Tag: Monty Python

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A Comedy Of Eating: Watt And More . . . Including Sex. **Warning. Adult Views Of Eating Expressed.

John Hurt as Krapp in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape carefully, cautiously, contemplatively and then completely eats a banana, at first by letting it hang out of his mouth, just hanging there, caught between the air and its fruit shorn of peel, and the inside cavern of Krapp’s mouth, and then biting it off and … Continue reading A Comedy Of Eating: Watt And More . . . Including Sex. **Warning. Adult Views Of Eating Expressed.

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The Anatomical Theater: The Stomach Our Cultural Engine.

Ah, ginger beef tripe from Yum Yum Cha Cafe.  Though no longer a fixture of Rice Village, many a Sunday morning the Harvey/Maya family traveled to its storefront window and entered in search of dim sum.  Beef tripe comes to us from the muscle wall of the first three chambers of a cow’s stomach.  The … Continue reading The Anatomical Theater: The Stomach Our Cultural Engine.

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Cooking The Bones: Pleasures Of The Table And The Grim Reaper

There’s something compelling about cooking bones.  Maybe it’s the strangeness of seeing recognizable body parts within a food culture that so successfully conceals any connection between meat and a living or dead animal.  Maybe it’s a deep memory in the brain stem of scaring off predators from their kill, gathering bones with shreds of meat, … Continue reading Cooking The Bones: Pleasures Of The Table And The Grim Reaper

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Cooking Fish With H.P. Lovecraft

People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal among themselves, but said very little to the outer world.  They had talked about dying and half-deserted Innsmouth for nearly a century, and nothing new could be wilder or more hideous than what they had whispered and hinted years before.  Many things … Continue reading Cooking Fish With H.P. Lovecraft

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Food Of The Day

Sean Brock has an amazing menu and a clear creative and critical eye for Southern Cooking.  I’ve dined at Husk in Charleston, while the above image is from his new Husk in Nashville.  I’m watching him on The Mind of a Chef, narrated by Anthony Bourdain.  His mind clearly cooks within heirloom varieties, centuries-old traditions … Continue reading Food Of The Day

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Specialties Of The House

Stepping out tonight, driving to your favorite restaurant.  How exciting! You park outside a corner building glowing with bright, animal warmth. Up the steps, a smartly dressed man opens the heavy oak door, inside you go. Ah, the maitre d’ greets you. Bon.  You’re thirsty of course.  Do you see something on the menu that speaks … Continue reading Specialties Of The House

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Rome: Porridge or Pig Stomach?

I’m in the beer section of a market, what to have?  What to have?  Ah, Dogfish Head, yes they have some rather . . . oh, an almost three-thousand year old beer recipe from Italy.  I’ll take it. Birra Etrusca Bronze: drinking vessels in 2,800 -year-old Etruscan tombs.  I taste wine?  Sauturne?  Fermented pomegranate?  A … Continue reading Rome: Porridge or Pig Stomach?

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The Dinner Party: Do I Amputate, Change Out, Or Kill The Guests?

Jules-Alexandre Grün knew how to paint a dinner party.  All the light, all the wealth, all the joy.   Such a beautiful nineteen hundred and eleven, what could go wrong?   I think of the word hospitality.  Here’s a Walter Arnold photograph of the old Marine Hospital in the French Fort area of Memphis, Tennessee. … Continue reading The Dinner Party: Do I Amputate, Change Out, Or Kill The Guests?