Book Review: The Cuisines of Germany

There are easy-breezy cookbooks that focus on short recipes and time-savers and then there are cookbooks that are teaching tools, travel companions, and story-tellers. The Cuisines of Germany by Horst Scharfenberg belongs to the latter category, for adventurous cooks, food historians, and those wanting to learn more about their German roots. Unfortunately out of print by now, it's worth checking out of the library or looking for in used bookstores.

Written by a native Frankfurter for English-speaking audiences when Germany was divided into East and West, The Cuisines of Germany is a serious study of regional traditions and a love letter to Heimat. Even if you never make any of the recipes (but you'll want to!), the book provides hours of absorbing reading. Food writer and television presenter Scharfenberg knows the regions, cooking, and history of Germany and takes the reader on a travelogue of memory and custom.

The book opens with a 75-page ethnography of the 16 culinary regions of Germany for background, explaining how culinary customs evolved and comparing regional variations among shared dishes. The recipes are then divided by types of dish, starting with soups and ending with desserts and drinks. 19th century-style lithographs of food, kitchen scenes, and the skylines of famous German cities appear throughout for illustration, giving the book a nostalgic Farmer's Almanac feel, but there are no illustrations of how the dishes themselves will look after making, which may be a drawback to the beginner.

Included with the recipes are regional origins and further historical details taken from contemporary cookbooks and personal documents. For example, in the section for Gänsebraten (roast goose), he talks about the dish's association with the Mecklenburg and Pomerania regions and includes a guidebook's tips for how to make use of the inedible parts of the goose. In several cases, he translates directly from the historical source, including a recipe for Duck with Pomegranate juice taken from a 1795 publication, The Magdeburg Cookbook for Beginning Housewives, Housekeepers, and Cooks. And he explains how the events of the Thirty Years War influenced the development of a beef stew called Bifflamot (or Böfflamot) from the French boeuf à la mode. Also a nice touch are the allusions and quotations from relevant literary and artistic figures associated with a particular dish or region.

Although the book is probably best geared toward those with mid-level cooking skills or previous experience with German cuisine, there are recipes for the beginner or casual cook, like Berlin's famous dish, the Stolzer Heinrich (Proud Henry), a bratwurst in beer sauce, and Königsberger Klopse (meatballs) that can be made on a weekend without too much time and fuss. Also handy is a map of Germany in the front and a U.S.-European measuring conversion table in the back.

Unless you have a lot of leisure time, these recipes aren't practical for everyday living but they are great for special occasions and parties… or if you have a German sweetie and you want to impress the in-laws with your savvy at wrangling Saumagen.

Book Review: Tough Guy Tourism Presents...

If you have the time and are patient enough, nosing around the shelves and boxes at a used bookstore can yield some unexpected treasures. Any given day I could sift through mangled paperbacks, second draft screenplays, magazines from Saturday Evening Post to Cat Fancy, and those all-time fun faves, pulp fiction paperbacks. It's an overview of American pop culture that's amusing, fascinating, and discouraging all at the same time.

Pulps enjoyed a golden age in publishing from the 1930s to the mid 1960s, providing grateful writers with an income source and eager readers with hot stories about naughty bits and crazy folk. Of course, most of it was hype--the headlines, blurbs, and glorious cover art carried most of the story in a few punchy words and images. The prose stylings of pulp fiction were sometimes florid in the Poe tradition, sometimes Hemmingway terse, and covered dark city nights behind sunny suburban days.

So it was a pretty cool find when I recently came across a book unique within the genre, a pulp fiction travel guide published in 1950, entitled The Big City After Dark: The Lowdown on Its Bright Life by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer.

Yeah, pally, put on your fedora and start humming Sinatra. Tough Guy Tours take you where the action is! The minute you get off the bus, the dames will all say, "Welcome to Noo Yawk! Hey! Whaddaya lookin' at?" Look, this guide isn't for chumps and namby-pambys, no sirree! We'll tell you where to go--and where not to go, see. Strictly confidential information, see.

Lait and Mortimer were editors at the New York Daily Mirror, and wriggle out the worm on the Big Apple in classic clench-jaw tough guy prose that practically gives you TMJ just to read it. But behind the Damyon Runyan dialogue, they gave their young readers a comprehensive guide to midcentury New York. They describe neighborhoods, dispense dating tips, how to deal with high society and mobsters, and for the really motivated, how to speak hipster and the names of the headwaiters at the major restaurants.

