Yesterday’s posting “Another visit to Vienne en Isère” ended with a menu from a 1971 lunch Bonnie and Ed Campbell had at the fabulous restaurant La Pyramide in Vienne in 1971; I wondered what choices they had made from the menu, and Bonnie recalled that they had chosen La Marjolaine as the dessert. A specialty of the house, as it turns out. A photo of this remarkable flourless cake, and then crucial information from the Epicurious site’s “This Classic French Cake Tastes Like the World’s Best Candy Bar: The majestic marjolaine — beloved by chefs all over — is worth making for your special celebration” by Genevieve Yam on 1/20/22:
Archive for the ‘Taste’ Category
Vienne en Isère 3: La Marjolaine
October 24, 2025Entertaining raunch
September 11, 2025(Plain talk about male bodies and man-on-man sex, so not for kids or the sexually modest — though raunchification is pretty much the apex of funny for early-teen boys)
☹️ 😢 😡 sad weeping furious on the anniversary of 9/11/01 , also on the day after the assassination of Charley-Horst Kirk-Wessel, occasions whose stench can only be properly countered by the celebration of small everyday human experiences that bring moments of delight, joy, and pleasurable physicality — not to take us away from the wreckage falling around us, but to assert and nourish what’s best in us, and not in any grand gesture or powerful speech, but in simple, everyday, silly, and earthy acts. Kharkiv Opera, but on a more intimate scale. Darwin had considerable reverence for the earthworm and its doings; let’s look to Darwin.
Two Facebook exchanges from yesterday, in which I write innocent comments (boldfaced below) that can, if you have the mind for it, be raunchified — understood as a raunchy double entendre:
Fortuitous soup
March 16, 2025This is a third Kharkiv Opera posting, about a pleasant, playful, joyous event staged in the face of terrible times. Previously on this blog:
— on 3/9, “The dandelion caper”, about the enjoyment of the plants and flowers around us
— on 3/11, “Music of the night, about the enjoyment of music
Today, it’s about the enjoyment of food, in particular a 2/17 soup* I contrived from things I happened to have in the house — leftovers from a Chinese food delivery; some leftover crunchy salad greens; rice sticks (maifun), which are staple household supplies in my kitchen cupboard; beef broth in a carton, ditto; and some fine chili power that I got as a gift a while back. The result was fabulous, and there was enough for three meals. Amazing Wok duet mushroom beef, Taylor Farms Mediterranean crunch salad, Dynasty rice vermicelli, and Penzey’s medium hot chili powder: I salute you.
[*The mills of the mammoth grind exceedingly slowly.]
Aged anchovy salt
December 27, 2024🎁 Boxing Day 🎁 — also St. Stephen, with his feets uneven — coming a day late, because life has been very difficult for me, and postings have piled up so high I’m not sure I can ever get to them, so I’ve picked something I know I can get done, so that this dark, rainy, and excruciatingly painful low-air-pressure day will not be a total loss
I bring you an e-mail message from Victor Steinbok on 12/25, about this ad for Spice Tribe (website here), a San Francisco-based on-line spice store dedicated to mindful cooking:
(#1) VS wrote: Facebook has offered another example of what I used to refer to as parenthetical ambiguity. Is it [aged anchovy] [salt] or [aged] [anchovy salt]. From a culinary perspective, the latter makes no sense (aging salt doesn’t change it). But that doesn’t mean there’s no built-in ambiguity.
Flavor of the Week
August 9, 2024The New Yorker cover for the August 12th, 2024 issue is a great big Roz Chast cartoon. With the accompanying cover story, “Roz Chast’s “Flavor of the Week”: The artist’s enticing (and not so enticing) tweaks to one of summer’s enduring pleasures” by Françoise Muhly on 8/5/24:
(#1) Along with plain Vanilla, there are strangely modified real flavors, in it for the alliteration (Microchip Mint, First Avenue Fudge); actual food names not especially attractive in an ice cream (Lard Swirl, Hardtack, the potato variety Yukon Gold); and lots of totally non-food allusive names (Placebo, Bitcoin, Tumbleweed, Amnesia, Tsunami, and the noble gas Xenon)For the cover of the August 12, 2024, issue, the cartoonist Roz Chast — who has delighted readers since 1978 with her opinionated and peculiar takes on life’s indignities — gives ice-cream makers some suggestions for new flavors. “There are a lot of things I like about ice-cream stores aside from the ice cream itself,” Chast said. “I like looking at the different colors and patterns of all the bins. I like comparing cones: wafer flat-bottom or pointy classic? And the names of the flavors: the more preposterous and baroque, the better.”
(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings about Roz Chast and her work)
Preposterous and baroque naming schemes run riot in several domains: famously, for colors, especially of paints and of fabrics; and then widely in the word of ice cream flavors, where many frozen-confection firms exult in their naming practices. I’ll comment on just three US companies, with three different approaches: Häagen-Dazs, Baskin-Robbins, and Ben & Jerry’s.