Too much

Ronson's Psycopath Test Reviewed.

2011-09-19T15:37:00.001-04:00

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A light-hearted though not superficial romp through the annals of psychopathy, from the author's solving of the mystery of why people have been targeted to receive a vanity press mess called Being or Nothingness through the incarceration and release of an untreatable psychopath. In between the author looks at various famous and obscure contestants for the psychopath award and examines the problems created by Bob Hare's psychopath test and the DSM. Ronson finally comes to the conclusion that defining people by the edges of their sanity or insanity is simplistic. I'd thought that writers and readers of psychological thrillers might mine this book for ideas, but that was not the case.

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Tales of a snowy night: McDermid's shivery Distant Echo

2011-09-14T20:25:00.000-04:00

In 1978, in St. Andrews, Scotland, four very different young men who had been friends since secondary school are out gallivanting early in the morning when they discover a young woman dying of a stab wound in the snow. They become suspects in her murder, and even after they are released they are subjected to the worst kind of abuse by the young woman's family and by their classmates at university. Twenty-five years later, when this unsolved case is re-opened, ever more terrible things start to happen to them. McDermid does a good job of building our sympathy for the men, based on their young years together and their long-standing bond, so that suspense builds to fever pitch....

Like a wooden nickel, Johnny Boy keeps turning up

2011-09-11T10:46:00.002-04:00

The Consorts of Death by Gunnar Staalesen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Set in Bergen and rural Norway, this sad, funny and nearly implausible story follows a social service worker interacting with a wee boy who eventually becomes a criminal. It is a shame that this is Staalesen's only novel is available on Kindle. With good reason, Staalesen is very popular in Europe. His protagonist Varg Veum, a social worker turned private investigator, is a sympathetic narrator about how life conspired against Johnny Boy, who keeps turning up like a wooden nickel, first as a baby taken away from his incapacitated mother, then twice as a foster child, and finally on his own. Apparently the book was made into a film which is available for a free download -- I haven't tried it, but I may.

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Crystalline structure upheld by rich metaphor: Merullo's novel Talk Funny Girl

2011-09-06T10:51:00.000-04:00

To praise Roland Merullo's recent novel THE TALK FUNNY GIRL as a roadmap for overcoming abuse is to miss the point that it is artful fiction. True, it is didactic, but its careful structure and magnificent use of metaphor raise Merullo's novel to the level of Dickens's HARD TIMES and Christina Stead's MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN.

Let's start with the title. The narrator Marjorie Richards was a linguistically deprived backwoods New Hampshire girl who as an adult looks back at the turning point in her life, when her private world with her parents and the bigger world come into deadly conflict. The only way to describe her unspeakable experiences is with metaphor. Marjorie writes of her mother sitting on the kitchen counter drinking a bottle of cheap wine, "her legs jiggle as if small animals inside the jeans were trying to break free. Her hair, dark as used motor oil, had fallen loose and hung down the sides of her face....There was something methodical about the way she did it, something brutally efficient, as if she was feeling her way back, decision by decision, across an unlit landscape mined with regret." As an adult, Marjorie is able to understand the context for her mother's murderous regret at having left a comfortable home to marry and have an unplanned child with Curtis Richards, the feckless son of a mean backwoods man. The family goes to church every Sunday to hear murderous sermons given by Reverend Pastor Schect, a monster who hates children.

These three functionally evil characters are balanced by Marjorie and two wholly good characters, Marjorie's aunt Elaine, a nurse and stepsister of Marjorie's mother, and Sands, a troubled young man who hires Marjorie to help him build a cathedral to love on the ruins of a burned out church in town. Building the new cathedral seems like a worn-out Hippy's whim when set beside the Reverend Pastor Schect's quonset hut church devoted to increasing the suffering of children and Marjorie's own museum of pain. The novel's elegant structure gives its message of hope enough clarity to be inspirational to younger adults; its use of startling metaphors is an unexpected pleasure for a reader of any age.

Gypsy-loving Jana becomes a target: Genelin's Requiem for a Gypsy

2011-09-01T14:27:00.000-04:00

Requiem for a Gypsy: A Jana Matinova Investigation Set in Slovakia by Michael Genelin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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Love story with a killer punch: Andrew Nicoll's LOVE AND DEATH OF CATERINA

2011-08-30T11:30:00.002-04:00

A little too rich for one-day binge-reading, Andrew Nicoll's LOVE AND DEATH OF CATERINA dissects society in a middle-sized city in an unnamed Latin American country ruled by the secret police and outmoded social conventions. Mr. L. H. Valdez, the anti-hero, stumbles on a gorgeous and brilliant math student named Caterina just when, at the top of his writing and polo games, he is beset by writer's block. This is not a typically structured mystery since we know at the beginning that Valdez has killed Caterina: the mystery, and the psycho-social analysis it entails, explain how a successful writer can be at once bewitched and then intimidated by raw talent and beauty. And perhaps worse, how a police state upholds the inauthentic and urbane Valdez at the expense of the perfectly proportioned country mouse Caterina.

Although there is something slightly off-putting about the novel's hyper-real, ironic and poetic style, which is reminiscent of the best Latin American fiction, the Scotsman Nicoll does succeed in making us fall in love with Caterina and her love for stories, as we learn to despise Valdez. That said, it seems as silly to criticize Nicoll for setting his novel in a generic Latin American dictatorship as to fault Faulkner for creating a fictional county in Mississippi. Nicoll's stories touch on humanistic and humane themes of art, love, power, and sexuality; here, politics endow the love story with a killer punch.

Short squibs mostly on mysteries

2011-08-26T09:05:00.000-04:00

Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails: I understand that this is a cult book; I picked it up to decide whether to get tickets for a musical version at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA, to celebrate my birthday. Horrible. Not a chance. "Black" "humor" that fails miserably. Self-indulgent and childish. Phooey.

Benjamin Black's Death in Summer: Smooth, nostalgic noir featuring Dublin's rotten upper crust. The pathologist Quirke, though described in unappealing detail, nevertheless seems to attract fascinating women? Why? Poetic license?

Michael Harvey's The Chicago Way : Chicago color with a heavy dose of noir.

Eleanor Jones Harvey's The Voyage of the Icebergs: Frederic Church's Arctic Masterpiece: I picked up this book at the bookstore at Olana, Frederick Church's estate on the Hudson, wanting to learn more about his desire to see exotic places and paint them. Nice pictures, but the commentary described rather than probing Church's enterprise.

John Verdon's Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, #2):Why does such a sharp observer as retired inspector Dave Gurney not question the obvious? "For all these reasons," the process is drawn out (Verdon has a verbal tic: characters nearly always sit in pairs of matching chairs!), and anticlimactic.

Quentin Bates's Frozen Assets: Nice series beginning! I'm excited to keep on learning about how Gunna and her mythically named crew defuse unsavory Icelandic elements. Realistically, right does not always trump might, even, as now in England, journalists and bloggers are revealing pervasive scandals.

Åke Edwardson's Frozen Tracks (Inspector Winter, #5): Always connect would be a good subtitle for this the fifth Erik Winter mystery. Winter hugs a father whose son has disappeared and later connects the dots. To say more would spoil everything.

A touching view of Swedish Society: Kjell Eriksson's Hand that Trembles

2011-08-26T08:44:00.002-04:00

The Hand that Trembles has so many trembling hands that it seems at first as if one is reading several very sad novels critiquing Swedish society. Here are a die-hard commie from the Spanish Civil War who is writing his memoirs, a local politician who without any apparent reason leaves Sweden for Bangalore, an unsolved murder, a small, stray female foot without a body, a hypersensitive woman artist who lives alone among a set of odd couples and lonely bachelors on a sparsely populated Northern peninsula, a Violent Crimes Unit that functions like a family, and the detective Ann Lindell, who, as Kjell Eriksson has set out to do, feels like with talent she would be writing "the story of Sweden. Most of the people she encountered in her work were actually innocent, even the guilty ones...." Sweden is a relatively small country, so the trembling hands come together as a touching novel. Finally, as the crimes are solved with deep understanding, it is hard to say who is guilty. This was a worthy sequel to Ericksson's riff on Petrarch, Cruel Stars of Night.

Caveat lector: Reginald Hill's thriller The Woodcutter

2011-08-26T08:40:00.000-04:00

Funny. I can't figure out THE WOODCUTTER, but it is either a satire of GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATOO or perhaps of how the scum rises and stays at the top of British society. When we meet Wolf Hadda he is a failed success, in a prison hospital on child pornography and fraud, and becomes the patient of a girl with funny hair called Alva Ozibo. Although slow-paced, it picks up speed but not verisimilitude by the end. There is so much detail that this book could be the basis for a 6-part miniseries. Caveat lector.

It takes a generous woman: Nina Sankovitch's Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

2011-08-26T08:37:00.001-04:00

Comparisons are odious, but I think that Nina Sankovitch is a much more generous person than I am, easier on herself and on others. Although I've always felt lucky, especially in the worst of times, to be able to lose myself in books, I could not sit on some smelly purple chair reading amidst dustballs and fur balls; nor could I find comfort in the oddly assorted 365 "great" books not thicker than 1" (hardback) that she had read in the year following the third anniversary of her older sister's rapid death from cancer. I mean, how can my list exclude Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, books that cannot be read over a 24-hour period and that I need to re-read periodically to assess how I have changed? Obviously, I do agree that thinking, writing, and communicating about what we read are essential to the intellectual enterprise and deepen the pleasure of reading. Perhaps after all the brouhaha generated by Sankovitch's excellent project, reading yourself to tranquility will not seem to be such a novel idea.

Doggedly Slow: Kate Atkinson's Started early, took my dog

2011-05-10T10:00:00.000-04:00

Susan Joseph's review May 10, 11 ·

bookshelves: mysteries, novels
status: Read in May, 2011

STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG is a great title for a novel that gives meaning to what would otherwise have been just another prostitute killing in Leeds. But, as other reviewers have noted, STARTED EARLY starts rather late. Because the author stays in her characters' heads, Kate Atkinson's mostly mystery novel reaches the 20% mark before the story lines intersect and the sense of a mystery emerges.

Atkinson's tried and true Dickensian structure features overlapping pairs of antipodean characters who search for lost parents and siblings: an English private detective who picks up an abused dog is looking for the parents of a client who lives in New Zealand while a retired English CID pays a prostitute for her child because she remembers a case of a child who was left behind in a prostitute's horrific murder. Meanwhile, the detective is messily formerly married to an actress who is working in a detective series with an old bat, her opposite number.

Anything but superficial, Atkinson's novel is the opposite of a "treatment" that would have concentrated more on scene changes and physical details. Like a cheat book for someone playing in a Masterpiece Mystery, it tediously recounts the characters' inner lives. With all the characters' streaming drivel, I can't say I found it as suspenseful or engaging as Atkinson's CASE HISTORIES; and Donald Westlake and James Lee Burke do the sad, climactic slapstick routines much better.

Getting accustomed to Ake Edwardson's Inspector Winter

2011-03-20T14:14:00.002-04:00

Despite Ake Edwardson's ploy of raising the stakes with young victims, as he did in the #2 Inspector Winter mystery Shadow Woman, I enjoyed Death Angels. That it veers stylistically between Mickey Spillane and Tolstoy, and that Inspector Winter, like Lord Wimsey, is a tad too well dressed, add to the fun. The story concerns tracking sex crimes in Gothenburg and London that Inspector Winter solves with expensive shoe leather and good old intuition.

As for Shadow Woman, I felt as if I were reading this book with my eyes going in two directions. The detective is hysterical to find the answer to the mystery, but the case, set against a backdrop of Gotheborg's Summer Party, proceeds at a snails pace. The conclusion is truly chilling.

Here's my teaser for Never End Never End by Åke Edwardson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Chief Inspector Winter and his crew doggedly try to stop what appear to be a series of rapes/strangulations against 19-year-old girls that occur in high summer in a secluded "cave" in a beachside Gothenburg park after dark. As is common in Scandinavian mysteries, the humanity of the detectives tones down the horrific material. There's a neat parallelism in that Winter has recently married and started his family and his associate Halders must start again as pater familias.

