No-No Paleo! Yes-Yes Retreo!

Yes, boys and girls, when you get old you do start to fall apart.  In my case, the digestion faltered, and I was forced to change my diet.  This led me to Dr. Google's colleague, the great nutritionist in The Cloud, and my head began to spin.  Eventually,  I settled on a classic bland diet that seemed strangely familiar.

You've heard of the trendy Paleo "caveman" lifestyle with meat, meat, meat and no processed food on the menu? I found I was living the Retreo lifestyle, where the more processed the food is, the better.

As I overcooked my green beans and plopped them on a plate of naked chicken breast, with a side of white rice, I felt like I had been sucked into a wormhole and spit out into my mother's kitchen, circa 1957.  The gang was all there:  Little Miss Sunbeam, the Blue Bonnet Lady, Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima, Snap Crackle Pop. Welcome back, daughter!  Permission granted to eat white bread, white flour, Jell-o, and mushy carrots. Permission granted to turn up your nose at broccoli, cauliflower, and kale.

I hope that slice is slathered with Blue Bonnet Margarine because
"Everything's better with Blue Bonnet on it."

For a while the diet was good transgressive fun. The devil says eat the white bread, the angel says eat the multigrain.  I got to hang with the devil.  True, cooking in was boring and eating out was a challenge since "land that time forgot" restaurants--where the rolls are squishy and the lettuce is all iceberg, all the time--are few and far between in this part of the world.


But there are two versions of Retreo--Mom's Kitchen and Galivanting Gourmet--as I found when I consulted my favorite vintage cookbooks:  The Ford Treasury of Favorite Recipes from Famous Eating Places, Volumes 1 and 2.  Dating from the very early 1950's, and given out as inducements to test drive a new Ford, they were designed, no doubt, to elicit a Pavlovian drool as you ran to the garage, hopped in your new Ford and drove fifty miles for a swell meal.  Reading through I realized that the most dramatic revolution I've lived through has not been technological, but culinary.

What's on the menu?  How about an appetizer of Banana Meat Rolls (all you Paleo people, hold the roll), followed by an entree of Opossum, Roasted and Stuffed (with bread stuffing, not taxidermy fluff).  Don't forget  a side of Walpole Woodchuck Relish.  Alas, the relish contains no woodchucks, only cabbage, green peppers, sour pickles, a can of pimentos and some seasonings.

If those items don't appeal you can choose between five versions of Lobster Thermidor, three Sweetbreads presentations and six bowls of Clam Chowder, but why bother when you can order Roast Vermin.

You could opt for  a salad, but fair warning, the dressing will contain either tomato soup or its cousin ketchup/catsup or canned pineapple, possibly both.  If you like your pineapple without tomato sauce, you might choose the Holiday Salad, either the Jello-O mold version or the lettuce version: canned pineapple rings colored with red and green food coloring, cinnamon flavor for the red and peppermint for the green, laid out on crisp lettuce leaves and garnished with mayonnaise.  The only fresh pineapple in the book was used as a pincushion for toothpicked tidbits of shrimp and cheese. Oh, the glamour.

What's up with all that canned pineapple?  My first cookbook, which was a kid's cooking thing, included a recipe for Flagpole Salad, which featured a vertical banana jammed on a canned pineapple ring.  Maybe the folks at Dole were especially good at product placement, and dropped off crates of rings, chunks, and crushed bits on the doorstep of every eating place in the country.

"Fat" was not often specified, so anything went: bacon drippings, lard, butter, oleo, Crisco, Wesson Oil, or axle grease. For the Ancient Barbecue Sauce you need tallow (beef or mutton fat rendered from suet) and an otherwise modern sounding recipe for Guacamole calls for mayonnaise (not enough fat in the avocados?) and green food coloring (for St. Patrick's Day?)

Dessert will be cream pie: coconut, banana, chocolate, chocolate rum, coffee, lemon, mint, lime, pineapple and three versions of unspecified flavor "cream."  There are very few chocolate desserts, but there is a Tomato Soup Cake that I remember appeared regularly at Ma's Eating Place.

