Today’s breakfast

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One can think of eggs in many ways (including, in the case of my brother John, not at all), but this is one of my favorite breakfasts. No two iterations are the same, what with the variability in eggs, the heat of the pan, the attention paid to the magic moment for over-easying, the state of the toast… Nothing special, but mine own:

Apotheosis of Hen Fruit Apotheosis of Hen Fruit

…and sambal oelek and a touch of pepper, on pumpernickel:

Apotheosis of Hen Fruit

Thinking about food blogging

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A recent correspondence thread has got me considering how I might blog about food (one of the realms of interest that I’ve developed ummmmm fully…), and so I’m sort of looking out for food-related material. A story in today’s Guardian on making sausages [by Tim Hayward] is worth a look if this sort of thing rings any personal bells [emphasis added, and don’t miss the Comments]:

The truly ideal way to cook a sausage is to poach it slowly sunk to its hips in a bath of olive oil but, failing that, massage each individually with oil first then slide them into an oiled pan and keep them rolling, on a low heat, for as long and as continuously as possible.

Trust me, even 25 minutes of gently rolling them back and forth, jostling their plumply greased little bodies against each other is not too long. As the skins change to a light tan, then begin to caramelise as the Maillard reaction takes place, you’ll find yourself shifting into the perfect meditative state to honour your sausage.

Vegetarian friends may gag at the very thought, but for those of us without qualms there’s something ineffable in the guilty pleasure of a well-turned sausage. Dunno that I care to put all that work into stuffing casings myself, but I wish I could lay my hands on the Julia Child “stuff it yourself” episode.

Admiring what Ian Nagoski is up to

A posting at Excavated Shellac got me started on this threadlet. It links to an mp3 of a ca. 1911 Turkish-language record (though probably sung by two Christian or Jewish women) that’s in the Pretty Boy Floyd tradition. Or so I learned by reading Ian Nagoski’s masterful summary, which served to connect up a bunch of dots I already knew something about, having to do with pre-1921 Smyrna, its ethnic composition and its various musics. I’ve been acquainted with Nagoski’s enterprise since acquiring his compilation CD Black Mirror: Reflections in Global Musics 1918-1955, but I hadn’t turned Google loose on the case until today, and the documents linked below tell a tale that I could only wish was my own:

Distant Transmissions: Ian Nagoski brings obscure World Music 78s to CD

News from Home: a short tour of non-English language music for sale in Baltimore

Ian Nagoski: Musician and Writer (2001 interview, before his immersion in ‘World’ stuff, but there’s a money quote: “…curating and re-presenting consensus-reality culture with insight [as in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music] can be completely mind-shattering.”)

I have wrestled for years with the enormous potential represented by my own music collections, and with the question of how to link stuff up, how to distribute the gems to audiences who would be glad to hear them, how to narrate the stories that are immured in the grooves and the lyrics. I don’t expect to solve those problems, but it’s heartening to see examples like Ian Nagoski, and to know that others are after some of the same things.