![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Random and sundry
Apr. 19th, 2010 06:45 amPassing on a couple of things that have amused me:
The first is the continuing storyline at 9 Chickweed Lane; I'd thought it would end along with it's retelling of WWII, but instead it's a decade later and the young Austrian officer (remember when I asked for translation help?) has started to work for the Metropolitan Opera in NYC and re-met his lost American love. "Opera managements are rather a departure from my wartime experience in the Wehrmacht... For one thing, the Wehrmacht was considerably more cuddly."
The other is a digression on clam chowder. Now, in America, there are two kinds of clam chowder: New England Style (in a white base of milk and sometimes potato) and Manhattan Style (in a red base of tomato). That's been contentious for a long time - I remember a concert a long time ago with the Maine-based folk group Schooner Fare discussing one of their "southern tours" (read: "anywhere below Vermont") discussing how they were in NYC and ordered clam chowder as a taste of home.
After a very expressive silence, they offered a cure for Manhattan Style: "Stop digging your clams in the East River. Something in there is injured."
What I hadn't known was how far back the feud goes. I'm reading Food of a Younger Land (yeah, Doomsday Book is on the back burner) and under New England Eats, what do I find? Walter Hackett and Henry Manchester coming up with lines like "Not is is entirely possible that some convert to the rank of the tomato may, in an unpremeditated burst of enthusiasms, have dropped an innocent tomato into the clam chowder when no one was looking... Even Colonel Atwell of the famous Fields Point establishment was guilty of this culinary outrage."
The first is the continuing storyline at 9 Chickweed Lane; I'd thought it would end along with it's retelling of WWII, but instead it's a decade later and the young Austrian officer (remember when I asked for translation help?) has started to work for the Metropolitan Opera in NYC and re-met his lost American love. "Opera managements are rather a departure from my wartime experience in the Wehrmacht... For one thing, the Wehrmacht was considerably more cuddly."
The other is a digression on clam chowder. Now, in America, there are two kinds of clam chowder: New England Style (in a white base of milk and sometimes potato) and Manhattan Style (in a red base of tomato). That's been contentious for a long time - I remember a concert a long time ago with the Maine-based folk group Schooner Fare discussing one of their "southern tours" (read: "anywhere below Vermont") discussing how they were in NYC and ordered clam chowder as a taste of home.
After a very expressive silence, they offered a cure for Manhattan Style: "Stop digging your clams in the East River. Something in there is injured."
What I hadn't known was how far back the feud goes. I'm reading Food of a Younger Land (yeah, Doomsday Book is on the back burner) and under New England Eats, what do I find? Walter Hackett and Henry Manchester coming up with lines like "Not is is entirely possible that some convert to the rank of the tomato may, in an unpremeditated burst of enthusiasms, have dropped an innocent tomato into the clam chowder when no one was looking... Even Colonel Atwell of the famous Fields Point establishment was guilty of this culinary outrage."
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif){kind=small}