The best part of that book is the bit where she says that sometimes you just have to splurge anyway.
Apparently Claire Huchet Bishop's Pancakes -- Paris is out of print, which is a shame, but still maybe available online used.
4 to the named restaurant of the OP. I have nothing against pancakes.
3. I liked that book when I was a kid.
Wow. That brings back memories.
Eh, a bit of pretentiousness on Ethan Stowell's part. It's a good restaurant, if not spectacular, and probably not as good as some of his other 5 restaurants in town. And it does make use of simple ingredients, if not quite as cheap as Fisher intended.
Checking now, it seems he's down to 4. And the gnocchi on his home page look disturbingly like grubs.
If not, if not.
Simple but not Cheap: now there's a name for a restaurant.
There's nothing wrong with that approach (obviously), but, erm, poaching the MFK Fisher title seems revisionist, and I cannot approve of that. Or, more fairly: I don't know Fisher's entire oeuvre, so I have no idea if it's revisionist.
Most relevant to the critique, I went there with a vegetarian in tow and she had trouble finding a dish to eat, which really doesn't seem to fit with Fisher's cheap eats philosophy.
It's not the pretentiousness (I wouldn't have minded (as much) if it were named, say, Serve It Forth or something else from Fisher), it's the tackiness and tone-deafness.
That recipe for sludge is basically the traditional scottish soup. But in scotland you probably wouldn't add beef, except stock, and you'd probably replace oats with lentils.
I don't know about tacky, but tone-deaf is not a bad description of Seattle.
Serve it Forth is kind of hilarious as a restaurant name, though. (N.B. I'm not familiar with the book.)
Granted. But it's better than "The Gastronomical Me". It might be on a par with "Consider the Oyster".
I'm having a giggle fit: Serve it Forth! or, Here's your Damn Food! or, Yep, There you Go!
15
How cool! In a not-cool way, of course. Makes me thing that I've probably not actually tasted real truffle flavor and if my general apathy to truffle oil is due to that.
I just don't know how I feel about these restaurant names that are actually sentences, or propositions.
Well, no restaurant name could be a proposition, on many views of what a proposition is.
The article reminds me of an old Asimov short story.
21
I'm going to name my restaurant "How You Doin'?"
"Consider the Oyster" would be a proposition, it seems to me; but right, on a more formal understanding of what a proposition is, it seems that a true proposition is only a matter of time. Say, oh, "Simple is the new cheap." I jest.
Sad to hear about the truffle oil.
I'm not sure what you're thinking of under the title "more formal understanding", there, but! I let it go.
(Wouldn't "Simple is the new cheap" be a proposition? Of course there is no restaurant with such a name at this time -- as far as I know -- but there could be! Yet you said that no restaurant name could be a proposition.)
(Perhaps you just mean that it can't be a proposition insofar as it's a name.)
Propositions are just sets of possible worlds, doncha know.
Propositions are just sets of possible worlds
Possible but not necessarily probable, like the "Wanna fuck?" worlds.
28: I will not be dragged into that morass. ! I'm still hung up on "Yep, There you Go!"
How to Cook a Wolf is bad enough as it is.
I should try to get ahold of my grandparents' rationing-edition Joy of Cooking sometime.
I think there should be more restaurants named after random books by food writers. Who would not want to dine at "Aromas and Flavors of the Past and Present", "Diet for a Small Planet", or (stretching the point slightly -- perhaps it can be a food truck) "A Big Storm Knocked it Over"?
There are plenty of cookbooks out there about homesteading-style practices. I gave one, the name of which I can't remember now, to a friend who has a cabin in W.Va.: it had instructions for skinning deer and cooking possum and rendering fat and making soap and tallow candles, stuff like that. I find it fascinating, but that one was particularly focused on animals, so of less interest to me than to him.
33: Doesn't Bourdain have one called "The Nasty Bits"?