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Booby traps

2011-03-08T17:52:00.000-05:00

Although it lacks the harsh ending of Tom Perrotta's 2004 novel, Todd Field's done a brilliant adaptation of Little Children. Everything the viewer sees is booby trapped to explode in the worst possible way. The little figurines of children that accompany the opening credits must be destroyed. If you see two unhappy attractive parents it must follow that they will have an affair. The story juxtaposes this illicit relationship and the community's response to a sex offender who has been released into their neighborhood. The female protagonist, Sarah, played poutily by Kate Winslet, has not finished her Ph. D. in English literature. Ergo, she can comment on Madame Bovary from both lit-crit and personal standpoints in a book group meeting. Sarah and her opposite number Brad, the hunky Patrick Wilson, go to the pool a lot together. Ergo, the sex offender (Jackie Earle Haley) must show up there despite an order forbidding him to come within 500 feet of it. In his snorkeling gear, the S.O. looks like he comes from another planet, and once he is recognized, panic empties the pool. Brad has a friend named Larry (Noah Emmerich), a bad cop, and Sarah has a playground foe named Mary Anne (Mary B. McCann) who reach the limit of intolerance. Brad, who is supposed to be studying for the bar exam, would rather be watching the skate-boarders, and this, along with a knife, figures in the climax of the film. Exotic Spanish and Arabic music by Thomas Newman playfully underlines the characters' romantic urges. This is a comedy, so the little children, unlike their figurine counterparts, do not get hurt. I admire the perfect characterizations as well as the artful structure of Todd Field's Litte Children.

Notes from the North: Nordic Challenge 1st Quarter Reviews (January-March)

2011-02-01T14:25:00.000-05:00

Notes from the North: Nordic Challenge 1st Quarter Reviews (January-March)

Anne Holt's What is Mine: At first I was unsure about whether I could deal with a mystery about the imprisonment and murder of children. As I kept going, the love stories among Holt's interesting characters off set the hideous crimes described -- and -- here's the satisfying part -- halted.

Next best gourmet: sous vide supremes à la Sicilienne

2010-12-20T15:31:00.000-05:00

Skinless, boneless chicken breasts come out great with the sous vide, but they desperately need a sauce. Here's a delicious Sicilian sauce adapted for the mini-processor. The cinnamon and nuts make it smell a bit like Charoset, the traditional apple-cinnamon concoction served at the Jewish holiday of Passover to symbolize the mortar with which the Jews build the pyramids during their captivity in Egypt. The novel Sicilian sauce transforms chicken breasts into a memorable dish.

For the chicken

1 pound (0.45 kg) boneless, skinless chicken breast

Kosher salt, pepper, grated peel of a lemon

Canola oil

Hungarian paprika

Sugar, salt, pepper

1 pound (0.45 kg) boneless, skinless chicken breast

Kosher salt, pepper, grated peel of a lemon

Canola oil

Hungarian paprika

Sugar, salt, pepper

Preheat the SousVide Supreme™ or other precision water bath to 140F/60C.

Sprinkle chicken with salt, pepper, and grated lemon peel.

Put the chicken breasts into individual food-grade food pouches, and vacuum/seal.

Cook at 140F/60C for 2 to 4 hours.

Make the sauce by combining almonds, bread crumbs, anchovy fillets and several mint leaves and chopping in a mini food processor. Add Sherry wine vinegar, lemon juice, and olive oil and process until creamy, adding more olive oil if necessary.

Before serving, remove the chicken breasts from pouches, pat dry. Sprinkle salt, pepper, Pakrika, and sugar, and sear the surface of the chicken, and either in canola oil in a very hot skillet or by brushing the surface with oil and searing under the broiler or with a kitchen torch to caramelize the exterior.

Slice chicken and serve with sauce on top.

For the Sicilian sauce, combine the following ingredients in a mini-processor.

3 tablespoons (42 g) toasted blanched almonds

4 tablespoons (56 g) toasted bread crumbs

3 anchovy fillets

several mint leaves

Add the next four ingredients and process until smooth and creamy.

pinch of ground cinnamon

½ tablespoon Sherry wine vinegar

½ tablespoon lemon juice

6 tablespoons (84 g) olive oil

Next best gourmet: sous vide hanger steaks with rainbow peppers

2010-12-20T15:11:00.000-05:00

I had good reasons to be worried that my Sunday dinner for friends would fall flat. Would 1 1/2 pounds of hanger steak suffice? Would hanger steak be more tender and flavorful than the sirloin tip steak that had taken a sous vide bath with the hanger steaks a few nights before? Would my guests notice the surreptitious anchovies in the pepper saute? As it turned out, the quantity of steak was enough, the steaks were a tender and tasty novelty (who serves steak to company these days?), and the anchovies went unmentioned. Completing the menu were a salad with watercress, Belgian endive, baby arugula, a kumato and some diced hydroponic cucumber dressed with olive oil, Sherry wine vinegar, salt and pepper, baby potatoes roasted with rosemary and a little bit of butter. For dessert we had a fruit salad of everything on hand: apple, banana, pear, mandarin, kiwi, sliced strawberries, red and green grapes with a little orange liqueur.

Ingredients
1 1/2 lbs hanger steak
salt and pepper
sweet Hungarian paprika
3 sweet peppers, red, orange, and yellow, cut into large chunks
1 clove garlic, minced
2 anchovy fillets
1 Tblsp olive oil
salt and pepper

Preheat the SousVide Supreme™ or other precision water bath to 130F/60C.

Sprinkle steaks with salt, pepper, and seasoned salt, if desired.

Put the steaks into individual food-grade food pouches, and vacuum/seal.

Cook at 130F/54C for 6 to 8 hours.

Just before serving, heat olive oil in a skillet, add chunked peppers, anchovies, and chopped garlic and saute over low heat until the peppers are soft, about 15 minutes.

Remove the steaks from pouches, pat dry. Sprinkle salt, pepper, and Paprika, and sear the surface in canola oil in a very hot skillet or by brushing the surface with oil and searing under the broiler or with a kitchen torch to caramelize the exterior.

Serve the steak pieces on top of the sauteed peppers.
Serves: 4, with a generous mixed salad and baby potatoes roasted in a little butter and fresh rosemary.

Next Best Gourmet: Sous Vide Synopsis of Sauce Successes

2010-12-13T12:22:00.001-05:00

I am happy to say that using the Sous Vide Supreme has become part of my routine, both for every day and for entertaining. For entertaining, duck breasts with "bacon" may be the all-time favorite, but butterflied leg of lamb cooked sous vide (130 F, 20-24 hours) spiced up with a simple mint vinaigrette and served with sauteed spinach, roasted potatoes was a real hit at Thanksgiving. A few days later, lamb in Southern style barbecue sauce was equally good. Sous vide chicken breasts frozen and then defrosted were so tender and tasty that my cousin used a spoon to cut herself an extra piece of chicken! Veal chops, seasoned with salt and pepper and 1 bay leaf each and cooked at 134 F for 4 hours, complemented with braised baby artichokes, red peppers, and tomato and mashed potatoes, turned out rare and tender and too good to share with company.

The sous vide frees you up to concentrate on presentation. Here are three sauces that have been special favorites.

Mint vinaigrette for lamb (3/4 cup)
Chop together
3 Tblsp fresh mint
1 Tblsp Italian parsley
1 tsp garlic
Add and combine
1 tsp sugar
2 Tblsp Sherry vinegar
3 Tblsp olive oil
salt and pepper
Pour sparingly under and over cooked, sliced lamb and serve rest of sauce on the side.

Southern style barbecue sauce for beef, lamb or chicken -- or as marinade for swordfish (4 servings)
1 Tblsp butter
1/2 c sliced onion
1 clove garlic, minced
1 c Heinz ketchup
juice of 1 lemon
1 Tblsp brown sugar
dash of Tabasco
1 Tblsp Worcestershire sauce or soy sauce
Melt butter, and saute onion and garlic until soft. Add remaining ingredients and cook for a while. If there is not enough sauce, add 1/2-1 c of water and 1/2 or 1 tsp beef stock essence. Add sliced meat and heat up. Serve in sandwiches or as entree.

Baby artichokes with red peppers and tomato -- for veal chops or chicken breasts (2 servings)
6 baby artichokes, cleaned, cut in half, and put in water with lemon juice
1/2 red pepper, sliced lengthwise, with slices cut in half
1Tblsp olive oil
1 tomato, skinned, seeded, and chunked
chopped fresh herbs such as rosemary, thyme, parsley, oregano
salt and pepper
Saute artichoke halves in olive oil until golden; add 1/2 c water and cook down. Add pepper slices and saute until soft. Add tomato and cook for a minute or two. Season with herbs, salt, and pepper. Put on plate or platter below veal chop or chops. Serve with mashed potatoes.

Next best gourmet: Making the most of too much of a good sous vide thing

2010-10-19T11:51:00.001-04:00

For a family of two, the sous vide method is a convenient way of creating not quite raw material for the freezer. To my way of thinking, it is almost as easy to suit up four chicken breasts for the water bath as two. As with a simple roast chicken, chicken breasts sous vide cry out for a complement of interesting vegetables. One week the moist and flavorful chicken rests on a bed of low fat creamed spinach or wilted spinach with garlic, the next week, over warm truffled mushrooms.

But this new way of cooking can be more problematical: what's to be done with not quite large enough leftover portions of protein? We can take our cue from Chinese and French cuisines, which, compared to an American meat and potatoes approach, are rich in vegetables and relatively low in protein.

For two people, cut this easy recipe for stir-fried shrimp with vegetables in half and use with 1/2 lb of leftover chicken or pork and any combination of vegetables on hand, for instance, thinly sliced peeled winter squash, sliced red peppers, snow peas, sliced portobello mushrooms and sliced scallions, adding the meat last. Serve over rice or sauteed Chinese or Japanese noodles.

A simple onion tomato red wine vinegar sauce for leftover meat comes from Roy Andries de Groot's 1977 Cooking with the Cuisinart Food Processor. And why sous vide, you may ask. The virtue of these leftovers is that they are incredibly moist and tender, and for reasons I don't understand, more filling!

Onion tomato red wine vinegar sauce for leftover meat gratin

1 large onion, chopped

1/4 c parsley, chopped,

1 tblsp olive oil

1 tblsp red wine vinegar

1 tblsp flour

1 tsp thyme

1/2 tblsp tomato paste

1 c beef bouillon

1 bay leaf

salt and pepper

1/2 lb pork, beef, or lamb, or a combination, sliced

1/4 cup dry bread crumbs

butter

Preheat the oven to 450 F.

Saute onions and parsley in olive oil until soft; add vinegar and sizzle to reduce; add flour, thyme, and tomato paste and combine well. Cook a minute or two. Pour in bouillon, stirring. Add bay leaf, salt and pepper. Cook for 15 minutes, adding more bouillon or water as necessary, for a nice, thick sauce.

Spoon enough sauce to cover the bottom of a gratin dish. Layer slices of meat over and cover with remaining sauce. Sprinkle with bread crumbs and dot with butter. Cook in preheated 450 F oven for 10-20 minutes, until bubbly and brown. Serve with a salad.

Next best gourmet: rare success -- sous vide Florentine pork roast

2010-10-06T21:15:00.001-04:00

Just about this time of year, several life times ago, before dawn I went up into the hills overlooking Florence with a student from the University who made an unforgettable pork roast. The young man whom we used to call Il Lupo cut slits into the meat which he filled with fresh rosemary, salt, and slivers of garlic and roasted the pork over an open fire. I have roasted pork alla Lupo for ages, always making it much more well done than Il Lupo did, but this time I tried something different. I made a seasoned salt with dry rosemary, fresh garlic, and pepper which I rubbed onto 1/3-lb pieces of pork tenderloin before cooking them in the S ous Vide Supreme for two hours at 140 F. Instead of fresh morning air, at the kitchen table we contented ourselves with fresh applesauce and winter squash microwaved for 4 minutes and then seasoned with dry sage, salt, pepper, and olive oil and roasted at 450 F for 15 minutes. Sous vide "Florentine" pork was even rarer than when Il Lupo made it. Just as delicious, though, and probably more tender, if I remember rightly.

Ingredients

1 tblsp Kosher salt

1 clove garlic

1 tsp dry rosemary

1/2 tsp rainbow peppercorns

l lb pork tenderloin

To make seasoned salt, combine first four ingredients in a mini food processor and chop until fine and well combined.
Rub tenderloin with seasoned salt and cut into 3 pieces.
Put each piece of meat in a vacuum sealed bag.
Cook for 1 1/2 hours at 140 F.
Dry meat with paper towels.
Sprinkle with Paprika and brown in a very hot pan sprayed with canola oil.
Slice the meat and serve with roasted winter squash and fresh applesauce.

Serves 3.

Next best gourmet: Hommage a Jean Cocteau -- Autumn dinner of sous vide pork chops

2010-09-24T20:31:00.005-04:00

Truth to tell, the sous vide does a marvelous job on pork chops, so much so that I've now changed my here's autumn dinner of sauteed pork chops and apples, a favorite from the classic of Michel Oliver illustrated by Jean Cocteau (1963) La cuisine est un jeu d'enfants. Now if only the weather would only turn seasonably cool. Today the mercury registered in the low 90's, but my autumn dinner still hit the spot.

Ingredients (serves 2)
2 nice rib pork chops
2 cups water
2 Tblsp Kosher salt
1 Tblsp brown sugar
fresh thyme
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
Paprika

3 apples
1 cinnamon stick
1/2 lemon, sliced

1/2 lb broccoli and cauliflower florets, from the salad bar

Brine the pork chops in water, salt and sugar for at least 2 hours in the refrigerator.
Remove chops from brine and dry thoroughly, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and put each chop into a separate vacuum bag with two sprigs of fresh thyme.
Sous vide at 140 F for at least 1 1/2 hours.
Peel and core apples and cut into chunks.
Combine apples with cinnamon stick and 1/2 sliced lemon in microwave safe bowl and microwave, covered, for 10 minutes. If the sauce is too dry, add some hot water and return to the microwave for a minute or two.
Remove chops from vacuum bags, dry thoroughly, and sprinkle with Paprika before browning them in a very hot skillet, on the grill, or under the broiler.
Serve with steamed or microwaved broccoli and cauliflower florets, sprinkled with salt, pepper, and olive oil.

Next best gourmet: no easy answers for Sous Vide Supreme

2010-09-22T21:32:00.008-04:00

As an early advocate, I fretted that David Hagedorn's response to trying two sous vide set-ups this morning in the Washington Post was not a rave, though my husband reminds me that DH credits the water oven with brilliant results for chicken breasts, pork chops, and rib eye. My husband and I disagreed over swordfish that had stayed in the Sous Vide Supreme for a half an hour. He thought it was not done, and I thought it was moist and delicious, though it might have needed something more assertive than a fresh tomato sauce. Accompaniments for the fish were roasted golden beets, microwaved greens, and sliced grilled polenta from a Sun of Italy package that looks like a roll of cookie dough.

Tonight's dinner was a different story. We were both very pleased with my slightly adapted take on Richard Blais's recipe for Asian-inspired chicken breasts from the Sous Vide Supreme web site. The changes were almost insignificant. I cut the recipe in half and used 2 chicken breast halves with skin and bones. For the brine, I reduced everything by half and instead of poultry seasoning I substituted one teaspoon each of sage, rosemary, tarragon and thyme and a bay leaf. For seasoning in the vacuum bag with the chicken, I improvised a bit: instead of garlic salt, a slivered clove of fresh garlic; instead of Thai chile, a slice of jalapeno chile, minced. To finish, I sprinkled the cooked and dried off chicken with Paprika to facilitate browning in a very hot skillet sprayed with canola oil.

To accompany the chicken, I made whole wheat linguine with toasted sliced almonds, broccoli and cauliflower, inspired by a recipe from the today's Washington Post. The chicken was super tasty and the noodles were so comforting.

Next best gourmet: Flank steak burritos with Mediterranean flair

2010-09-20T09:28:00.001-04:00

Once again, the Sous Vide Supreme has provided an encore meal just as good as the first time around. Frozen flank steak still in its vacuum sealed bag and immersed in a 130 F bath for a few hours and then grilled for a minute on each side.

The steak was every bit as flavorful for the next best gourmet duo as it had been the first time. This time the tender steak smothered with fresh tomato salsa and guacamole served as the basis for mediterranean burritos. Giving a continental flair were crumbled blue cheese, Belgian endive leaves, fresh spinach, a freshly roasted red pepper and a grilled zucchini.

Of glass jars and broken mirrors: How Gubaidulina and Schnittke speak to Brahms and Mendelssohn

2010-09-16T15:33:00.003-04:00

When ‘the future’ is uttered, swarms of mice rush out … and gnaw a piece of ripened memory. --Joseph Brodsky

What does a glass jar moved across piano strings have to do with the shimmering piano work of Mendelssohn? By answering that question I attempt to make sense of the Peabody Trio’s November 7 program at the McKenna Theatre at San Francisco State. The Peabody Trio, known for their devotion to new music, lists Sofia Gubaidulina’s 1993 duo for violin and cello Dancer on a Tightrope and Alfred Schnittke’s 1979 duo for violin and piano Stille Musik alternating with - or should I say breaking up - two well known and discursive Romantic piano trios, these last two available together on the same disk, Brahms’s second and Mendelssohn’s first.

To establish both the continuity and rupture between nineteenth- and twentieth-century classical music a recent critic has offered the metaphor of the broken mirror. Although twentieth-century music may seem to be an irreparably broken mirror, nonetheless, its pieces, no matter how fragmented and oddly arranged, are made of recognizable material. Using the mirror we can make the giant step from Mendelssohn and Brahms to the two Soviet-era composers Gubaidulina and Schnittke.

The broken mirror allows us to understand how Brahms, whom Shaw dubbed “the Leviathan maunderer,” may have given Gubaidulina the idea of magnifying small motifs. Thus, the short and simple dotted Gypsy-like first theme that opens the second movement of Brahms’s second piano trio is a forerunner to the jittery violin solo that Gubaidulina elaborates in her Dancer on a Tightrope.

Describing Mendelssohn’s performance of his own piano concerto, Robert Schumann was lulled into an easy meditative state, quite unlike the uneasiness that arises from the troubling music of the following century. Our mirror of the soul is broken, and no longer do we feel, with Schumann: “Music is the outflow of a benign spirit, regardless of whether it flows in the presence of hundreds or in solitude.” Indeed, its constant experimentation makes twentieth-century music exigent. We must open our hearts to new experience, while also engaging memory and intellect.

The music of Gubaidulina and Schnittke requires that we do more than sit back and listen. We are in good company. The two are considered the most important Russian composers since Shostakovich. His biographer Alexander Ivashkin describes Schnittke as “one of the most prolific composers of the twentieth century. His works are an established part of the standard repertoire for orchestras, chamber groups, and soloists.” Ivashkin sums up his encomium, “All performances of his music were important events for Soviet listeners, for in it they found spiritual values that were absent from everyday life during the endless years of ‘terror,’ ‘thaw,’ ‘cold war,’ and stagnation.’” Paul Griffith's review of Gubaidulina's 70th birthday celebration at the Miller Theatre in 2002 is one of innumerable tributes.

Both composers were outsiders in Russia, Gubaidulina from the Crimean Tatar Republic, and Schnittke from Vienna, and both emigrated from Moscow to Germany. The metaphor of flight is relevant to both composers, fettered and free. As she has written, “A person dancing on a tightrope is also a metaphor for this opposition: life as risk, and art as flight into another existence.” Temperamentally, Gubaidulina is a solitary explorer, interested in how sound is produced. In happier times, her explorations might have been joyful, like the scherzi that Mendelssohn first created in his Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and repeated in the third movement of his first piano trio.

So, apparently, the ravages of history must be brought into the frame. The story is not only that in the scherzo movement, Mendelssohn’s diaphanous piano part, which he re-wrote entirely in order to ‘modernize’ its passage work, becomes more opaque in Brahms’s hands. Or that playing on a much more powerful instrument than the composer used, it is technically difficult for pianists today to achieve clarity in Brahms’s piano parts. To appreciate the black humor of Gubaidulina’s glass tumbler on the piano strings calls for much more specific knowledge. Gubaidulina’s glass tumbler may be a joke, but coming from a Soviet composer it also intensifies her theme of freedom, as a reference to Foss, Crumb, and other Americans who used the same device. In Stille Musik the echoes of Shostakovich’s eery, funereal stillness, as in the opening of his second piano trio, are reduced to static whispers.

Thus, in a very real sense, there are no better examples of engagement with history than the music of the rough contemporaries Sofia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke. Here we find two different reactions to suffering. Gubaidulina was inspired by Francine duPlessix-Gray’s observation in her 1991 study, Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope that under Gorbachev women were living simultaneously in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like her real-life counterparts, Gubaidulina’s Dancer on a Tightrope swings frenetically. In stark contrast, Schnittke’s Stille Musik is ossified mourning, possibly inspired by his studies of yoga, cabbala, the I Ching, and anthroposophy in 1979. If tempo - and genre - separate the two composers, yet each composer relies on dissonance to subvert time.

Rather than an accent or transition to consonance, as it was for the Romantic composers, dissonance in twentieth-century music is a thing in itself: possibility of movement in any direction, chaos, an unending present, a dreamy discontinuity. An orderly view of the future, or metaphorically, the progress of the soul, would have been signaled in the Romantic era by recourse to a formal series of repetitions. Instead of structural methods, both composers depend on musical and extramusical allusions to give their compositions intellectual rigor.

If in the nineteenth century Brahms was criticized for his small-scale, bourgeois mentality, in the twentieth century these defects were seen as virtues. Brahms’s (and Mendelssohn’s) lyricism, the spinning out of small fragments into intricate textures, opened the way to the twentieth-century preference for subjective rather than objective structures that have come to dominate classical music. The Romantic fragments that Mendelssohn and Brahms articulated in larger forms became, in the works of Gubaidulina and Schnittke, definitive fragments, precious pieces of a broken mirror, and the form dominant in “serious” art of the twentieth century.

Next best gourmet: Surf and turf second thoughts

2010-09-16T11:27:00.002-04:00

A very smokey flavor left me not completely satisfied with my first salmon sous vide experiment. Did the Williams Sonoma Potlatch seasoning make the brine too flavorful? Was three hours too much time in the brine? Last night to Doug Baldwin's brine of 1/2 c water + 1 tblsp Kosher salt I added only 1 tblsp brown sugar and followed his suggestion of dousing the salmon for 10 minutes. The short bath in the skimpy brine did not eliminate the white film of albumin from forming after cooking to medium rare in the sous vide; nor was the texture as firm as I would have wished. Accompaniments for a still delicious dinner were cucumber salad with chopped fresh mint and parsley, tomatoes with pesto vinaigrette, and a crispy baguette.

Brine for next time -- time at least 2 hours

4 oz Kosher salt

1/4 c brown sugar

1 quart cold water

But another claim relating to flexible timing is correct. Food frozen after cooking in the sous vide and then defrosted at the same temperature is loses no quality! A few weeks after my first experiment with silver tip roast sous vide, I defrosted the frozen half roast in the Sous Vide Supreme set at 130 F for a few hours, dried it thoroughly with paper towels, and then grilled it for a minute or two on each side. Voilà! The results were uncannily identical to the first time around. To complete the dinner, vegetables stir-fried in 1 tblsp canola oil of 1/2 sliced red onion, 1/4 lb sliced Shitake mushrooms, 2 baby yellow squash, and 1/2 sliced red pepper in , 2 tblsp Brandy, 2 1/2 oz fresh baby spinach, left over juice from the roast, and salt and pepper.

Next best gourmet: sous vide lemon chicken with some difficulties

2010-09-10T21:59:00.003-04:00

Sous vide lemon chicken has been a great success, but also a learning experience. Boneless breasts with skin were not available at the market, not even for ready money, and my attempts to remove the bones with a poultry scissors were crude. Next time I will use skinless breasts. Now that the days are getting shorter, it is too dark to see when the skin gets crispy -- and the skin had to be removed after the chicken had been insufficiently browned. The skin might have contributed to the taste, so it was not a total loss. Yet another lesson learned -- even a slice or two of lemon produces so much juice that the vacuum sealer does not work: the chicken needs to be double bagged. Nevertheless, the results were delectable. Next time, perhaps, the recipe will be a bit neater.

For each boneless, skinless chicken breast
2 slices of lemon
salt and pepper
a sliver of garlic
a sprig of fresh rosemary or thyme

Cook at 140 F for at least 2 hours

To serve
Sprinkle chicken with salt, pepper, paprika and sugar; then rub with a small amount of olive oil.
Brown on a gas grill for less than a minute on each side.

Fresh tomato sauce for 2 chicken breast halves (4 pieces)
1 tomato
1 clove of garlic
1 tblsp fresh parsley
1 tblsp fresh basil
grated rind of 1 lemon
1 tblsp olive oil
1 tsp vinegar
salt and pepper

Cover the tomato with boiling water.
Chop garlic, parsley, basil, and lemon rind in Cuisinart.
Skin tomato, cut in half and squeeze out juice and seeds, and cut pulp into four pieces.
Add tomato pieces, oil vinegar and salt and pepper to Cuisinart and process.
Scrape sauce into a small serving bowl.
Spoon sauce over cooked and browned chicken breasts, and serve what is left with chicken.

Suggested accompaniments
Roasted sweet potatoes and blanched green beans.

Next best gourmet: salmon sous vide for a small New Year's celebration

2010-09-08T22:16:00.000-04:00

Happy New Year! I had a timing issue, and the Sous Vide Supreme solved my problem. A friend and I decided impromptu to do a Jewish New Year's celebration for just ourselves and our husbands, and I had already done my shopping. In my refrigerator was a scanty one pound of Alaskan coho salmon from Whole Foods. Would I have to buy more for the four of us? As it turns out, sous vide salmon is very rich, and should be served in small portions, so a pound was just right for four people. The brine is not superfluous: it gives the salmon an unusual taste, firms it up, and keeps a white film from forming on the surface of the fish. If ever there was a dinner to convert the infidels to the sous vide, this is it -- simple and flexible as to time. To complete our feast my neighbors brought over Rutherford Hill 2002 Chardonnay and homemade apple pie. A savory and sweet beginning to the New Year!

Festive Salmon Dinner for 4

For the salmon

Brine: 4 oz Kosher salt

1/4 c brown sugar

2 tblsp Williams Sonoma potlatch seasoning

1 quart cold water

1 lb Whole Foods Alaskan coho salmon, without skin

fresh thyme and rosemary, to taste

Combine the seasonings and water in a large bowl. Put salmon in.
Cover and refrigerate for 10 minutes to several hours.
Preheat the Sous Vide Supreme to 123 F.
Rinse and dry salmon.
Cut into 4 pieces.
Salt and pepper and rub with a little bit of olive oil.
Put in vacuum pouches and seal, but as soon as the air starts to escape, turn off the vacuum sealer and switch to seal only.
Put packages in Sous Vide Supreme and cook for 15 minutes to an hour or two.
Salt the salmon skin, put in a ziplock bag, and refrigerate until ready to use.
Preparing and cooking the salmon
Rinse, dry, cut salmon skin into small pieces, and saute for 20 minutes, until crispy.

To serve

salmon roe caviar, available online and at Whole Foods

crème fraîche, available online and at Whole Foods

snipped dill or chives

cooked salmon

crispy salmon skin

Make a design on serving platter like the green rustic oval from Sur la Table illustrated above or on individual plates with salmon, salmon roe, crispy skin, snipped dill or chives and crème fraîche.

Accompany with a salad.

A handful of fresh spinach

1 tomato, diced

A handful of green beans, cut in 2" pieces and microwaved for 90 seconds

2 small yellow squash, diced and microwaved for 90 seconds

2 small Yukon gold potatoes, diced and microwaved for 90 seconds

1/4 pitted mixed olives

A handful of chopped basil

small amount of extra virgin olive oil, Sherry vinegar, Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper

In the order listed, put the ingredients in a 12" shallow salad bowl, such as this one from Williams Sonoma, sprinkling vegetables with salt and pepper and oil and vinegar as they come out of the microwave, being sure to distribute basil, salt and pepper over everything. Toss at serving time.

Next best gourmet: sous vide as process

2010-09-06T09:51:00.000-04:00

The back and forth with my gifted gourmet friend explains a new concept: the sous vide process.

Leah Hadad Isn't it too much cooking time for the chicken breast to saute and then slow cook? For tender chicken breasts, saute or grill should do the trick. As long as you don't over do it, of course. So says the vegetarian...
Susan Joseph
Before answering your question it is necessary to explain how the sous vide works. The process perhaps makes more sense as part of a routine starting before going to the grocery store: plan to clean and put the chicken in the sous vide rather than in the refrigerator. The chicken breasts then are ready whenever you want them. Here's how it works. The sous vide set at 140 F slowly brings the chicken to appropriate serving temperature, the same 140 F. It can't overcook because the water never gets any hotter. Whenever you want after the minimum cooking time of two hours you can put the vacuum bags into the refrigerator or the freezer. The sous vide process then resembles what my friend Barbara does: she washes and preps her vegetables out of the grocery bag and into the refrigerator.

As for serving, saute is simply for the aesthetics, but I'm not really sure it is necessary if the chicken is in a sauce which gently heats, covers and permeates the snow-white meat. The real question is in the tasting. Prepared in the sous vide, chicken breasts taste like meat taken from a roasted chicken, which is the standard for perfect. Maybe today I'll try chicken breasts WITH skin. So says the endless experimenter.

Sous vide encore! Doggie says, Yes!

2010-09-05T20:17:00.000-04:00

By now I have encored chicken breasts and duck breasts in the Sous Vide Supreme. Chicken breasts are still a mystery. After they had been sous-vided and dried off, they were brushed with a weak sugar solution before being seared in hot oil. I sliced them and put them in a simple sauté of red onions and shitaki mushrooms seasoned with white wine, rosemary, and salt and pepper, so the slices could soak up flavor. OK, but still not really there. And the supremes do not need to be seared if they are sliced and then immersed in a sauce. The duck breasts à l'orange however were an even greater success than the first time, served with duck bacon, couscous festooned with diced zucchini, almonds, and plumped up dried cranberries and cherries, and spinach sauteed with garlic and roasted red peppers. Dessert: Marian Burros' classic plum torte.

Silver tip roast, rubbed with salt, pepper, dried green chilis and seared on the grill and then cooked 6 hours at 130 F in the sous vide and then dried off and seared again on the grill was good enough for company, rare all the way through, served with grilled corn, and grilled tomatoes, yellow squash, and peppers with pesto. Sliced thin, the meat tasted like a sirloin steak.

The sous vide method is a novelty that I still do not quite understand. Chicken is in the very good not great range, lean cuts of meat are tender and rare, and the dog likes slurping up the cooking liquid from the vacuum bags.

Next best gourmet: Friday risotto in the pressure cooker

2010-08-28T14:50:00.001-04:00

The pressure cooker makes a terrific risotto. My Fagor combi has a generous skillet and a large soup pot. Cooked in the skillet, this quick, low-fat recipe for vegetable risotto, dedicated to my appreciative husband, can be made any day you want to empty your vegetable drawer! Cook "hard" vegetables like mushrooms and winter squash before adding "soft" vegetables like peas, summer squash, tomatoes, asparagus, baby artichokes, and spinach, which will give off a lot of juice.

Ingredients

1 tblsp olive oil

1/4 c onion, diced

1/2 c Arborio rice

1 portobello mushroom, diced

2 1/2 c vegetable or chicken broth, more as needed

1/2 c shelled fresh peas

1 small zucchini, diced

1 small yellow squash, diced

1/2 tomato, skinned and diced

2 Tblsp Parmesan, grated

Salt and pepper, to taste

Chopped fresh herbs, optional

Directions

Warm the olive oil in the pressure cooker.
Sauté onion 1 or 2 minutes, to soften.
Add rice and stir until the rice becomes translucent
Add mushroom and saute until soft
Add 2 c broth, bring to boil, cover, and set to high pressure.
Cook at high pressure for 6 minutes.
Release cover, carefully.
Add tomato, zucchini and yellow squash, and more broth if necessary.
Cover, set to high pressure, and cook at high pressure for 3 minutes.
Release cover, carefully.
Stir rice until vegetables are cooked and all the broth is absorbed. If the rice is not plump, add more hot broth and stir until liquid makes the rice expand.
Stir in Parmesan and serve.

Yield: 2 or 3 portions

Next best gourmet: sous vide supremes

2010-08-23T20:39:00.000-04:00

The Sous Vide Supreme is worth its weight in naked chicken breasts! Ubiquitous, tasteless, dry, deadly, and almost impossible to cook well, these skinless and boneless little devils are the bane of every sensible eater's existence. But eureka! Set at 140 F, the Sous Vide Supreme produced tender tasty though pasty pullet's breasts in two hours. For each individual chicken breast into the vacuum bag went two slices of lemon, a small piece of garlic, a branch of rosemary, a small amount of olive oil, and kosher salt and freshly ground pepper. After being wiped dry on paper towel, the cooked chicken breasts were dusted with kosher salt, freshly ground pepper, and Hungarian paprika and sauteed in a small amount of olive oil over high heat for a minute or so on each side. For two breast halves, the sauce was microwaved sliced fennel (2 minutes) sauteed with a few thin slices of onion and two cut up portobello mushrooms, and a splash of white wine, reduced. Once again, husband was thrilled, eager to have his opinion quoted: sous vide is the best way to cook supremes de volaille, moist, toothsome and flavorful as the breast of a perfectly roasted whole chicken.

Next best gourmet: O dad, poor dad, where's your chewy piece of meat?

2010-08-22T20:08:00.000-04:00

As my friend Margaret is fond of saying, "I have to chuckle." My father always claimed that he liked a chewy piece of meat. Was he being polite? Making the best of it? A rather tough piece of marinated flank steak broiled conventionally would have pleased him, but what about flank steak cooked sous vide, for 11 hours, rare and meltingly tender but not stringy? On p. 25 of his Sous vide for the home cook, Doug Baldwin recommends a cooking time of 12-14 hours for flank steak cooked to 130 F. I apologize, Doug, for my impatience. I confess to improvising from bloggers specifying between 3 and 12 hours: four vacuum sealed 3/4-lb pieces of flank steak each rubbed with a different spice mixture were immersed at 135 F for about 11 hours, with fine results. After it had been seared for about a minute on each side on a hot gas grill, the meat sliced up so beautifully, uniformly rare that I could barely bring myself to cover it with roasted, sliced red peppers and a minimal sauce made from about 1/4 cup of gaspacho boiled down with bag juices. With my husband's homemade bread, fresh corn, and cold sweet and sour red cabbage, this meal made my husband exclaim how right I had been to purchase the Sous Vide Gourmet. I think even Dad would have approved. On to fresh fields and pastures new!

Next best gourmet: Celebratory dinner featuring sous vide duck

2010-08-21T12:14:00.000-04:00

I've taken the plunge! The Sous Vide Supreme with the accompanying sous vide vacuum sealer is easy to use. I actually enjoyed sealing skinless duck breasts, one side covered with a branch of fresh rosemary and and the other with a branch of fresh thyme. Instead of following the web recipes for duck breast that suggested a 20- or 25- cooking time, since guests were involved I used the minimum of 2 1/2 hours recommended in Douglas Baldwin's Sous Vide for the Home Cook, for skinless duck breast. During that time I roasted the duck skin according to Baldwin's recipe, and made a fairly ambitious dinner of gazpacho, sweet and sour cabbage (microwave), potatoes roasted with rosemary and duck fat, and white chocolate mousse with blueberries. Because I forgot to dry off the cooked duck breasts, searing took a little while, but the juicy tenderness was not disturbed. The simple orange and Grand Marnier sauce was perfect, and the "duck bacon" was novel and good.

Preparation note: When I try the sous vide again I will probably use the shorter cooking time, as the longer time may have been published as a convenience. Since I had plenty of time, I put the duck breasts in 50% ice: water before refrigerating them.

Next best gourmet: plunge day approaches

2010-08-19T11:30:00.000-04:00

Today will probably be the day. Perhaps my reasons for springing for the whole sous vide schmegigge are trivial: storage underneath the counter where the Sous Vide Supreme can be plugged in; relief from naughty naked chicken breasts; and comments from numerous bloggers, summed up as, "Not only was the meat cooked perfectly medium (hence the pink color), but the texture was like beef tenderloin. It was the most tender piece of duck meat I have ever eaten." In contrast to the pedestrian presentations in a cookbook that will remain nameless, at least in this post, the web affords a cornucopia of possibilities for duck of which these are only some highlights -- read my links. Onwards to Sur la Table. Tomorrow, duck breasts sous vide for husband's birthday!

Next best gourmet: Sous vide dans la batterie de cuisine?

2010-08-18T15:21:00.000-04:00

OK, I love to cook, variety is my favorite food, and I am devoted to many gadgets. With the Kitchen Aid immersion blender I avoid transferring hot soup into the blender or Cuisinart. Kitchen Aid also makes a steam oven that produces moist and tender roast beef, pork and chicken with a crispy exterior and bread that is as good as what was sold in Italian bakeries in Paterson, NJ, in the 1950's. The virtues of the pressure cooker are many. It is hard to choose between creamy risotto, ready less than 15 minutes, without stirring, and, for instance, osso bucco, about half an hour, all told. The microwave is a boon for single and double servings of fresh vegetables: corn wrapped in plastic wrap takes two minutes per cob, and a cleaned artichoke rubbed with half a lemon, four minutes; cut up vegetables are crisp and bright when cooked in a small oval dish covered in plastic wrap for 90 seconds. The Cuisinart mini processor chops fresh herbs and garlic for salad dressings and marinades. Along with parchment paper, good knives and an array of cutting boards, these are most of my favorite things for preparing fresh, flavorful food that does not have many calories.

So am I set? Not exactly. As I said, I love variety, both in food and also in preparation. What about a set-up for sous vide cooking? In this fail-safe if slow process a sealed plastic bag is immersed in a water bath set at the final temperature for the food in question. The whole roast can be cooked to rare and then taken out of the bag, dried off, and seared on a grill, in a broiler or in a skillet. Those horrible naked chicken breasts can be cooked with fresh herbs and a small amount of butter or oil, browned the same way, and then submitted to an appropriate sauce. Lobster can be poached in two tablespoons of butter rather than a cup or more.

If this tempts you, as it does me, you can fiddle with a sous vide set-up, or, as is my inclination, just buy the whole deal. Sur la table sells the Sous Vide Supreme for $449.95, as does Amazon, with free shipping. The sous vide vacuum sealer will set you back another $129.95, and Amazon sells an 18-foot roll of food saver bag material for $25.21, for a total somewhat north of $600. A similar but considerably larger set-up is available from Williams Sonoma, at a store near you, but not yet on their website, for about $1,000, without the bags. The extra $400 gets you water that circulates, but the results are the same. Besides, the Sous Vide Supreme has a cute little rack for holding the vacuum sealed bags, but with the Williams Sonoma device you must weigh down your bags with a strainer.

As for cookbooks, I'm dissatisfied with what is out there. Sous Vide for the Home Cook by Douglas Baldwin, Michael Eades, and Mary Dan Eades provides all necessary technical information and cooking times, but the recipes are pedestrian. At the other end of the spectrum is Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide by Thomas Keller and Harold McGee, aimed solely at ambitious restaurant chefs.

Which brings me to another topic: most of the food in high-end restaurants, and, for that matter, in institutional settings like university cafeterias, is cooked sous vide! Caveat emptor: don't order roast beef in a nice restaurant. A big slab looks strange, browned on the outside and cooked to perfection on the inside. And, if like me, you are thinking of buying this paraphernalia, it will mean reorganizing so that you cook in two stages: first sous-viding the food, plunging it into a 50% ice water bath, and then making it palatable by browning it and/or preparing a sauce, or refrigerating or freezing the dried bag of food. Food cooked slowly sous vide can stay in the refrigerator for several days or in the freezer for up to a year.

So if I buy a sous vide cooker, not only will I have to keep an index of what is in the freezer, the creativity and zaniness of my cooking will come from dreaming finishing touches, rather than from thinking organically, about how long it takes to, for example marinate a few of those naked chicken breasts and then dry them out into pseudo-skeletal remains on the grill. This morning in the New York Times, Mark Bittman suggested an alternative method for killing harmless naked chicken breasts on the grill: insertion of flavorful stuffings inside pounded and then grilled chicken breasts since marinades don't do the job. I wonder how to apply this information to sous vide cooking. A frozen herb butter could go into the bag with the uncooked chicken -- but I'm not so sure about a tapenade. There's only one way to find out! My checkbook just said, "Ouch!"

Cathleen Schine's EVOLUTION OF JANE AS VADE MECUM

2010-03-13T12:11:00.000-05:00

Cathleen Schine bases her didactic and entertaining novel THE EVOLUTION OF JANE (1998) on the precious and fruitful conceit, that the contours of friendship and differentiation of young girls follow Darwin's theory of evolution. Or is it the other way around, that Darwin's observations of flora and fauna on the Galapagos can be understood in terms of young friendship?

That the novel is successful means that the metaphor cuts both ways. The story of Jane's engagement with and estrangement from her cousin Martha unfolds when by chance Jane's mother sends her on a cruise of the Galapagos that happens to be led by Martha. The narrator Jane uncomfortably ruminates below on possible reasons why Martha dropped her when they were young teenagers. At the same time, we learn, via Jane's experiences with Darwin's theories and observations of speciation in the Galapagos, that young friendship stems from homology and peradventure; the twin-like girls were brought together initially by chance circumstances, when the young Martha galloped up (pun intended, I'm sure) to Jane one fine summer day.

Speciation occurs along borders, which is why the equatorial Galapagos islands, and the synecdochal cruise ship Huxley, named for Darwin's bulldog, are chock-full of evolutionary oddities. Although Schine can be merely entertaining when she displays her precocious New York wit, her youthful narrative manner suits the matter of friendship among the very young and reconciliation among the slightly mature. This is fiction. My own Galapagos tour probably will not enable me to understand my emotional history; but if I mine THE EVOLUTION OF JANE for its reading list my own tour cannot fail to be instructive and fun.

Hardball Question to Paretsky:Won't You Please Go Now?

2010-03-09T11:06:00.000-05:00

First take: Hardball is the worst mystery I've read by Sara Paretsky, and one of the worst mysteries I have ever been acquainted with, a big disappointment to this native Chicagoan and a Paretsky fan. So far, and I may be approaching the midpoint of this mess, almost nothing connected to the mystery, a 40-year-old cold case, has happened in the present! V I is doing a lot of research but her files are in pretty good shape. Her vapid cousin appears a couple of times and Uncle Sal and the dogs put in their two cents. Bah. The sagging style fits the slipshod substance. Buyer and borrower beware! You have nothing to gain from reading this book. I thought that suspenseful novels were supposed to be suspenseful. Hardball is about as suspenseful as a long day in the library or at home straightening out one's files!

Second take: the connection between the 40-year-old case and the present occurs at midpoint of the novel; it lacks credibility, as do V I's super-girl antics and the clownish disguises she adopts while trying to make her cousin and her own past re-appear again. Every character has a purpose, the most obvious one a new neighbor who plays a double bass, laughably convenient for one of V I's escapes. The novel is a procedural tracking research and risks for V I; it is padded with repetitive explaining of unbelievable events to characters not on hand to witness them and cloying re-evocations of V I's family. Ms Paretsky, could this exercise in nostalgia be your farewell?

Can You Forgive Trollope's Triumph of Material Substance over Style?

2010-03-05T10:51:00.000-05:00

My first impressions of CAN YOU FORGIVE HER had more to do with Trollope's leisurely pace, which I felt compelled to parody, though looking at what I wrote, it smacks more of Virginia Woolf than AT. One feels that the Pallisers and their relatives, for their society was incestuous by twenty-first-century standards, had all the time in the world, time that men spent actively doing nothing, running to the hounds, hunting, dabbling in politics, gambling, traveling and carousing amongst themselves. Women whether intelligent or not were the blank canvasses on which the activities of men were painted; if the women were self-aware they got into trouble anatomizing their own emotions and interfering in the lives of others. It took me about 250 pages (one-third of the way through) to begin to be caught up in Trollope's sympathetic and thorough observations of the first thousand or ten thousand people of England in the mid-nineteenth century. As with Faulkner's, Trollope's descriptions are so minute as to be universal. Even today who cannot help but note that, in spite of having attained the vote and being on the way to financial parity, there are still intelligent and silly women who prefer passionate men to sensible men? The point? We must, when all, and I mean all, is said and done, like Trollope, forgive the few and many.

As I progressed through the novel, however, I become deeply concerned with tracing the determinative effects of wealth on inextricably bound character and fate. For the purposes of this essay, fate is marriage. And, the more I read, structural parallelisms and contrasts with regard to access to wealth in Can You Forgive Her became too obvious to ignore. My observations are not out of line with those of Trollope's critic A. O. J. Cockshut's, forwarded by Larry Kart: "It would be a mistake to try to detect any political ideas in Trollope's satire on rank and wealth.... Trollope's satire on wealth has far more in common with Spenser's cave of Mammon than with the political slogan of fair shares; he is concerned with the mental and moral emptiness which follows the acquisition of fortunes, or accompanies the pride of rank." In my view, Trollope is showing us that the escape from the cave of Mammon requires male characters to have active lives, in politics, preferably, or, if not, taking notice of their wives, and female characters to live well examined if somewhat secluded lives.

Although they are secluded, this is a novel about money and marriage that belongs to the female characters. Alice Vavasor, Glencora Palliser, and Alice's wealthy widowed Aunt Arabella Greenow each have two suitors, one wealthy and one not. The thoughtful Alice must choose between John Grey, a wealthy, handsome and somewhat boring landholder and her fiery cousin George who despite a heroic act that cost him a facial scar is held in such low esteem by his family that he cannot be sure of what is his by the rights of primogeniture. As a result of being denied money at every turn, George becomes savage, preying upon Alice who has a fortune of 10,000 pounds and then abusing his sister Kate, Alice, and Alice's by then successful suitor John Grey. Why did his family hold out on George? By contrast, in the next book of the Palliser series, Phineas Finn's family did everything they could for him. The Vavasors' attitude towards George, which predated his moral decline, seems cruel and arbitrary. Cruel lack of money makes a prostitute out of George's starving mistress, and an exile out of George himself. There is no place for either of them in Britain.

Glencora's marital fate is likewise determined by access to funds, too many funds. Rich already, she has two suitors, the divinely handsome but empty-headed and feckless Burgo Fitzgerald who like George has trouble shaking money out of his relatives, and the highly presentable Plantagenet Palliser who is, will be, and ever will be rich beyond imagining. Glencora laments being sold against her wishes to Plantagenet who has no interest, until Glencora begins acting badly, in having a physical or emotional relationship with her.

In a comic subplot that mirrors the story lines of Alice and Glencora, Alice's aunt Arabella Greenow encourages the affections of an ugly and ridiculous rich pig farmer named Cheeseacres and at the same time an impoverished and good looking soldier named Captain Bellfield whose faults, the narrator mentions, are slighter than Burgo Fitzgerald's because Captain Bellfield has less access to money. Put differently, the poorer man Bellfield is easier for Arabella to rule than the richer Cheeseacres whose addiction to bragging Arabella cannot cure.

Thus, material substance is fundamental to these three marriages. When Alice discounts riches she gets the whole package, but let's not forget that she is rich enough to make the independent choice of a spouse who is good looking, sensible, and kind -- good reasons -- while the poor, infantilized Glencora is so rich that she has no choice in the matter at all. Occupying a position similar to Alice's, her widowed, well set aunt Arabella can make a reasonable although limited choice of a man who will give her not much trouble and not much pleasure either. For a woman, too much money will not a good marriage make; enough money will suffice for happiness.

The narrator in a leisurely fashion follows and comments upon these wealthy characters who, excepting Palliser, are so unoccupied as to be his audience: they do almost nothing but interfere in the lives of others or sit around reading novels. Lack of activity brought about by wealth leads both Alice and Glencora into emotional difficulties that make up much of the grist of the novel, Alice's thoughtful wavering between her cousin George Vavasor and the unwavering John Grey contrasted from Glencora's yearning for and uninhibited dancing with Burgo Fitzgerald. When at last pregnant, Glencora is so fettered and inactive because of her husband's concerns that she would like to descend the social ladder and become a milkmaid.

In fine, I was more sympathetic to George whose marital and political ambitions are ruined by having no money than I was to the beautiful love object Burgo who has only enough to become a degenerate. I find I cannot forgive the dominant role of wealth in Victorian society. But could AT?

Ripstein's anti-film Asi es la vida

2010-02-14T09:41:00.000-05:00

Asi es la vida, a filmed but literary version of Seneca's tragedy Medea

Arthur Ripstein and his wife and screen writer Paz Alicia Garciadiego have made a faithful version of the hideous tragedy of the Roman Seneca's Medea, moved and updated to a small, claustrophobic neighborhood in Mexico City. The high-powered Roman queen Medea has been degraded into Julia, an abortionist and curandera. Julia is a poor woman who is abandoned for a younger and richer woman by her husband, a small-time pugilist named Nicolas. True to her Senecan predecessor, Julia maintains a self-destructive fury that ends in her murder of their two children.

Even as a classicist, I am bothered rather than cheered by Ripstein's faithfulness to Seneca's tragedy. Because Seneca lived in Nero's police state, his tragedy may have been recited by a closeted solo actor rather than performed more conventionally in a public theater. Ripstein preserves the claustrophobia and paranoia of the original.

Were that he were not so true. Ripstein's screened claustrophobia crashes against the conventions of film. Asi es la vida is theatrical rather than cinematic with one exception. At intervals the camera follows the back of a mysterious silver van as it goes through monotonous highway tunnels . The van, whether it be a hearse, ambulance, or transport for a news crew, may represent elapsed time or the deus ex machina. On the whole, however, Ripstein confines his mise-en-scene to interiors and exteriors that could have been stage sets. So, like Seneca's tragedy, the film feels static. And as in Seneca, there is no development of the characters, who get angry and stay angry. Is it because he is in sympathy with Seneca that Ripstein misses the advantages of film? He does not paint with images and memories to give a full picture of characters and to fill in the story. Instead, the subconscious of Julia (the Medea character) and her almost ex Nicolas (the Jason character) close in rather than opening out cinematographically.

Asi es la vida then is an anti-film, going against cinematic conventions. Structurally, it achieves unity by finding modern analogues to the Senecan devices of the chorus and the deus ex machina, but with a heavy dose of alienation. By this I mean that Ripstein injects a weird sense of humor into the chorus and the deus ex machina. The chorus could drive you crazy! It is a depressing mariachi band with an affectless boy listlessly shaking his marraccas who sing what Medea is feeling, first in her presence and later from a TV screen. The TV assumes the entire role of the chorus. Medea's stormy feelings are read on the weather channel, and Jason's lust is figured by playing a porn video as he makes love to his new sweety. These devices, the chorus, the TV, and the mysterious van, rather than matching or contrasting images or sounds give the film coherence.

Unsurprisingly, like Brecht's, Ripstein's sense of humor is grotesque. The King figure, Julia's landlord and the father of Nicolas's love interest, for example is a hugely fat man who waddles around the barrio in a robe and slippers. If he blows up the King, Ripstein deflates the dragon chariot on which Medea sails away from her scene of murder. Instead of flying off, after killing their children at the top of a staircase so Nicolas can see, Julia simply walks down to the street and gets into a yellow cab. These devices are small for the big screen. But then again, Asi es la vida is hardly a popular film. Could Ripstein have made it to be viewed in the privacy of one's own home, as Seneca composed Medea as a closet tragedy?

If it is an anti-film, Asi es la vita does not add much to the dialog between men and women. Julia is every abandoned woman who has no identity and no value apart her husband and her children. Using Seneca's tragedy to tell us that poverty underlies psychopathic behavior is gratuitous. As Julia, Arcelia Ramirez is believable as she bangs her head against the wall and punches herself making her face bleed, to the accompaniment of the mariachis, but under Ripstein's direction I am afraid that the film is exploitative rather than revealing. And perhaps it is also gratuitous to add that Ripstein's film does not make use of the techne and resources of cinema as Lars von Trier's or Pasolini's versions of Medea. Von Trier's Medea is a horrifying amphibian monster and Pasolini's silent queen speaks in fire imagery. Ripstein writes using the history of theater, while von Trier and Pasolini used the whole world.

Zuviel: Recipes for too much chicken liver

2009-11-30T09:40:00.000-05:00

These days, chicken liver, when it is available, comes in a daunting 1-lb container. My solution for Thanksgiving is to make two different hors d'oeuvres. Thanks to the Cuisinart, this is a breeze. The strategy is to cook livers and onions and then divide them. One preparation serves Italophiles and the other goes down well with traditionalists. Both patés will be welcome to friends and family helping to make the dinner. For lunch, offer these two varieties of chopped liver on bagels, with sliced tomatoes and a mug of hot chicken or turkey broth. There will be plenty left for hors d'oeuvres.

Health note: The traditional recipe used chicken fat and 6 hard-boiled eggs.

Zuviel chicken liver (8 lunch and hors d'oeuvres servings)

1 lb chicken liver, washed, dried, cut in half, discarding membranes

1 large red onion, sliced

2 tblsp olive oil

salt, pepper

fresh parsley, rosemary, sage and thyme

2 tblsp Sherry or brandy

***********************

4 anchovies

1 tblsp capers

***********************

3 eggs

1 tblsp olive oil

fresh parsley, rosemary, sage and thyme

paprika

Sauté livers and onions with seasonings in hot olive oil until nicely browned; livers should be cooked through. At last minute add Sherry or brandy and cook down for a minute.

For Italophiles

Scrape half of the livers and onions into Cuisinart.
Add 4 anchovies and 1 tblsp capers and purée.
Scrape purée into serving dish. To serve, spread on thin slices of rye bread.

For traditionalists

Chop fresh herbs in Cuisinart.
Remove remaining liver and onions from frying pan to Cuisinart.
Heat 1 tblsp olive oil to frying pan.
Crack three eggs into hot oil and scramble until fairly hard.
Add eggs to Cuisinart. Chop coarsely. Taste for salt.
Scrape into serving dish. Sprinkle with paprika. Chill before serving.

Simple swordfish dinner for 2

2009-11-24T09:34:00.000-05:00

These quickly cooked ingredients add up to a tasty dinner in less than 30 minutes. Serve on individual plates or make a nice platter with couscous on the bottom and beautifully glazed and browned fish cut into serving pieces on top of couscous and surrounded by baby broccoli.

3/4-1 lb very fresh swordfish

juice of half a lemon

olive oil, coarse salt, freshly ground pepper

Preheat the broiler with rack at highest position. Wash and dry the fish and put in (disposable aluminum) broiling pan. Season on both sides with juice of half a lemon, olive oil, coarse salt, pepper. Let stand while preparing couscous.

Broil just before serving, 4 minutes on each side.

1/2 cup instant couscous

1/2 cup boiling water
pinch of saffron
handful of dried cherries
1 tblsp sliced almonds
olive oil, coarse salt, freshly ground pepper

Put couscous into medium sized serving dish. Pour boiling water over. Add pinch of saffron, olive oil, salt and pepper. Do not stir. Pour some boiling water over dried cherries in same measuring cup used for couscous and water. Put almonds in pyrex custard cup and brown for 2 minutes on high in microwave. Cook almonds in microwave for another minute. After 5 minutes fluff couscous with a fork, stir in drained cherries and sprinkle with browned almonds.

1/2 lb baby broccoli

juice of half a lemon

olive oil, coarse salt, freshly ground pepper

Chop baby broccoli into 1" pieces. Put in shallow microwave-proof bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Cook for 2 minutes. Remove plastic wrap and season vegetables with juice of half a lemon, olive oil, coarse salt, pepper. Serve immediately.

Note: Raw baby broccoli stays fresh in the refrigerator for at least a week.

Old and Good: Rashomon and Vienna Chamber Orchestra

2009-11-23T15:00:00.000-05:00

Looking around for things to do over the weekend, I chose a performer and a film vaguely remembered from college. Nearby, with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra, Philippe Entremont (b. 1934) was playing and conducting Mozart's 20th piano concerto as well as conducting Mozart's Haffner Symphony and Haydn's London Symphony, # 104. Kurosawa's film Rashomon was being shown in a repertory film theater downtown. Entremont was masterful at both conducting and playing: the orchestra was perfection, and Entremont was titanic and precise at the same time. He was especially grand in the cadenzas composed by Beethoven and at getting a Beethoven sound out of his small ensemble during the Haydn.

Rashomon, which was remastered last year to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Kurosawa's death, was harder to come to terms with than the effervescent music, and not only because the film's musical score combines bouncy Western music with kitchy riffs on Bizet's Bolero. The film contains four dramatized accounts of a rape and a murder. These self-serving accounts, shot in the luminous style of René Clair, add up to a parable of the problems facing Japan immediately after the Second World War: the clash between peasants and aristocrats, subjugation of women, poverty, and the irrelevance of traditional religion. The woman who was raped spent a lot of time crying and shouting in each of the four accounts of the incident. Did this make her an unsympathetic character? But incontrovertibly she was raped! Why didn't she merit our sympathy simply on that basis? An even deeper irony emerged from the revelation that the truest account was given by an avowed liar and thief.

The concert and the film were great. They are as novel today as they were when I was in college. Just as with individual sections of Philippe Entremont's concert, it is possible to look back at the film and experience freshness and spontaneity. Kurosawa was figuring out for the first time how to tell a story with images, and Mifune was trying to convey the mad physicality of a rapist and murderer who swatted insects with the same violence he used on human beings.

Recipes as Thanks for Comments to "A New Gadget"

2009-11-22T08:48:00.000-05:00

Friends' enthusiastic email comments to my first cooking blog have encouraged me to keep going in a seasonal direction.

To answer Marla's questions about Thanksgiving: I'm going to throw my sweet potatoes in with cranberries, orange zest and juice--maybe walnuts?? Some brown sugar?Seasonings?? Do you think it will work??

Sort of, but it would be better to keep the two separate. Here are two super easy recipes.

Sweet potatoes a la maman
Figure on one orange, one small sweet potato and one apple per serving. For large amounts, use the Cuisinart to slice peeled, cored apples and peeled potatoes.

Starting with potatoes and ending with apples, make alternating layers of peeled, sliced potatoes with peeled, cored apples in a shallow, buttered microwave-proof casserole.
Over each layer of apples spread orange zest, pinches of butter, and brown sugar or cinnamon sugar.
Cook uncovered at 350 F for about an hour, until soft. Reheat, covered with plastic wrap, in microwave.

Cranberry sauce

Cook a 12-oz bag of cleaned cranberries with 1/2 cup of sugar, a stick of cinnamon, and 1/4 cup of orange or apple juice in an 8-cup Pyrex measuring cup covered with plastic wrap in the microwave. The cranberries are ready when they start to pop, in 5 or 6 minutes. Add a dash of orange-flavored liqueur and grated orange rind. Put into serving dish, cover, and cool in refrigerator until jelled.

Notes. Peeled, diced apples or diced pears may be cooked along with cranberries.

Chopped walnuts may be added after cooking.

Chicken salad with diced pepper and green beans for Brigid (2 servings)

Cook 4 oz of green beans, sprinkled with water and wrapped in plastic, in microwave for 2 minutes.

Remove chicken from a big roasted half-breast and wing, throwing away skin. Cut into large dice.

Add juice of half a lemon, 1 tblsp diet Mayonnaise, 1 tblsp barbecue sauce or 1 tsp concentrated tomato paste, 1 tsp turmeric, coarse salt and freshly ground pepper, 1/2 red or orange pepper, diced.

Line a serving plate with lettuce or baby spinach, and put chicken salad on top. Strew 4 oz of cooked green beans cut in 1" pieces on top. Sprinkle with sherry wine vinegar and olive oil.

A New Gadget: Enthralling One-Pot Meals

2009-11-19T11:48:00.000-05:00

I was not hungry when returning from a 5-mile walk I ran into a friend with her two little dogs near my house. Marla was excited about a new cookbook, something about easy, fast, better than Chicken Out, and with lots of vegetables. Since she is pretty, smart, and technically savvy I went into the bookstore we were standing in front of as quickly as it was possible to do so politely. Luckily Barnes and Noble store 2759 had a copy of Elizabeth Yarnell’s Glorious One-Pot Meals.

I am an endless proselytizer for new gadgets. First it was the Cuisinart, then the microwave, then the pressure cooker, parchment paper, and finally the stick blender. Now Yarnell’s amazing cookbook holds me in thrall.
Glorious One-Pot Meals has a sexy but accurate subtitle: “a revolutionary new quick and healthy approach to Dutch-oven cooking”.

Revolutionary. This is one-swoop cooking. While the oven is preheating to 450 F, you assemble your ingredients. In the hot oven, the 2-quart Creuset casserole is transformed into a microwave or steamer. The wet ingredients provide steam to cook everything through.

New. Without any pre-cooking, everything goes into the pot in specific layers at the same time. This includes frozen and dry ingredients like rice, pasta, couscous, polenta, quinoa. My grandmother threw everything into a vast soup kettle, but Yarnell’s method is precise.

Quick. It usually takes 5 or 10 minutes longer to get the casserole ready than it does for the oven to heat up, but the actual cooking time is mysterious. Yarnell specifies 45 minutes, plus 3 minutes after it starts smelling like dinner. This can be a pleasant interval for washing the knife and cutting board, returning everything to cupboard and refrigerator, setting the table, and having a pleasant time with wine and Tivo or running around the block. The proper cooking time is about 35 minutes.

Healthy. A scant poof of oil comes from a spray of olive or canola oil onto the interior of the pot and inside its lid, and nutritious grains and vegetables.

Dutch-oven. The 2-quart Creuset pot is adorable and usually easy to clean.

Cooking. Fish and seafood cook quickly and are easily ruined by overcooking, as I knew but felt compelled to discover once again. Meatballs and macaroni in tomato sauce stuck to the bottom of the pot. I’ll make the meatballs again with more liquid, but I am not going to hazard any recipes with beef filet.

Glorious. Yarnell’s cookbook has other advantages: Yarnell has a nice way with seasonings, and many of the recipes are flexible in the sense that you can substitute whatever vegetables you have or like. But stay with the 2-quart casserole. Citrus-Ginger Chicken with Root Vegetables, the first recipe I tried in a pot that was larger than the 2-quart Creuset casserole, had too much liquid, and was overcooked; but the combination of citrus, honey was so intense that I intend to make it again, in the right casserole. Especially satisfying are the recipes with grains, like polenta with sausage, California chicken with quinoa, and red curry chicken with Basmati rice. And did I mention that there is almost always a little bit left over for lunch?

So thanks to Marla and Yarnell, for firing me up to try new recipes!

