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May. 20th, 2008 12:41 pmSo, I found a new foodie website that looked reasonably interesting and I thought I'd add it to my "reading" list on my del bookmarks. This week they did a feature on recipes for picnics, which looked pretty great until I saw the first recipe. Let me break down their recipe for "Steak and German Potato Salad":
1. Buy german potato salad from the store.
2. Cook a steak, chill it, slice it up, and add it to the potato salad.
3. Serve over lettuce.
WE ARE NOT IMPRESSED. Also, the same set of recipes offered "Chipotle Beet Brownies" which aside from wow gross is basically instructions on how to puree pickled beets and add them to boxed brownie mix.
I poked around on the site a bit more and found a messageboard, which in my experience is kind of like finding the back-alley craps game after leaving Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. You might not get any more actual value, but the people are way more interesting. A posting on the board sent me off to research a certain recipe for Black Walnut Loaf Cake (with sugar glaze). The original came from Southern Planter magazine, and guess who has a half-dozen research databases at his fingertips. Oh yeah, that'd be me!
This magazine is fascinating. I LOVE old newspapers and magazines, and Southern Planter starts in the 19th century. I've already found historical wank, proof that humanity is unchanging and that someone should have invented the concept of "TL;DR" way sooner. There is genderwank over Virginia chickens. And I totally did not laugh at the article on horse breeding by Philip St. George Cocke. It's not entirely uninformative, either; apparently eggs can be kept preserved without refrigeration by dipping them in grease so that the shells are completely covered (chemists? agriculturalists? survivalists? confirm or deny!).
One thing that did catch my attention, however, is that I'm reading a magazine devoted to agriculture in the south of the United States, published in Richmond (once-capital of the Confederacy), and the volumes I started in came from 1844. That's twenty-one years before Emancipation, but I have yet to come across a single reference to slavery other than "A Housewife's Advice On the Management Of Servants". Which very carefully never uses the word "slave".
I skimmed ahead to the first few months of the war and found no explicit allusions to that, either, though I did find one advert, not an article, which read "Farms for sale in different parts of Virginia. With some of these Farms the negroes, stock, &c., will be sold [...] When negroes are sold one per cent will be charged to the purchaser."
I'm not sure what it all means but it's something to ponder, I suppose.
Dude, old magazines! Awesome!
1. Buy german potato salad from the store.
2. Cook a steak, chill it, slice it up, and add it to the potato salad.
3. Serve over lettuce.
WE ARE NOT IMPRESSED. Also, the same set of recipes offered "Chipotle Beet Brownies" which aside from wow gross is basically instructions on how to puree pickled beets and add them to boxed brownie mix.
I poked around on the site a bit more and found a messageboard, which in my experience is kind of like finding the back-alley craps game after leaving Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. You might not get any more actual value, but the people are way more interesting. A posting on the board sent me off to research a certain recipe for Black Walnut Loaf Cake (with sugar glaze). The original came from Southern Planter magazine, and guess who has a half-dozen research databases at his fingertips. Oh yeah, that'd be me!
This magazine is fascinating. I LOVE old newspapers and magazines, and Southern Planter starts in the 19th century. I've already found historical wank, proof that humanity is unchanging and that someone should have invented the concept of "TL;DR" way sooner. There is genderwank over Virginia chickens. And I totally did not laugh at the article on horse breeding by Philip St. George Cocke. It's not entirely uninformative, either; apparently eggs can be kept preserved without refrigeration by dipping them in grease so that the shells are completely covered (chemists? agriculturalists? survivalists? confirm or deny!).
One thing that did catch my attention, however, is that I'm reading a magazine devoted to agriculture in the south of the United States, published in Richmond (once-capital of the Confederacy), and the volumes I started in came from 1844. That's twenty-one years before Emancipation, but I have yet to come across a single reference to slavery other than "A Housewife's Advice On the Management Of Servants". Which very carefully never uses the word "slave".
I skimmed ahead to the first few months of the war and found no explicit allusions to that, either, though I did find one advert, not an article, which read "Farms for sale in different parts of Virginia. With some of these Farms the negroes, stock, &c., will be sold [...] When negroes are sold one per cent will be charged to the purchaser."
I'm not sure what it all means but it's something to ponder, I suppose.
Dude, old magazines! Awesome!