MFKF wrote that she wrote about hunger, & that all the desires were hunger and - I think - that they were all suitable subjects for philosophy. But if I remember the autobiographical bits of HtCaW, the restaurant is invoking breakups & bankruptcies.
You could cook and eat a black squirrel, according to Britain-to-Upper-Canada icon of domestic housekeeping (she of Hints on Canadian Housekeeping fame), Catherine Parr Traill:
Some people object to them [black squirrels, that is], simply because they have not been accustomed to see them brought to table, or even to hear of their being used as an article of food, and others consider them as insipid. This last objection is, perhaps, the most weighty; but by seasoning them well, it may be overcome. Nothing can be more cleanly than the habits of these little creatures; their food consisting entirely of grain, or fruits, or vegetables. When fresh meat is scarce, as it often is in the woods, the black and even the red squirrel may be eaten, as a wholesome change of diet.
The backwoodsman will also eat bear, of course, which is "like coarse beef," and not very genteel.
You could cook and eat a black squirrel
RACIST.
I would eat at "Harvest of the Cold Months" unless it turned out to be some overpriced artisanal iced-cream place. (Reasonably priced artisanal is ok._
I was annoyed by that "expose" on truffle oil. So what if it's synthetic? What's wrong with synthetic?
What I mean is that I thought the principled arguments for "organic" food were centered on the harmful effects of particular uses of chemicals in food production--something something about soil exhaustion something--rather than just an atavistic longing for authenticity. This guy's "but there are CHEMICALS in it" schtick just makes me want to throw a bottle of truffle oil in his face.
more restaurants named after random books by food writers
You could do worse than "American Fried" or "Alice, Let's Eat."
re: 41
I suppose the issue is that it's marketed with the word 'truffle' which has connotations of the expensive and organic. I'd guess if they called it 'synthetic umami juice' or something, people wouldn't care.
So what if it's synthetic? What's wrong with synthetic?
If you're getting the rosemary truffle fries from the local gastropub, I'd say probably nothing. If you're at a fancy restaurant that carefully sources its ingredients, and especially if some of those ingredients are actual, incredibly dear truffles, it seems odd to go for the fake stuff, especially given that it tastes different. So says the article, anyway, and I am inclined to believe it. I am not a giant truffle fan, so I don't go out of my way to have them, but when I've had actual truffles they don't bother me, I just don't get that eyes rolling back in my head with pleasure thing that some people seem to. But things with truffle oil, like iterations of the fries mentioned above, or in eggs at not-particularly-upscale brunch spots, taste pretty horrid to me. This is surely due at least in part to overuse -- just douse the fries in that cheap oil, why not? -- but I think not only.
So yeah, while the IT'S CHEMICALS guy sounds annoying, I think the larger point about real food stands.
I remember in reading MFKF (no idea which book, as I read them all out of the big Art of Eating compilation) getting a little annoyed at her repeated insistence that you could just eat soup and a salad and that could be dinner. Just that! By itself! Really! But then part of the linked review reminds me how radical the lack a meat entree must have seemed to some at that time:
She has the weird notion that if a soup is rich enough and good enough, it is almost presumptuous to want anything else. Imagine! [...] After giving a recipe for date pudding, she suggests that a soup and salad are sufficient with it and no meat or vegetables are needed to call it a dinner!
But I also recall a passage in which MFKF says that sometimes all you want for dinner is an egg and a glass of sherry, and I remember thinking, no, I pretty much always want more for dinner than that.
Simple but not Cheap: now there's a name for a restaurant.
Hey, I've eaten at that place!
The sludge seems unfairly named. I thought it was going to be one of those concoctions of weeds Miss Jessica Palinode makes in Margery Allingham's More Work for the Undertaker, from recipes in some pamphlet called "How to Live on a Penny a Day" or some such.
Serve it Forth! or, Here's your Damn Food! or, Yep, There you Go!
Or, by an expression a friend picked up in Ireland, Get That Inside You Now. That will be the name of my second restaurant, the first being the Vietnamese joint Pho King Awesome.
