Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Beltway pundits like to ridicule Trump supporters for thinking he’s playing some sort of four dimensional chess when he clearly isn’t. Whether it’s the fight with Musk or ending Iran’s nuclear program, it’s all the same complaint: not only does President Trump not understand what he’s doing, his supporters think there’s a plan when there isn’t one, confusing random flailing with multi-dimensional strategy.

In fact, though, that’s not what I see most Trump supporters celebrating in Trump’s actions. Most Trump supporters appear to be grateful that the President plays mere two-dimensional or one-dimensional chess.¹

Most politicians and beltway pundits seem to be stuck in zero dimensional chess. When Trump announces some action in pursuance of some policy, such as that he’s going to raise tariffs against a country until that country decides to negotiate to reduce their tariffs against the United States, the beltway class yells that this is crazy.

And then when the President rolls those tariffs back when the country announces they’ll negotiate, the same crowd crows that Trump is walking back his actions, not that the actions resulted in the consequences the President desired.

The same thing happened only last week with Iran. Trump threatened Iran with specific consequences unless the Islamic leadership in Iran started negotiating, starting with a ceasefire in the Strait of Hormuz. The beltway class yelled that he’s crazy. Iranian leaders came to the table, so he stopped the threats that he explicitly said were meant to bring about this result and the beltway class crowed that he was chickening out. They didn’t argue that he shouldn’t trust the Iranian leadership—or that he shouldn’t trust the Pentagon—or that the starting point of negotiations offered was a bad one or even that the ceasefire was likely to be measured in hours rather than days. For that you need to go to someone on the right, someone who has actually supported Trump, such as Mark Steyn. No, they argued that he was chickening out when he did what he said he would do.

It’s literal zero-dimensional thinking. There is no sense that policies have goals and that reaching those goals will affect policy. When a politician literally announces the goal of an action, and the goal is met and so the action is ended, this is crazy and incomprehensible to beltway “thinkers”. Who, to paraphrase Edgar Rice Burroughs, “do more talking than thinking”.

“This is going to get salty.”

“A lot of recipe writers and publications… present recipes in a way that they are very difficult to read. They put up roadblocks. They over-complicate them. They try to make something into something that it isn’t.”

Glen goes on a rant about a particular style of recipe-writing that also makes me laugh. It’s all about over-complicating things in ways that literally do nothing for the recipe. This particular cookie recipe hits one of them for me. He doesn’t talk about this in the video, but he does fix it in his altered version: it calls for unsalted butter… and then adds salt. I’ve pretty much stopped keeping unsalted butter on hand because every one of them seems to do this.

It’s why I put the note in A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book about converting sodium content to salt.

If the recipe required clarifying the butter, that might make sense. But it does not. It requires browning the butter, which is the opposite of clarifying. So, this recipe calls for a 10½ tablespoons of butter (an amount worthy of Glen’s rant) and ⅜ teaspoon of fine salt (ditto).

Of the three butters I buy—the store brands at H-E-B, Randalls, and Trader Joe’s—each contains exactly 90 mg of sodium per tablespoon. That means 10½ tablespoons butter contains 2,362.5 mg of salt. This is less than a percent off of what ⅜ teaspoon is. It’s a measuring error.

You could make this cookie and it would be just fine by using normal butter and not adding salt. Literally, the author required unsalted butter and then added exactly the same amount of salt back in. Given that this is a modern trendy recipe, adding more salt not only wouldn’t hurt, it likely would make it even better.

As they say, watch the whole thing.

My dad remembers his parents renting freezer space in the local grocery store. They lived on a working farm and had to drive about five miles into town to access that rented space. Having that refrigeration space allowed them to store purchases and excess food. But it didn’t allow them to forego the daily trip to the market, because their refrigerated food was at the market.

With the 1927 introduction of General Electric’s monitor-top all-in-one system home refrigeration changed drastically, just as home computers would exactly fifty years later with the introduction of all-in-one home computers from companies like Radio Shack.

The story of home refrigeration happened slowly… and then quickly. It took place over hundreds and even thousands of years, depending on how deep you go. Here’s how Oscar Anderson, in Refrigeration in America, described the life of farmers in pre-refrigeration America:

Lyrics for “O Living Bread from Heaven” ca. 1872.

Samuel Sebastian Wesley’s Aurelia is used as the melody for a hundred songs, literally, and more. Hymnary.org lists 188 songs that use this melody. They range from soaring (The Day of Resurrection) to vivid (No Seas Again Shall Sever) to timeless (O God, the Rock of Ages).

It rings in the new year with Another Year is Dawning, guides us through the years with The Sunday Bells are Calling, and sings the year (and mortal life) out with The Year is Swiftly Waning.

It’s all the more amazing because it is, for church music, relatively recent. Wesley wrote it in 1864. He wrote it for John Mason Neale’s 1849 Jerusalem the Golden, itself a wonderful song with a wonderful history. Jerusalem the Golden is a very loose translation of a relatively few lines from a much older and much longer Latin satire, Bernard of Cluny’s 12th century De contemptu mundi.

Here, for example, are what I think are Cluny’s Latin lines which inspired Neale’s second verse as reprinted in The Invalid’s Hymn-Book:

My very rudimentary Latin says that this is a very loose translation. It’s really more of an inspired by than a translated from.

A beautiful and delicate Easter dessert.

This is a very simple dessert, with, technically, three ingredients: holiday bread, including stale holiday bread, candy canes, and stabilized whipped cream. And if you expect to finish the dessert in one sitting, you don’t even need to stabilize the whipped cream.

