Alvah’s Books

At the last moment, before settling in to finish off Alvah Bessie’s Spain Again, I decided to check my email and see if I needed to anythig urgent. Usually, I never get many emails on a Sunday evening, but not tonight.

I received a notice from GoodReads that I had an email, letting me know that I won Books on the Nightstand’s Beowulf on the Beach contest and won Beowulf on the Beach by Jack Murnighan.

In addition to winning the book, I’ll be participating in my first reading challenge and that’s to read one of the classics mentioned in Beowulf on the Beach.

I am so excited to have been selected as one of the five winners and to participate in the challenge. Thank you Books on the Nightstand!

Until I was in grad school, I wasn’t much of a coffee drinker. I drank mostly Lipton’s tea with milk and sugar until one day the red Twinnings tin of loose English Breakfast tea caught my eye and I thought I would try it. Well, I’ve never touched Lipton’s since then.When I spent a semester abroad in France, I became very friendly with a Canadian fellow who was an avid tea drinker and enjoyed formal afternoons teas. One afternoon, we discovered a little tea shop that had a little restaurant that served “Afternoon Tea” to the British ex-pats. I always looked forward to 4:00 pm when we’d make our jaunt, settle in to have tea, and try all the assorted sandwiches and pastries. It was such a civilized way to spend the afternoon.

When I returned to the States and told my mother about my love for afternoon tea, we decided to start our own tradition and stock up on different types of tea, which included, Early Grey, Irish Breakfast, Ceylon, Jasmine, Orange Pekoe, Oolong. Every afternoon, we’d take out our good tea set and sip that day’s choice and savor the tiny sandwiches and pastries we made.

In one of my weekly forays to our local independent bookstore, I discovered Having Tea by Catherine Calvert, and I knew that I had to buy this book just by looking at the cover. I’ve had this book for 22 years now and it’s still one of my favorites.

Having Tea: Recipes & Table Settings
By Catherine Calvert, photographs by Keith Scott Morton
Clarkson. N. Potter Inc./Publishers, 1987
87 pages, $22.50

If you want to go beyond dunking a teabag in a mug and enjoy a civilized “cuppa,” Calvert’s book gives you five option on how to be civilized and a slew of recipes. And chuck away that all chipped mug, because you’ll need a proper tea service if truly want to enjoy tea.

If I had to pinpoint what I like so much about Having Tea, I’d have a hard time. As I leaf through the book, I ooh-and ahh at the tea services that have been photographed. These range from traditional white porcelain sets to 1930s Art-Deco geometric designs. Others include delicate flowered porcelain sets (we had those, my mother was partial to egg-shell thin porcelain with an ornate flower design), to Asian-inspired services.

But my oohs soon change to stomach grumblings  as I read through the recipes, I suddenly get a hankering for “Brunch in the City” which consists of the following:
• Toasted Cornmeal Muffins with Apple Butter
• Slow-Scrambled Eggs with Cream and Chives
• Pan-Fried Tomatoes with Fresh Tarragon
• Honey-Dew Melons Wedges with Lemon
• Bloody Mary’s and English Breakfast Tea.

Now that’s how you kick off a Sunday!

What if you’re in the mood for a picnic? Try “Summer Harvest Picnic” which includes:
• Honey-Glazed Chicken with Rosemary
• Red Potato Salad
• Vine-Ripened Tomatoes with Fresh Basil
• Crusty White Peasant Bread
• Old-Fashioned Peach Pie
• Fresh Peaches
• Mint Iced Orange Pekoe Tea

In addition to the recipes, Calvert includes a section on tea tasting and lists the major types of tea and their individual characteristics. Like wine, the qualities in tea reflect the region they’re cultivated, the soil, the altitude, and the climate.

Once you’ve decided what teas you like, you need to stock your tea larder. Some items you might want to consider:
• Crystallized Ginger (sweet, but with a little kick)
• Honey
• Lemon
• Preserves (stir in the preserves in your cup in the fashion of the Russians or Hungarians)
• Sugar

Short on tea sandwich ideas? Calvert offers the following:
• Stilton Cheese crumbled over pear slices on oatmeal bread
• Asparagus spears with lemon mayonnaise on wheat bread
• Smoked turkey with raspberry mayonnaise on cracked what bread

Next time, when you need a pick me up of sorts, skip the Starbucks. Instead, have a nice cuppa with a few shortbread biscuits and enjoy your tea time.