My barbecue restaurant: Get Outside of Some Dead Pig.
Pipe Down And Eat Your Haggis!
48: there is a food truck in LA called "Pho Sho".
Anyhoo, my career as a restaurateur will be launched with my fast-casual meat-oriented chain, THE STEAKHOSE.
My edition of The Joy of Cooking has a recipe for squirrel, with pictures showing how to skin one.
Also, the phrase "sushi-grade" always annoys me, probably for no very defensible reason.
51: The sign outside a restaurant in Albany, OR proudly proclaims the place to be "The Pho King of Albany", which I presume they get away with because of widespread ignorance of the pronunciation of "pho".
I was annoyed by that "expose" on truffle oil. So what if it's synthetic? What's wrong with synthetic?
I thought the objection wasn't that it's synthetic, but that it's too one-note: not actually what truffles are like at all.
Get That Inside You Now
From a slightly tangential direction: the motto (slogan?) of a now-defunct local restaurant was "You'll eat 'til you stop!"
That's right up there with "Up to 50% off - or more!" in the tautology department.
The name of an actual convenience store I saw in Oklahoma, Git 'n' Split might work after a fashion.
48, 51: there used to be a Vietnamese food truck in London called "Phat Phuc's Noodles".
The best (by some estimates) local pho/banh mi joint just put up a sign that reads "iPho" to great hilarity. Nobody in the pho business seems to take themselves too seriously.
I read the other days of wolf-cooking on that blog at teh sludge link. On day 4, s/he said that they were sceptical about a ham and mustard combination, but it turned out well. Ham and mustard is pretty standard, surely? And this person is writing a food blog?
From a slightly tangential direction: the motto (slogan?) of a now-defunct local restaurant was "You'll eat 'til you stop!
Lionel Hutz: Now, Mrs. Simpson, tell the court in your own words what happened after you and your husband were ejected out of the restaurant.
Marge: Well, we pretty much went straight home.
Lionel Hutz: Mrs. Simpson, remember that you are under oath.
Marge: We drove around until three in the morning looking for another open all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant.
Lionel Hutz: And when you couldn't find one?
Marge: [crying] We... went... fishing.
Lionel Hutz: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, do these sound like the actions of a man whose had ALL he could eat?
what is the relevance of fisher's (undeniable) greater affinity for french cuisine in the stated objection?
Smearcase and I had beet sorbet topped with dijon mustard ice cream the other night. Classic.
67 sounds interesting. I ask myself at times whether I'm not adventurous enough in cooking: my housemate keeps proposing putting green beans in a black bean soup. No, that doesn't go! I say. "Why not?", he wonders.
"It just doesn't."
66: one associates French cooking more with elaborate preparations, sauces, etc. than with something like simple ingredients simply prepared (which one associates more with Italianate cookery). The kinds of French recipes Fisher gives seem to support that.
Over the weekend, I was sharing with a friend the running list of stupid bands names I keep on my phone, only to discover that not only does he, too, keep such a list, but also to delight in learning that he, too, has independently come up with one of the same stupid band names that I came up with: Goatmeal!
So someone should name a restaurant or a dish Goatmeal.
my husband's current favorite, a heavy metal band called: "knightsoÿle"
it's just pronounced "nightsoil," obviously.
69: what is it that you imagine poor people in france ate in the recent past other than simple ingredients simply prepared? costly ingredients simply prepared, but eaten only at great intervals? simple ingredients, prepared with the most refined, time-consuming methods possible, such that more than half the family's available agricultural labor was relegated to being sauciers and the like? I invite you to reflect more deeply upon the problem, neb.
what is it that you imagine poor people in france ate in the recent past other than simple ingredients simply prepared?
My point is simply that while of course there is peasant food in france, "French cuisine" is not generally understood to refer to that kind of cooking, and many of the French recipes MFKF gives definitely are not in that class. (Though, again, others are!) Obviously the vast majority of French persons have not been eating from Escoffier.