BLACK Memory Holes in Jo Nesbø's thriller NEMESIS

2009-07-27T08:56:00.000-04:00

For an athlete dying old: Nesser's RETURN

2009-07-16T09:30:00.000-04:00

There is usually not much sympathy for the dregs of society who end up as victims in Nordic mysteries. Maj Sjöwall's ROSEANNA is off the radar screen because all she seeks are thrills and privacy, and there is a horrible justice in Nesser's own BORKMAN'S POINT. More an object of horror than sympathy, the rotting corpse found by a fat six-year-old girl is headless, handless, footless in Hakan Nesser's THE RETURN. Like the corpse, Chief Detective Van Veeteren also goes under the knife in this slow-paced, darkly brooding philosophical procedural. Medical and societal problems run parallel as Chief Inspector Van Veeteren doggedly and unhappily contemplates and undergoes surgery, and then institutes his own rehab for intestinal cancer. Once he is physically cured, Van Veeteren becomes fully human by transforming himself into the spirit of Nemesis. Van Veeteren cannot find the victim's missing head, hands and feet, but he does return him to society, and to the right of Christian burial. Only because of Van Veeteren's persistence, the fallen athlete Leopold Verhaven does receive the sympathy of his community.

Helene Tursten's GLASS DEVIL: A Cozy Tragedy

2009-07-15T09:47:00.000-04:00

I cannot keep from admiring Chief Inspector Irene Huss, and not only for her far from decorative ju-jitsu moves. The stellar Swedish protagonist of Helene Tursten's mystery THE GLASS DEVIL must find the murderer of a well-respected pastor, his depressive wife, and their son who is a popular elementary school teacher. Huss runs head on into the demonic in a god-loving community in several small hamlets outside her home of Goteborg. Much to Huss's delight, the trail leads to elegant Mayfair, endearing but dangerous Bayswater, Edinburgh, and a castle or two. As the scenery changes, the solution to the three murders plays out like the final act by the Roman tragedian Seneca -- or his modern successor the outrageous Sarah Kane who updated Greek myth to expose and debase the Royals. The new ecclesiastical and techie royalty have as much to hide as their mythic predecessors. But in a way, this is a comforting book, for virtue and family values prevail as perennially bad weather and violent gang skirmishes make the police team cozy up across the North Sea. And even though Inspector Huss seems beguiled by her English counterpart, the dashing Scottish-Brazilian Glen Thompson, she is a family gal, happiest enjoying Good Friday buffet lunch with mom, chef hubby and her twin daughters, and tidying up the emotional life of her unruly superior.

Cat Eats Connelly's SCARECROW

2009-07-09T08:27:00.000-04:00

Not the best of Connelly's books, THE SCARECROW suffers from repetitiveness of the cat-and-mouse formula and somewhat less nuanced characters than MC usually gives us. Connelly compensates by giving a scary analysis of the news business -- and the FBI. The newsroom scenes and lingo are fun, even if his verdict is that the paper is going the way of all flesh. The detective's nemesis incarnates what's wrong with the media -- the insanely stunted juvenile crud that is creeping into all aspects of our lives. Even when he's not at the top of his form, Connelly still produces a good page-turner, though I will not, like so many reviewers do, tell you what is in store!

Courtney Sullivan's COMMENCEMENT delivers sexy read

2009-07-09T08:23:00.000-04:00

Courtney Sullivan's COMMENCEMENT satisfied this Smith College grad's desire to know how the sexual revolution has changed the college in the last 45 years. What may have grated the most is that grades are up: the four friends tracked here all received Phi Beta Kappa. The girls are not repressed: they sleep together, but while kissing, hugging and sitting in each other's laps are routine, going all the way is something special. Jews hardly exist, except in name, and although the girls are supposed to be smart, they don't care much about their classes unless they're sleeping with the prof. Marriage with a MAN is a despised option, while commitment to a WOMAN is applauded. The one perfect man accepts that his wedding ceremony is held within Grécourt Gates and outside the girls will continue as mainstays of his wife's affections, up to and including in the delivery room. All in all, a fun, sexy read, characters are action figures rather than well analyzed, and not especially well written, even though the author is a member of the NYT editorial staff (hence the good reviews?)

An Open Question: Kate Walbert's Brief History of Women

2009-07-09T08:19:00.000-04:00

Odd, funny, and somewhat unpleasant, like an Edward Gorey illustration, Kate Walbert's BRIEF HISTORY OF WOMEN uses interconnected chapters with points of view of successive generations of women to describe effects of rabid suffragettism combined with the Great War. The book begins with a young girl witnessing her mother's death by starvation as a protest for rights for women. It ends with what must be the final days of this girl, by now a retired professor of mathematics tenderly spoon fed by a young student from Barnard College. Time slips back and forth, as Walbert lets each of her five or so protagonists speak, sometimes in a style that would have delighted Virginia Woolf, so full it is of dangling sense perceptions and contradictory ideas. The descriptions of blue-stocking life at Girton College, Oxford, are as hilarious as they are enlightening, while the fate of a female professor at Barnard is an altogether somber affair when it means that her heart, like her mother's is closed. Through love affairs, marriages, Platonic relationships, divorces, drunken mommy play-dates, and even anonymous midnight blogging with one's own mother, the Woman Question -- what shall I do -- is never answered.

Jealously conservative of old things

2009-06-24T12:07:00.000-04:00

but conservative of them as pillars, not as pinnacles -- as aids, but not as idols. --John Ruskin

What is musical conservatism? At 19, Mendelssohn modeled his Op. 13 string quartet on Beethoven’s opera 130 and 132. Did his precocious ability doom Mendelssohn as a shooting star rather than a guiding light in the musical firmament? Shostakovich was discredited for his musical and political conservatism by the Viennese school of critics and atonal composers -- and by his political enemies. Brahms too was faulted for not looking beyond his great predecessors. Despite his abhorrence of the more modern Wagnerian chromaticism and his daily habit of prayer, it is claimed that Brahms had cosmopolitan taste in friends!

In op. 13, Mendelssohn conserves his own song, The Questions, where the poet equates his beloved’s questions to the moon and stars with her loyally to him.

Is it true? Is it true
that over there in the leafy walkway, you always
wait for me by the vine-draped wall?
And that with the moonlight and the little stars
you consult about me also?

These questions permeate the quartet, first wistfully, then developed more insistently in each movement. In the second movement the song enters as a hymn, and then becomes counterpoint; in the third movement a tiny part of the song is a repetitive dance and then a fluffy scherzo reminiscent of Mendelssohn’s contemporaneous Midsummer Night’s Dream overture. The orchestral finale movement alternates between operatic and contrapuntal passages, always with heart-felt intensity. The hymn from the second movement is reprised in a final coda.

If Mendelssohn’s quartet embodies organic unity, Shostakovich’s fourth quartet shifts ambivalently among major-minor, modal, and chromatic harmonies. Nevertheless, like Mendelssohn, the Russian achieves cohesiveness with similar motifs throughout. A bucolic folk tune harmonized with open fifths and a bass pedal point gets more furious, insistent and buzzing before returning to the pastoral mood. In the second movement, the violin solo develops into a short recitative hinted at in earlier movement; the alternating-note motif also continues, more plaintively, ascending and descending with purple patches, through unlikely tonal centers that shift among tonal, modal, and chromatic techniques. Shostakovich’s use of these three scale patterns has been linked, unfairly, to his ability to survive and prosper under Stalin. The third movement is frenetic, with repeated notes that contrast with melodies that wander uncertainly like witches through a night sky until a sad cello theme enters without a break to begin the final movement. The back and forth movement of the violin morphs into a parodic dance, limping, bouncing, moaning. As this “Jewish” motif is shared conversationally among the instruments harmonies become harsh with “wrong” notes, repeating obsessively instead of developing.

The most conservative part of Brahms’ Op. 18 sextet is its great theme-and-variations second movement, which can be analogized to Brahms’ character. At first “sober and dignified” the theme in D minor becomes turbulent, evoking “broad sweeps of romantic lyricism” and “tender intimacy” before the coda, in the major but tinged with minor, falls into reverie.

The wet way to flourish after breast cancer

2009-06-24T11:48:00.000-04:00

As soon as I learned about dragon boating I simply had to try it — and it seems to have transformed me, into a more daring person. My story is not unique. I speak for women I have met in Washington, DC, on the East Coast, in California, Canada, Italy, and France.

Here is how it started. Three years ago, I had just finished surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation for stage 3 invasive breast cancer. As I was leaving my physical therapist’s office, I picked up a post card inviting breast cancers survivors at any level of fitness to try out dragon boating at the Anacostia Boathouse in South East Washington, DC. Neither my therapist nor I had ever heard of dragon boating. She was willing to let me try. I felt that I had to try, for unless I did something extraordinary I would be letting breast cancer have its way with me. I was 63 and cancer was not going to be an excuse for getting old.

A lot has happened since the first time I went down alone to the Anacostia Boathouse. Now with more than 20 members, GoPink!DC then had eight or nine. I was in awe of them. I also wanted to be like them, to catch up, to learn to put together what seemed like many complicated and unnatural elements of the dragon boat stroke that they had mastered. It made me tired just to watch them as with their inside arms close to their ears and backs facing the shore, they leaned out over gunwale burying their paddle blades deep in the water, rotating as they pulled back their paddles to their hips, and then sitting up and counter-rotating to assume their beginning position with their backs facing the shore. They looked like the Greek huntress goddess Diana as they pulled back imaginary bow-strings. I wanted to look like that, to be part of their group.

To paraphrase from Nathan Detroit’s description of his card game in the Broadway musical “Guys and Dolls,” my team GoPink!DC, Washington’s first and only dragon boat team for breast cancer survivors and their supporters, is the oldest established, permanent floating, breast cancer support group in Washington. The sport is only part of what happens. Sure, we practice together on Saturday mornings and race together against other breast cancer survivor dragon boat teams in festivals. GoPink!DC has given me the confidence to join other teams as well, the DC Dragons, DC Dragon Boat Club, and most spectacularly, the Dragon Lady of Florence, Italy.

Often it seems that all I think about is how to attract breast cancer survivors and the medical community to dragon boating. I want to change the story that breast cancer patients tell themselves about what their lives can be like. In the United States, dragon boating is just starting to be visible. The sport is very popular in Canada where in 1996 Dr Don McKenzie started a study to determine whether upper body exercise would help or harm women who had undergone surgery and radiation after breast cancer and were at risk of developing lymphedema, a swelling of the arm that can be a complication. Dr McKenzie recruited 25 women in Vancouver, five of whom I met recently in Italy, and taught them dragon boat paddling. After the study was over, Dr McKenzie’s volunteers insisted on continuing as a team, A Breast in A Boat, for the strenuous upper body exercise had not harmed them physically; on the contrary, paddling had made them stronger in mind and body. Plenty of women and their doctors agree. At last count, there are 150 breast cancer survivor dragon boat teams worldwide, 30 in the US, and the rest in Canada, Italy, France, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

I am part of the international movement to demonstrate that life after breast cancer can and should be an adventure! GoPink!DC deems such a positive attitude a gift of cancer. Our lives have been interrupted by cancer, which has a genius of its own. That genius made me think once again about what Erik Erikson had written in Identity: Youth and Crisis. Recently, as in the late 1960’s, I have drawn comfort from Erikson’s theory of crisis as an opportunity for positive change. My body has been repaired, and even improved, because I seized an opportunity from the polluted jaws of misfortune. Friends still think me crazy for exposing myself to filthy water in the Anacostia and Venice, but my husband is reassured that I am on teams that perform respectably and even win races. Last year I took part in seven dragon boat festivals; this year the number will be at least five.

But those are not the only important numbers. As a member of what medical sociologist Arthur Frank calls the remission society, I have GoPink!DC as my safety net. It is dangerous to have breast cancer, and to spend time with others who have had it. I have lost friends. I could lose my life. Perhaps that is why I love the sport and the people who do it. We are on the edge, and that can be an exciting place to be. The latest statistic from the American Cancer Society is that one in eight American women will contract metastatic breast cancer over her lifetime. But the number seems higher. Just two weeks ago in Florence while visiting with a college friend we realized that three of the 12 of our junior year abroad group have had breast cancer — that we know of. As Abbie Hoffman said of prison reform when he was arrested at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, in 1969, the new issue is survivorship!

The motto for GoPink!DC, “Friendship, fitness, and fun!” makes a boon of survivorship. A few weeks ago when I was the only American to speak in Venice at the Forza Rosa international conference on paddling and breast cancer I translated our motto into Italian. As is natural in Italy, each element of our message got magnified, into “amicizia, benessere, e gioia!” Amicizia is a resonant value from ancient Rome. In his treatise on friendship Cicero could have been describing what friendship means for the members of GoPink!DC.

“[I]t lights up a good hope for the time to come, and thus preserves the minds that it sustains from imbecility or prostration in misfortune….Thus the absent are present, and the poor are rich, and the weak are strong, and — what seems stranger still — the dead are alive….so that the death of the dying seems happy, the life of the living full of praise.”

Benessere, or well-being, comprehends mind and body. Finally, joy is greater than fun. Gioia in Italian has a difficult etymology, but it seems to come from the Latin word joca, which gave the Italians their word for game or sport, and means everything that produces pleasure and is filled with pleasure.