Consider, for example, a tip on flirting: "If you flirt on the street, you're apt to be arrested and in the subway, killed." Woah! The cover dude ought to look out. She's actually a lady police officer with wicked fashion sense.

The book also displays a map of Manhattan on the back cover. (I've seen the map-on-the-back motif on other pulps and always liked the graphic art):

I can see this nice young fella from the midwest walking down Fifth Avenue, staring at this map, busting his conk to be hep. Then sitting down on the subway, trembling, and not looking at anyone.

Postwar pulps acted as popular guides for a society coming to terms with changes in the economy, crime, urbanization, gender roles, and race, both reveling in and fearful of the changes. The Big City captures that superego/id thing that the 1950s had going on, a delicate balance between idealizing the pure and fantasizing about the raw. Magazines painted happy pictures of suburban idylls while the pulps reminded readers of the city they left behind.

Book Review: Love Me

Garrison Keillor wanders out of Lake Wobegon in this tale of Larry Wyler, a sadsack Minnesota writer who finds commercial success, becomes estranged from his do-gooding wife, and moves to New York City to write for The New Yorker. You know, standard writing career trajectory and all that.

But then Wyler enters a twenty year desert of writers' block, unable to write those Great American Short Stories. Despite hobnobbing with John Updike, S.J. Perelman, Thurber, and J.D. Salinger, he can't make with the literary fiction. Even heart-to-heart conversations with the tough, golf-swingin', hard-drinkin' editor Shawn Wallace can't break the spell.

In order to earn some income while the Muse is out to lunch, he instead writes an advice column under the name "Mr. Blue," responding to the lovelorn, befuddled, and downright addle-pated, chastising them with a mixture of tough love and sympathy. Along the way, he has a string of unfulfilling affairs, attempts another schlockbuster novel, gets entangled with the Mob, and maybe learns a little about himself and his place in the writing world and the losses and revelations of middle age.

Keillor's in good form here, with his patented mix of down-home and smart-alecky humor (which gets saucier and more adult outside Lake Wobegon). He delights in poking fun at writing and writers with a mixture of goodwill and cynicism. The letters are witty and the prose is above average: "People mate in choir all the time in Minnesota. We are a choral state." Or on the sign of a writer now panhandling carries: "Will reminiscence for food." Ouch.

Book Review: Elvis and Nixon

On December 21, 1970, Elvis Presley ambled into the White House, high on, uh, life, and had a meeting and photo op with Richard Nixon. Rambles about What Is Wrong With Today's Youth and Those Darn Hippies were exchanged. As a token of his esteem, Elvis gave Nixon a gun and Nixon, never one to be outdone, gave Elvis a badge designating him a federal agent in the war against drugs. Seriously.

The meeting was one of those strange events that can only happen spontaneously and couldn't be staged by even the most enterprising PR flack. And as such, a perfect topic for fictionalization. In Elvis and Nixon, author Jonathan Lowry novelizes the event into a satirical, surreal epic, with plenty of snark at the popular and political cultures of the era.

The story gets stretched a little thin and many of the characters feel like archetypes rather than rounded characters. We meet an African-American Vietnam vet and his streetwalking sister, Elvis' good ol' boy entourage, anti-war protestors, scampering/scheming Nixon aides, and a British bartender intent on creating a religion around the King. Their dramas are entertaining, maybe a little distracting, but nonetheless underscore the tension between the dampening political mood and the still freewheeling, hustling culture of those heady days when people started to come down from the 60's high of idealism and political action began its slide into cynicism.

Many twisty turns of phrase and plot later, we come away with a look into the complicated souls of the King and the Prez. (His research was based in part on Egil Krogh's memoir The Day Elvis Met Nixon.) Not exactly a nice glimpse, mind you, but an interesting one. The novel is out of print now (I read a library copy)—it's high-concept that makes a wild first impression/printing, but veers a bit much into experimental fiction, which isn't everyone's fave. But I got a pop culture kick out it, nonetheless.

By the way, did you know that this fabulous photo is the National Archive's most requested photo? Nixon, nervous, bear-trap mind working overtime, wondering if posing with this hip-thruster will make him hip, too, although the notion dismays his Quaker soul. Elvis, belt-buckled and be-jeweled in full freaked-out Napoleon mode. And what's with the lonely Staffordshire china chicken in on the shelf?