As Max Black observed I believe about "pig", often the stereotypical associations are more important than the actual facts.
75: Obviously the vast majority of French persons have not been eating from Escoffier.
He would have long since been entirely depleted...
Plus I don't think the French were ever big fans of long pork.
now, the retreat into relativism begins. I declare victory. that said, there are surprisingly few if any "classic" cookbooks about french peasant cuisine. la bonne cuisine de madame e. st.-ange is an excellent book and compatible with a certain sort of frugality but it is not "simple ingredients, simply prepared." except insofar as, say, larks are simple. but then again, if there are loads of them about, they are simple?
now that I consider it further this seems an odd lapse. italian cooking really is simple to the point of austerity. "could we have something to go with this dry bread?" "you already have wine." thanks, roman dudes! or "here, I caught you this fish--why don't I grill it for you and then put salt and pepper and olive oil and lemon on the top. but not too much pepper. we don't want to get crazy. this is sicily." but it does have it moments of intensive preparation and weird medieval sweet/savory things. what do you call that fruit stuff, I don't have time to google before my eyes boil. AHA! agrodolce. no wait, that's just a sauce and it's just like aigre-doux. there's a thing with preserved fruit that gets totally medieval on your ass. you figure it out.
thus, we are lacking:
1. the peasant foods of france: a celebrated cookbook by that one cookbook woman who was so into france.
2. the infinitely time-consuming foods of 19th century italy: a famous cookbook by that guy who wrote that other book.
where are they? you guys figure it out and I'll check back in before bed when I take my next dose of go-juice.
sidenote: it is a good thing I am seeing my neurologist tomorrow because MY BRAIN IS NOT WORKING PROPERLY. I cannot do mental math. I lose words. I replace typed words with other words which sounds like them but are nowhere near them on the keyboard. I have to spend half my internet time proofreading. I can't spell for shit. my doctors are all, "that's sweet, honey." no, ME. I can't spell. that is WRONG.
now, the retreat into relativism begins
I deny it.
Maybe alameida is thinking of mostarda?
78.last: Wow, that sucks. I hope you bought the extended warranty...
poor people can have labor to spare, if the problem is lack of market demand. Volume 2 of Civ&Cap, I think.
I would call some of the French peasant recipes Luard gives complex, especially as the pantry preparation was also domestic.
hahaha you guys, I'm bored at the lab (though I have "really great veins" according to the phlebotomist; it's difficult not to say "oooh, maybe I should become a drug addict!"). guess what I forgot? my appointment with the neurologist was today! fucking fucking fuck. I will have to tell my husband and be embarrassed and it's costing us money because I'm going to an out-of-coverage pain specialist and I am hoping to get referred to him. there's a fucking calendar feature on my stupid motherfucking iPhone that I carry with me everywhere. for now. I didn't bother calling the taxi company the other day to see if anyone had found a canon lens cap and 40mg of morphine. I'm so stupid. I hate everything and I can't even be sick properly. I really think I might cry in the waiting room before I'm called up to pay, except I don't believe in public crying. also, I was thinking of mostarda.
I will solve this problem by staying in public spaces until I don't feel like crying anymore. since I'm not allowed to have a triple bourbon on the rocks which is the traditional solution.
thanks teo! I appreciate your sympathy.
Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking claims to be quite peasanty. Most of the recipes are still the other side of my 'can be arsed' threshold, though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_David_bibliography#French_Provincial_Cooking_.281960.29
87: oh yes, I have that one, and I do put it more on the "fun to read" than the "what am I going to have for dinner" side of the shelf. it ain't sitting next to the battered "charleston receipts" if you know what I mean. I think it's partly that it's written wrong, though, rather than that the recipes are complex. it's the sort of book that will spring "add the tomatoes (which have been blanched and peeled, with the seeds discarded, then diced and sautéed briefly in clarified butter)" and you're all what with the who now? mention some shit to a sister one time.
