commonplace book, or things I have run across

[rushthatspeaks]

Rainer Werner Fassbinder turns out to be the best writer on film I have run across in literally years, probably the best since I tracked down Louise Brooks' essays. In a discussion of his film version of Jean Genet's Querelle, he handily summarizes the issues I have with ninety-nine percent of film adaptations of novels:

Contrary to popular opinion, the making of an authentic film from a piece of literature is in no sense simply a matter of accomplishing the most "congenial" possible translation from one medium, literature, into the other, film. Cinematic transformation of a literary work should never assume that its purpose is simply the maximal realization of the images that literature evokes in the mind of its readers.

Such an assumption would, in any case, be preposterous, since any given reader reads any given book with his own sense of reality, and therefore any book evokes as many different fantasies and images as it has readers.

There is no such thing as the ultimate objective reality for any work of literature. Consequently, the intention of a film that tries to come to grips with literature cannot be the realization of the author's world of images in some fixed and final consensus of separate and contrary fantasies. Any attempt to turn a film into a substitute for literature must inevitably result in a compound fantasy based on the lowest common denominator and will therefore, by definition, be a mediocre and lifeless product.

A film that comes to grips with literature and language has to make of this confrontation something absolutely intelligible, clear, and transparent. Not for a single moment may it turn its own fantasy into a composite one. Always, at every stage, it must make it clear that this is but one possible way of dealing with a work of art in another medium.

-- The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, tr. Krishna Winston, p. 168

All too often, it feels to me as though film directors are trying to replace what I already had in my head from the book, or to assure me that their version is what most people have in their heads from the book. I prefer work which shows me things I had not seen in the book, without invalidating what I already had. This is why my favorite literary adaptation on screen is Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, because its metafictional meditation on how impossible it is to film Tristram Shandy handily encompasses what the filmmakers got out of the book while remaining a note on the personal experiences of those filmmakers and no-one else. I had not put all this together until Fassbinder said it, but yes, yes, very much that.

Another thing I've been reading is Breakfast, Dinner, and Supper, or What to Eat and How to Prepare It, a cookbook from 1897. Ordinarily, when I look at a recipe (usually in a more modern sort of cookbook), I can extrapolate some idea of what the finished product is likely to taste like due to my knowledge of ingredients in general and of what foods similar to the one being made have tasted like when I have had them.

But when I hit the chapter called 'Catsups and Spiced Fruits' my imagination failed me comprehensively. I simply cannot imagine the results of the recipe below, and I think that anything resembling it may have fallen out of U.S. foodways entirely. If anyone has had this, what in the world is it like?

Southern Catsup.-- Take half a gallon of green cucumbers; after being peeled and chopped, sprinkle with salt, and let stand 6 hours; pour the water from them, and cover with hot vinegar. Prepare half a gallon of cabbage the same way. Chop 1 dozen small white onions, cover with boiling water, and let stand half an hour. Chop 1 quart of green tomatoes, 1 pint of tender green beans, 1 dozen green peppers, and 1 dozen small, young ears of corn; scald and drain. Mix 2 tablespoonfuls of grated horse-radish, 1 teacupful of ground mustard, 2 cupfuls of white mustard seed, 3 tablespoonfuls of turmeric, 1 each of ground mace, cinnamon, cayenne and celery seed, 2 tablespoonfuls of olive oil, and 1 pound of sugar. Put in a jar with the prepared vegetables, and pour over boiling vinegar to cover.

That recipe is also a tad much work for me to attempt it just to see how it turns out, though I am rather tempted by its relative:

Cucumber Catsup.-- Grate large, green cucumbers on a horse-radish grater; drain, salt and pepper to taste. Put through a sieve to remove the seeds. Add a quantity of grated horse-radish, and sufficient vinegar to make the consistency of tomato catsup. Bottle, and keep in a cool place.

See, that we ought to be able to buy in the supermarket, honestly, and I may well put some up, because it sounds as though I would use it for everything. The final catsup I am intrigued by, though, I am intrigued by in a sort of nightmare way, where I don't want to make it, and I don't want to taste it, and yet if I am ever in the same place with it I know I shall have to try some:

Celery Catsup.-- Bruise 1 ounce of celery seed, 1 teaspoonful white pepper, 1 teaspoonful salt, one-half dozen oysters in a mortar. Rub through a sieve, add 1 quart of best white vinegar and bottle for use.

