make sense (such as rhubarb and saffron), combinations I've worked with forever (such as pork and apple), and combinations I need to be talked into (such as white chocolate and olive, which she is quite insistent about but which I cannot as yet manage to believe).

I am marginally less keen on the execution. There are ways in which she's done very well. For each combination, she goes in one of several directions: sometimes she discusses the ways the combination has been cooked with in various cultures, and that is generally wide-ranging and well-done; recipes from the entirety of the world show up here. Sometimes she talks about the chemical makeup of each food, whether they share any flavor compounds, and whether particular varieties of each have ever been described as having notes that taste like the other. This works pretty well, too, in suggesting possible cooking avenues and specific areas in which to begin experimentation.

However, sometimes, especially with the more outré pairings, she talks about famous chefs and dishes who have attempted it, and this-- well. It becomes a bit starstruck, and a bit testimonial, and a bit about how lucky she has been to be able to eat at a great many very famous restaurants. In short, it becomes amazingly pretentious. More pretentious than you are imagining. No, even more than that. She is always talking about quaint little places far out in the country (which country? pick one, anything from Provence to Morocco) away from the tourist trade and then insisting that she can't remember where they were. And she lapses into alliteration, which makes me raise an eyebrow, and at one point into verse, which makes me back away slowly. And she is desperately searching for a new set of words with which to describe the flavor of each of her individual ingredients in its summary, a dilemma with which I sympathize, but which she has rather comprehensively failed to conquer. I do not, for instance, think that cardamom ought to be compared to 'a sinus-cleaning stick', and if you have to try to describe cloves by comparing them to holy basil something has gone wrong somewhere.

Fortunately, the way the book is organized means that she is changing her subject every other paragraph, so we never get too much of anything particularly egregious at once. And she can be clever, and she can be charmingly down-at-heel, although not when she's trying to be, and the system she has designed is so interesting. Just, there are points at which you may need to grit your teeth a little and remember it will all be over soon.

As a way of getting me to think about flavor and food differently, it definitely works. The section on parsnips came damn close to sending me into the kitchen to look up baking ratios, because she mentioned that parsnip, which I love, used to be as popular in cakes as carrots are now, and also-- and this could have sent me to the store in the middle of the night, if the store weren't shut-- that parsnip goes really well with anise. I am making a parsnip cake with star anise, cardamom, molasses, and nutmeg, walnut cream cheese icing, just as soon as I have the brain to do the recipe adaptation and go out and buy the parsnips. I will let you know how it comes out.

The Flavor Thesaurus, Niki Segnit (365 Books, Day 163)

Thrud picked this up for me because she thought it was the most different cookbook she'd seen in a while. I agree that it is-- organizationally, at least.

Segnit has selected ninety-nine separate strongly flavored ingredients, sorted them into categories to make them easier to handle, and then written about the things that can be made with each potential pair. (She decided on pairs because combinations of three or more ingredients would make the book insanely long.) Her goal is not really to provide recipes, although there are some; she assumes you can already cook. Her goal is to help you learn to improvise, to think about different flavors together, to get into the habit of mentally juxtaposing the tastes of all the things in your fridge and seeing what might work.

I really love the organization of this book. It includes combinations I would never have thought of but that make sense (such as rhubarb and saffron), combinations I've worked with forever (such as pork and apple), and combinations I need to be talked into (such as white chocolate and olive, which she is quite insistent about but which I cannot as yet manage to believe).

I am marginally less keen on the execution. There are ways in which she's done very well. For each combination, she goes in one of several directions: sometimes she discusses the ways the combination has been cooked with in various cultures, and that is generally wide-ranging and well-done; recipes from the entirety of the world show up here. Sometimes she talks about the chemical makeup of each food, whether they share any flavor compounds, and whether particular varieties of each have ever been described as having notes that taste like the other. This works pretty well, too, in suggesting possible cooking avenues and specific areas in which to begin experimentation.

