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Food Trivia Perilously Close to Usefulness - WILLIAM GRIMES, NY Times, 9.8.2004
SCHOTT'S FOOD & DRINK MISCELLANY By Ben Schott
There's a word for creatures who feed on oak leaves. It is querciverous. This piece of information is absolutely useless, which makes it the perfect candidate for inclusion in "Schott's Food & Drink Miscellany." In this compact volume, arranged in no particular order, one finds the names of the last four turkeys to be granted a presidential pardon on Thanksgiving (Jerry, Liberty, Katie and Stars), Robert Burns's "Address to the Haggis" and the complete lyrics to the original Chiquita banana song. Like its predecessor, "Schott's Original Miscellany" (2003), the book is pointedly pointless, intentionally aimless and endlessly entertaining.
It is gratifying to learn that humble pie is no mere expression. There really was such a thing, a dish made with venison offal, or humbles, a word that derived from the French word for deer entrails, nombles. Mr. Schott thoughtfully includes a 17th-century recipe, which sounds delicious, much more appealing than a restaurant's roast camel "English style," one of several dishes served on Christmas at Voisin in 1870, when Paris was under siege. The zoo at the Jardin des Plantes sold off the animals it could no longer feed, and enterprising chefs rose to the challenge. At Voisin, diners feasted on stuffed ass's head, elephant soup, wolf haunch in venison sauce and a truffled antelope terrine. The wines were appropriate.
Anyone curious to know what elephant soup tastes like will be disappointed, but Mr. Schott does include a list of exotic creatures and their reputed flavors. Bat, it seems, tastes like partridge, the Nephila spider tastes like a potato, and termites taste like lettuce. A valuable footnote explains why Portuguese settlers in Africa were allowed to eat hippopotamus (tastes like beef) during Lent. Because it spends so much time in the water, the hippo was judged to be a fish.
The sin of gluttony, by the way, turns out to be a lot more complicated than overeating. As Thomas Aquinas parsed it, gluttony has five forms, each with its own Latin designation. In addition to overeating (nimis), one could transgress by eating too soon (praepropere), too expensively (laute), too eagerly (ardenter) or too daintily (studiose). It is impossible to know where Homer Simpson fits into the scheme.
Mr. Schott has made a study of the stimuli that have elicited a drooling "Mmmmm" from Homer. These include doughnuts, free goo, unprocessed fish sticks and hog fat. This bit is funny in itself, and doubly funny coming as it does after a literate tour of mid-19th-century English drinking terms.
The word miscellany has an antiquarian ring to it, suggesting a fusty rooting around in history's attic. Mr. Schott does a little of that, but his approach, placing ridiculously unrelated data side by side, makes him a close cousin to the compilers of the Harper's Index and its many offshoots.
Mr. Schott does cheat a bit this time around. For one thing, he seems to think that smoking qualifies as a form of eating or drinking, so he makes room for the color nomenclature used by Cuban cigar makers to indicate the lightness of the tobacco and instructions on how to blow smoke rings. A detailed table of wages for various classes of servant in 1825 makes fascinating reading but has nothing to do with the book's title, nor do most of the English idioms using the word water.
At times the book comes perilously close to being a useful reference work, which violates the whole spirit of the enterprise. The various tables of weights and measures, standard cocktail recipes, temperature charts and vintage guides take valuable space away from absurdities like Mr. Schott's illustrated treatise on how to organize a tub of popcorn.
The scientific approach is to put a layer of caramel popcorn on the bottom and salted popcorn on top, arranged in a proportion guaranteeing that the moviegoer's fingers will reach sweet popcorn at the precise moment when the palate tires of salt. It's much more fun to find out that in England you can order a Domino's pizza topped with tuna and sweet corn than it is to know that a pie pan measuring 10 inches by 11/2 inches holds six cups.
Mr. Schott, when he's on his game, understands this. Why else would he list sample last meals requested by convicts on death row, or the foods that rock stars demand in their touring contracts? That's canned cheese for Z.Z. Top, Cool Ranch Doritos and Altoids for Britney Spears. It's good to know these things. A full page seems just about right for a map showing the names and sizes of Australian beer glasses.
The information age spews forth a tidal wave of facts every day. Mr. Schott has made it his mission to ensure that nothing unimportant gets lost.