in crying related-news, I decided to just go ahead and cry for 10 minutes until the children got home with my maid and their mandarin tutor. it is to LOL.
but really, how else are they going to do well in mandarin at school? she's a high schooler from their school, recommended by the principal as being of sterling character (!). they do their chinese homework with her, but that doesn't take very long, so then they just play their usual games but in chinese, like open imaginary cafés and things. it's charming. it has improved their mandarin a lot.
but really, how else are they going to do well in mandarin at school? win the bitter, invidious struggle against sally and newt to get into harvard?
edited for clarity. now I REALLY better stop looking at tiny, agonizingly bright words.
what is it that you imagine poor people in france ate in the recent past other than simple ingredients simply prepared? costly ingredients simply prepared, but eaten only at great intervals? simple ingredients, prepared with the most refined, time-consuming methods possible, such that more than half the family's available agricultural labor was relegated to being sauciers and the like?
Possibly, yeah. Peasant food is generally cheap, but it isn't always fast to make. Some Indian dishes - not expensive or complicated ones - take hours. They're designed to be cooked in bulk for a large extended family, which can generally rely on having a handy aunt sitting around minding the kids and thus able to stir the pot every ten minutes for twelve hours, and to use (for example) really poor-quality meat that has to be boiled or stewed into edibility.
But when one's talking about "French cooking", one's talking about cuisine bourgeoise - the kind of food prepared by the servants of a middle class household. French food, even if it has roots in some peasant dish or other, has long since left its humble origins behind and is quite snooty, like my aunt. Italian food, on the other hand, even in the finest restaurants, never manages to escape its peasant origins. Like my other aunt. Eye eye are sea, Elizabeth David is pretty clear on this one (in the book on French provincial cooking anyway, I don't think she calls the Italians a bunch of peasants to their faces in her Italian cooking book). It's "provincial", not "French Peasant Cooking". Montaigne was a provincial.
O hey guys, by the way, I am running for a position in the youth wing of my local mass market left-wing party, so if any of you are under 25 and members of the NZLP, please vote for me for policy! (Sorry for that everyone else! I have to whore myself out efficiently...)
Al, don't feel bad about losing a lens cap, or even no chasing it up. Losing lens caps is legit proof you actually use the camera for something other than wanking.
Isn't the very term `french cooking' detached from any real concern as to what french people cook as to make it basically meaningless in that sense? Like, when ol' Ecoffier talks about orthodoxy or otherwise, he is more concerned about practices at the court or hotel de whatever than any actual french people.
More to 91, peasants often have to deal with at least one of these three problems, all of which have time-intensive solutions:
1) Their food is low-quality, and much of it is not that nutritious or palatable when unprocessed
Solution: Spend a lot of time processing the food (soaking beans, fermenting grains, stewing tough meats)
2) They have to eat the same thing every day
Solution: Put a lot of work into making it seem different by different, laborious preparations, seasoning, etc., so rice, or wheat, or eggplant, or potatoes for the thousandth time doesn't just get thrown right back up.
3) Some of their key foods are seasonal, and unavailable during large parts of the year
Solution: pickle them.
All of these solutions being a way to substitute time for the quality of the ingredients.
I don't think either "French" or "Italian" food bears much of a resemblance to what actual peasants would have eaten, at least prior to about 1880. Much "traditional" food is actually very recent IIRC, though I can't be bothered to look up a reference. Anyway, fuck bread.
In Count of Monte Cristo, the characters regard Italian food is regarded as dreadful to the point of horror. This could be just a question of change in status, but it makes me think that Halford is right. I'm going to skip bread at my next meal in his honor.
In Italy, where one eats badly, the few good inns tell you, "Sir, we have a French chef". In Spain, where one eats abominably, the good places tell you, "Sir, we have an Italian chef".
It's okay because the snake has cookies.
Escoffier, who was a provincial, regarded his mission as being to simplify haute cuisine. It makes you wonder what the fuck Carême was doing.
