LONGITUDE, COD, and FRIED CHICKEN

          
This piece by Elinore Standard appeared in the Bedford, NY "Record Review" as one in an ongoing series "My Reading Life."

              LONGITUDE, COD and FRIED CHICKEN

Mentioned below: "Longitude," by Dava Sobel; "Cod" and "Salt" by 
Mark Kurlansky; "Hiroshima" and "Blues" by John Hersey; "A Cow's Life," by M.R. Montgomery; "The Secret Life of Dust," by Hannah Holmes; "Coal," by Barbara Freese; "Sweetness and Power," by Sidney Mintz; "Sex," by Madonna; "Fried Chicken" and "Apple Pie," by John T. Edge; "Spam," by Carolyn Wyman.


    Dava Sobel surprised everybody, including herself, when her popular account of the 18th Century measuring of Longitude (Walker, 1995) became a bestseller.  I remember taking the little paperback version on a cross-country flight and by the time I landed in California, I had gained appreciation of the marine chronometer or clock that would keep precise time at sea.

    Not far behind “Longitude” came “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World” (Walker, 1997) ” and “Salt: A World History” (Walker, 2002), both by Mark Kurlansky. (Notice that Walker appears to have got the early lock on publishing these successful one-subject books).
 Although “Cod” got better reviews, to me “Salt” is more interesting. Think about salt as a source of wealth, state monopoly and means of exchange. See it as a preservative: salted fish, cheese, meat, and vegetables (think: pickles) were main staples in practically every culture. Know that salt is as essential to the everyday cook as it is to the chef at Nobu.  A first century A.D. recipe from Apicius begins: “Pluck the flamingo, wash it, truss it, put it in a pot; add water, salt, dill and a bit of vinegar…”

    In this genre of one-subject titles John Hersey got there early on with “Hiroshima” (1946) and then with “Blues” (Knopf, 1987) a loving tribute to fishing and to the less-than loveable bluefish (around our house known as “the rat of the sea”). Hersey includes poems about fish and fishing by Homer, and by modern poets including James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes and Marianne Moore. Since knowing what to do with a bluefish once you’ve caught it is important, he provides several recipes (heavy on the garlic, rosemary and mayo—anything to subdue the nasty taste) that offer hope for making your bluefish palatable. The real trick to cooking a bluefish is to cause it happen within minutes of it being caught and gutted.

    Maybe try “A Cow’s Life: The Surprising History of Cattle and How The Black Angus Come To Be Home On The Range” by M. R. Montgomery (Walker, 2004). This little book traces the evolution of domesticated cattle and, among other things, walks us through a day in the life of a Montana cow.

    Perhaps you’d be interested in “The Secret Life of Dust: From The Cosmos To The Kitchen Counter, The Big Consequences of Little Things”, by Hannah Holmes (Wiley, 2001) and dedicated to “My big, fat muse, P. Earth."  Holmes, who says she grew up in a household with a microscope on the kitchen table, concludes the universe is growing dustier with every passing million years. She says that ultimately dust will insulate the stars and the night sky will darken. “And then, like an old newspaper in the attic, the worn-out universe will gradually disappear under the thickening dust.”

    “Coal: A Human History” by Barbara Freese (Perseus, 2003), takes us into another dimension, into the seams of coal beneath the earth. This is not so much a history of coal mining as it is a social, political and environmental history and explication of the world-changing essence of coal. Freese quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote about coal in the mid-19th Century: “Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta; and with its comfort brings its industrial power.” Freese thinks we may go back, someday, to using coal that, “for all its faults, brought us through a sort of prolonged industrial childhood and ultimately gave us the power to build a world that no longer needed coal.”

    Digging deeper, there are the classic academic works on commodities such as Sidney Mintz’s  ambitious work, “Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History” (Penguin, 1985). Most of these one-topic books can be found in the 500 section at your library, a repository of the esoteric, the exquisite, the obsessional. Go in there and you’ll emerge with an armful of books on subjects you never thought for a minute about and then spend happy hours reading about cows or coal, or maybe even dust.

    One book you probably won’t find in the 500 section is “Sex” by Madonna, a coffee table-sized book (Ediciones B, 1992) whose first printing sold out in a week. A photo album about Madonna’s sex rather than, well, just sex, the book is long out of print and now collectible with prices at Amazon starting at $125 and going to more than $350. The only copy in the Westchester Library System had been at Mt. Vernon and, no big surprise, it is listed in the catalogue as “missing.”

     You might want to try, “Fried Chicken: An American Story” by John T. Edge (Putnam, 2004) which lists 34 “favorite chicken  houses” in 14 states with commentary on their specialties. You can read about Cape May Onion-Fried Shore Chicken, for example, and even try out a recipe for it. KFC, eat your heart out! For something to go with your chicken, Edge has also written “Apple Pie”.

    Perhaps you’d care to dig into “Spam: A Biography” by Carolyn Wyman (Harvest, 1999). This is spam the ham product in a can, not the junk e-mail. Try to think of something nobody else has done, which is about as tough as finding a subject for a biography or a dissertation.  I can think of a couple of topics I wouldn’t mind spending time writing about – amber, for example. Amber is so Baltic, so organic, so ancient.

     It might be interesting to write about boxcars. Yes, boxcars might be good. Think of all the logos on those long lines of boxcars, hundreds of them, that took forever to trundle through the railroad crossing as you watched from the back seat of your father’s DeSoto. I Googled “boxcars” and found 99,000 entries, so figure it has, alas, as editors are so fond of saying, “ been  done.”  For the fun of it, go to  HYPERLINK http://www.nonotuck.us./kens/boxcars / and you’ll see pictures of all sorts of railroad freight cars, a handy reference for all your trainspotting needs.

     Then, I Googled “amber” and found myself on Page One of 6,420,000
entries. Pretty daunting for the would-be writer of a small book on a single interesting topic.
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Elinore Standard is the editor, along with Laura Furman, of
“Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading. (1997. Carroll & Graf).