WHAT DO YOU EVEN PUT THAT ON. AND WHY. Especially since the book contains a much more reasonable recipe for oyster sauce, later, which involves both cooking the oysters and not trying to mash them through a sieve.

Cookbook available at archive.org. I will let you all know if I wind up making cucumber catsup.

Comments

[kore]

oh my God YES. That is an amazing quote about film.

[phi]

Southern Catsup sounds similar to achaar, specifically the mixed pickle variety. I got nothing on the Celery Catsup and am hesitant to make the attempt lest I give someone food poisoning. (I'm irrationally phobic of cooking with shellfish. I really don't know how to do it properly.)

[anne]

Those cucumber things remind me vaguely of a traditional Southern summer salad, which was eaten up very fast by a bunch of Missourians who'd never heard of it before, to wit:

slice some cucumbers and some white onions. take some hot water but not too much and put in some white vinegar and white sugar. cover the veg with the liquid. refrigerate and demolish at will.

(I don't have a recipe; it's just a thing you grow up watching your mother make.) (Oh, and you really do need to use a glass bowl for this one.)

The last weak remnant of a once-powerful family. I think I'll call it House of Usher Salad from now on.

[jinian]

Well that's just agurkesalat though. How'd it get to the South, I wonder?

[wordweaverlynn]

Cucumber-onion salad is also classic Pennsylvania farm cooking -- I grew up eating that.

The southern-style catsup sounds a great deal like chow-chow, a mixed-vegetable pickle that's often one of the seven sweets and seven sours of a Pennsylvania Dutch table.

[anne]

That recipe says the onions are optional, and in my stuff they're really not.

You can also get a similar dish in France, except theirs has oil and less water. And red onions.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

That salad is very like one my mother and grandmother made -- I'd thought of it as a Wisconsin thing, but it may have been specifically Scandinavian (my grandmother's father was Norwegian, and my grandparents lived in towns that were heavily Norwegian).

[movingfinger]

I think that recipe is going to come out something like piccalilli. I think. My mother's piccalilli used sweet red peppers, I seem to recall, not green ones.

[rachelmanija]

I was thinking the same thing, except for the pound of sugar.

[movingfinger]

The teacupful of ground mustard stopped me for a moment---if they mean a standard six-ounce teacup, that is a lot of mustard. Plus two teacups of mustardseed!

With the sugar + mustard, the net result should be on the bread-and-butter pickle side rather than the tangy side of pickleness.

[starlady]

I've only seen one Fassbinder film, but I want to see all of them eventually. And yes, that.

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

I haven't had or made "Southern Catsup" per se but the recipe resembles others I have read for corn relish and picalili (sp?), both of which are readily available bottled in most supermarkets.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

One of our favorite local restaurants is a terroir place, and they understand that catsup does not mean tomato sauce inherently, and so we have had any number of lovely catsups from them. Not cucumber yet, but I can remain hopeful. Celery I do not use with, on, or in anything, ever, because celery is not Mrissachow.

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

Well into the 20th century, cookbooks call what Heinz now bottles, "Tomato" Catsup/Ketchup to distinguish it from other catsup/ketchup sauces. The best I can tell from my reading of food history, the earliest thing called Ketchup probably resembles Thai Fish Sauce more than anything else regularly consumed here/now.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

That explains so much. (Fassbinder. Not the ketchup.) It never occurred to me, but when I like the film of a book, it's always because I like what they've added or changed. And when I, much more often, dislike the film, I always complain about how it isn't faithful to the book. The ones I can recall liking are Chronicles of Narnia (plays with Susan's characterization to give her an actual character arc), the most recent Peter Pan (gets deeply into the question of what it means to grow up and whether it's worthwhile), and the most recent Time Machine (sank without a trace, but actually makes it work to add a romance and an evil genius morlock).

The restaurant that went with the Archives food exhibit had varietal catsups--I never made it there because budget, but apparently this was a thing. The oyster catsup sounds kind of tasty to me even though I have a religious geas against eating shellfish. But I like the smell of shellfish, and it seems like it would go with celery seed.