Reading a few of Escoffier's recipes makes you understand why the Prince of Wales was the shape he was...
15: Chris L'Hommedieu? Chris The Godman?
Is this a put-on? Or has my French gone awry?
No one named Jesus L'Hommedieu, though.
I don't think either "French" or "Italian" food bears much of a resemblance to what actual peasants would have eaten, at least prior to about 1880.
I suppose it depends on how you're defining ""Italian" food". Do you really think that grilled sardines with a little lemon and olive oil are a post-industrial era innovation? Or do you just mean that, if you look in The Silver Spoon, 90% of the recipes are of fairly recent vintage? I don't think there'd be much debate about the latter: I don't think a peasant cook would have 50 or 100 recipes at her fingertips, and I'd imagine that there'd be vast overlap in the peasant recipe "toolkit" (if you will), such that you'd see the same recipes over and over as you asked successive peasants about their cooking.
Of course, you'd also see tons of small variations, because people want not to hate their food. So sometimes the soup uses oregano, other times sage, but the variations son't really rise to the level of separate recipes. Real innovation in cooking makes sense primarily in either courtly circumstance (vying for reputation) or capitalist (vying for cash).
Speculating about the food ways of peasants in Ye Olden Dayes is giving me unpleasant flashbacks to a thread about the distinctive shirts worn (or not) by peasants from different villages. I think that's a sign to return to work.
103: Per a genealogy website:
The name "L'Hommedieu originated over a thousand years ago on a field at Ascalon, where there was conferred upon the crusader, Sir Lucus, a Knight of St. John, the Norman-French title of "Le Home de Dieu" meaning "the Man of God."
Oh and, FWIW, I totally get the guy's tone in the truffle oil article. Pretty much any kind of restaurant that would serve truffle oil is the kind of restaurant that doesn't use a lot of artificial flavorings, and that doesn't deceive its customers about ingredients. I'd say that calling oil that's never been in the same room with a truffle "truffle oil" is deceitful. We expect food labels to be honest: Clark bars have a "chocolatey" coating, because that shit they use isn't chocolatey enough to be called chocolate. I love my salt and vinegar flavored potato chips. Etc.
So as I say, it's a double-whammy: these places aren't otherwise going to the artificial flavor shelf, so it's a weird exception, and the name in no way indicates its actual nature, which is weird and deceptive. Not a big deal, but noteworthy.
I don't think a peasant cook would have 50 or 100 recipes at her fingertips, ... such that you'd see the same recipes over and over as you asked successive peasants about their cooking.
My sense is that the same is true of traditional music.
Bob Coltman has a story in the liner notes for one his albums about going into Appalachia in the late 60s (maybe early 70s) to hear traditional songs. He describes being in one small town and asking around who had the best local reputation as a singer and being directed to somebody in his 70s living in a cabin in the middle of nowhere who had won a number of local music competitions when he was in his prime. If I recall correctly the guy had seven songs that he performed, total. It might have been less, I remember a line that he had fewer songs that he knew than he had children.
It was a vivid image of how the current "traditional music" scene is very different from actual traditional music (in a way which makes me think of the distinction between oral and literate cultures -- there's just a lot less breadth of cultural knowledge that can be preserved in an oral tradition).
108 is really interesting, and points towards something I can never quite figure out. I feel as if I'm always being told that "traditional music" mostly isn't - that Carl Sandburg and Alan Lomax were actually collecting a lot of regurgitated songwriter songs, not "folk" songs as we understand the concept. Yet you also have the preservation of Child Ballads in the hollers of Appalachia over the course of centuries.
I feel as if there's a very strong urge in the current zeitgeist to deny that anything we call old actually is (never such a thing as pagans with Wicca-like beliefs; Rob's comment above about recipes before 1880; fairy tales all written by identifiable moderns; Arthurian legend invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth), but part of me suspects that it has more to do with intellectual fashion than rigorous analysis. That it's certainly true in many cases, but that it's applied to all cases out of a sort of iconoclastic urge.