Beyond the weirdness, there's something quintessentially American about this picture, something that speaks right to our ideals. Because here we have two Horatio Alger stories: two men from humble backgrounds who through a combination of talent, hard work, and savvy, rose to the highest positions of power in the U.S, president and celebrity. These are archetypes of dreams fulfilled, implying success over all obstacles, which appeals to our boot-strap, DIY ethic.

But there's a dark side: they were also undone by the same qualities that made them successful. Nixon self-destructed, Elvis self-destructed. But we'll always remember them, we'll always have this picture.

Get more Elvis and Nixon stuff right here

Book Review: Ficciones

Ficcionesis a slim volume of short stories by the 20th century Argentine author, poet, and translator Jorge Luis Borges, a good introduction to the author's unique style of writing. Most of the stories are only a few pages long, but despite their brevity—or because of it—they push the boundaries of literary fiction into something wild, complex, and challenging.

Borges plays with words and ideas, mixing, stirring, and baking them like a magician-chef until they rise up in strange new shapes to nourish a part of the brain you didn't know existed until now. And yet they retain an elusive quality—his worlds are beautiful and strange to behold, ideas and phrases remain with you, and yet you can never quite inhabit a Borges world. His stories push the boundaries of language and the imagination and are not concerned about realistic situations or relationships.

Take for example, the two strange worlds and one mysterious organization of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Tlön exists in an encyclopedia and might be the creation of the Orbis Tertius society. The author's fictional alter ego (a favorite motif) goes in search of maybe real Uqbar and imaginary Tlön, learning its complex languge.

In "The Circular Ruins," a wizard retires to an abandoned temple where he attempts to dream a person into being. Borges uses the story to explore the ways an idea can manifest in the physical plane and the fine line between reality and dream.

"The Lottery in Babylon" presents a society in which people's lives are delegated through the luck of the draw through a lottery run by a mysterious Company, and explores the contradiction/paradox between deliberate choice and luck.

And then there's the famous library in "The Library of Babel." Imagine the universe as a series of hexagonal room, each containing a set number of books, most of which contain gibberish. And yet, rumor has it, that in other rooms there are books that make sense, that contain valuable information, and the librarian spend their lives looking for them.

These descriptions are just the beginning—each story is so complex I'd have to write long, long posts on each and I'd rather enjoy the stories like dreams instead of analyzing them to pieces. Ficciones, because of Borges' love of the abstract and conceptual, isn't an easy read, but it's a rewarding read. I'm on my third re-read and I admit, sometimes my eyes glaze over at the complexity, but then I keep going, fascinated at how someone could come up with this stuff. His stories are a testament to how unique writers can be, how far we can push our imaginations to touch something sublime.

Picture: Borges in a hotel lobby, 1969

Book Review: Spoon River Anthology

In Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, the voices of ordinary people reach out to us in poetry.

In over 200 poems, the deceased residents of the fictional town of Spoon River speak to the readers about the truth behind the facades of their lives, resulting in a series of interconnected stories with a kind of multiple-perspective Rashamon feel. The poems are their epitaphs, the summation statements broadcast to the rest of the world. Secret affairs, business and personal failures, frustrations, political in-fighting, and confessions, all is revealed.

Relating to the anonymous reader what they couldn't or wouldn't while alive, the characters' narratives become confessions of lives less than perfect, as if by doing so they can absolve themselves--or maybe, simply, accept themselves. And as readers, we become involved in their stories, drawn in by these cries to be heard.

Masters' verse is free, loose, his ear close to the ground to catch the rhythms of natural, realistic speech, yet shading each poem with the character's unique outlook. The tragic poetess Minerva Jones' simple yet elegant voice contrasts with the bluster of her father; the acerbic wit of Editor Whedon contrasts with the Romantic, garrulous tone of Webster Ford.

What is it about confessional stories and memoirs that we like so much? Is it to confirm our secret sense of superiority? Is it to feel relieved that we not the only ones? Or is a curious mix of both? While we may feel compassion for one or more of the characters, we may also breath a quiet sigh of relief that our lives aren't so messy. And which characters we sympathize with the most may also be revealing of our own inner life.

In as large a collection as this, the quality of the invidividual poems varies. Monotony crops up as well as the poet's tendency to insert his views into the characters' confessions, (although the intruding narrator was still a common literary convention at the time). However, these tense energies of confession and gossip contained in free verse and short stanzas make Spoon River Anthology a quick, absorbing, enjoyable, and just a wee bit uncomfortable read.

Above all, the poems will make the reader wonder...what will be my epitaph? What will I say about my life?