Monday, October 20, 2014

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 by Jeremy Megraw  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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