But I could be wrong!
Another counterexample: alameida's anecdote about cooking "Southern" food for Parisians, one of whom is Senegalese and says "this is cooking from my home." That's a lot of folk memory, and makes me doubt claims that most folk memory is actually an invention of Victorians.
I feel as if there's a very strong urge in the current zeitgeist to deny that anything we call old actually is
Except in math!
I feel as if there's a very strong urge in the current zeitgeist to deny that anything we call old actually is
I think that's right, but there's also a strong urge to say that nothing is really new (the whole Jonathem Lethem, "Everything is a Remix" thing).
Silly, jaded, paradoxical zeitgeist!
Obligatory folk song link. I have the Seva version on iPod, which I think is better told.
109.2: I feel as if there's a very strong urge in the current zeitgeist to deny that anything we call old actually is . . . Arthurian legend invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth
This is confusing. Geoffrey of Monmouth, who lived in the 12th century, is insufficiently antique?
Far as Wicca goes, or the history of fairy tales or cookbooks, one would hope that scholarship would show an intellectual fashion for rigorous analysis that includes skepticism about highly speculative claims, and tends to prefer interpretations that are consistent with the available sources once their potential biases, flaws, limitations and exaggerations have been taken into account.
113: I sure hope that's the authentic traditional iPod, with the grey screen and the click wheel.
Obligatory folk song link.
I keep meaning to thank you for that link. It's a great song and performance and, well, when you originally posted it, the timing was good (see my final comment there).
I feel as if I'm always being told that "traditional music" mostly isn't - that Carl Sandburg and Alan Lomax were actually collecting a lot of regurgitated songwriter songs, not "folk" songs as we understand the concept.
I'm not an expert. One thought is that this sort of pedantry is going to spring up any time something obscure becomes hip. If "peasant" cooking becomes popular there will be lots of people to say (see OP), "X isn't actually peasant cooking." And most, but not all, of those complaints will be correct.
My second thought is to recommend (not for the first time) that you see Jeff Warner if he's performing in your area. Not only is he a fantastic (if understated performer), both of his parents were folklorists and he has fascinating stories to tell about traveling with them as a kid and hanging around when they were doing field recordings from people born in the 19th century.
Which also raises the point that you have to ask what counts as "old." For most of us it's not worth spending much time distinguishing between something which became popular at the beginning of the 19th century and something which became popular around the civil war, but for somebody like Jeff Warner he's very aware of that distinction. I imagine there are people for whom the difference between late 17th Century popular art and late 18th Century is similarly impossible to ignore.
Finally there are always legitimate concerns about how possible it is to preserve elements of folk culture outside of that culture. So, arguably, even for songs which date back to the 17th Century, if our only information about them comes from collections done in the 19th or 20th Century we don't know if the song being collected is the same as whatever was popular in the 17th Century. Even if the words and melody are approximately the same, we don't know the pop culture significance of it in the 17th century.
Yet you also have the preservation of Child Ballads in the hollers of Appalachia over the course of centuries.
Finally, as an aside, Dick Gaughan is amusing skeptical of the collection of Child ballads as accurate history (more context for that recording here).
More about the Warners.
I haven't listened to either of those CDs, but every time I look at them I'm tempted to buy them.
My day week is made. Thanks, NickS.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, who lived in the 12th century, is insufficiently antique?
It rather depends on which Arthur you're talking about. NB. I AM NOT AN EXPERT IN THIS SHIT. But I understand that there are some very old, possibly originally pre-Christian, stories that the name of Arthur has been attached to and which are sorta kinda traceable in early Welsh, Breton and Irish literature. And then there's the grail legend and the round table and that kind of stuff - the Matter of Britain to the troubadours - which is solidly set in the high middle ages and was probably invented not long before if at all. And in between there's Gildas (probably 7th century), on whom careers have been built and wrecked, but whose sources are certainly not understood very well.