I had a hard time choosing which recipe to include here, but when I came across the following vegetable dish, I though immediately of my sister Maureen.

CHEESE BEAN A LA FALLHALL

2 cans yellow wax beans

Butter

Brown sugar

White Sauce

1/2 cup grated cheese

1/2 cup aged cheese

I'm sure you can guess that it hails from Wisconsin, and I think you can guess how the ingredients get assembled and baked, but you probably didn't know how to make the aged cheese: dry cheese, grate it until very fine, and pack in glass jars.  It keeps indefinitely and has a fine tang. I'll just bet it does.

I know that I can't count on my sister to be in the same room as, let alone prepare, this tempting treat, so it won't be on the menu on the  Trouserville table this Thanksgiving.  While not traditional fare, the recipe for Upside-Down Fudge Cake in Volume Two does sound pretty good and that could make a guest appearance. So hop in the Ford and drive on up on the 27th of November to find out.

In the meantime, skip on over to read Maureen's blog post Gag Me with a Spoonful of Creamed Corn to understand her aversions to wax beans,  with a side of turnip and creamed spinach.

McStemCell's

Yummers!

Scientists have managed to grow enough stem cell beef to make a couple of patties--to the tune of over $300,000--so I guess it won't be anytime soon that engineered burgers will be on the fast food menus of the world. I wouldn't read this report  on an empty stomach, or a full one, either.  Burgers with a "yellowish tinge" even though they've been tinted with beet juice? No, thanks. 


Of course, these were scientists in the UK, and it probably seemed like a good idea after all that Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy going around a few years back.

Makes me happy that I am old enough to have eaten any number of juicy, thick, medium-rare burgers (accompanied by fries cooked in beef fat) without one iota of guilt and old enough that I won't be force-fed lab meat at the Sundowners' Club.

I don't know why this mystery meat seems more disgusting than any other edible.  If you've ever worked in a restaurant, studied a nutrition label on a salty snack, or read any of the scary bestsellers about the food chain, you know what I mean. Want to supersize that pink slime?

However, the test tube beef is getting a bit too sci-fi even for me.  I'm old and my head is filled up with all kinds of cultural rubbish, so all I can think of is a bloodied and battered Charlton Heston searching the back alleys of The Future (New York in 2022 which looks a lot like Kabul 2012) to find the secret* of the "tasteless, odorless crud" that passes for food:  Soylent Green.

*Spoiler alert:  it begins with the letter "P" and rhymes with "Creeple."

Cute Vegetable Overload

Locavore or just plain loca? 

Here's how I spent high double digits on Wednesday (not including the chicken in the fridge and the scone which I scarfed down before the photo shoot and the foraged cranberry chutney which is hidden so that not just anyone can eat it right out of the jar).

Unedited, UnPotoshopped, UnInstagram'd!
Local produce from the local Farmers' Market.
Doesn't it look good enough to blog, I mean, eat?

Yup! It's summer and it's time for Veggie Pr*n ("pr*n"because of course we don't want to spell out the "p" word do we? I think I can do without comments from anyone who lusts after unseemly, albeit organic, acts with tubers, cucurbits, brassicas or deadly nightshades.)

I'm not such a curmudgeon that I want to return to the days of pallid crunchy "Cello" tomatoes or lettuce=iceberg of my childhood, but sometimes the Farmers' Market is all a bit much. I don't need my produce curated into precious little bunches, and arranged just so on the tables. I don't need the customers who monopolize the attention of the vendors with self-congratulatory questions and eventually move on, coffee in hand, without buying anything else. I really don't need them waltzing around with their vile little dogs, on leashes of course, but on leashes that are a hazard to navigation for those of us who actually want to buy something and get the hell out of there.

I have a vegetable garden and I understand there is nothing cute about the process of getting food out of the ground. Nothing cute about the heat, the humidity, the mosquitoes, the cabbage moths, the lettuce slugs. But no one wants to think about all that when they're buying a beet, and I certainly don't fault the farmers' marketing efforts. I just wish it wasn't such a tourist attraction for dog-walking idlers, and, starting this week it'll be packed with urban parents  with their binky-biters in tow explaining how K is for kale and kale is green and don't worry, I won't actually make you eat any. Bah, Potato Bug!