However, sometimes, especially with the more outré pairings, she talks about famous chefs and dishes who have attempted it, and this-- well. It becomes a bit starstruck, and a bit testimonial, and a bit about how lucky she has been to be able to eat at a great many very famous restaurants. In short, it becomes amazingly pretentious. More pretentious than you are imagining. No, even more than that. She is always talking about quaint little places far out in the country (which country? pick one, anything from Provence to Morocco) away from the tourist trade and then insisting that she can't remember where they were. And she lapses into alliteration, which makes me raise an eyebrow, and at one point into verse, which makes me back away slowly. And she is desperately searching for a new set of words with which to describe the flavor of each of her individual ingredients in its summary, a dilemma with which I sympathize, but which she has rather comprehensively failed to conquer. I do not, for instance, think that cardamom ought to be compared to 'a sinus-cleaning stick', and if you have to try to describe cloves by comparing them to holy basil something has gone wrong somewhere.

Fortunately, the way the book is organized means that she is changing her subject every other paragraph, so we never get too much of anything particularly egregious at once. And she can be clever, and she can be charmingly down-at-heel, although not when she's trying to be, and the system she has designed is so interesting. Just, there are points at which you may need to grit your teeth a little and remember it will all be over soon.

As a way of getting me to think about flavor and food differently, it definitely works. The section on parsnips came damn close to sending me into the kitchen to look up baking ratios, because she mentioned that parsnip, which I love, used to be as popular in cakes as carrots are now, and also-- and this could have sent me to the store in the middle of the night, if the store weren't shut-- that parsnip goes really well with anise. I am making a parsnip cake with star anise, cardamom, molasses, and nutmeg, walnut cream cheese icing, just as soon as I have the brain to do the recipe adaptation and go out and buy the parsnips. I will let you know how it comes out.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

Poetry and the Police, Robert Darnton (365 Books, Day 164)

The full title of this book is Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris.

Darnton examines the Affair of the Fourteen, an incident in 1749 in which Parisian police were ordered to track down the author of a subversive poem. Louis XV had recently dismissed the Compte de Maurepas, who had been the comptroller of both the navy and the king's household, and it was not a popular dismissal. Poetry in favor of Maurepas and against the King and his mistress Madame de Pompadour was circulating throughout Paris, which was illegal. The specific poem in question was brought to police notice by a spy, who also gave the name of a man who had a copy of it; the police proceeded to arrest that man, question him as to where he'd gotten the poem, arrest the man whose name he gave and question him, and so on. Eventually fourteen men were arrested and imprisoned as part of the poem's chain of transmission, none of whom was actually the author; one other man went into hiding, but then gave himself up and traded information for his safety. The author may have been protected by one of the detainees, or may have been unknown to any of them, or there may indeed have been no author and the poem may have arisen from the numerous additions and subtractions of oral vocal tradition before being written down by somebody or other at some point.

The thing that Darnton finds interesting is that, because of the police records, we have a clear notation of who each man was (mostly abbés, minor clerks, and students), where each says he got the poem, and in which form each man had it (memorized, copy obtained from someone else, copy transcribed while hearing the poem, copy written from memory), as well as any tiny changes in wording. (It's also interesting and worth noting that everyone arrested did either have a print copy or was able and willing to recite the poem. Subversive poetry was not punishable by death, but prison was a dangerous environment, and one got out of the Bastille much faster by cooperating with an investigation. Eventually all of them wound up exiled to the provinces, which was financially ruinous but not deadly.)

In short, we have here a record of the actual modes of transmission of samizdat poetry. This does not often happen. Darnton uses this record to examine the political role of subversive poetry in Paris at that time, the reasons for the crackdown against it, the speed and reach between classes of the poetry communications network, and the rise of public opinion, a concept which was just coming into existence at that time-- the phrase 'public opinion' begins to be used towards the end of the eighteenth century. The overarching question of the book is whether to take a Foucauldian view of public opinion, which means that in meaningful ways it didn't exist until it existed as a discourse, or whether to take it as an unconscious force which nonetheless existed and had influence, but was only just beginning to emerge due to technological advances. Darnton pretty much splits the difference.

This is a well-researched, well-contextualized, interesting and quick read-- unsurprising, as Darnton is the leading historian of France in the English-speaking world and has a list of awards and honors several miles long. This is exactly the caliber of unusual and illuminating work one expects from him, although I am rather confused by the book's internal organization scheme, if there is one. But it provides vast quantities of information in a short space and provokes thought in multiple avenues. And you don't need to speak French (though you will get more out of the appendices and endnotes if you do; but everything major is translated).