114: I assume that scholars are being rigorous (although they're surely susceptible to intellectual trends/atmosphere/assumptions as well); I'm mostly talking about how scholarly findings are translated into popular understanding (again, Halford's comment at 96 might be instructive, if I'm reading him right; if all he's saying is that peasants didn't eat veal piccata, then that's unrelated to my point).
My point about Geoffrey is that he (according to some) essentially invented everything we call Arthurian (except for stuff that was obviously invented later) on the basis of little more than a couple random names in the chronicles. That is, that no one in Britain had any beliefs or stories or folk memory of anything to do with any Arthur at all until Geoffrey came along. Since he was telling tales set in the ~6thC, 12thC becomes not very antique.
Chris y is on point with this. The Matter of Britain was obviously invention, but the purported source material was ancient, channeled through Geoffrey.
I'm not saying that this is false; all I'm saying is that it's of a piece with what strikes me as being a tendency rather than (necessarily) a rigorous set of proven facts in every case. IOW, since tartans and kilts were invented in the 18th C (?), therefore Bavarians never wore lederhosen* or whatever.
*actual history, according to Opa: actual farmers wore leather pants; nobility on their hobby farms would wear fancy versions that look like modern lederhosen; farmers now wear modern lederhosen as regular clothes, albeit not every day
I'm not sure why I'm being singled out for this. What I said was that I doubt that what we now identify as "traditional" French or Italian cuisine bears a close resemblance to what French and Italian peasants were in fact eating before the end of the 19th century. While I don't know the relevant literature well, that seems overwhelmingly likely to be the case. You don't have to agree with the proposition that everything started in 1911 or whatever to be suspicious (especially in the realm of food history, one of the mainstays of bullshit origin stories) of the accuracy of claims about traditional food.
119 , 120: I'm not specifically an expert on Arthurian legend either, but as far as I know the general scholarly perspective on Geoffrey of Monmouth is that he took some very basic threads of ancient tradition about Arthur and embroidered them into a literary work very much his own, which went on to become hugely influential in the creation of subsequent Arthurian legends and romances. And I haven't looked a lot at the popular adaptations of the scholarly consensus about Monmouth specifically, but if anything it's always seemed to me that the far more common mistake popular tradition is likely to make with history is to far overshoot what historians of a subject would see as likely to have been known and transmitted or "channeled" about extremely ancient traditions. In general, amateurs seem to me to be a lot more likely to be attracted to the notion of having discovered, say, "the real King Arthur" or "the real Robin Hood" or "the historical Jesus" than to be intoxicated by an excess of skepticism* about these things.
Of course there may be middlebrow I'm-more-skeptical-than-thou knee-jerking out there (though I think hanging such a sentiment on Halford on the grounds of 96 seems a bit unfair). I'm wary of the notion that it forms a substantial zeitgeist, though.
(* With the caveat that there's even more of a hunger for revelations of the "real" and "authentic" historical such-and-such that appear to turn accepted history on its head and offer the reader the illusion of joining in a grand, eons-spanning expose.)
121: I'm not singling you out - it wasn't your comment that set me on this track. But I took it as part of the same idea - that things considered old or traditional or folk are usually (always) nothing of the sort. My 105 might clarify my initial response, uncolored with thoughts about origin stories in general.
122: I suspect that there's no way to judge what the dominant zeitgeist is. I am, of course, informed by my own sense of what people are thinking/kneejerking, which is informed by what I read/who I talk to. In my world, authenticity is rarely used without scare quotes; in the broader world, of course, it's still a bedrock concept (albeit an under examined one).
"middlebrow I'm-more-skeptical-than-thou knee-jerking" precisely describes the sentiment I'm complaining against. And as I've said, there's reason to be skeptical, rather than accepting at face value every just-so origin tale. I just feel as if I'm surrounded by the idea that everything old is actually new, and it bugs me.
Most of this is Elijah Wald's fault, I suspect.