Batman Wants You to Eat Your Vegetables

The husband found this book in the "collectibles" section at Half-Price Books and had to blog about it.

--The Faudie
Remember the end of the first Superman movie, when Superdude turnes back time by reversing Earth's orbit? No, it didn't make one damn lick of sense, but I'm not here to complain about that. Instead, I'd like to pretend Superman is spinning the planet backwards again...

...and now it's 1982! And this cookbook is available at your neighborhood bookstore:

Yup, it's the DC Super Heroes Super Healthy Cookbook. This no doubt well-intentioned oddity tries to get children excited about eating healthy foods such as sprouts and wheat germ (seriously, half of the recipes include wheat germ) by having the likes of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman pretend that these recipes are really, really exciting. Don't take my word for it, though. Let's examine a few select pages together.

Yeah, this is messed up. Here you have two winged superheroes, admiring a breakfast that looks like a bird...made from eggs. So enjoy the cheerful little birdie, if you can get past the creepy infanticide/cannibalism vibes it's giving off.

Remember when Batman was fun? Because this is 1982 and Frank Miller hasn't been born yet (at least, I hope he hasn't been born, as that's the only excuse I can think of for his juvenile writing), Batman is still a nice guy, dressed in baby blue and almost--almost--cracking a smile as he wastes his time investigating a plate of French toast.

The highlight of this picture is, of course, Robin's comment about "putting the banana in the Batman." Say what?!?

Okay, this one's actually kind of cool. Dig those crazy-lookin' sandwich monsters! Green Lantern spends most of the book fighting peanut butter-based antagonists. I have no idea why.

Supergirl has the same powers as Superman, but because she's female, she gets stuck making dinner. Nice. (But you do have to love these instructions: "Bake in oven for one hour at 375 degrees or cook for two minutes under heat vision if you have superpowers." If only.)

Not more bananas! William Moulton Marston would be having a field day with that illustration.

Here's the cookbook's big finale: a party to celebrate the founding of the Justice League of America, attended by everyone...everyone except the Martian Manhunter, who's mysteriously MIA. (I like to think J'onn is maybe in disguise as the punch bowl.) Again, as this is 1982, our heroes actually get to cut loose and have some fun.

If only they knew what's in store for them in the years following this party. Superman dies. Green Lantern dies. Green Arrow dies. Aquaman dies. The Elongated Man dies. Hawkman dies. Hawkgirl dies. Batman dies (or gets stranded in time, or gets lost on the way to the bathroom, or whatever). Kind of a bummer, isn't it?

Oh, well. On a more positive note, Zatanna returns to the fishnets and ditches the Count Chocula outfit.

So the DC Super Heroes Super Healthy Cookbook succeeds in making healthy eating fun, but more in the way of giving me an opportunity to snark about something than by me actually preparing any of the food. There is one recipe, though, that I may try someday if I have the time and the wheat germ. Until then, I'll return you to the year 2009. Get that globe spinning, Supes!

Our Parents Survived This How?

As I think I've mentioned in a few posts, Gentle Reader, I take a perverse delight in browsing old recipe books. I suppose it's an extension of my reading on how cooking and our understanding of nutrition and good food and the "womanly arts" have evolved over the years (aka, the 20th century), but at the same time, it's a bit of nostalgia and, well, shock and awe for me when I read because some of the recipes are somewhat familiar and somewhat shocking in their nutritional content.

In short, I sit and read sometimes and marvel that I wasn't heavier than I was as a kid. And I totally understand why Mum made so many food items with Crisco--that's just the way things were done in the day.

Can the Culinary Arts Institutes Retract a Publication?
Yesterday, the boys and I made a trip to our favorite haunt: the Half-Price Books on North Lamar. We hadn't been (or at least the boy and I hadn't been) for a few weeks, and it just seemed like a fun thing to do on a lazy, blessedly rainy Saturday afternoon. After surviving an incredibly obnoxious know-it-all in the comics section who'd had the audacity to kick off his cheap-ass rubber flip-flops while browsing along side us (and offering unsolicited reviews of books, authors, artists, much to our ever-growing annoyance), as well as surviving a short nose blood that the boy experienced, we three made our way over the cookbooks so I could browse while the husband sorted out our comics finds and the boy...well, I'm not sure what he did aside from whine and bitch and moan (as if he hadn't had a two-hour nap before the trip!) and make our time miserable.