Bonus Vegetable Content

This didn't make it into the beauty shot, either:  a Caraflex Cabbage, a Welsh variety of the "Conehead" type. Much as I would like to claim credit for the mot, I didn't make that up.

"Tell them you're from Wikipedia."

 "Tell them you're from Wales."

Cinema Inferno

The first movie I ever saw in a theater was Alice in Wonderland (Disney not Depp).  In glorious color. It was awesome. I don't remember much about it, but my mother took me and, I think, my aunt, downtown to see it. I'm sure there was no buttered popcorn or Junior Mints in the experience because first, I would have been wearing a clean, starched, and ironed dress, and second, we lived in No-Candyland, except for the occasional Hershey bar my father would sneak in and split among us. No matter. What I didn't know about, I didn't miss. What I did know was that walking into that dark theater and seeing giant cartoons in front of me was pure magic. An American Cinema Paradiso.

Flash forward to 2013.  A new cinema has opened not far from my home.  I wish I could say that I am excited that the musty old multiplex has been renovated and that I look forward to visiting. But I can't. I fear this cranky old crone-nut is not  Showcase Superlux material. The cinema is part of the swanky new "lifestyle complex," The Street At Chestnut Hill, and, apart from my general lack of interest in lifestyle complexes, there is a reason I won't be experiencing the Superlux Experience any time soon.

Not that Superlux has absolutely zero appeal. Even if management can't guarantee that every flick features Superlux Story, Acting, or Direction, I might have been persuaded by the Superlux Seats which recline and have footrests,the Superlux Technology with state of the art bells and whistles, the Superlux Carpeting with no gum stuck to it, and the Superlux Restrooms which must boast red carpet amenities and nary a wad of sodden toilet paper to sully their Superlux Floors.

But the Superlux Experience has one big Superlux Feature that turns it into Cinema Inferno.

It's not  the admission price tag which tops out at a hellish $28, although I do admit to a bit of sticker shock since the last movie I went to cost $7.50.  And, no that wasn't in the year ought-five, it was last Friday evening.  

It's not even the circles-of-hell tiered system of admissions--Lux Lite (a mere $20) and Superlux--with their different levels of cushiness and service, like a plane. (There doesn't appear to be a Geezer Discount, which in and of itself isn't the deal breaker.)

No, It's the diabolical Superlux Food and Beverage Service. Yes, service.  Superluxians can order food and drink right without getting off their Superlux Tushes--and it will be delivered to them by black-clad waitrons at any time. Yes, any time, including during the movie.

Won't that be exciting? Watching all those servers stumbling around with trays full of $9 Margaritas and micro-brews, instead of watching the screen?  Smelling the delightful aromas of appetizers ($8-16) wafting through the auditorium? Hot dog! Every film will be "Smell-o-Vision." (If you want a chuckle, click the link to find out how that technology worked out.)  Will they suspend service at crucial moments? Or will you listen to the big reveal or the deathbed confession over the sound of  "Which one of you ordered the Thai rolls?" I have been both audience and performer in smallish theaters, and I can assure you that someone chowing down a Carnivore's Delight pizza or digging into a mound of malodorous take-out is quite the, um, Experience.  And it ain't Superlux.  Not to mention the to-ing and fro-ing which I would find mighty distracting.

If you create an atmosphere of a cocktail lounge happy hour, no matter how upmarket, how do you think the patrons will behave? Like people who are there to be absorbed in the movie? Or people who are out to par-tay? Will there be Superlux Cones of Silence to drop around them? Or do the waitrons double as bouncers?

I understand the commercial impulse behind all this. There is nothing wrong with wanting people to leave their comfy caves and spend money in your entertainment establishment.  I hope people have a rip-roaring good time and that they feel their triple-digit evening at the movies is worth it. I hope that no one has a plate of pulled pork dropped onto a silk blouse or wind up with a lapful of brewski. I hope that "Sh-h-h" doesn't escalate to "Shut the %@#* up!"