It should be clear by now that I have put in time as a classics professor. Because at 64 I was no longer willing or able to teach full time, I lost my job teaching Latin, Greek literature in translation, and mythology and film in the Classics Department at Howard University. But I did not entirely lose my focus. As a scholarly project I began to look for parallels between the dragon boat festival and ancient Greek athletic festivals. It seemed that Westerners might more easily understand and appreciate the history of dragon boat festivals within the framework of the ancient Greek Olympics.

As I have learned, dragon boat racing is an ancient sport that emerged in Southern China about 2,500 years ago, at roughly at the same time as rowing became the first team sport to be included in ancient athletic festivals in Greece. Like the Olympics and other ancient Greek festivals, the ancient dragon boat festival was born of commemorative poetry. Greek festivals included competitive recitations of Homer’s epics and were also occasions for poetry that praised athletes and patrons by equating them with the gods. The dragon boat festival, while most likely part of shamanistic practices surrounding the cult of the prehistoric river gods on whom the people’s survival depended, was dedicated to the lyric poet Qu Yuen, the father of Chinese poetry. As tradition has it, Qu Yuen, a disfavored diplomat during the Tang dynasty, drowned himself in the river Miliuo on the 5th day of the 5th moon in 277 B.C.E. In the first ever race Qu Yuen’s followers paddled after him trying unsuccessfully to save his body from the fish.

Neither the Greek festivals nor the dragon boat festivals have continued uninterruptedly since ancient times. While love for everything Greek led the Brits to revive the Olympics in the 1880’s, it was not until about 90 years later that dragon boat festivals began to be celebrated world wide. My knowledge of festivals is limited to Princeton, Ithaca, Long Beach, and Venice, but north, south, east, west, the DC Festival is best. Dragon boating is a source of pride for the Asian community, and paddling with an international club, the National Capital Area Women’s Paddling Association, is part of the fun. But once I became involved as a representative of GoPink!DC, helping plan the DC International Dragon Boat Festival I entered the distinctly different world of the Chinese Women’s League. Our teams love to eat together, but the CWL starts every meeting with food; while we treat each other with tough love, the CWL are always respectful. GoPink!DC has much to learn from the CWL. The critical and most instructive difference is that the CWL as just that — not individuals but a community. Oddly, in this they resemble the Dragon Lady team of Florence who always include food — and their entire families in celebrations.

But back to the DC International Dragon Boat Festival. Started eight years ago, the DC Festival is more meticulously run than and as colorful as anything I have seen, with fat red, green, gold dancing dragon puppets whose white fur is piped in gold, dragon kites, drummers, scads of local dignitaries, and a dignified carnation ceremony recognizing breast cancer survivors and those who have not been lucky. In accord with ancient tradition, the DC Festival is held in the middle of May, corresponding to the fifth day of the fifth month. The fifth month was the time of epidemics, when the ancient water people of southern China were beset by the five venomous inspects or reptiles, the snake, scorpion, centipede, lizard, and toad. In Washington, the middle of May is the time of storms. This year the CWL brought over The Ro Han Mem Taiwanese Cultural Troupe whose songs, dances, and a battle array even with a generous percussion accompaniment did little to improve the weather.

Bad weather is a fact of dragon boating. After all, it is a water sport, and only very high and turbulent water with thunder and lightning can interrupt or postpone a festival, in the United States, that is. In Italy, everything is more dramatic. At the Vogalonga race in Venice, at least, bad weather and rescue boats are just additional characters in the comedy. Even with 80-km per hour winds, as I learned, May 31, 2009, the show goes on. Some 30 of the 1600 boats submerged, with rescue boats stirring up the waves and then efficiently rescuing the unlucky, while most of the boats found sheltered canals that led them to cheering crowds at the finish line. My team of women from Florence, England, and the US went down. But as with submerging, so with life. We are all back up and eager to paddle in the Vogalonga and to meet up again together in Canada next year!

My experience with dragon boating has changed the way I tell the story of having had breast cancer, but not the way that a Venetian oncologist suggested. Her message is that you can be again what you once were. For me at least, that is not true. With mixed emotions I accept that I either cannot or will not return to being a university instructor. But teach I will, to a new and different audience. The ancient rhetoricians, like the existentialists, told us that our example, who we are and what we do, our ethos, is the most forceful argument of all. With more than a little help from my friends, new and old, like me and very different, alive and dead, I have found that dragon boat paddling is a big part of who I am.

My new job is to pass that information on. On the water we not only grow, we flourish after breast cancer.

Sources of unity

2009-05-04T11:02:00.000-04:00

Three piano trios recently performed together by the Amsterdam Trio, Beethoven’s Opus 1, no. 1, Martinů’s Bergerettes, and Brahms’ second piano trio Opus 87 encode as many approaches to the problem of unity. Beethoven and Martinů are cool, technical: the first adhered to expectations of classical repetition and variation, while the second used rhythm as a unifying device. Brahms however traditional in his compositional approaches is hot: his trio (1880–82) is all at one high level of emotional intensity. Thus, the Moravian folk tunes as used by Brahms in his prime sing out with abandon while Martinů’s are thickly veiled.

His first trio brings to mind the early version of the Titanic Beethoven as a cool, calculating, popular and brilliant pianist about Vienna, as indeed he was in 1795 when he decided to start publishing his work, lest it be stolen by his competitors. Despite having stopped his studies with Haydn a year earlier, Beethoven continues in the first trio to converse with his old master, making gentle jests of the older composer’s proclivity for jaunty tunes that veer on the edge of sophisticated silliness.

More bracing than silly, the Bergerettes (1939) refresh like a rare vintage champagne, a sparkling and well-crafted but minor work from a prolific and versatile Czech composer not enough celebrated outside of his homeland but whom Ernest Ansermet considered the greatest symphonist of his generation. Somewhat obscured by bubbling rhythms are the composer’s characteristic careful selection and planning. With a jazzy attitude, melodic motifs grow in complexity from the repeated notes of the opening, to scale passages in the second movement, followed by a sobbing motif in the third movement, alternating notes with scale passages over a slightly crashy piano accompaniment in the fourth movement, and finishing with with a less syncopated, more insistent motif of alternating notes in the final movement.

Beneath the jazz are other elements of this eclectic composer’s musical biography. Largely self-taught, Martinů adored the Bohemian country side and played the violin from the age of six. His crystalline repetitions recast in rhythms learned along Parisian boulevards alongside his friend the composer Albert Roussell still clang like the church bells he heard living atop the church tower where his father was the bell ringer in the small Bohemian town of Policka. Like the Baroque concerti he admired, the first movement opens with the instruments playing repeated notes all together, then, in the middle section, as soloists The title Bergerettes signals Martinů’s love for Orlando di Lasso and the English madrigalists. With their folksy ABA form, his Bergerettes are less like single-stanza songs for a shepherdess than their Italian cousin Barzelletta used by the madrigalists whose music littered the tiny room in the 14th arrondissement where Martinů lived from 1923, until he escaped on foot to Aix-en-Provence following the Fall of Paris. As a whole, the Bergerettes are more French than the French, weaving together open harmonies of Copland, jangling traffic sounds of Gershwin, neoclassic counterpoint of Stravinsky, haunting loneliness of Shostakovich into an idiosyncratic mélange, as suited to a ballet or film score as to abstract music.

Swedish fog and Italian sun: mysteries of Sjövall and Camilleri

2009-04-28T09:12:00.000-04:00

Roseanna by Maj Sjöwall

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
ROSEANNA, the first of Maj Sjövall's Martin Beck series, is a procedural in the truest sense, moving at an almost excruciating pace as it follows the obsessive thoughts and actions of the detective Beck solving the murder of a young American young woman aboard a small Swedish cruise ship who without his efforts would have been a nameless victim. I'd wanted to read something by Sjövall because Detective Inspector Montalban was reading one in Andrea Camilleri's most recent mystery AUGUST HEAT. Camilleri's books have humorous descriptions of love and desire, but Sjövall's Nordic detective is all about work: his marriage is loveless, his job without long lunches holds no pleasurable distractions, and when the sun shines someone gets murdered. Camilleri's books are tasty snacks that focus on age-old Italian social problems, but the novels in Sjövall's series take longer to read and digest because Sweden is terra incognita. I am happy there are more books in this sad Swedish detective series.

View all my reviews.

O, Susanna

2009-03-27T11:14:00.000-04:00

Washington may have a new sweet heart. The audience seemed unable to restrain their applause, bravos and uncategorizable shouts for young soprano Susanna Phillips's DC debut recital of Lieder and art songs by Strauss, Faure, Barber (Knoxville 1915) and Messaien last night at the Terrace Theater. Phillips is a most assured and cheerful performer whose luscious soprano sound pays throughout her range, from quiet plainsong chants of Messaien all the way up to brilliant Straussian flourishes. She sings with the intelligence, joyous abandon, and love that made Beverly Sills famous. Gotta go: I'm catching the Vamoose the hear Susanna sing Musetta at the Met!

Yesterday, today and tomorrow

2009-03-23T17:22:00.000-04:00

Is listening to recordings useful preparation for writing a program essay? A pianist friend thinks not, because recordings, and my essays, are broadly interpretive. She is right, but she is also wrong. Superlative recordings by the Melos and Takács quartets of Beethoven's Op. 95 and Schubert's "Rosamunde" quartets led me to bold interpretations that were proved more correct than I could have ever predicted -- as performed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Sunday, by the very young Ariel Quartet from Israel. It was not the immediacy of performance but more the shock of hearing a cohesive and original group dynamic supporting individual virtuosity and temperament. Two players alternated as first violin. Gershon Gerchikov made the folia theme explode in the last movement of Beethoven's Opus 95, and Alexandra Kazovsky played Schubert's melodies with the finesse of a Lieder singer. Writing the essay was a pleasant intellectual enterprise, with some interpretive leaps, but listening to the young Ariels made my heart leap with joy.

Fair world, where are you?

The well formed and delightful quartets of Beethoven’s Opus 59 had more influence on his contemporary Schubert and his successor Brahms; yet the aesthetic of his Opus 95 quartet, perhaps because it is difficult, may be closer to our sensibilities. In this, the first of his “late” works, Beethoven assumes a haughty, Jovian outlook, surveying endless musical possibilities and transforming them into elemental musical ideas. The cosmic Beethoven is no longer producing organic unity with highly contrastive themes that morph into each other. Instead, the Opus 95 quartet expresses polarity in groups of well-developed fragments that form a dialogue between male and female mythic forces. Rather than stating, developing, transitioning, and recapitulating, the quartet unfolds like conversation between Creon and Antigone. The play between these two forces devolves into madness before ending with a happy flourish, like a satyr play coming at the end of a tragic cycle.

Masculine and feminine forces alternate as first speaker in each of the four movements, with masculine starting the faster, odd-numbered movements and the female starting the slower even-numbered ones. Beethoven grabs our attention with an assertive twirling summons that resides with a tender, yearning theme in the first violin. The summoning theme moves along in twirls and brash scale passages, occupying more time and space than its female counterpart.

It is only logical then that the feminine element should begin the second movement, rising above a tentative downwards scale passage, a veiled announcement of how the plaintive theme with its orderly melody plus accompaniment form and classical gestures will be explored contrapuntally. The contrast here between somber lyricism and polyphony is the basic stuff of Schubert’s “Rosamunde” quartet. With the third movement a harsh, acerbic mood starts, only to be broken by episodes of sweet, ascendant yearning that yield to it in the end. The yearning mood of the fourth movement develops into a full-blown folia or madness theme typical of the Baroque period. Madness scampers in fits of joy and sorrowful sobs, pursued by sawing menaces, until it falls into a sad heap. The Mozartean flurry at the end must have inspired Mendelssohn, to say nothing of Brahms.

As with Opus 95, a personal and cosmic sense of loss lies behind Schubert’s “Rosamunde” Quartet. In the lost play for which Schubert wrote incidental music Rosamunde laments, “The full moon shines on the mountain tops. How much I have missed you.” The opening lament and its contrapuntal treatment uncannily continue what Beethoven began. The third movement quotes Schubert’s song setting of Schiller’s poem Gods of Greece, a cosmic lament for the Golden Age, “Fair world, where are you? Turn back again, sweet blossom-age of nature.”

What's in a blog name?

2009-03-21T09:32:00.000-04:00

The title for my blog plays my given name, Sue Fields, against my married name, Susan Joseph, while signaling my long-held love for German art songs and my new enthusiasm for the Chinese sport of dragon boating. Past and future meet between zu viel and Suzhou. I cannot penetrate the tautology zu viel, which means too much, but Suzhou, the garden city of China, is a metaphor for the possibility of change.