My eyes fell upon the battered spine of a real gem--Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook edited by Ruth Berolzheimer (do follow the link to a fascinating piece about Madamoiselle Editeuse, Gentle Reader) from 1973. At least I think it's from '73: That's the year on the title page, whereas the most recent copyright date is 1971. This sucker's a good 3 inches thick, with handy tabs (the old-fashioned cut-out-to-fit-your-fingertip tabs, not adhesive ones you buy at Office Despot) for the various sections, and the division of the content into sections is just...beyond bizarre. For example, there's a section tab for eggs, fish and meat but then another section tab for fowl--and fowl is paired with vegetables. Okay.... Salads and desserts are paired on a finger tab, and candy and dairy team up on another tab.

Yeah, those pairings are totally logical.

Then I dove into the actual recipes themselves. Now I own a 1984 edition of Escoffier's Ma Cuisine, which is one of those grands livres of haute cuisine, and I also have the antithesis of it, a 1950 (I think--it's the seventh printing of the first edition) copy of Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book, which millions of household cooks (including my own mum) have owned, used or learned to cook from over the many years its been in print. These two books, sort of the alpha and the omega of culinary guidance, have prepared me for all kinds of weird shit, to be quite frank.

Or so I thought.

As I did while perusing Ma Cuisine and the infamous and ubiquitous Betty Crocker book, I found myself thumbing through the CAI Encyclopedic Cookbook and muttering, "Good grief, people actually ate this? People wanted recipes for this? People actually tried to cook some of these abominations?" Here's an example:

Spiced Tongue Mold1 1/2 T unflavored gelatin [Unflavored gelatin was huge in its day.]
1/3 C cold water
2 C stock from cooking tongue
1/2 t salt
1/8 t pepper
1/2 t dry mustard
1 T lemon juice
1 t Worcestershire sauce
2 C chopped cooked tongue
2 hard-cooked eggs, sliced
4 T chopped sweet pickles
1/4 C mayonnaise

Soften gelatin in cold water and dissolve in boiling stock. Add seasonings, lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce. Chill until mixture begins to thicken, then fold in remaining ingredients. Chill until firm. Serves 6.

Yummy!

Now I realize that modern folks are incredibly spoiled and incredibly wasteful in their food consumption, thus beef tongue--or any other animal's tongue--would be incredibly unwelcome on our table. I realize that once upon a time in the not too distant past, making use of the tongue was essential because, dammit, ya paid good money to have that cow butchered and prepared or, dammit, ya don't have money for t-bone steaks, so the tongue'll have to do ya. But.... Well, consider the case of cow brains. They were and in some places still are considered a delicacy. Me, I consider them a major health hazard. Granted, I don't think there's been a confirmed case of a human ingesting prepared cow brains and subsequently developing Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (that's what bovine spongiform encephalopathy--aka, mad cow disease--is called in humans), but would you want to be the first case, Gentle Reader? The FSM knows we have enough reason to worry about contracting CJD just from consuming parts of the cow (and other livestock) that are normally prepared and consumed by humans, so why put yourself at risk?

The Many Blessings of Modern Photography
Of course, using the book to prepare a dish would require one to get past the garish photography. Now, if you lived through the 1970s or have family who've shown you color photos from the 70s or even the 60s, you might be familiar with the type of color that seems to be the result of a composition that was shot through cheesecloth and somehow got glazed over with an orange haze that seemed, at least to me, somewhat pervasive during that time. But looking at the color photos in this book, I figure a person has to have a very strong stomach or absolutely no sense of taste--as in dead taste buds and dead cells in that part of the brain that registers food appeal--to be able to look at those photos and decide the food made from the recipes in the book are worthwhile.

And Don't even get me started on the black and white photos, which are far more numerous than the color ones (by some small, gorge-saving blessing from the publisher).

Is that the Loch Ness monster? Nay, 'tis not Nessy.
That's mock duck.

The book highlighted this fine feast as a suitable main dish for children in the section of the same name. Why feed a child real duck when you can feed her or him mock duck. (If you can't identify what it's made from, Gentle Reader, let me spoil you: That's a lamb shoulder, and the "head" is wrapped in four slices of salt pork or bacon.)

Over the coming weeks and months, I'll try to bring you more treasures from this tome. The husband, who found the mock duck, has set a goal to find one recipe worthy of being made here at Chez Boeckman-Walker, and I've asked him to mark any...real finds that he passes on that just cry out to be brought to the light of day here in the 21st century.

Bon appetit, Gentle Reader--if you dare!

Everything Old Is New Again

Are you tired yet, Gentle Reader, of all the bad news about the economy, of all the doom and gloom, of all the tired comparisons of today's woes to those of the Great Depression?

Yeah, me too. I'm finding it hard to listen to NPR in the morning as I'm getting three breakfasts rounded up because, well, every story seems to be about the economy. Granted, I'm up and rambling about the kitchen to catch all of Marketplace, which is a total downer these days, but I always hold out some hope that what follows from NPR will be a tad lighter, a bit brighter.

