In 1941, a British cargo ship known as SS Politician was wrecked on a submerged sandbar off the coast of Eriskay, one of the islands in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. On board were trade goods en route to Jamaica and New Orleans. If, however, there was a marquee item among the ship’s inventory, it was surely the whisky—264,000 bottles of it. * Africaans Pie--Dutch settlers brought early recipes for this cinnamon-dusted custard pie to the southern tip of Africa in the 17th century. With them came their native tongue, which blended with other languages to form Afrikaans, now one of South Africa’s official languages. Melktert is Afrikaans for “milk tart,” and it’s the closest thing the country has to a national pie. * The ancient Romans grilled and ate the dormouse with gusto (and plenty of honey). Today, the edible dormouse is still a traditional peasant dish in Croatia and Slovenia. * The soft, dragon-like skin coating the sweet, custardy fruit cherimoya looks like something out of a fairy tale. It hails from South America and remains an infrequent find outside of its native tropics. Gastro Obscura August 8, 2020
Crystal, Colorado was incorporated on June 8, 1881. The ghost town of Crystal was described in a 1973 advertisement of the Public Service Company of Colorado: "Crystal City spring up during a mini boom in 1880 when word got out that silver, zinc, and copper had been located in the Elk Mountains by the Crystal River." "At its peak, Crystal City supported two hotels, a barber shop, a general store, a saloon and a pool hall along with a population of 500, most of whom worked in the seven nearby mines. In its heyday, Crystal City even had a post office and an exclusive club for men only called the Crystal Club." "But the boom was short-lived. Crystal City was so remote and the winters so severe that transportation, particularly for bringing in supplies, was a nearly insurmountable problem. A few people still maintain summer retreats in the area, which is one of the most scenic in the state. But the last ores were shipped out in 1913, and most of the mines and buildings in the town have disappeared." The silver crash of 1893 did not affect the Crystal mines as severely as other districts due to the lead and zinc content of the ores. In fact, the iconic Crystal Mill was built in 1893, the same year as the crash in silver markets. The Mill was a power plant built to power local mines and mills. The availability of locally produced electricity was one of the factors that helped the Crystal mines weather the turbulent economic times following the great silver crash. The Crystal Mill building still stands today, and is one of the most photographed historic structures in the West. https://westernmininghistory.com/towns/colorado/crystal/
I must have been high on his genius, creativity, and playfulness when I attempted to climb into the trees myself and invent a series of Italo Calvino-inspired pies, interlocking like the chapters of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and utilizing tree fruits and tree nuts from The Baron in the Trees. My plan also drew on a biographical note of Calvino’s: his parents were botanists, and his father pioneered the cultivation of exotic tree fruits in Italy, which made me feel that any tree fruit or nut was fair game. These high-concept pies would use new-to-me techniques such as chiffon, Italian meringue, chilled custard filling, blind-baked crusts, and pudding layers. I settled on a menu of five for this story: a sour cherry meringue pie with a nut-cookie crust; a tree-nut tart with apricots and mascarpone; a black-bottom peach pie with a mascarpone crust; an almond-cream pie with a chocolate crust; and a grapefruit chiffon pie with an almond-rosemary crust. Each of the pies would share an ingredient with the one preceding it, and the last, the grapefruit chiffon pie, would share sugar-whipped egg whites with the first, the sour cherry meringue pie. Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Find recipes and pictures at https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/09/04/cooking-with-italo-calvino/
Leslie Charteris (born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin, 1907–1993), was a British-Chinese author of adventure fiction, as well as a screenwriter. He was best known for his many books chronicling the adventures of his charming hero Simon Templar, alias "The Saint." Charteris was born in Singapore to a Chinese father, Dr S. C. Yin (Yin Suat Chwan, 1877–1958), and Lydia Florence Bowyer, who was English. His father was a physician, who claimed to be able to trace his lineage back to the emperors of the Shang dynasty. Charteris became interested in writing at an early age. At one point, he created his own magazine with articles, short stories, poems, editorials, serials, and even a comic strip. Once his first book, written during his first year at King's College, Cambridge, was accepted, he left the university and embarked on a new career. Charteris was motivated by a desire to be unconventional and to become financially well off by doing what he liked to do. He continued to write British thriller stories, while he worked at various jobs from shipping out on a freighter to working as a barman in a country inn. He prospected for gold, dived for pearls, worked in a tin mine and on a rubber plantation, toured Britain with a carnival, and drove a bus. In 1926, he legally changed his last name to Charteris; in the BBC Radio 4 documentary Leslie Charteris–A Saintly Centennial, his daughter stated that he selected his surname from the telephone directory. Charteris was excluded from permanent residency in the United States because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law which prohibited immigration for persons of "50% or greater" Oriental blood. As a result, Charteris was forced to continually renew his six-month temporary visitor's visa. The adventures of The Saint were chronicled in nearly 100 books (about 50 published in the UK and US, with others published in France). Charteris himself stepped away from writing the books after The Saint in the Sun (1963). The next year, Vendetta for the Saint was published and while it was credited to Charteris, it was actually written by science fiction writer Harry Harrison. Following Vendetta came a number of books adapting televised episodes, credited to Charteris, but written by others, although Charteris did collaborate on several Saint books in the 1970s. Charteris appears to have served in an editorial capacity for these later volumes. He also edited and contributed to The Saint Mystery Magazine, a digest-sized publication. The final book in the Saint series was Salvage for the Saint, published in 1983. Two additional books were published in 1997, a novelization of the film loosely based on the character, and an original novel published by "The Saint Club", a fan club that Charteris himself founded in the 1930s. Both books were written by Burl Barer, who also wrote the definitive history on Charteris and The Saint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Charteris
Massive plumes of smoke blanketed the San Francisco Bay Area, turning the sky orange, as wildfires rage across the West Coast. See videos at https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/09/10/san-francisco-orange-sky-california-wildfires-lon-orig-bks.cnn Wildfires raced through more than a dozen Western states September 10, 2020. See also The Science Behind Mysterious Orange Skies In California by
The September 11 attacks (often referred to as 9/11) were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks against the United States on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001. The attacks resulted in 2,977 fatalities, over 25,000 injuries, and substantial long-term health consequences, in addition to at least $10 billion in infrastructure and property damage. 9/11 is the single deadliest terrorist attack in human history and the single deadliest incident for firefighters and law enforcement officers in the history of the United States, with 343 and 72 killed, respectively. Four passenger airliners which had departed from airports in the northeastern United States bound for California were hijacked by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists. Two of the planes, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, crashed into the North and South towers, respectively, of the World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan. Within an hour and 42 minutes, both 110-story towers collapsed. Debris and the resulting fires caused a partial or complete collapse of all other buildings in the World Trade Center complex, including the 47-story 7 World Trade Center tower, as well as significant damage to ten other large surrounding structures. A third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, was crashed into the Pentagon (the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense) in Arlington County, Virginia, which led to a partial collapse of the building's west side. The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, was initially flown toward Washington, D.C., but crashed into a field in Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania, after passengers thwarted the hijackers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks
Gabriel Fauré worked on a quartet for strings, without piano for a year, finishing it on 11 September 1924, less than two months before he died. The quartet was premiered after his death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_Quartet_(Faur%C3%A9)
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 2256 September 11, 2020
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