Cuisine in Veneto may be divided into three main categories, based on geography:  the coastal areas, the plains, and the mountains.  Each one (especially the plains) can have many local cuisines, each city with its own dishes.  The most common dish is polenta, which is cooked in various ways within the local cuisines of Veneto.  Polenta once was the universal staple food of the poorer classes, who could afford little else.  In Veneto, the corns are ground in much smaller fragments in comparison with the rest of Italy:  so, when cooked, it tastes like a pudding.  Typical of many coastal areas, communities along the coast of the Laguna Veneta serve mainly seafood dishes.  In the plains it is very popular to serve grilled meat (often by a barbecue, and in a mix of pork, beef and chicken meat) together with grilled polenta, potatoes or vegetables.  Other popular dishes include risotto, rice cooked with many different kinds of food, from vegetables, mushrooms, pumpkin or radicchio to seafood, pork meat or chicken livers.  Bigoli (a typical Venetian fresh pasta, similar to Udon), fettuccine (hand-made noodles), ravioli and the similar tortelli (filled with meat, cheese, vegetables or pumpkin) and gnocchi (potatoes-made fresh pasta), are fresh and often hand-made pasta dishes (made of eggs and wheat flour), served together with meat sauce (ragù) often made with duck meat, sometimes together with mushrooms or peas, or simply with melted butter.  Cuisine from the mountain areas is mainly made of pork or game meat, with polenta, as well as mushrooms or cheeses (made by cow milk), and some dishes from Austrian or Tyrolese tradition, such as canederli or strudel.  A typical dish is casunziei, hand-made fresh pasta similar to ravioli.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_cuisine



Treviso is the no-frills gateway to Venice.  The centre of Treviso is a little walled city, with medieval gates, narrow, cobbled streets of arcaded rose-red brick and stone that twist and turn like dried-out water course--which is what some of them originally were.  Tiny canals run past handkerchief-sized gardens, glide beneath houses, appear at street corners.  Treviso is the birthplace of Luciano Benetton, founder of the worldwide empire.  The family lives locally and Benetton’s flagship store dominates a central piazza.  Only in this corner of the northern Veneto is a culinary gem--radicchio rosso di Treviso cultivated--crimson and white bundles of rapier-slender leaves.  Beyond the old city walls lie the radicchio fields.  Delicious as the crunchiest of salad ingredients, it’s even better grilled or roasted, in risotto or pasta.  Pliny commended it as a cure for insomnia.  Its subtle, slightly bitter flavour is addictive.  Treviso’s other claim to culinary fame is the local wine:  prosecco, which in recent years has been granted DOCG status, preventing the name from being used for wines made outside the protected area.  Lee Langley  Read more and see pictures at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/italy/veneto/articles/Treviso-Italy-an-underrated-gateway-to-Venice/  Pasta made with coffee, and tossed with shrimp and almonds is served at Odeon alla Colonna in Treviso.  New York Times  June 10, 2019



antebellum  adjective  From the Latin phrase ante bellum (literally “before the war”), from ante (“before”) + bellum (“war”).  (not comparable)  Of the time period prior to a war.

In the United States of America, of the period prior to the American Civil War, especially in reference to the culture of the southern states.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/antebellum  Lady Antebellum is an American country music group.

catcall  noun  also cat-call 1650s, a type of noisemaker (Johnson describes it as a "squeaking instrument") used to express dissatisfaction in play-houses, from cat + call; presumably because it sounded like an angry cat.  As a verb, attested from 1734.  https://www.etymonline.com/word/catcall

“The White Man’s Burden,” published in 1899 in McClure’s magazine, is one of Rudyard Kipling’s most infamous poems.  It has been lauded and reviled in equal measure and has come to stand as the major articulation of the Occident’s rapacious and all-encompassing imperialist ambitions in the Orient.  The poem was initially composed for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee but Kipling decided to submit “Recessional” instead.  Kipling, observing the events across the Atlantic in the Spanish-American War, sent this to then-governor of New York Theodore Roosevelt as a warning regarding the dangers of obtaining and sustaining an empire.  Roosevelt would then forward the poem to his friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, commenting that it was “rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view.”  https://www.gradesaver.com/rudyard-kipling-poems/study-guide/summary-the-white-mans-burden