It’s Friday and here are my latest book review blogger discoveries

Chaotic Compendiums

Rose City Reader

Fresh Ink Books

Fleur Fisher reads

Passages to the Past

That’s it for this week. So much reading to do for both books and blogs!

Siren’s Feast: An Edible Odyssey
by Nancy Mehagian
Cielo Press, 2008
340 pages
$22.00

Reviewed by Alice Folkart

In the Siren’s Feast, an Edible Odyssey, Nancy Mehagian serves up a plethora of delicious and exotic dishes from the fabulous spiritual, social, sensual, artistic and intellectual banquet of her young adulthood. She has landed on her feet now, more than twenty years later, and can lead us along the trail she followed through the 60′s, hungry for visions, and convinced that there was more to life than appears on the surface.

Mehagian describes her child self as ‘different.’ A first-generation Armenian-American girl with attitude, a wild mop of curly, dark hair and a body plumped up with her mother’s wonderful cooking, she is not the ideal, skinny blond of Phoenix, Arizona in the 50′s and 60′s. She gravitates to others who are different, misfits, ‘baby beatniks.’ She makes quick work of college, doing well, but dropping out, convincing her parents to send her to study in Italy, but taking off instead for Tangier with a boy friend. There, she experiences the first of several spiritual awakenings with her first Acid trip.

Her life had changed. As she puts it, “I never made the Dean’s List again.”

But, in eschewing ivy halls, she gains admittance to the University of Universal Curiosity, where learning seems to be in direct proportion to how many new experiences, people, places, feelings, ideas, dreams, tastes, and sounds she could cram into every day. Her fearlessness, and the tides of the great hippie invasion of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, India and Nepal took her on an incredible, often edible, journey.

To a sound track of Crosby, Stills and Nash; Dr. John, Taj Mahal (an important man in her life then), and whatever music was ‘happening,’ Nancy moved from romance to romance, friend to friend and country to country breathlessly, joyously. Free Love and Turning On were the name of the game, and she seemed to travel a magical path. At many potentially dangerous junctures, she instinctively, some might say impulsively, ‘leaped,’ and survived. Change is the constant in her story. In India, she accomplishes an arduous pilgrimage despite no preparation, inadequate clothing and scant funds. On the Spanish island of Ibiza, without a dime in her pocket, but eager to show the world how to stop eating meat, she opens a successful vegetarian restaurant. On the eve of being ejected from Syria, she conceives, in one encounter with a gypsy violinist to whom she has never spoken, the child for whom she has begun to yearn. And finally, she is duped into running drugs into England, is caught and arrested and spends more than a year in prison. When she and her daughter emerge (yes, she is allowed to keep her baby with her), they return to the United States where she is finally sure that she knows what she has to do–finish college and find a spiritual teacher who can help her make herself useful to the world and to her child. She does it all.

Nancy Mehagian has one of the greatest gifts a person (or a cook) can have, the ability to make lemonade when all she has is lemons. She puts the most positive spin on even the direst situations. She sees her prison experience as an enforced retreat where her vision was bound to expand as her options narrowed. She continually asks herself whether what happens to her is misfortune or opportunity.

Siren’s Feast comes with a bonus, a collection of delicious-sounding recipes scattered throughout the account–some of her mother’s and grandmother’s best traditional Armenian dishes like Vosp Kufta (Armenian Red Lentil Patties), Kataif (Honeyed Shredded-dough Pastry), and her father’s recipe for home-made yogurt; and many recipes picked up throughout her travels such as Fattoush (Syrian Bread Salad), Nigerian Pepper Stew (taught her by a fellow inmate at Holloway), and the baby food she devised for the children in the prison nursery, Baby Feast.

A sad subtheme of Mehagian’s memoir is historical, the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Turks, an event so brutal and senseless, that it is incomprehensible to the author. She can only say that in her quest for meaning, in facing, “. . . a legacy so filled with violence, loss, pain and death–the survival of my race and our unique culinary heritage has the sweet liberation of revenge.”

