Toscan ruby sauerkraut

Another rare Toscan recipe!

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Every time I make this sauerkraut, I think of great aunt Phélomēn. I learned it from her for a school project when I was a kid.

Now, great aunt Phélomēn spoke no English, so I had to do this through an interpreter, My cousin Mära knew enough of the old-country dialect to help me.

I can still remember aunt Phélomēn, regal in her mantillita, her bright black eyes snapping as she dictated.

“Chop the cabbage fine,” translated Mära, “And you must use a mixture of red and green.”

“Why?” I wanted to know.

Aunt Phélomēn pursed her lips shrewdly at this question. “You’ll see why,” relayed Mära, “And if you don’t, she say she’ll tell you when it’s done.”

Finally, all the cabbage was chopped. It seemed like a great pile, to my small hands.

“Are we going to put a grape leaf in, to keep it crisp?” I asked, “Like the books say?”

Aunt Phélomēn began muttering something in the guttural old-country language.

“What’s she saying!” I asked Mära. It almost sounded like great aunt Phélomēn was swearing at me.

Mära listened for a while, and then began, “She says, ‘When we eat grape leaves, we eat grape leaves.'” I remembered the delicious dolmas aunt Phélomēn would cook for holidays. “‘But when we eat cabbage, we eat cabbage.'”

I took this in, but it seemed as though aunt Phélomēn must have said considerably more than that.

Now it was time to add the salt. “We need kosher salt, right?” I piped up. “We can’t use iodized salt!”

This time, aunt Phélomēn went on a long time. Her dark old eyes glittered and her lips worked, as she intoned in a husky voice.

“Is she cursing at me?” I blurted out to Mära. I couldn’t help myself.

“Oh, no,” replied Mära in her big-sisterly way, “She is praying. Those are her little benedictions,” she added, “For you, and your school project.”

After a while I braved, “But what did she say?”

Mära sighed, “Only 34 parts per million iodine. How could your cabbage even tell?”

I pondered this. Only much later did it occur to me to wonder how you say “parts per million” in the old-country dialect.

We weighed out the two percent salt, just ordinary table salt, out of the box from the store. We sprinkled it on the cabbage, and worked it in.

I still remember the wonder I felt as the dry, squeaky cabbage began to exude juice and wilt down.

“Now, we’re going to put it in a crock! Right?” I was excited. I had seen this once on vacation, maybe at the Amana Colonies. “And put a plate on it? And weight it with a special stone?”

I was beside myself, bursting with this secret knowledge. You know how little kids are.

This time great aunt Phélomēn rolled her eyes skyward and grimaced, practically sputtering out guttural syllables.

“Is she mad at me!?” I squealed to Mära. I thought I recognized one of the phrases uncle Pyotor would exclaim when he’d had a bit too much to drink, and had been talking politics. “Is she saying bad words?”

Patiently, Mära soothed me. “How could you think such a thing? Phélomēn is a saint. Why, if she even hears one word of strong language, she says nine Bènedés, every day for nine days, to atone for the poor sinner who spoke so.

So I waited for aunt Phélomēn to wind down. Finally, her wiry old fingers stopped working, as though she were trying to strangle something. Praying, I thought. Sure.

Through Mära, aunt Phélomēn directed me how to pack the salted cabbage into jars. Just ordinary glass jars.

By now, the liquid began to fill the air spaces between the cabbage bits. With a spoon, we pushed down to press out even more air.

Then, aunt Phélomēn directed how to place a clean plastic bag of water on top of the cabbage, after checking the bag had no leaks.

We gently worked the water bag into the corners. I was worried about the remaining bubbles, but aunt Phélomēn waved her hand, dismissing. “It will work itself out,” translated Mära.

“But they aren’t full,” I complained about the scant jars. When aunt Phélomēn was told what I’d said, her eyes crinkled in amusement.

“Like a baby,” relayed Mära, “You’ve got to give him room to burp!”

“I’m not a baby!” I began, indignantly.

But Mära chuckled, “Not you. The jars.” Aunt Phélomēn spoke some more, emphasizing with her finger. “If you fill him too full,” translated Mära, “Don’t be surprise, if he spits up a little!”

And sure enough, ever after when I have made this recipe, I’ve known to put the jars in a bowl or something, if they are close to full. The cabbage can “burp” a few bubbles when it gets started, and push out a little of the juice.

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To my young eyes, the project at this stage looked rather — gross. Purple and green chops of cabbage leaf, mangled in a briny soup. Dark, lurid purple, and bilious green.

But, over the next two weeks, the mixture gradually changed to the sparkling violet-red color I had come to associate with this delicious condiment, always served at our most special Toscan feistas.

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As this magic transformation occurred, I was nagged by the question, why both red cabbage and green?

I wanted to ask aunt Phélomēn, but Mära refused. “She will tell you when it’s done,” Mära chided gently, “If you haven’t figured it out yourself.”