SCHOTT'S FOOD & DRINK MISCELLANY By Ben Schott
There's a word for creatures who feed on oak leaves. It is querciverous. This piece of information is absolutely useless, which makes it the perfect candidate for inclusion in "Schott's Food & Drink Miscellany." In this compact volume, arranged in no particular order, one finds the names of the last four turkeys to be granted a presidential pardon on Thanksgiving (Jerry, Liberty, Katie and Stars), Robert Burns's "Address to the Haggis" and the complete lyrics to the original Chiquita banana song. Like its predecessor, "Schott's Original Miscellany" (2003), the book is pointedly pointless, intentionally aimless and endlessly entertaining.
It is gratifying to learn that humble pie is no mere expression. There really was such a thing, a dish made with venison offal, or humbles, a word that derived from the French word for deer entrails, nombles. Mr. Schott thoughtfully includes a 17th-century recipe, which sounds delicious, much more appealing than a restaurant's roast camel "English style," one of several dishes served on Christmas at Voisin in 1870, when Paris was under siege. The zoo at the Jardin des Plantes sold off the animals it could no longer feed, and enterprising chefs rose to the challenge. At Voisin, diners feasted on stuffed ass's head, elephant soup, wolf haunch in venison sauce and a truffled antelope terrine. The wines were appropriate.
Anyone curious to know what elephant soup tastes like will be disappointed, but Mr. Schott does include a list of exotic creatures and their reputed flavors. Bat, it seems, tastes like partridge, the Nephila spider tastes like a potato, and termites taste like lettuce. A valuable footnote explains why Portuguese settlers in Africa were allowed to eat hippopotamus (tastes like beef) during Lent. Because it spends so much time in the water, the hippo was judged to be a fish.
The sin of gluttony, by the way, turns out to be a lot more complicated than overeating. As Thomas Aquinas parsed it, gluttony has five forms, each with its own Latin designation. In addition to overeating (nimis), one could transgress by eating too soon (praepropere), too expensively (laute), too eagerly (ardenter) or too daintily (studiose). It is impossible to know where Homer Simpson fits into the scheme.
Mr. Schott has made a study of the stimuli that have elicited a drooling "Mmmmm" from Homer. These include doughnuts, free goo, unprocessed fish sticks and hog fat. This bit is funny in itself, and doubly funny coming as it does after a literate tour of mid-19th-century English drinking terms.
The word miscellany has an antiquarian ring to it, suggesting a fusty rooting around in history's attic. Mr. Schott does a little of that, but his approach, placing ridiculously unrelated data side by side, makes him a close cousin to the compilers of the Harper's Index and its many offshoots.
Mr. Schott does cheat a bit this time around. For one thing, he seems to think that smoking qualifies as a form of eating or drinking, so he makes room for the color nomenclature used by Cuban cigar makers to indicate the lightness of the tobacco and instructions on how to blow smoke rings. A detailed table of wages for various classes of servant in 1825 makes fascinating reading but has nothing to do with the book's title, nor do most of the English idioms using the word water.
At times the book comes perilously close to being a useful reference work, which violates the whole spirit of the enterprise. The various tables of weights and measures, standard cocktail recipes, temperature charts and vintage guides take valuable space away from absurdities like Mr. Schott's illustrated treatise on how to organize a tub of popcorn.
The scientific approach is to put a layer of caramel popcorn on the bottom and salted popcorn on top, arranged in a proportion guaranteeing that the moviegoer's fingers will reach sweet popcorn at the precise moment when the palate tires of salt. It's much more fun to find out that in England you can order a Domino's pizza topped with tuna and sweet corn than it is to know that a pie pan measuring 10 inches by 11/2 inches holds six cups.
Mr. Schott, when he's on his game, understands this. Why else would he list sample last meals requested by convicts on death row, or the foods that rock stars demand in their touring contracts? That's canned cheese for Z.Z. Top, Cool Ranch Doritos and Altoids for Britney Spears. It's good to know these things. A full page seems just about right for a map showing the names and sizes of Australian beer glasses.
The information age spews forth a tidal wave of facts every day. Mr. Schott has made it his mission to ensure that nothing unimportant gets lost.