It’s unfortunate that the author chose to do without an editor. Writers need that second set of eyes unclouded by love or friendship. A good editor would have cut the book by at least 50 pages and shown the author how to infer results without describing every event leading to them. A knowledgeable editor would have urged the author to leave some space–after all, the ‘art’ in writing is almost more about what’s left out than what’s included–we don’t need every detail. A professional would have thinned out the many digressions and non-sequiturs that stop the reader in his tracks, flagged the poor word choices and awkward phrasing that slow the narrative, and polished the book into the gem it deserves to be.

Editorial issues aside, Nancy Mehagian’s Siren’s Feast, An Edible Odyssey will surely entertain and nourish the reader looking for a light read, a little social history, and some good recipes. Such a reader’s biggest question will undoubtedly be, ‘Do I shelve it under Cookbooks, Travel, Erotica, or Memoir?’

Private Midnight
By Kris Saknussemm
The Overlook Press
333 pages
$25.95

In his second novel, Private Midnight, dubbed as a psychoerotic noir fairy tale, author Kris Saknussemm paints a perverse picture of an already spiritually raw man and the mysterious woman who strips away his deep layers of secrets and guilt

The story centers on homicide detective Birch Ritter, jaded by two bad marriages and his job. One morning, Jack McInnes, Ritter’s former partner, strolls into the precinct, drops a business card on his desk, and leaves without saying a word. Ritter pockets the card and seemingly forgets about it. While he’s investigating a possible suicide, he remembers the card, examines the ornate (and seemingly changing print) and decides to stop by the address. There, he is greeted by Genevieve-a redhead who knows quite a bit of Ritter’s past. She is alluring, intoxicating, and Ritter is dangerously drawn to her.

As the story progresses, Ritter becomes both obsessed and repelled by Genevieve, who-like her business card-physically changes at each encounter. During these on-demand meetings, she introduces Ritter to series of psycho-erotic acts and mind games that shred away at his psyche, and ultimately change his life forever.

Private Midnight is a mixture of various genres-detective noir, horror, and eroticism-and in each scene, Saknussemm has mastered the art of “show, don’t tell” in which he has beautifully painted a tableau of visual details rather than have typed away at a keyboard. However, in spite of all the well-written imagery, the overall story leaves the reader ambivalent to the outcome.

Saknussemm’s intent might have been stir the pot of morality and values-especially with Ritter’s baffling encounters with Genevieve–but by the novel’s end, Ritter’s metamorphosis comes across as an unsurprising cliché.

I’m very pleased to announce that I’m holding a giveaway of Roy L. Pickering’s Patches of Grey.  To enter and receive a signed copy, you need to do three of the  following:

• Follow me on Twitter. My handle is beachreads
• Become a fan of Alvah’s Books on Facebook
• Subscribe to Alvah’s Books
• Leave a comment on the Patches of Grey review page

I’ll announce the winner a week from today–June 2, 2009. Also, stay tuned…June holds a few surprises.

Today is Memorial Day and many of us are honoring the soldiers who defended our country and ideals in the numerous wars we’ve fought and in our current ones in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In today’s post, I’d like to honor the writer-warriors of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. These men and women were volunteers from the United States who served in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Of the 2,800, writers such as Alvah Bessie, Edwin Rolfe, James Gardner–son of humorist Ring Lardner and brother of screenwriter and Hollywood Ten member Ring Lardner, Jr.–Milt Woolf, James Neugass, and many more, illegally crossed into Spain from France to fight Franco and save the democratically-elected Spanish government. According to estimates, 800 American volunteers died in Spain including James Lardner–the last American casualty.

Not many Americans know of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, its history, or about the Spanish Civil War-a war known as the practice run to World War II. Readers who want to learn more about the “Abies” as they were known in the 1930s, should read Peter Carroll’s The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade or read Alvah Bessie’s Men in Battle. For a quick introduction visit the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

As to why these men and women volunteered in a war that America wanted no part, reporter James Gardner said it best in a letter to his mother:

Mother, darling,
This is a letter which I started to write on April 10. At that time I thought I was going to have to break the news to you gently, but you seem to have heard it before I had the chance. I have kept putting off writing you because each day it seemed as it on the next I would know what I was going to do and where I would be stationed. I still don’t know exactly what the situation is, but I am leaving in half an hour for Badalona, about seven miles up the coast, where I will learn the rudiments of artillery in company with a new mixed international unit. It looks as if French will be the medium of instruction. I shall let you know more as soon as I can.