But after one week, long before the process was complete, great aunt Phélomēn fell desperately ill. Day after day I heard her coughing in her garret room. Among the family were whispers of “the fever”, and talk of bringing in the bishop, for special intercession.

Would I ever find the answer, the secret to making perfect ruby sauerkraut?

Finally, one morning, the storm that had ravaged the entire village for days was gone. Golden sunshine poured down.

I was allowed to come to aunt Phélomēn’s bedside. But I was sternly admonished not to bother her too much, with my “silly questions”.

The shutters had been thrown wide, and I could see aunt Phélomēn’s color was returning. But she was still weak.

“Please,” I timorously asked, “Why both the red cabbage and the green?”

Between coughs, aunt Phélomēn spoke to Mära.

“Purple cabbage turns red when it goes sour, so you can tell when it’d done,” Mära relayed.

I almost felt like I had a fever myself, so hot with embarrassment over missing this, so obvious. I was about to run from the room.

But I gathered courage for one final question.

“Please, great aunt Phélomēn, why both red and green?”

I thought I’d killed her. Aunt Phélomēn was wracked by another spell of coughing. It went on and on. Just when I thought she was done, she would begin again.

But, after all these years, I can’t help wondering if aunt Phélomēn was — laughing.

“So you can tell when you’ve got it well mixed, and don’t get lazy!”

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The recipe is real. The backstory is foodie lampoon.

Great Satan dance

In the late 1940s, Islamic leader Sayyid Qutb spent two years in the United States, sent by the Egyptian government to study US educational methods. During his time at Colorado State College for Education (now University of Northern Colorado) in Greeley, he was horrified by such sights as young men and women square dancing together at a church social. His criticisms are in the lineage of America as the Great Satan.
Too bad it wasn’t gay square dance. We can only guess that men together would have been no more offensive than Punjabis dancing the Bhangra.

A little radioactivity

I’m going to have radioactivity in the house. Not often. But you keep track if you ever feel bad, and we’ll try to correspond it with when I had radioactivity in the house.

Sometimes late at night, I just need to give myself a radiation treatment. Burn off a wart, or something. I’m sure nobody in the house will mind these little experiments I’m doing on them. This way we’ll know for sure if radioactive dust in the house is ever a problem.

And we’ll have clear communication.

As clear as you can over something so loaded!

 After the talk on “just a little smoking, in the house”.

Non sequitur

This morning the words “Catlin Gable” idly drifted through my mind. Just some syllables with an engaging cadence.

A few hours later when I checked email there was an announcement for a party coming up. I put it in my calendar, and then checked the address on the map.

There it was in the West Hills. To the northwest maybe half a mile away was something called Catlin Gabel.

It was nothing but a private school. But what’s going on here?

Maybe I had subconsciously noticed “Catlin Gabel” at some previous time. Possibly. But why would I think of it before reading an email about a place nearby? Unless I had also, subconsciously, mentally pinned the address of the party. Before reading the email? That’s a stretch.

A whimsical phrase like “Catlin Gabel” is just the kind of thing I would peripherally notice on a map. But — before looking at the map?

The Occam’s Razor idea is explaining things with the minimum number of assumptions. So, we could get away here with just one single assumption: That information can travel back through time. Huh?

This kind of thing has happened to me before. But always like this. Trivial. Random. No real consequence. But I have to admit it tickles me.

So, if I can see the future, is the key that I can only see whimsy? Well, my favorite form of humor is the non sequitur.

Dog tricks

My niece, Rebecca, had been training her dog, Cooder. “But he’s so slow!” she ranted. “He’s getting it, but he’s so slow!”

Dan, another guy at animal rescue, chimed in. “My dog’s smart. He can sit, stay, roll over, speak, and even shake – with either paw you ask for.” Then Dan sauntered off.

“What did you think of that?” we asked Bek.

“Well,” she said, “I didn’t tell him Cooder was working on colors and numbers.”

The Royal “Y’all”

There was no denying Mama had gone downhill. Here in the rehab center, this was the first I’d seen her in six months. But she roused from her nap and gave us a little smile.

“Do you know who this is?” my brother Allen introduced me cheerily. She mouthed a pleasant assent, but I’m not sure she really knew.

After awhile we got her up in the wheelchair. It was a nice day out, sunny and 60 degrees. Allen decided we were going to take Mama outside for a bit.

We tucked her up with a blanket all around. Soon were on the veranda. “She gets cold,” he’d explained, “She won’t want to stay out long.”

We visited, and Allen pointed to the little birds flying. I’m not sure how much Mama tracked. Allen had explained to me that she wasn’t eating well at meals. He had me offer her a candy bar.

“No,” she softly turned it down at first.

“Oh she’ll want it,” said Allen, “It’s just that Christian martyr thing of self-denial. Can’t ever accept anything for herself.”

Sure enough, when I put it to her lips, she slowly bit it off. She chewed appreciatively and swallowed.