But I won't be there to find out. I recently figured out how to operate the remote controls for the superlux technology that has stood idle here in Trousertown for many a year,  I am more than happy to lounge around the den where the only Smell-O-Vision is the scent of pine trees and the ocean. Where I can loll shoeless, clutching my beverage of choice. Where I can unapologetically binge-watch "Game of Thrones" and "Breaking Bad" and "Duck Dynasty." Best of all? No Cones of Silence will ever be required.

My Girl Pearl

I'd just returned from my annual doctor's visit with new resolve to eat more salad and less candy for a few weeks to drop the winter flab-ola. Seemed a small price to pay for postponing if not avoiding my cardiac destiny.

I thought I had come to terms with the luck of my genetic draw.  If I can't eat unlimited Cheetohs and Ring-Dings, I won't cry. But then I read about Pearl Catrell.  Boo-hoo! Hand me my hankie!

Pearl just celebrated her 105th birthday with a ride in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.  Why did this lovely lady get such a treat?  Because she attributes her longevity to her daily consumption of bacon--crispy bacon--two slices for breakfast and maybe another couple of slices for lunch. Bacon! Demon bacon! Who knew?

Truthfully, I suspect Pearl's longevity comes from her ancestors who appear to be a lot of hard-working Texas farmers who actually worked on the land instead of collecting enormous subsidies from the pork barrel. For Pearl, the bacon is the gravy, the ice cream, the hot fudge sauce on top of that pile of lucky genes. 

But, what if?  If only she were right.  If only eating a couple of strips of salty, fatty, nitrate-laden char was the real fountain of youth.  





Nutrition information comes and goes in a Seussian whirl of no-fat, low-fat, good-fat, bad-fat. 

Worry floats from additive to additive. Remember the cyclamates that gave Tab it's polarizing taste:  can't live without it/wouldn't drink it if I were in the middle of the Mojave dying? 

Now we are told to worry/not worry about high-fructose corn syrup, to worry/not worry about about GMO's, to worry/not worry about aspartame.  (All I can say is, at least I don't live in China where I might have to worry about rat meat sold as lamb.)

I'd like to believe that Pearl is right, but the nasty voice of reason whispers, "Dream on."  So, I'll dream. But, if movies are our dreams, then I'll take comfort in this scene from Woody Allen's Sleeper (1973), in which, according to the IMDb, "A nerdish store owner is revived out of cryostasis into a future world to fight an oppressive government." Not nutritionally oppressive, though.

Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk."

Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.

Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?

Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.

Dr. Melik: Incredible.

Trouserville: We should all live so long!


Fun (?) Fact from the Trouserville Memory Bank:  While Tiger's Milk is now a brand of nutrition bar, it was a canister of dried up nutrition popular in the 1970's. Don't ask me how I know that it tasted like garbage.

Trouserville Thank You to my sister Trish for letting me know about Pearl.

Early Bird Special

Every time I see the sign "early bird special," it conjures up a picture of doddering oldsters gumming their comfort food dinners while it is still light out. Very funny, until it came to this: a dinner so early-birdy that it was really lunch.

Real retro lunch, too. None of your hipster-retro grilled pork belly or caramelized bacon.  Nyuh-uh. This was the real deal. And it was delicious.

FIsh cake, baked beans, cole slaw, corn bread.

When I was a kid, my family almost never went to restaurants.  Once a summer we went to the Fox Lounge for the open face steak sandwich.  A huge grilled strip steak lolling atop two thin slices of toast which pretty much dissolved in the meat juice, that sandwich was as far from our usual sandwich fare of baloney on white bread as it could be. The platter was completed with an avalanche of french fries, cooked in beef fat, of course, because this was in the days before the cholesterol police took the fun out of fries.

I'm sure that once the early bird families who came only to chow down on steaks packed it in for the night, hauling greasy kids and doggie bags full of meat, the Fox Lounge showed it's true neon-beer-sign colors and became a  rowdy road house with drinkin', dancin', and carryin' on aplenty.

The place I had lunch today, The Sagamore Inn in Sandwich, Massachusetts reminds me of the old Fox Lounge, only much, much cleaner. It's a wonderful family run restaurant serving seafood, Italian food, and Shirley's Famous Pot Roast. The most modern thing on the menu is a Classic Caesar Salad. In the summer you can get breakfast, too.