This is a most exclusive army. It has taken me twelve days of going from person to person and office to get where I am. I have listened to advice of all varieties, a large part of it against my enlisting at all. The decision has been very much my own, and I took it after a great deal of consideration. My closest friend and principal adviser here has been Vincent (Jimmy) Sheean, who told me not to join, which shows you how stubborn I am, if you didn’t know. Ernest Hemingway’s advice was that it was a very fine thing if I wanted to fight against fascism, but that it was a personal matter that could only be decided by me.

I don’t know how closely you have followed the war, but I imagine you must have an exaggerated idea of the danger of our position. On the map it looks as if Catalonia were a small fragment of territory about to be pushed into the Mediterranean, but in reality it is a lot of country, and I don’t think it will ever be conquered. There are too many people here who are fighting for things they believe in, and too few on the other side.

My views on the whole question are too complicated for me to try to explain here. I hope you are on our side and will try to convince your friends that I am not just being foolish. Not that I mind being though foolish, but American opinion is a very important factor.

I have made up a list of reasons why I am enlisting in the International Brigade, which is fairly accurate, as I did it for my own information. I am copying it here so that you may see for yourself which are the real ones. Some of them are picayune and most of them would have been insufficient in themselves, but all have something to do with it.

Because I believe that fascism is wrong and must be exterminated, and that liberal democracy or more probably communism is right.

Because my joining the I.B. might have an effect on the amendment of the neutrality act in the United States. Because after the war is over I shall be a more effective anti-fascist.
Because in my ambitious quest for knowledge in all fields, I cannot afford in this age to overlook war.
Because I shall come into contact with a lot of communists, who are very good company and from whom I expect to learn things.
Because I am mentally lazy and should like to do some physical work for a change.
Because I need something remarkable in my background to make up for my unfortunate self-consciousness in social relations.
Because I am tired of working for the Herald Tribune in particular and newspapers in general.
Because I think it will be good for my soul.
Because there is a girl in Paris who will have to learn that my presence is not necessary to her existence.
Because I want to impress various people, Bill for one
Because I hope to find material for some writing, probably a play.
Because I want to improve my Spanish as well as my French.
Because I want to know what it is like to be afraid of something and I want to see how other people react to danger.
Because there may be a chance to do some reading and I won’t have to wear a necktie.
Because I should like once more to get in good physical condition.

The first four reasons and the ninth, especially the first, are the most important ones in my opinion, but you may decide for yourself. I have also considered a few reasons why I should not join the army, such as that I might get seriously wounded or killed and that I shall cause you many weeks of worry. I am sorry for your sake that they are not enough to dissuade me. If it is any comfort to you at all, I still hate violence and cruelty and suffering and if I survive this war do not expect to take any dangerous part in the next.

If you still consider me one of your sons, you can send me an occasional letter and possibly a package now and then. My address here, I think, will be in care of the Brigadas Internacionales, but for a while I think it will be simpler to communicate through the Sheeans. Anything edible would be appreciated, milk chocolate or raisins, or anything in cans that does not require preparation.

Love,
Jim

In memory of those who fought and died in Spain.

Salut!

I am still very behind of reading and reviews. To make matters worse, I went to our local library’s booksale and stocked up on some beach reads.

In any event, this week’s reading includes:

• A Spy by Nature, by Charles Cumming

Still reading:

• Spain Again, by Alvah Bessie
• A World I Never Made, James LePore

I completed:

• Lush Life, by Richard Price. Review will be up on Wednesday

The Settlement Cookbook: The Way to a Man’s Heart
by Mrs. Simon Kander
The Settlement Cook Book Co., 1949. 623 pages.

I come from a long line of cooks. My paternal grandmother was famous for her chocolate cakes, and my father was always trying out a new recipe and tweaking old ones. One of his favorite cookbooks was Mrs. Simon Kander’s The Settlement Cook Book.