Also, it has the best bonus materials of any book in basically ever, which I now get to share with all of you. You see, subversive poetry was quite frequently set to popular music, which made it memorable and more easily spread around, and the most popular tunes of eighteenth-century France were collected in volumes of sheet music called chansonniers. Some of these volumes were reference works and some were sold in the street by street musicians; many have survived. Darnton has deduced from the refrain structure of the subversive poems he examines which poem goes with which tune, and has had the Parisian singer Hélène Delavault record them, with guitar.

Free downloading and listening, with program notes and texts appended, of Hélène Delavault singing incredibly scurrilous things about Madame de Pompadour and the War of the Austrian Succession to popular and catchy tunes of the day: here you go.

Poetry and the Police, Robert Darnton (365 Books, Day 164)

The full title of this book is Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris.

Darnton examines the Affair of the Fourteen, an incident in 1749 in which Parisian police were ordered to track down the author of a subversive poem. Louis XV had recently dismissed the Compte de Maurepas, who had been the comptroller of both the navy and the king's household, and it was not a popular dismissal. Poetry in favor of Maurepas and against the King and his mistress Madame de Pompadour was circulating throughout Paris, which was illegal. The specific poem in question was brought to police notice by a spy, who also gave the name of a man who had a copy of it; the police proceeded to arrest that man, question him as to where he'd gotten the poem, arrest the man whose name he gave and question him, and so on. Eventually fourteen men were arrested and imprisoned as part of the poem's chain of transmission, none of whom was actually the author; one other man went into hiding, but then gave himself up and traded information for his safety. The author may have been protected by one of the detainees, or may have been unknown to any of them, or there may indeed have been no author and the poem may have arisen from the numerous additions and subtractions of oral vocal tradition before being written down by somebody or other at some point.

The thing that Darnton finds interesting is that, because of the police records, we have a clear notation of who each man was (mostly abbés, minor clerks, and students), where each says he got the poem, and in which form each man had it (memorized, copy obtained from someone else, copy transcribed while hearing the poem, copy written from memory), as well as any tiny changes in wording. (It's also interesting and worth noting that everyone arrested did either have a print copy or was able and willing to recite the poem. Subversive poetry was not punishable by death, but prison was a dangerous environment, and one got out of the Bastille much faster by cooperating with an investigation. Eventually all of them wound up exiled to the provinces, which was financially ruinous but not deadly.)

In short, we have here a record of the actual modes of transmission of samizdat poetry. This does not often happen. Darnton uses this record to examine the political role of subversive poetry in Paris at that time, the reasons for the crackdown against it, the speed and reach between classes of the poetry communications network, and the rise of public opinion, a concept which was just coming into existence at that time-- the phrase 'public opinion' begins to be used towards the end of the eighteenth century. The overarching question of the book is whether to take a Foucauldian view of public opinion, which means that in meaningful ways it didn't exist until it existed as a discourse, or whether to take it as an unconscious force which nonetheless existed and had influence, but was only just beginning to emerge due to technological advances. Darnton pretty much splits the difference.

This is a well-researched, well-contextualized, interesting and quick read-- unsurprising, as Darnton is the leading historian of France in the English-speaking world and has a list of awards and honors several miles long. This is exactly the caliber of unusual and illuminating work one expects from him, although I am rather confused by the book's internal organization scheme, if there is one. But it provides vast quantities of information in a short space and provokes thought in multiple avenues. And you don't need to speak French (though you will get more out of the appendices and endnotes if you do; but everything major is translated).

Also, it has the best bonus materials of any book in basically ever, which I now get to share with all of you. You see, subversive poetry was quite frequently set to popular music, which made it memorable and more easily spread around, and the most popular tunes of eighteenth-century France were collected in volumes of sheet music called chansonniers. Some of these volumes were reference works and some were sold in the street by street musicians; many have survived. Darnton has deduced from the refrain structure of the subversive poems he examines which poem goes with which tune, and has had the Parisian singer Hélène Delavault record them, with guitar.

Free downloading and listening, with program notes and texts appended, of Hélène Delavault singing incredibly scurrilous things about Madame de Pompadour and the War of the Austrian Succession to popular and catchy tunes of the day: here you go.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.