Neapolitan ice cream is ice cream made up of blocks of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream side by side in the same container
(typically with no packaging in between).
Neapolitan ice cream was named in the late 19th century as a reflection
of its presumed origins in the cuisine of the Italian city of Naples, and the
many Neapolitan immigrants who
brought their expertise in frozen desserts with them to the United
States. Spumoni was introduced to the United
States in the 1870s as
Neapolitan-style ice cream.
A Cold Night's Death:
The Allure of Scandinavian Crime Fiction Maybe you've got the Nordic noir bug from reading Stieg
Larsson's Millennium series or were enthralled earlier by Peter Høeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow or the Detective Wallander series of
books. However you encounter them,
Scandicrime writers such as Henning Mankell, Larsson, or Jo Nesbø are like a
good bag of chips, it's hard not to have another. Find a guide to some notable authors and
detective series from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and even some Nordic noir from
Iceland, and what's better, a guide to pronouncing their names correctly over cocktails. See pictures and read about the selected
authors including Johan Theorin's Öland Quartet of novels. In
the first book Echoes From the Dead, the
detective figure is a retired sailor named Gerlof who is seen throughout the
series, sometimes only indirectly involved with solving the mystery at
hand. Theorin creates a deeply troubling
atmosphere of murder, family secrets, and crossed destinies with a gothic feel
set on the rugged coast of the Swedish island of Öland. http://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/01/14/scandinavian-crime-fiction
"A nonce word is one coined 'for the nonce'--made up
for one occasion and not likely to be encountered again. When Lewis Carroll coined it, frabjous was a nonce word. Neologisms are much the same thing, brand-new words or brand-new
meanings for existing words, coined for a specific purpose. Analogy, especially with familiar words or parts of speech, often guides the coiner, and occasionally these words will enter the
standard vocabulary." (Kenneth G.
Wilson, The Columbia Guide to Standard American English.
Columbia University Press, 1993) http://grammar.about.com/od/mo/g/noncewordterm.htm
Nesselrode pie
is named after one Count Nesselrode, as are a number of dishes that are made
with chestnuts or chestnut puree. This
is according to Larousse Gastronomique, the French food encyclopedia. Larousse doesn't say why chestnuts are
associated with the Count, a 19th century Russian diplomat who negotiated the
Treaty of Paris after the Crimean War, but it does note that nesselrode pudding
was created for the count by his chef Monsieur Mouy. The pie, as we know it in New York, however,
was popularized by Hortense Spier, who started her business not as a pie bakery
but as a brownstone restaurant on 94th St. between Columbus Ave. and Central
Park West. The restaurant closed before World War II and Mrs. Spier baked her
specialty pies for other restaurants after that. Find more
information and the recipe at http://www.thefoodmaven.com/radiorecipes/nesselrode.html
Mad About Saffron--It’s the world’s costliest spice for a reason. Just a pinch can elevate even the humblest
dish to special-occasion status by Charlotte
Druckman
‘IT IS NECESSARY to pick 150,000 crocuses in order to
produce one kilogram of saffron,” reads the introduction to Australian poet
Judith Beveridge ’s “The Saffron Picker.”
It underscores a poetic injustice explored in the verse and reminds us
why this is the world’s most expensive spice.
Crocus
sativus is an incandescently blue-violet flower whose fiery orange stigmas,
once dried, become the prized spice, with its distinct flavor: floral, astringent, musky. According to Pat Willard, author of “Secrets
of Saffron,” procuring it “is a lot like buying illicit drugs. The concerns for purity and potency are the
same, as are where it is grown and how it is processed.” The Iranian strain is thought to be the
best, but because of sanctions currently in effect, scoring it in the United
States is difficult. First discovered in Asia Minor, saffron is grown today
in Macedonia and Greece and eastward, through Turkey and Syria to Kashmir. You’ll also find it in Spain, Italy, Corsica
and, lately, Afghanistan. Sown in June
and harvested in October, the plant does best in soil that matches that of its
place of origin. So you might be
surprised to find Jim Robinson pulling his “lilac-colored torpedoes” from the
earth in Port Angeles, Wash. Link to recipes at http://online.wsj.com/articles/mad-about-saffron-1412371772
Forgiveness does not change the past,
but it does enlarge
the future. Paul Boose
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. Mahatma Gandhi
The game of Pall Mall, also known as Pel Mel, Pell Mell, Paille Maille,
Palle-malle, Pelemele, Jeu de Mail (Game of Mail), is a genuinely Royal game
that appears to have been played primarily by Western European royal families
and the higher aristocracy. A lot has
been written about the game in England and the fact that a London Street is
named after it gives it a certain momentum that it doesn't necessarily deserve
- not only was it played by a tiny minority of the populace but only three Pall
Mall alleys are known to have existed in the whole of Great Britain. It is the close cousin of two wholly popular
modern sports - Golf and Croquet. There is no concrete evidence that Croquet is
the modern descendent of Pall Mall and, in England there was gap of more than
100 years between the demise of Pall Mall and the emergence of Croquet around
1850. The games have mallets, balls and
hoops in common. However, the balls and
mallets were smaller, the hoop much bigger. It is possible that there is a link from Pall
Mall to modern croquet but it seems to me that Pall Mall is much more closely
related to Golf as the objective was to whack the ball some distance several
times towards the target hoop. When
close to the hoop, (according to the Lauthier rules), the striking implement
was changed to a shaft with a spoon-like end for hoicking the ball through the
high arch - adapted more for accuracy and less for power like a putter in the
game of Golf. Pall Mall seems
to have been primarily enjoyed by the French but the earliest mention of the
game indicates an Italian source. A
carnival song around 1500 from Florence mentions Palla a Maglio - in Italian
"palla" - a ball and "maglio" - a mallet. James Masters
Read more and see pictures at http://www.tradgames.org.uk/games/Pall-Mall.htm
Chicago for armchair travelers
http://www.openhousechicago.org/
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, the author of dozens of children's and young-adult
novels centered on lonely kids with rich but chilling fantasy lives, died on
October 7, 2014 in San Francisco. She
was 87. With more than 40 books to her
credit, Snyder won the Newbery Honor – one of the top awards in children's
literature – three times. Her winning
novels were "The Headless Cupid," "The Witches of Worm" and
"The Egypt Game" – a 1967 story involving preteens who secretly
re-create ancient Egyptian rituals at a makeshift shrine as a child killer
lurks in the neighborhood. For Snyder,
it was, like many of her books, drawn from bits and pieces of her own life. As a girl in rural Ventura County, she was
entranced with Egypt and, for a time, walked to school each morning as an
incarnation of the elegant and mysterious queen Nefertiti. Born May 11, 1927, in
Lemoore, Calif., Zilpha Keatley spent her school years in Santa Paula and Ventura,
where her father William, a rancher and oil-driller, had been transferred. In her early teens, she left her country
school for a larger one "in the big city of Ventura," as she wrote,
and the pressure drove her even more deeply into reading stories and
daydreaming. "Disney wanted to
option The Egypt Game for a film but wouldn't guarantee a multiracial
cast," her longtime editor Karen Wojytla said in an interview. "She was very forward-thinking, and
wouldn't sell them the rights." Witchcraft
was a central theme in "The Headless Cupid," which became No. 98 on
the American Library Assn.'s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990-2000. Steve Chawkins http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-zilpha-keatley-snyder-20141019-story.html
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1206
October 20, 2014 On this date in 1632, Christopher
Wren, English architect, was born.
On this date in 1711, Timothy
Ruggles, American American lawyer, jurist, and politician, was born.
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