The edition I have is from 1949. It could have well been my grandmother’s. The yellow cover has faded, the binding is torn and has been taped. The pages are yellow and there are several thumbstains. It’s a book that’s been used over and over again. According to the cover page this is the 29th edition–enlarged and revised. The first one was published in 1901!

Not knowing much about Kander, I went ahead Googled both her and the cookbook. What I learned from the Historic Cookbook Projects was that her full name was Lizzie Black Kander, a community service leader and cookbook author. Below is her full bio along with information about the cookbook:

In her twenties, Kander began working to help Jewish immigrants -comprised mainly of Russian Orthodox Jews arriving in large numbers-overcome poverty and adjust to American ways. She joined the Ladies Relief Sewing Society, where she collected used clothes and repaired them for needy families. As president of the society in 1894-95, she expanded the group’s activities and philosophy, making personal contact between volunteers and immigrants a priority. Their name changed to the “Keep Clean Mission” in 1895 and quickly changed again to the Milwaukee Jewish Mission (1896) as activities expanded beyond lecturing children on cleanliness, to include industrial education, sewing, paperwork, painting and drawing. In 1900 the Mission, under Kander’s direction, merged with another Jewish charity, the Sisterhood of Personal Service, to form Milwaukee’s first settlement called simply “The Settlement.” Settlements — institutions founded by educated, affluent citizens to provide services within a congested urban area – were already established by this time in Chicago (Hull House) and New York City (University Settlement). Kander succeeded in attracting financial and volunteer support for “The Settlement” from Milwaukee’s Federated Jewish Charities. As president from 1900 to 1918, she expanded the educational services to assist children and adults, recent Jewish immigrants and long-time citizens. There were night classes in English and American history, instruction in Hebrew, a mothers’ class, athletic and cultural clubs for children, a lending library, a savings bank, a gymnasium and public baths.

The first edition of 1,000 copies of The Settlement Cookbook: The Way to a Man’s Heart appeared in 1901, and was an immediate success. Since assimilation necessitated adjustments between Jewish and American culinary traditions, the cookbook contained Jewish and American recipes, and recipes that were amalgams of these traditions. In this way the cookbook reflected some of the foods and recipes that Jews brought with them, foods they encountered for the first time, and variants from other parts of Europe, all presented within an up-to-date domestic science framework. Also, given the anecdotal evidence that poor cooking was responsible for much marital discord, the readers of the day probably took the sub-title quite seriously.

The second edition appeared in 1903, and sold 1,500 copies. To date the book has gone through more than 40 editions and has sold more than two million copies, which makes it the most profitable charity cookbook ever. Kander served as cookbook editor from 1914 until her death, revising each edition and adding new recipes. The skeptical trustees – who once joked that they would gladly share in any profits should the ladies publish a cookbook without their financial support – would see cookbook royalties provide more than a quarter of the sum paid for a brand new building in 191l; the Settlement values of service and education would endure, even as the needs of Milwaukee Jews changed. Immigration tapered off in the 1920s, and by 1931 the group had changed location again, to a building five times larger; now called the Jewish Community Center, it offered an expansive program of vocational, cultural and communal activities, as well as sports and social events. The cookbook royalties, again, covered a large portion of the building’s cost.

Sections include:

• How to feed a family
• How to set a table
• Directions for serving with a maid, no maid, in the Russian style, platter service, buffet style, etc.
• Cooking for invalids (Pre-politically correct days)
• Menus and food combinations
• Cooking for camping and how to build a campfire

Some of my favorite, but not heart-healthy, recipes are the following:

• Berliner Pfann Kuchen (Filled Dougnuts)
• Chocolate Icebox Cake made with Lady Fingers, lots of butter, eggs, and cream
• Potato Cakes made with cold mashed potatoes
• Chicken Liver Timbale
• Cheese Sticks

FInding these recipes takes me back to a time when I was an underweight kid and my mother insisted that my father make something to fatten me up. He tried, I ate massive quantities of doughnuts, cheese sticks, and cake, but I never gained any weight.

Now, well, that’s a different story. I never make any of these recipes, but maybe when I start picking wild raspberries I’ll get a hankering for Berliner Pfann Kuchen, make a dozen, and take my cue on how to serve them.