The Cosmology of Sloppy Joes

And now, the stunning return of cosmic auditory food programming. From time to time, The Elephant and Butter hopes to interview noteworthy figures in the culinary world. It's important to recognize and herald personal knowledge, I think. Recall that Julia Child, in the early history of "The French Chef," cut from her kitchen in Cambridge to Simone Beck's kitchen in rural France to show how Simcha handled a particular type of pastry dough for a spinach turnover (episode: "The Spinach Twins").

And now, we shall cut to a subject-matter expert on the Sloppy Joe. The history of this unpretentious sandwich is not fully known, but the savvy gourmand interviewed provides some possible answers:

The Recline of the Uncle

The Elephant and Butter has been on a special uncle assignment in the Colorado portion of the country. Children have been wrestled to the point of delirium. Vanilla pancakes have been cooked. Favorite colors and animals have been declared. Dadaist songs have been devised and sung con gusto on a barely tune-able toy guitar. Picnics have been staged. A three-year old has been taught the phrase "East Coast media bias." A six-year old has alleged that the uncle's wardrobe is repetitive.

And then, during the glorious time of the nap, the uncle becomes recumbent on a hammock with a bowl of cherries from the farmers' market, and he spits pits every which way while looking up through the flutter of some cottonwood trees.

[Note: That last line originally read "a cottonwood tree," but the six-year old found out I was writing partially about her, and asked me to read the entry aloud. When I got to the last line, she said, "Make it trees, not tree." So I did.]

Butter vs. Butter

I've been thinking about milk fat more than usual these days. What I've been thinking is that I love it. Having read recently that the French make butter with a higher percentage of fat, I decided to buy some the other day. Then, for the sake of comparison, I dropped by Cook Farm in Hadley, MA, and purchased some of their butter, too, which had been produced by the following holsteins:

Notice the come-hither look of cows. Very flirty, those cows.

Inside the farm stand, I asked the girl behind the counter if she knew the percentage of milk fat in her butter, and she regarded me as if I had just said something deeply immaterial. Farm girls know what's what.

A few days later I sat down with my two butters and tasted thin pats of each. The French butter was manifestly salty and sharp. The sharpness might be a product of the pasteurization process, the heat of which can give milk a slightly toasted flavor. Purists complain about this, but I admire the glossal effect. The local, unpasteurized butter, however, was absolutely silky. I felt as though a bra had been gently pushed into my mouth. The verdict, then, is that both butters have much to offer.

Field Notes on Picking Strawberries

Strawberries are announcing themselves in the fields right now, so after work I got down to a white T-shirt and drove out to the farm to begin the gathering. A swine made some percussive noises at me as I walked out to the strawberry patch. Then an ignoble fly started to ram me in the head over and over again, so I jogged the rest of the way through the hollow, thinking: how lucky am I to live in an area where there is a thing called a 'hollow' through which to run, even if the running is the result of aggressive flies. I like using the word hollow because it makes me feel like I'm writing from within a Van Morrison song. My heart was thumping, etc.

Anyway, here are some minor thoughts on how to approach picking 'strewn berries':

1. Look for the thickest clumps of plants. Big dudes hide in the deep, dark.
   
2. Walk past plants dotted with smaller berries. (Actually, they're technically not berries at all, but stamens.) I have noticed that small strawberries hang out near other small strawberries, and big ones near big ones.
3. Follow the bugs. Though strawberries self-pollinate, insects can also cross-pollinate them, which has been shown to produce bigger strawberries.
   
4. Pick with your legs, not your back.
5. To pick, you must put your arm into the unknown. Don't just reach for what you see -- reach for what you can't see. Be aspirational.
6. Should the kneeling and hunching wear you out and tempt you to complain, consider that workers in Watsonville, CA pick strawberries ALL DAY during harvesting times.
7. Don't count on strawberries to ripen after they're picked. They don't work the same way as avocados, bananas, and mangoes.
8. ALWAYS eat the best few you find right there in the field, dust and all. Make a sweet red mess in your mouth.

When Are We Not Cooking?

Just got back from Philadelphia, where The Elephant and Butter speared kabobs, sipped homemade chilled borscht, gasped at a drive-through liquor store, ate raw radishes with butter, got intimately reacquainted with chorizo tacos, drank mosaic-like sangria, listened to some great shambling Balkan music, and consorted with refined/debased poets of concentrated living.

One morning, after an austere omelet and a game of chess, Rebbi Jose and I sat down to plan a guest lecture for a creative writing class at Temple University, and all sorts of tendrils of thought spun out of us. We decided between bites of challah that we wanted to talk about the practice of writing rather than the artifacts produced by that practice. Everyone knows about the artifacts, anyway. And perhaps the object-orientation of the world prevents people from seeing that the real good shit comes out of a process of careful seeing, understanding, and translating -- one that need not always result in words on a page. That led us to ask ourselves when, as writers, we are not writing. The answer seemed to be that we are never not writing.

This got me thinking about cooking. When are we not cooking? So long as we contemplate the manifestations and capacities of food, so long as we never disregard a single taco, or take for granted any bananas, or shut ourselves against the rhythm and rituals of flesh life, we are never not cooking. That's what I'm thinking.