You’d think, with so little time left, life would settle down to the basics. But no. Still these convolutions.

After awhile, Mama roused herself to remark, “Y’all must be cold.”

“That means she’s cold,” Allen said.

It was turnabout on that grade-school joke, “A sweater is something you put on when your mother gets cold.”

I’m glad Allen was there, and knew the code. Myself, I would have blithely breezed, oh, no, I’m fine. I would have left my poor little Mama out to freeze!

Comedy or Tragedy

Whether it’s comedy or tragedy depends on when you stop watching.

food warning whimsy

On the snack bins:

Regular trail mix

• contains nuts

Spicy trail mix

• contains nuts

Gummi bears

• contains bears

Religious arguments

People arguing about religion sound like little boys on the playground, yelling whose dad can beat up whose dad.

The joke is, they’re brothers.

The human condition

In the three weeks I’ve been on the North Slope, spring has come. When I arrived, this drive south from Deadhorse to the research station was through a wilderness of white. While I was at Toolik, the geese migrated through. They floated in half-thawed tundra ponds, then moved on north. Now they are here, on the vast, flat coastal plain that slopes imperceptibly northward to the Arctic Ocean.

The land is no longer white. There is still snow, in dirty gray patches, and ice on the Sagavanirktok River. The abruptly-revealed brown vegetation has scarcely started its sprint towards summer green. The brushy willows are barely budding, and there are only a few patches of flowers.

Anemone?

Overhead, the sky is gray, and the wind is cold, but to the geese it’s the Promised Land.

Tundra swans

Wack, who is quite an ornithologist, points out raptors, owls, tundra swans. Occasionally there is a puff of white feathers among the gray twigs, crime scene of where a ptarmigan met its end back during the winter. But everywhere are the geese. They step, in twos and threes, between the tundra bushes. The birds carry shreds of wet vegetation, swinging from their beaks. Nesting material. All across the tundra, the geese are nesting.

Mile after mile, as we traverse the gravel highway, the geese are out there. Thousands, maybe millions. From an aerial perspective, they would seem endless.

Then an ecological perspective overlays. All the geese are doing exactly the same thing. Building nests. Eating grass. The same thing, multiplied a million times. I think of other species. The willows. The caribou. As species, they all do the same thing. Then I think of humans.

As soon as even a few humans get together, like an ice age hunting camp, they start to do different things. One is better at flintknapping. One is better at stitching the hides. So humans join together in groups, which can do more than the individuals alone.

The hide stitcher frees up the flintknapper to become even better at that job. There is a place for broken humans. A clan member who is blind can still chew the hides, to make them soft for mukluks. Thus, can free up the clan.

We admire animals. Each one is whole and complete. It must be. A broken goose is soon no more. But, as other humans are taking up the slack for us, each of us is incomplete. Broken, if you will. As individuals, that’s not very admirable. But together, it makes us more.

Other species specialize a little. When geese are flying in a “V”, the one at the head of the “V” tends to be a more experienced bird. But that’s about as far as it goes. Individual willow bushes are either male or female, so pollen or seeds. But that’s about it.

Social insects organize to a considerable degree, but it’s hardwired. They don’t come up with new things to do, only on evolutionary time scales. Geese fly in the “V”. They never try squares, or pentagrams.

On the other hand, humans are continually coming up with different things to do. Piling rocks on top of each other. Digging in the ground and sowing seeds. By and by, the things that work free up enough time that some humans can get by doing utterly bizarre things, like analyzing  mortgage-backed security derivatives. And, well, running research stations.

I think of how far this can go. This human innovation and specialization. I thought of it one time I went to the Portland bear bar, The Eagle.

That night it was advertised there were “dancers”. Well, they weren’t really dancing. There was a sheet of plywood laid down atop the pool table, and the two guys were up on that. They were standing, stepping sort of back and forth, side to side, keeping rhythm a little with their arms. I guess that’s about all they dared risk, or the plywood might go flying.

The two of them did look fine. They were big and muscular and hairy, just what the clientele liked. I don’t recall patrons coming up and tucking dollar bill tips in the dancers’ jockstraps, but it was that kind of scene.

I thought, how could you explain such a thing to any other species?

I daydream: On the long drive north to the airport in Deadhorse, we stop for a pee-break along the highway. We fan out across the tundra. I shoulder in amongst the taller willow bushes for some privacy.

Up ahead, what’s that? The branches thin, and I see a little clearing. Quietly, I crouch and peer inside. Two fine ganders are standing on a tussock, stepping back and forth on their big webbed feet. Around them, in the shadows of the brush, is an appreciative gaggle of other ganders. As I watch, one in the crowd occasionally tosses a tuft of edible grass towards the first two. These bob their necks in acknowledgement but for now leave the morsels lay. They flutter their wings a bit, as if for balance. They keep on stepping, back and forth, side to side, on their big webbed feet.