Anywho, with all this talk about economizing and cutting back and pinching pennies and making the most out of what a person can now afford, particularly when it comes to food, I thought it appropriate to find myself reading M.F.K. Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf, revised edition. I didn't by it at HPB solely for this reason; no, I bought it to check out why so many food writers--and other writers--rave about Fisher's work. But as I dug into it, I realized it's a book that's once again sort of relevant.

The book was originally published in 1942 (if I have to explain to you, Gentle Reader, what was going on in '42 and why a book about making the most out of very little in the kitchen was published at that time, then you should get thee to a library--or turn to the History Channel), and the author revised it in 1951. Some of those revisions, placed conveniently in brackets, Fisher uses to update recipes or her own personal philosophies, which do evolve with time and experience, and some of the revisions are just her way of pointing out how absurd or crazy she must have been at the time of the original writing.

What I found most striking is how she recognizes that certain common sense ideas for managing a food budget and making that budget stretch without suffering terribly had during her day disappeared because of changes in society. In his review from May 22, 1942, Orville Prescott of The New York Times calls Fisher's tips "intensely practical," but he also admits he's a "mere man...who has never become even a naturalized citizen of that foreign country, the kitchen, [for whom] a good deal of the ground covered in 'How to Cook a Wolf' is terra incognita.

Funny, those same common sense ideas have also disappeared in today's society, and many folks now are finding out the hard way how they can make a few dollars for groceries go a lot further when they apply themselves to the task.

The recipes included in the book are at times an eye-opening look at how our understanding of diet and nutrition have changed over the years. My my, how differently people cooked back then! So much fat! If a recipe doesn't call for butter, it seems to call for shortening, bacon grease (if one could live with one's conscience for not giving it all to the munitions efforts) or other animal fat. And I don't know about you, Gentle Reader, but encountering the phrase congealed fat literally turns my stomach. Just contemplating some of these recipes while lying in bed at night, I found myself getting queasy at times.

As for Fisher's writing, I can't say that I'm terribly impressed. Yeah, she's got a certain wit and humor about her that is at times self-deprecating (reminded me a bit of Erma Bombeck--but not that suburban and frazzled), and her turns of phrases flow fairly well. But I guess I was turned off by her, umm, pedigree--she's terribly worldly. I mean, Fisher lived and traveled in Europe quite a bit, and some of her experiences she writes about seem...almost elitist. If she were of the same age and experience writing in contemporary times, she'd probably be a bit of a foodie in the worst sense of the term--a bit of a snob. Then again, she probably wouldn't feel guilty in partaking of some low-brow, common "delights" either--but not too frequently.

Or at least that's the sense I got. I'll readily admit to my own prejudices against folks who think that Europe's the be-all end-all of all things culinary. Of course, in Fisher's time, it was. The foods of the East were not being heavily explored yet by the masses (WWII helped change that to a pretty large degree), and I think there was a certain prejudice against the foods of India and the Middle East because they were, in a way, the foods of a subjugated people. By jove, those English and those other Europeans had to come in, take over and show the savages and lowly ones how to eat properly.

If you want to amuse yourself and have some time (and patience), you might pick up a copy of How to Cook a Wolf. I don't regret reading it--entirely--but I am looking forward to moving on to other books.

Foto Fun

My official photographers (i.e., the boys) were unable to capture me crossing the finish line at last weekend's Human Race, but luckily the event's official photographers did so. And now they want me to buy some photos--some of which appear more like pages torn from some old Where's Waldo? book.

If you want a laugh, check out the page of photos I've been solicited to buy. I can confirm my presence in four of them (I'm the sweaty blonde without her top on). The others? Not so much. I am for sure not in the concert photos since I was well on my way home or already there by the time John Legend took the stage.

Speaking of Races....
For all my bitchin' and moanin' and fussin' preceding the Human Race, you'd think I'd never enter another 10K. And after it was over, I told myself I wouldn't.

Heh, that didn't last long. I've got my eye on one or two this fall.

And from what I read Friday, such a reaction seems perfectly natural. Here's Murakami on what goes through his mind when he's running a marathon (he has close to 30 under his timing chip):

"...whenever I run a marathon my mind goes through the same exact process. Up to nineteen miles I'm sure I can run a good time, but past twenty-two miles I run out of fuel and start to get upset at everything. And at the end I feel like a car that's run out of gas. But after I finish and some time has passed, I forget all the pain and misery and am already planning how I can run an even better time in the next race. The funny this is, no matter how much experience I have under my belt, no matter how old I get, it's all just a repeat of what came before."