Naulakha, also known as the Rudyard Kipling House, is a historic Shingle Style house on Kipling Road in Dummerston, Vermont, a few miles outside Brattleboro.  The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993 for its association with the author Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), who had it built in 1893 and made it his home until 1896.  It is in this house that Kipling wrote Captains Courageous, The Jungle Book, The Day's Work, and The Seven Seas, and did work on Kim and The Just So Stories.  Kipling named the house after the Naulakha Pavilion, situated inside Lahore Fort in Pakistan.  The house is now owned by the Landmark Trust, and is available for rent.  "Kipling named Naulakha after the book he wrote with Wolcott Balestier, his good friend and Mrs. Kipling's brother, about a precious Indian jewel, and it is filled with a trove of their possessions."  Etymologically Naulakha means nine lakhs or nine hundred thousand being the amount of rupees incurred for the cost of construction of the building.  The Mughal architecture of the monument had inspired him during his earlier stay (between 1882 and 1887) in Lahore.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naulakha_(Rudyard_Kipling_House)  See also Then Again:  Kipling’s brief and stormy stay in Vermont by Mark Bushnell at https://vtdigger.org/2017/12/31/kiplings-brief-stormy-stay-vermont/



Hunker down sounds like the most typically American of phrases, but it seems originally to have been Scots, first recorded in the eighteenth century.  Nobody seems to know exactly what its origin is, though it has been suggested it’s linked to the Old Norse huka, to squat; that would make it a close cousin of old Dutch huiken and modern German hocken, meaning to squat or crouch, which makes sense.  That’s certainly what’s meant by the word in American English, in phrases like hunker down or on your hunkers.  The Oxford English Dictionary has a fine description of how to hunker:  “squat, with the haunches, knees, and ankles acutely bent, so as to bring the hams near the heels, and throw the whole weight upon the fore part of the feet”.  The advantage of this position is that you’re not only crouched close to the ground, so presenting a small target for whatever the universe chooses to throw at you, but you’re also ready to move at a moment’s notice.  Hunker down has also taken on the sense of to hide, hide out, or take shelter, whatever position you choose to do it in.  This was a south-western US dialect form that was popularised by President Johnson in the mid 1960s.  Despite its Scots ancestry, hunker is rare in standard British English.  http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-hun1.htm



Eight of architect Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List on July 7, 2019, elevating them to the same status as Machu Picchu, the Pyramids of Giza and the Statue of Liberty.  The new additions to the list were announced in Baku, Azerbaijan at UNESCO's annual conference, include Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Hollyhock House in Los Angeles, the Jacobs House in Wisconsin, the Robie House in Chicago, Taliesin in Wisconsin, Taliesin West in Arizona and the Unity Temple in Illinois.  "Each of these buildings offers innovative solutions to the needs for housing, worship, work or leisure," wrote members of the World Heritage Committee in a press release announcing the designation.  "Wright's work from this period had a strong impact on the development of modern architecture in Europe."   Josh Axelrod  https://www.npr.org/2019/07/07/739359081/unesco-adds-8-frank-lloyd-wright-buildings-to-its-list-of-world-heritage-sites  See also list of UNESCO World Heritage sites at https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/



A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

Socratic irony  (suh-KRAT-ik EYE-ruh-nee)  noun  A profession of ignorance in a discussion in order to elicit clarity on a topic and expose misconception held by another.  After Greek philosopher Socrates (470?-399 BCE) who employed this method.  Earliest documented use:  1721.

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From:  Gavin Pringle  Subject:  Socratic irony  In Scotland, we call this playing the silly laddie. 
From:  Jim Clark   Subject:  Socratic irony   Did you know that Socrates was against reading?  He said that it would stunt the mind and make remembering obsolete if all that you needed to do was refer to stuff that had been written.



http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2123  July 12, 2019