The mushroom catsup looks quite tasty.

That is the weirdest idea of what tastes go with French toast that I have ever seen.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

Southern catsup sounds like mixed pickles.

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

exactly what i was about to come in here and say

basically it sounds amazingly delicious. except maybe for the sugar. sweet pickles really don't do it for me

[sovay]

A film that comes to grips with literature and language has to make of this confrontation something absolutely intelligible, clear, and transparent. Not for a single moment may it turn its own fantasy into a composite one. Always, at every stage, it must make it clear that this is but one possible way of dealing with a work of art in another medium.

OH LOOK IT IS THE PROBLEM WITH NEARLY EVERY LITERARY ADAPTION RECENTLY. THANK YOU FASSBINDER FOR BEING SO PRESCIENT STRANGELY GLAD YOU AREN'T ALIVE NOW YOUR EYES WOULD HURT A LOT.

Southern Catsup

. . . The closest thing that looks like to me is a relish, if the term applies to things that are not pickle-based. This is one of those cases where I can't tell if the kind I'm familiar with is the only kind or just the most popular local variation. See also the existence of mushroom ketchup and chutneys made from everything.

[edit] It looks like you may have a recipe for chow-chow. Which at least Wikipedia thinks is a relish. Cucumbers, cabbage, green tomatoes, other vegetables as available. You can order several brands of it off the internet.

Cucumber Catsup

Would totally eat that.

Celery Catsup

Was doing fine with that until the oysters. I wonder if it's trying to approximate something else like the "Southern Catsup" that still exists in regional food culture or whether it's just dropped mercifully off the face of the planet. Maybe it's a misprint for oyster mushrooms? Maybe?

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I think my great-uncle's yellow mixed pickle was somewhat like that "southern catsup." (He had never lived in the south, to my knowledge. Just Canada and the midwestern US.) It was something like coleslaw with a lot of other vegetables added and scary amounts of turmeric. I suppose you could sweeten it, but this uncle wouldn't. He was a beekeeper, and he didn't even have sweet honey. *eyeroll.* I've seen jars of mixed pickled vegetables at the grocery store, though without turmeric, and with cauliflower instead of the cabbage--I've never bought any.

[pameladean]

"A jar"? The jar would have to be big enough to plant a ficus in.

P.

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

The final catsup sounds almost like a sort of bizarre second cousin to Thai fish sauce, only without the whole fermenting process.

[anna-wing.livejournal.com]

http://www.mummyicancook.com/2011/05/simplified-nonya-achar-peranakan-spicy.html

A mixed vegetable pickle from Singapore and Malaysia. Eaten with fried chicken, fried fish, ham, beef curry, roast beef, rice, anything, really.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

That first one sounds like piccalilli -- which is the thing in All Creatures Great and Small if you remember that?

I can't eat it, obviously, because both bell peppers and cayenne, but it sounds like that.

I've had mushroom ketchup. I think I ever know where to buy it...

As for film adaptations, yes. I was at a book club this week that was discussing Hyperion and somebody said it would make a great film and somebody else said no, it would make a great miniseries with every episode directed by a different director. (Simmons Hyperion. Keats Hyperion would be very different!)

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

...And you just brought that scene in ACGS rushig back in great detail. Cool. At 10 I simply tagged piccalilli in my head [some sort of relish, eaten on bacon] and left it at that - so now I know more.

-Nameseeker

[rosefox]

he handily summarizes the issues I have with ninety-nine percent of film adaptations of novels

Allow me to encourage you to submit this entire quote as a Readercon program item inspiration/suggestion.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

... you don't think the resulting discussion might become a tad heated? I mean, I did not title this entry 'I HATE THE LOTR FILMS AND HERE'S WHY' but it was, in fact, actively tempting, so I feel as though the item might attract that sort of thing. It might be worth it, though? What do you think? It could be very interesting if it worked...

[rosefox]

Panels where people disagree are the best panels.

[encephalogistic.livejournal.com]

Does "Where the Wild Things Are" count as a film adaptation of literature? The original book had something like two sentences. Also lots of lovely images. So maybe it doesn't count.

If it does, it's an interesting example of a movie that doesn't try to find a "congenial" representation of the book.