So, Gentle Reader, I guess that means if I keep running and blogging and you keep reading, you're just going to have to put up with the bitchin' and moanin' and whinin'.

Media Mourning

Thursday night I finished the final book of Stephen King's The Dark Tower...saga, although that word is overwrought. Series? Well, I guess that comes pretty close. Seven books and upwards of 5,000 pages total written over some 20 years with characters and events that tie in to virtually one's entire oeuvre should have its own special word. Or at least that's what I think.

Anywho, I find myself in some way in mourning because I have no more Dark Tower books to read. Not that this is a shock, Gentle Reader. But I started reading these books back when I was in the sixth or seventh grade (the first book, The Gunslinger, while first published in a limited run in 1982, received a much wider release with a trade paperback edition 20 years ago this month). I remember seeing an interview with King on Good Morning America (back when Joan Lunden battled Jane Pauley for the queendom of morning news programs, and before Charles Gibson turned into an evil troll) in which he talked about The Gunslinger, and that sparked my interest. I might still have the mass paperback copy I received for Christmas 1989 from an uncle (one of Dad's many brothers) because that year all the aunts and uncles and cousins had drawn names to reduce the cost of exchanging gifts.

I faithfully read the second and third installments when I could get my hands on them (trade paperback editions from Sam's Club, I believe), but I petered out with the fourth installment. Wizard and Glass came out while I was a senior in college and preparing to get married (11/97), and so much time had passed between it and the prior installment that I just couldn't get through more than the first...gads, 50 pages or so. I remember my copy of Wizard and Glass sat on the toilet tank lid in our first apartment in Austin for the longest time until I...well, I think it might have been in our first-ever batch of sell-backs to Half-Price Books.

Funny that all but one of the copies of the series I now have came from Half-Price.

Anywho, so here I am, some 20 years after reading the first book, now finished with them. King has said he'll never really be finished with Roland and his ka-tet because The Dark Tower is sort of a Rosetta Stone for all his stuff and that he'll probably keep revising it until he finally croaks. He's also been working with Marvel (boo! hiss!) to adapt and expand the world of Dark Tower in comics (er, graphic novels if you must, but I suspect King's fine with calling 'em comics). I enjoyed The Gunslinger Born and can't wait to get my hands on all of The Long Road Home.

But comics can't really replace the weight of a mass paperback book in your hands. They really can't replace the desire to curl up in your favorite chair (the one you recently denuded of all the cat hair) and sit for hours on end reading about these people you've known but hardly known for so long, to find out how their story.... I hesitate to say ends, but it does end. It has to, otherwise it doesn't really have any impact.

And that's why I'm mourning. Reaching the end of the story had a definite impact on me. Even though I have several books waiting for my attention--and even plowed through Murakami's most excellent What I Talk About When I Talk About Running on Friday, which had me pondering the possibility of one day running a marathon, as laughable as that is--I feel sort of bereft, almost abandoned. The people I'd gotten to know for several thousand pages have no more to tell me and have gone away, and that makes me sad.

I'm sure you've felt this way too, Gentle Reader. I remember feeling this way when Deep Space Nine ended. That show's ending left a big hole in me for some time simple because the show itself had played such a sizable role in my life during those years. I probably felt a little that way when I read the last Little House book. Hell, I still get a little verklempt when I catch the final bathotic episode of the show on late afternoon TV.

Yes, I know, I'm being overly maudlin. Eventually I'll find another book and move on. And life will move on to. But for now, I'll mourn.

Calling All Literate Austinoids!

Gentle Reader, if you live in Austin and you like to read (and you must if you keep coming back here to read my long-winded ramblings), then you must join me and the boys tomorrow night (yep, Wednesday night) starting at 7 PM at Book People.

"Why ever should I do that?" you ask?

Because a friend and former coworker, Patrice Sarath, will be in da house signing copies of her new book, Gordath Wood. Patrice also promises, "Food, fun, a little reading, a little signing — and a little horse play." Now how can you miss something like that?

No, really. Give me one good reason, Gentle Reader, why you could let yourself miss something this nifty. Don't make me count to three before you spit out your reason.

But seriously, if you read this little 'ol rant-and-ramble fest 'o mine and live anywhere near Austin, hop in the car, hop on your bike, hop on the bus, strap on your skates or do whatever you must to make it to Book People tomorrow. If you have a valid reason for not being at Book People tomorrow night (perhaps you don't live anywhere near Austin), then you can order a copy online. Or you can sweet talk me into buying you a copy and getting it signed tomorrow night.

By the way, if you want to learn more about Patrice and read an excerpt from Gordath Wood, visit her blog. It's way better than this crapfest.

See you all Wednesday night! If not, I'll hunt you down like the dogs you are!