Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [63]
A friend of, among many others, Julia Child and Janet Flanner, she died in California in 1992.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
At Monticello, on July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson died at the age of eighty-three. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which he had written. Having served first as vice president and then as president, he retired from the “hated occupations of politics” in 1809 and spent the last seventeen years of his life contentedly at his Virginia farm. He grew more than 250 kinds of vegetables, including thirty varieties of the one he liked best—peas. They were imported from all over the country and the world, along with berries, fruit trees, and grape vines for wine production. He kept an extensive garden book, noting his successes, failures, and favorites, including the Carnation cherry, rare if even existing today, described as “so superior to all others that no other deserves the name of cherry.” But he saved his greatest praise for the olive tree, “the richest gift of Heaven.”
SYLVESTER GRAHAM
On this day in 1794, Sylvester Graham was born. Two years later, he was orphaned, along with his sixteen brothers and sisters. A man of fervent convictions, he became a minister like his father and used his pulpit to advocate health-promoting fresh air and exercise. His rigorous program included giving up meat and alcohol, not to mention sex. He urged young men to practice chastity, telling them that intercourse caused cholera, or worse, insanity, and that with each ejaculation, their lives were shortened.
In some other ways, he was merely ahead of his time. He believed that much of the indigestion suffered by Americans in the mid-1800s was caused by refined white flour and urged a diet of bran and coarsely ground wheat. The flour itself wasn’t new, but his intense belief in its power brought it to public attention. Graham invented a cracker made of it, combined with molasses, that is essentially the same recipe used today.
CRABS
John Hay, who was secretary of state under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, as well as ambassador to Great Britain, wrote that there were three types of creatures that seemed to be coming when they were going and going when they were coming: diplomats, crabs, and women.
Actually, crabs move sideways. There are well over four thousand species of them, of which the largest is the Japanese giant crab, with a span of up to twelve and a half feet. And all crabs, even land crabs, are born in the sea.
Crabs, like lobsters, are exoskeletal—their skeletons are their external shells, and from time to time, they struggle through the impressive act of somehow freeing themselves from the outgrown shell and hiding while they grow a new one. Soft-shell crabs are those harvested in this interval.
On the West Coast, the most popular crabs are the Dungeness and the Alaskan king crab. In Florida and on the Gulf, it is the stone crab, and along the East Coast, the blue crab, Callenectus sapidus, which means, in part, “beautiful swimmer,” the title of William Warner’s wonderful book about them. A shame they are so delicious.
MAYONNAISE
The first summer we lived together, in a borrowed house near the beach north of Los Angeles, we made a lot of homemade mayonnaise. This was in the days before the use of raw eggs could be dangerous, and in a house with a minimal kitchen. At the time it seemed more authentic somehow—not to mention a lot more exercise—to blend the oil, egg yolks, and lemon juice by hand instead of simply buying an electric mixer. Drop by drop, we would drizzle the oil into the other ingredients until the mixture was smooth and, eventually, thickened. We used it to bind the ingredients in Russian salad, with its cooked and diced carrots,