What really brings the Fox Lounge to mind is the old sign just outside the bar area:

I'm surprised it doesn't read "NO DANCING per order of the Sandwich Police Dept." I'm sure it had something to do with licensing or blue laws, but can't you just see a hussy in a polka dot dress being asked to leave the premises on account of a little butt-shimmying? Or a wise guy in a zoot suit being shown the door for toe-tapping? 

You know why I like that sign so much, and the wood paneled walls and booths, and the painted tin ceiling?  They date from the time when my parents were young. It's as though my own memory has extended back before I was born, and that doesn't make me feel old at all.  It makes me feel young. 

But not so young that I would even think about violating the atmosphere by DANCING. 

Excuse me, but I think there's a doggie bag calling my name.

Just Say Chantenay

Can you say "Chantenay?"

Shawn-Ten-A. 

There, I knew you could.  Miss Rogers is proud of you, even if she's not wearing her cardigan.

Now, boys and girls, who can tell me what Chantenay is?

No, not a famous pop diva; that would be Beyonce.   Not a discontinued Cadillac roadster (Allante) or high-priced wine (Santenay).  It's not even one of those perfumes that make you wish you carried a gas mask when you are stuck in an elevator going to the 40th floor behind someone who seems to have pickled themselves and their clothes with it.

No, Chantenay is a carrot.

If you've dined out in a white tablecloth restaurant lately you have probably seen it listed on the menu as an accompaniment (please, we don't say “side dish” anymore) to, oh, pan-seared scallops with pureed turnips, truffles, and crispy shallots ("excellent choice"). You salivate. This is going to be something special, something novel, something you'll want to take a picture of and share with everyone you know.

You wait with growing anticipation. When your plate arrives (please be careful, it's hot), you poke around, you find the four tiny orange cubes. You taste them. Why it's just like eating a . . . well, a carrot. A Bugs Bunny, grocery store, snack-in-a-bag carrot. Of course, it is slathered with a sauce of three parts butter, one part salt that could make a slice of Styrofoam palatable, but it is still just a carrot.

I don't have any great nostalgia for the good old days when iceberg was the only lettuce, calves' liver (shudder) was regarded as a health food, and carrots sometimes came in cans as a component of the dreaded “Mixed Veg, ” but I think I am missing the point of the Chantenay carrots. Of course I'm missing any number of things these days what with getting older and losing my taste buds, my sense of smell, and my mind (if what I read in the newspaper is correct), but I can still let my fingers do the walking and found out something interesting.

To oversimplify, because I am not a botanist or a farmer and there is no impartial fact checker here in Trouserville, there are a couple types of ordinary carrots that have been used for years by processors: Danvers and Chantenay. Yes, that's Danvers as in Danvers, Massachusetts, where the variety was introduced in 1871. Chantenay came to us from France. Both of them came from the vicinity of Afghanistan via the Netherlands.

Turns out we've been eating Chantenays for years without knowing it, but now through the miracle of marketing they can garner a premium price on the menu.  I don't find these menus entertaining at all, nor do I find the over-described and obscure ingredients anything to get excited about.  Let's just dump those Chantenays in the compost bin marked excessive complexity and meaningless choice. Right down there with purple potatoes, micro-greens,  and samphire (that's glasswort to you, Bub, a plant that anyone can yank out of the marsh for free).

Chantenays do have some interesting attributes, though.  Look at their publicity photo.  Compare them to thin scrawny supermarket carrots.   Or to tiny little baby snack-bag carrots (which I am sure I don't have to tell you are just ground-down pieces of bigger carrots.)

Actual carrots are much larger, thicker, and longer than they appear in this photo.

Now, now, boys and girls, let's stop the sniggering. 

Miss Rogers says, "Remember, sometimes a carrot is just a carrot."

For extra credit, take a trip to  The Carrot Museum.




A big Trouserville Thank-You to my talented friend Mary who called my attention to the Chantenay on the menu during a recent restaurant outing.