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a self-made tradition of using candy canes from my Christmas tree to make an Easter Sunday dessert. This recipe, however, did not start out as an Easter offering. When I first marked this recipe to try, after browsing through the Lakota, North Dakota, All Loved and Cherished Wonders, it was because I had a bag of pre-crushed Heath bar that I’d picked up on the discount shelf of the local grocery.

But, combined with having some makeshift Christmas bread that was about to go stale, I decided to holidize the recipe and switch out the chocolate wafers for toasted bread, and the crushed Heath bars for crushed candy canes. The original recipe ran:

Heath Bar Dessert

1 box chocolate wafers, crushed	¼ cup butter (melted)
10 Heath Bars (ground)	1 pint heavy whipping cream

Combine crumbs and melted butter. Press half of crumbs into large cake pan, cover with half of layer of Heath bars. Spread with heavy whipped cream. Sprinkle with remaining crumbs and Heath bars.

Mrs. Pat Kuball

Right off the bat you can see some problems with this recipe, problems common with vintage recipes and the assumption of unchanging product sizes. The cook book is, by my estimate, from about 1964. What was a box of chocolate wafers in 1964? How big were Heath Bars?

A wonderful pie from white potatoes instead of sweet potatoes.

Pi Day is this coming Saturday.

A few days after it, on Tuesday, is St. Patrick’s Day.

This year’s Independence Day will be the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

So why not a pie this year celebrating all three of those? I found this pie in a Horsford Baking Powder cookbook that celebrated its product’s Centennial Award from the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. That’s right: this pie was in a cookbook that took part in the centennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The book itself probably didn’t come out in 1876, though it may have—the exhibition started in May of that year, leaving lots of time for a company that published as many iterations as Rumford did to add that award to their products. But I’m guessing 1877, for reasons I go into more detail about in my 2024 lead-up to the sestercentennial.

It’s a fascinating pie and one that appears to have fallen out of favor in favor of the sweet potato pie. This is a much lighter pie than sweet potato, and it allows the spices to shine. But it still exhibits some of the flavor of potato, and, to my mind, to great effect. But I come from a long line of potato aficionados.

I considered saving this recipe for National Potato Day, one of the other handful of food days I enjoy. But that’s in August, after Independence Day, so, given that this is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I decided to put it here.

Here’s the full recipe as it appears in the Rumford Chemical Works cookbook:

Irish Potato Pie.—One pound mashed potato, rubbed through a cullender, one-half pound butter creamed with the sugar, six eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately, one lemon squeezed into the potato while hot, one teaspoonful nutmeg, one teaspoonful mace, two cups white sugar. Mix and bake same as Sweet Potato Pie.

The “Sweet Potato Pie” appears directly above:

Independence Day. (Erik Drost, CC-BY 2.0)

On March 13, 1881, Tsar Alexander II, Emperor of Russia, was assassinated in Saint Petersburg by literal bomb-throwing anarchists. This led to one of the most enduring and universal symbols of Independence Day and American freedom, known throughout the world. She holds not just the torch of freedom but a tablet inscribed with “July IV MDCCLXXVI”, celebrating the American revolution. She is synonymous with the United States and with freedom.

If you want to say “America” in a visual medium, you show Lady Liberty. If you want to say “America has fallen”, you show Lady Liberty fallen. The Statue of Liberty has been featured in countless movies, from Planet of the Apes to Superman to Cloverfield. I’m pretty sure every Marvel superhero from the sixties and seventies has flown, swung, or walked by her at least once. In DC Comics she even granted superpowers to the World War II era hero Miss America.¹ I first ran across Miss America in the pages of the wonderful Martin Pasko/Gerry Conway/Bob Rozakis comic Freedom Fighters, initially published during the Bicentennial celebrations of 1976.

Marvel Comics had their own Miss America, in Roy Thomas’s wonderful The Invaders, also published in the runup to and during 1976.

The first reference to “homemade” granola in my collection.

Many recipes in community cookbooks call for ingredients by company and brand name. Eagle Brand Condensed Milk, for example, and Pet Evaporated Milk are very common ingredients. Not only are those names used in a generic manner—you’ll often see condensed milk called Eagle Milk and evaporated milk called Pet Milk, despite both companies producing the other product—a product name obviously won’t be used before the product was introduced to the market.

A brand name isn’t likely to be used in an ingredient list unless that one brand is the only such ingredient on the market, or it has had time to become the semi-generic term for the ingredient. Product debuts can thus provide a lower bound for the year of publication when a recipe calls for such a product.

Jell-O is a very good example of a brand name that has become a generic name or nearly so for the ingredient. A recipe after Jell-O’s rise in popularity is as likely to call for “jello” as it is to call for “gelatin”, especially if the gelatin called for is a flavored gelatin.

Sometimes, the way an ingredient is referred to can provide a hint to the age of the cookbook. In Favorite Recipes Prepared by Fremont Nursery, Inc. there is a great recipe for “Homemade granola” from Joy Dykman. Why would it be called “homemade” granola? One likely reason is that the first mass-market granola came out in 1972, and the recipe’s title contrasts itself with commercial granola. That narrows the range for the cookbook’s publication considerably. It almost certainly came out after 1972. While I can find granola recipes in cookbooks before 1972, none that I’ve seen call themselves “homemade”. Homemade was the only kind of granola before 1972 and didn’t need to be noted.

Here’s a list of products commonly found in community cookbooks, and their debuts under that name. This list is mainly ones that I’ve used or tried to use to help date cookbooks in my collection: