Bluebird

preamble to dinner

Early Sunday morning, she found herself inexplicably awake at six am. Too early for anything, she thought as she lay there listening to the steady breathing of her husband. She thought about the day ahead, making dinner for her cousin in town from the East Coast. He was a priest. A curious career path for the 21^st century, even though she knew her cousin would say it wasn’t a career but a vocation. He would be getting ready to say mass. She tried to remember when she was last even in a church, more than a year ago.

She carried her Catholicism around with her like some people carried the latest handbag—possessively although not ostentatiously. Although she had other identifying tribal affiliations like being an English/Polish pseudo-aristocratic bourgeois with a lineage that stretched back to the 1400’s, a prep-schooler with a naïve pretension of nihilistic intellectualism (probably a result of too much theatre as a child, combined with her older pseudo-intellectual siblings being a main influence,) and, today, a forty-something fashion snob with a decided bent for all things Belgian—she mostly thought of herself as a re-lapsed, Vatican-hating, feministic, veil-loving Catolica who felt perpetually sheepish (read guiltified) about the way she ultimately lost that long ago virginity (both physical and spiritual). Shallow and proud of it, she bragged about how Catholicism meant the most to her when all the females in her family got new hats for Easter Sunday mass. And she was nostalgic for the veils, those lace dribbles pinned to every female’s head in the sixties, even if she was too young to remember wearing one. (If truth be told, she never wore one, since they were worn by adult women and she was stuck in hats, being so young, not that hats were bad.) It was only when she fully grew up did she realize that the church thought the female head unclean, hence the headwear. Then there were the nuns. Modern vestal virgins, they could never hope to rise to the status of priests. Sexist for sure, but only after it had all been pointed out as such. When something is as familiar as that, you don’t necessarily question it or resent it. It was rote role-playing more than anything else. Like genuflecting before getting into the pew.

It was a quandary—this mix of repulsion/obsession. She truly believed that Vatican II killed organized religion as she never knew it, what with its gradual relaxation of standards that eventually resulted in the horror of bland guitar masses and made-up face-to-face confessions. And even if she could’ve been an altar girl, unlike her older sisters, she had no interest. She pined for the mix of exoticism and mystery and (perhaps most of all) the sense of ritual, (after all, she had minored in Anthropology) that seemed to add authenticity. No matter that she couldn’t remember the Latin mass when last practiced, she hated that most of all. It seemed a sign of being not only a lapsed Catholic, but belonging to a lapsed religion. She felt the whole religious revision had deprived her of experiencing the genuine, historical ritual, when going to mass was an event, dramatic pageantry—hence supportive of her revulsion/fascination. She was, after all, nothing if not melodramatic in her analyzing, rationalizing, conclusion-izing.

Being Catholic somewhat redeemed itself with its perpetual identifying factor/curse. She knew who she was—always. This possessive trait of her religion stamped her, tainted her throughout her day, affecting everything from turning the right cheek to crossing her legs properly like a lady in a pew. Then there were all the sacraments of her childhood, a way to get money from relatives and also a nice party with a cake.  She, unfortunately, had never been confirmed but that never kept her from being a Catholic.  It wasn’t her fault, anyway. They kept pushing the confirmation age further up in grade school. Her older siblings had all been confirmed (with parties and gifts) by sixth grade. Thanks to the new, modern take on things, everything changed in the seventies and confirmation was moved to the eighth grade. When she arrived at that final chapter of Catholic schoolgirlness, it was moved to the high school level. Well, she was not about to attend special classes on Saturdays simply to be confirmed, even if it did mean a cake (and she so loved cake). And she was most certainly not going to attend St. Ann’s girl’s high school for the convenience of confirmation. Rife with rumors of girl-on-girl action, she much preferred boys. But if they wanted her to publicly state her baptismal intent, they could have made the whole thing easier, like keeping it back in the sixth grade as it had been for all her siblings. Easy peasy. So she became a sort of in-between. No one seemed to mind it either, even when she was married in her family’s church. Unconfirmed but still not a heathen. It wasn’t like the Mormons where they excised the soul or some such trashy bible nonsense. (She only knew this sketchy information from visiting other parishes in eighth grade with the then-considered-liberal Sister Agnes Mary. Sister Agnes believed in opening up her student’s eyes (but she kept close tabs on their souls) and minds to the whole wide world of religion beyond the doors of St. Stephen’s grade school. Along with the Mormons, they’d visited Armenian, Episcopalian and Baptist churches, as well as a temple. Heresy before 1976—most assuredly.

The problem was, she still believed that the whole possessive/identifying thing enslaved her. She used to say (jokingly) how she was Catholic whether she wanted to be or not. It was like she had no say or choice in the identity that burdened/gladdened her through the years. A smallish weight to carry through life compared to being Jewish. But being Jewish seemed so much more than mere religion. It was a much more glamorous cultural stamp, they even had their own cuisine. On the opposite side of the coin, the Episcopalians she knew had no such identifying problem. It was just one small part of their lives, not their character. Still, there were no Episcopalian foods.

Then she remembered the fish fries of her childhood. Meatless Fridays during Lent meant dinner out at a church hall, supper club or even a tavern. Why even the Episcopalians ate perch on Fridays, it was so delicious. Maybe that was her religious culture food—perch from Lake Michigan. Pan-fried with potato pancakes and a lavishing of creamy coleslaw. Suddenly feeling better about it all, she knew what she'd make for her cousin's dinner and dressed for her own ritual—her Sunday morning jog.

 

http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Beer-Battered-Haddock

http://www.food52.com/recipes/7968_golden_panko_latkes_with_sour_cream_and_chives

http://www.saveur.com/article/Wine-and-Drink/Brandy-Old-Fashioned

“In the little moment that remains to us between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well drink a glass of Champagne.”

On Beheading Bubbly

By TOBY CECCHINI

 

 

Photographs by Jens Mortensen

Though we like to think of ourselves as a humble people who disdain ostentatious display, there are those occasions that encourage, nay, demand the chest-thumping, post-touchdown hubris inherent in our species. One of these is the presentation of a frosty bottle of Champagne. It’s like a convoluted Myers-Briggs test for personalities. Many people open such a gift, even on New Year’s Eve, with the gravity of a monk, showing the respect and discretion due a vinous masterwork. But there are those more excitable oenophiles, whose personal standard — “What Would Pirates Do?” — dictates freeing the bubbly soul by lopping off the bottle’s neck with a saber.

Why would anyone take a blade to Champagne? Well, frankly, it allows you to embrace your inner jackass under the guise of being dashing, with the entire drippingly elegant historical pageant of Champagne to lend your puerile posturing legitimacy and panache. I still can’t decide if sabering Champagne is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of, or one of the greatest, but it’s precisely that tension that makes it so stirring. It’s like climbing mountains in that way, except you don’t get as cold, and there’s Champagne more immediately afterwards.

There is all manner of ill-ascribed history to “l’art du sabrage,” upheld by posh dining clubs, which exult in a legend that harks back to Napoleon’s elite corps of lightning-fleet, saber-wielding Hussars. Take your pick of which dubious grandiosity you prefer: the Hussars developed the practice while leaving on horseback for battle; they developed the practice when returning from victories; or in homage to the widow Clicquot for her hospitality; or in Russia to impress the local ladies, and so on. … Parsing the reality of any of this is the work of someone else, ostensibly someone who cares. The important part, for us, is that it sounds great, all of it.

In fact, just make up your own Hussar-related history while you’re preparing the bottle, and give it some meaty personal embellishments to cover the time it takes you to clear the capsule, scrape the paper from the neck and free the cage from around the cork: “It so happens that my great, great grandmother, who was the only woman on the corps of Napoleon’s light cavalry, and had to dress surreptitiously as a man to so be, handed down, in a matrilineal line, her regiment’s manner of celebrating. I chanced to be watching on the day my mother schooled my sisters in it.” After all, this is about showmanship, not scholarship.

On to the pyrotechnics! And perhaps the stitches? No, no, be lionhearted; really, there’s nothing to it. The whole thing is predicated on very hard and firm-ish science. In the construction of the heavily reinforced bottle that keeps Champagne from exploding after it’s been dosed with a notch of beet sugar and capped back up to undergo a secondary fermentation (thereby creating over six atmospheres of pressure within), there are, as with any construction, natural weak spots. In our shameless grab for gusto and savoir-vivre, we will exploit these.

There are two seams running vertically the length of the bottle where the halves are fused, and a ringed flange atop that caps these two. After super-chilling the bottle — to both calm the wine so that it doesn’t all gork out the top upon being freed and to make the bottle, I suppose, a tad more brittle — we will run our “saber” up along the seam of the bottle to strike the top ring where it meets the seam with considerable aplomb. This is the work of the blink of an eye, but preparation is very important.

How to Saber a Bottle of Champagne, Carefully

1.) Remove the foil capsule and tear away the paper around the neck of the bottle as well. You will remove the wire cage also, but only immediately before sabering.

2.) Chill the bottle very, very well. Make a thick slurry of ice and water in a large bucket and chill the wine, making certain it is submerged entirely in the cold, for at least an hour. It must be extremely cold, or it may all just crumble in a heartbreaking explosion in your mitts. In fact, I turn mine upside down to make sure the neck is utterly cold. Dustin Wilson, the wine director of Eleven Madison Park — where they saber the house-imported Cuvée Vigneron from grower-winemaker Roger Pouillon only for couples getting engaged in the restaurant — stresses to his sommeliers that the single most import aspect of the process is “getting that bottle arctic.”

3.) Once the bottle is brutally cold, remove the wire cage. Locate one of the seams and place your weapon flat along it, using the dull side. Hold it out from your body, at a 45 degree slant and pointed away from any onlookers. Run your blade flat along the seam, in a straight line up, striking the neck ring forcefully (and simultaneously shrieking “Sauve qui peut!”).

4.) With any luck, or the merest practice, the ring pops off like nothing, and you should lose very little wine. It’s quite surgical. If the first go doesn’t get it, don’t be discouraged. Make some self-deprecating witticism, line it up and try again. Once you’re victorious, and understandably elated, refrain from the urge to swig from the open bottle. That, too, is surgical, but in a different way.

5.) The outward force of the pressure releasing immediately blows any stray shards of glass out and away from the bottle. This means you needn’t worry about drinking glass shards, but you do need to pass the Swiffer around the dining room before traipsing about barefoot. Or better, saber your Champagne on a beach.

This does work with other sparkling wines, it goes without saying, but not with all others. Some bottles, like very cheap cavas and non-reinforced bottles of vin pétillant, don’t work. If the wine is a full-on sparkler and the bottle is thick and seems to have prominent seams running up it, you’re most likely fine. People even do it with beer bottles. Would these guys approve of that? I’m certain not, which makes me all the more eager to saber beer now.

The knife is relatively unimportant, I’m almost sad to say. Online you can find videos of people offing the heads of Champagne bottles with spoons, butter knives, belt buckles and rings — maybe flowers if you search hard enough. All you need is a blunt edge and a stern knock. The dull backside of a regular 8-inch chef’s knife is, if a bit less swashbuckling than many of us might hope for, perfectly serviceable and at least something you’re bound to have about. There are a number of esteemed cutlery purveyors who make actual Champagne sabers: dull-edged, carnival-esque knives meant solely for this purpose. Such over-thought luxury gear seems not just unnecessary but frankly slightly dorky; it’s like being the guy who shows up to a pick-up game with the full matching Lebron jersey and shorts. If, on the other hand, it happens that you’ve the odd bayonet or lancer’s épée idling in the pantry, by all means step up; that’s exactly the kind of bold display for which style points are reserved, and it’s nice to (peaceably) repurpose a weapon that hasn’t seen service since the Boer War.

If you need more guidance, the best tutorial I could imagine comes from Dave Arnold, the erstwhile director of technology at the French Culinary Institute and all-around Johnny-on-the-spot enabler for ill-advised and possibly perilous culinary undertakings. If you need yet more impetus, I give you this quote from Paul Claudel, the French dramatist and diplomat: “Gentlemen, in the little moment that remains to us between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well drink a glass of Champagne.” To which I can only add: and let’s chop its head off with a sword!

 

Just because he really likes stuff like this...

CONSTRUCTION OF THE EIFFEL TOWER, 1889

It's Tommy's birthday today, so when I found this cool site with the actual construction of the tower Eiffel, I had to combine it with this photo of him, circa 1999.

We did not climb the tower that day, alas, as it was high summer and the line was woefully long. Some day we will return, and do just that, maybe even on a birthday. 

"good enough to slap your Mama..."

REX REED

CAT AT A HOT TIN STOVE

 

 

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED GOURMET NOVEMBER 2001

America's celebrated playwright was an accomplished cook with a penchant for anything "fattening, illegal, or on fire."

The excesses of Tennessee Williams, America's most prolific and famously tortured playwright, have been well documented. But in addition to sex, drugs, alcohol, and writing, food was also high on his list of passions. Dining well was an acquired taste he negotiated with no help from home, however. He once described his mother, Edwina, a faded steel magnolia immortalized as the cloying Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, as "an old trout terminally allergic to the kitchen, with the uncanny ability to make tinned soup taste like dishwasher detergent." So he learned, at an early age, to eat out. During the years I knew him, his two favorite words were "room service."

The first time I interviewed Tennessee was at Antoine's, in the French Quarter of New Orleans, a city that was, quite naturally by way of its own decadence, his favorite. The meal that night seemed dedicated to his preferred dishes ("Anything fattening, illegal, or on fire!" he yelped in a voice like a lazy alligator's) but began, as always, with a dozen oysters on the half shell ("Better than mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for a disintegratin' libido!"), washed down with a rye Old Fashioned, a crème de menthe frappé, a vodka Stinger, and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. "I'm not as young as I used to be," he sighed with a hiccup. The next day at breakfast, at Brennan's, he requested a pitcher of Martinis. "I'd like to order a Waldorf salad but my doctor won't allow me to eat nuts." Pause. "He didn't say anything about cannibalism, though." He settled for eggs Sardou, and grits and grillades with Creole tomato sauce, topped off with a bowl of flaming Bananas Foster.

In a city where fried okra is considered a green vegetable, he was perfectly at home indulging his appetite for the kind of food best self-described as a remedy for depression. Despite the culinary adventures he experienced during his restless travels (the year he was unwisely invited to be president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, for instance, when he never rose before noon, seldom saw the films, and announced to me, "I'm just here because I was told you could get really good absinthe"), his tastes were, in fact, relatively simple. No pomegranate-nasturtium sorbet for him. His favorite memory was of the summer he and his friend Carson McCullers rented a shack on Nantucket, where they survived on Jack Daniel's, canned green pea soup with wienies in it, and an innovation dubbed "spuds Carson"—mashed potatoes mixed with olives.

In Key West, he lived in a small Art Nouveau candy box on Duval Street with a Boston terrier named Gigi, who looked like a canine Colette; an orange tabby cat named Gentleman Caller; and Mr. Ava Gardner, a ferocious iguana chained to the front porch to scare off marauders. Here, on hot mornings, he combed the waterfront for a rare catch of pompano and the shrimp and crabs that made their way into one of the elaborate gumbos he prepared for an illustrious guest list ranging from defrocked bishops to Anna Magnani. His favorite cookbooks were those compiled by junior chambers of commerce in every southern town from Baton Rouge to Boca, along with a treasured, dog-eared thing called White Trash Cooking. He once prepared for me a memorable dinner of smothered roast beef and a Girl Scout recipe for lemon icebox pie with a vanilla wafer crust ("None of that Key lime mush with graham crackers that taste like shirt boards from a Chinese laundry"). When a new play tanked on Broadway, or some critic published a punishing premature obituary, he would sigh, "Baby, I'll soon be forced, through penury, to resort to usin' Caviar Helper."

I think his happy hedonism, his zest for food and life, and his wicked sense of humor saw him through every crisis. He told Gore Vidal he slept through the '60s. Maybe so, but he didn't miss a meal.

Tennessee Williams's
Lemon Icebox Pie
In a food processor, finely crush 1/2 box of vanilla wafers. Melt 1 stick of lightly salted butter for flavor (not sweet butter). Pour vanilla wafers and melted butter into a pie plate and shape into a pie shell with your fingers. In a large bowl, mix 1/2 cup of freshly squeezed lemon juice, 1 can of Eagle Brand condensed milk, and 1 egg yolk. Pour mixture into pie plate. In another bowl, beat 6 egg whites* with 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract, and 3/4 cup sugar until stiff white peaks form. Pour over pie and top with freshly grated lemon rind. Bake in oven at moderate heat just long enough for meringue to brown, about 20 minutes. Cool to room temperature and put in the refrigerator until ice-cold. The result, as Tennessee Williams always said, "is good enough to slap your Mama." —R.R.

 

March 23, 2012, 11:03 AM

Ancient Hawaiians Caught More By Fishing Less

By DOUGLAS M. MAIN

Getty ImagesA school of manini fish pass over a coral reef in Hanauma Bay in Honolulu.

Centuries ago, Hawaiians caught three times more fish annually than scientists generally consider to be sustainable in modern times — and maintained this level of harvest for more than 400 years, researchers report in a new study in the journal Fish and Fisheries.

The findings could be instructive for agencies that enforce fishing limits in overfished waters around the globe.

Native Hawaiians caught about 50 percent more fish than modern fleets catch today in both Hawaii and the Florida Keys, the two largest reef ecosystems in the United States, said a co-author of the study, Loren McClenachan, a fisheries researcher at Colby College in Waterville, Me.

Hawaiians harvested about 15 metric tons of fish per square kilometer of reef annually from 1400 to 1800, the study found. That’s five times the median harvest in island nations worldwide today.

Dr. McClenachan and her co-author, John Kittinger, a researcher at theCenter for Ocean Solutions in Monterey, Calif., drew on a variety of historical records and a method called catch reconstruction to estimate historical harvests in the Hawaiian Islands and the Florida Keys.

The Hawaiians used many techniques similar to those employed today, like temporary or permanent bans from fishing in certain areas, restrictions on certain species and gear, and catch limits. But they enforced the rules strictly; breaking them could mean corporal punishment or even death.

While the authors obviously don’t advocate such extremes, penalties in some areas could be stricter, the authors suggested, and enforcement could improve. In Hawaii today, “you get penalized much more harshly if you shoplift sunglasses from a store than if you take a bunch of fish that are the wrong size or kind,” Dr. Kittinger said in an interview.

Dirk Zeller, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the study, said that the conclusion makes sense: Hawaiians were able to maintain such high levels because their fishing activities were so well managed and focused on a wide variety of different species, he said. They also left well enough alone, regularly outlawing fishing in spawning grounds and other areas to allow populations to regenerate, Dr. Zeller said.

The two places studied tell very different stories. As historians have documented, native Hawaiians employed a carefully controlled community-based system of regulations on fishing. Rules were passed down by oral tradition and recorded when missionaries introduced printing presses to the islands in the early 1800’s, Dr. Kittinger said.

In the Florida Keys, however, where intensive fishing didn’t take off until the mid-19th century, there have been fewer regulations and a repeating pattern of overfishing of one species for sale on global markets followed by a crash in that fish population and a switch to a new species. This cycle has severely depleted green turtles, sponges, sawfish and other creatures.

Now reefs in both places are overfished — “and there are less fish coming off the reef then back in the day,” Dr. Kittinger said.

Given that enforcement agencies are often underfinanced, he said, they might do better to devise a bottom-up approach. That is already happening in some areas, where officials have adopted co-management schemes with community groups that help draft rules and regulations.

Most productive reefs in long-ago Hawaii had community managers who knew a reef well and made rules unique to their own neck of the ocean, Dr. Kittinger noted.

The researchers reconstructed historical harvest levels by calculating the amount of fish consumption per capita necessary to maintain estimated population levels in Hawaii over the last 700 years. Dr. Kittinger said the results are conservative because he and his colleague used the low end of anthropologists’ population estimates in their calculations.

While some may question the use of such historical data, Daniel Pauly a researcher at the University of British Columbia, said that such information is probably just as accurate as current harvest estimates. One can estimate the catch of an isolated society like Hawaii by using population rates, which can be inferred quite reliably by anthropologists, said Dr. Pauly, who was not involved in the study.

Dr. Zeller suggested that the study shows “that we must learn from the past to save the future.”

If more marine reserves were established and limits were firmly imposed on fishing, he said, the fishing industry could actually catch more fish while making less of an effort.

But the blame should not be assigned solely to regulatory agencies, Dr. Pauly said. “We moderns cannot stomach restrictions on fishing that are necessary to maintain the stocks,” he said.

 

From the Paris Review:

ON TELEVISION

The Aristocrats

February 22, 2012 | by Meredith Blake

Let it be known that Lady Fiona Herbert, the eighth Countess of Carnarvon, occasionally answers her own phone. When I call the Countess’s office to discuss her new book, Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey, I am unusually anxious; it’s not every day I speak to a member of the British aristocracy. “Hello?” answers a startled-sounding voice. I nervously ask if Lady Carnarvon is available. “This is Lady Carnarvon,” the voice replies, erupting into hearty laughter—which, happily, is not directed at me. The Countess had been reaching for the phone just as it rang and was caught off guard. “I’m completely useless as a receptionist,” she says.

For a woman who lives at Highclere Castle, one of Britain’s most impressive “family piles,” as well as the primary setting of the spectacularly popular PBS costume drama Downton Abbey, Lady Carnarvon is surprisingly warm and unpretentious.

She projects an image of slightly disheveled glamour: her household is not a well-oiled machine, but something more akin to a living archaeological site, where one might just discover a decades-old scrapbook while foraging through an out-of-use desk drawer. “We found a staircase recently. That was quite exciting,” she tells me.

Downton Abbey isn’t Highclere’s first brush with fame—parts of Eyes Wide Shut were filmed there, and British tabloid curiosity Jordan celebrated her 2005 wedding at the castle, arriving via a pumpkin-shaped carriage—but the phenomenal success of the series has thrust the Carnarvon family’s ancestral home into the spotlight like never before. It’s also spawned a cottage industry of Downton Abbey tie-in books, including two competing biographies about Almina, the colorful and controversial fifth Countess of Carnarvon.

Widely believed to be the illegitimate daughter of industrialist Alfred de Rothschild and his French mistress, Marie Wombwell, Almina married George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, in 1895, when she was just nineteen. In Lady Carnarvon’s telling, it was a felicitous match romantically and financially. Dubbed “the Pocket Venus,” diminutive Almina was a renowned beauty, reportedly besotted with her new husband, a budding Egyptologist. More important, perhaps, Almina brought to her marriage the cash desperately needed to run Highclere. Lady Carnarvon’s book focuses on the tumultuous years of World War I, when Almina converted her palatial estate into a convalescent hospital for wounded officers, and ends rather abruptly in 1924, shortly after the Earl’s untimely death.

Downton Abbey fans will note the striking parallels between Almina’s life and that of her fictional counterpart, Lady Cora Crawley. This is hardly an accident: Lady Carnarvon and her husband, the eighth Earl of Carnarvon, affectionately known as Geordie, have been friends with Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes for more than a decade. Though Lady Carnarvon calls Fellowes a “genius,” she’s too involved with the show to call herself a fan. “It’s too much of a bloody muddle,” she says.

The Prince of Wales visiting Highclere. Lady Almina is front and center. Photo © Highclere Castle Archive

Yet Lady Almina portrays a lifestyle far more extravagant—and a hierarchy far more rigid—than anything on Downton Abbey. In one of the book’s most evocative passages, Lady Carnarvon describes how Almina spent the equivalent of £360,000 on a three-day visit by the prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII. On his first night at Highclere, the prince, a notorious glutton, enjoyed an impossibly decadent meal:

It began with a soup, a consommé, followed by the fish course: turbot grillé Dugléré, (after Adolphe Dugléré, who was one of the most famous chefs in nineteenth-century Paris and had cooked for the Rothschild family for years.) Then came the entrées: pâtés and a chicken dish. Next up were the roasts, a vast amount of game birds, stuffed with foie gras, all served with numerous vegetable side dishes. It was followed by a soufflé d'orange and ices.

After the entertainments (on this occasion, accounts show that a band played for the assembled guests in the Music Room), there was a light supper of cold meats such as pheasant and cold beef.

Later chapters about the war years at Highclere, while less exuberant, are full of sumptuous details, such as the “cheerful crushed-strawberry-pink” uniforms Almina designed for her team of pretty Irish nurses, or the soft down pillows and fine sheets on each patient’s bed.

In Lady Almina, Lady Carnarvon portrays her predecessor as a woman with a vast charitable streak and a knack for getting what she wanted—particularly from her “godfather,” Alfred, who footed the enormous bill for her war-time hospital. “She spent money like water, but she spent it saving lives. If you’re going to distribute your fortune, that’s a pretty good place to start.

Though the book is explicitly aimed at fans of Downton Abbey, reading it doesn’t feel quite as silly as it perhaps ought to. With or without the series, the Carnarvon family is intriguing and eccentric in a way that seemingly only wealthy British aristocrats can be. Almina’s husband would discover the tomb of Tutankhamun, dying shortly thereafter of a mysterious blood infection popularly attributed to the “Pharoah’s curse.” An even more fascinating character is the Earl’s half-brother, Aubrey Herbert, who was close friends with T. E. Lawrence and was twice offered the throne of Albania. His daughter, Laura, would become Evelyn Waugh’s second wife (his first wife was Laura’s cousin, also named Evelyn).

Though Lady Almina is little more than a frothy, well-executed piece of Highclere marketing, it is not, it turns out, an entirely uncontroversial book, nor is it the first Almina biography to hit the market. Historian William Cross beat Lady Carnarvon to the punch by a few months with his self-published The Life and Secrets of Almina Carnarvon.

Lady Almina © Highclere Castle Archive.

A few weeks ago, I called Cross at his home in South Wales to discuss the considerable discrepancies between his book and Lady Carnarvon’s. He was gracious and curiously charming, but it was difficult to get a word in edgewise; over the course of our nearly ninety-minute conversation, I asked him perhaps a half-dozen questions. Cross takes issue with Lady Carnarvon’s decision to end Almina’s story in 1924, shortly after her first husband’s death and her hasty remarriage, barely eight months later, to Colonel Ian Dennistoun. In the very last paragraph of the book, Lady Carnarvon tosses in a pointedly brief mention of a “damaging court case brought by Ian’s ex-wife, Dorothy,” a case that was, in fact, a massive and very expensive sex scandal revolving around her new husband. When Colonel Dennistoun's ex-wife, Dorothy, learned that he'd remarried a wealthy widow, she sued for alimony. In court, Dorothy further alleged that her ex-husband had forced her to sleep with a high-ranking military officer in order to secure a promotion. Because of Lord Carnarvon's fame, the scandal was front-page news in the U.K.

The fifth Countess would live for another forty-five years, eventually dying in 1969, at ninety-three, after choking on a chicken bone. Having long since squandered her inheritance from Alfred, the former chatelaine of magnificent Highclere Castle was living in a modest row home in Bristol. None of this depressing business is covered in Lady Almina. “I stopped it in 1924 because that to me was a beginning and an end that I could manage,” the Countess says of her decision to omit Almina’s checkered post-Highclere life.

In his book Cross makes a slew of sensational allegations, some more plausible than others. According to the author, Alfred de Rothschild was not Almina’s real father, but he encouraged the illusion as a way of deflecting attention from his homosexuality. (For her part, Lady Carnarvon never conclusively states that Rothschild was Almina’s father.) To make ends meet in her later years, Cross says Almina provided costly but illegal abortions to upper-class women at Alfred House, the London hospital she opened in the late 1920s. (Evelyn Waugh reportedly called it “Almina’s abortionist parlor.”) His version of Almina is an inveterate maneater, a woman who seduced her second husband’s undertaker and later took up with a decades-younger working-class lover named James Stocking.

A soldier recuperating at Highclere. Photo © Highclere Castle Archive.

Not surprisingly, the ever-judicious British press has latched on to Cross’s allegations, especially his outlandish claim that Almina’s son, the sixth Earl of Carnarvon, was in fact sired by Prince Victor Duleep Singh—the fifth Earl’s best friend and a frequent guest at Highclere. The incomparable Daily Mail even contacted the “real Earl of Carnarvon,” a Devon school teacher named Alan Herbert, to tell him that he has “a strong claim” to the title. (His reported response: “Wow.”)

Cross himself is not exactly diplomatic. He accuses Lady Carnarvon of writing a “hugely diluted and sanitized” version of Almina’s life and sees her hagiography as part of a broader conspiracy to consolidate power among the landed class. “Britain is still absolutely under the control of the aristocracy,” he says. “That, in 2011, isn’t right.”

Cross is even less restrained online, where he’s posted scathing reviews of Lady Almina on Amazon. “Know that toffs will not be transparent,” Cross warns the would-be reader, describing the fans who “follow this TV series as mesmerised as grazing sheep watching car headlamps flicking in the winter darkness of night.” He likens Lady Carnarvon’s book to Orson Welles’s famous “War of The Worlds” broadcast and, yes, to Nazi propaganda: “It seems a case of employing the technique of Mr. Goebbels that if one utters a big enough untruth and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

So what does Cross think of Downton Abbey? “Oh, I enjoy it very much,” he tells me. “I think the story lines are fantastic.”

Meredith Blake is a freelance writer living in New York. She is a frequent contributor to The A.V. Club and The Los Angeles Times.

 

Charlie's Secret

Charlie Chaplin was the son of a gypsy queen  

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

Last updated at 10:44 AM on 21st February 2011

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1358970/The-secret-letter-claims-Charlie-Chaplain-son-gypsy-queen.html#ixzz1mg8HR6D1

The little tramp: Charlie Chaplin may have been born in a gypsy caravan, not in London

A letter hidden for years by silent movie pioneer Charlie Chaplin has come to light which claims he lied about his birthplace and was in fact born in a gypsy caravan.

The letter, written to Chaplin in the 1970s, claims he was born on the 'Black Patch' near Birmingham rather than in London as previously believed. 

The comedian, one of most iconic personalities of the 20th century, received the letter six years before he died in 1977, and kept it hidden in his desk drawer.

It stated that the British comic actor's claim in his memoirs that he was born in London was wrong and instead relocated his birth, on April 16, 1889, to a caravan in the town of Smethwick, in central England.

Believed to be genuine by Chaplin's family, the letter was found in the locked drawer of a bureau which was inherited by Chaplin's daughter, Victoria, after his widow Oona died in 1991.

It was only found after his daughter had a locksmith open up the drawer.

WHAT THE LETTER SAID:

'Hello Charlie,

'If you would like to know, you were born in a caravan, so [was I]. It was a good one, it belonged to the gypsy queen who was my auntie. 

'You were born on the Black Patch in Smethwick. So was I, two and a half year later. 

'Your mum did move again with her dad's circus and later settled down in London but whereabouts I do not know.'

Jack Hill, who adds he is not out for any money for the information, signs off:

'Goodbye and good luck,

Jack Hill.'

The letter is set to be included in a British radio documentary tomorrow and reveals the inauspicious beginnings of the man who earned worldwide acclaim for his performance as the 'little tramp'.

It was sent by Jack Hill, of Tamworth, who says that he knew about the British actor's real background from his aunt, who was a gypsy queen.

Mr Hill wrote: 'The caravan belonged to the Gypsy Queen, who was my auntie. You were born on the Black Patch in Smethwick near Birmingham.'

The Black Patch was a thriving Romany community based on the industrial edge of Birmingham in the 1880s.   

Chaplin's birth certificate has never been located, even though by the late 1880s it was a legal requirement. His older half brother Sydney had one.

Until now it was thought he was born in London in 1889.  His mother Hannah, whose maiden name is Hill, was descended from a travelling family.

 

She was a singer and actress with the stage name Lily Harley, who separated from her husband Charles when young Charlie was three.

There may have been some shame in having a Romany background, which is thought to be why Chaplin made much of being a Londoner, particularly after he emigrated to America in 1910.

Secret letter: Charlie Chaplin aged 12 (left) in 1901 and aged 25 in 1914 (right). He received the letter telling him of his birthplace six years before he died in 1977

Inauspicious beginnings: Chaplin may have been born in a gypsy travelling wagon similar to this

The letter is one of a number of documents about the comic being kept in a bomb-proof concrete vault in Montreux, Switzerland, the country where his relatives now live.

Other documents include reel-to-reel recordings of Chaplin improvising at the piano.  

There are also press cuttings which detail the British Army's banning of the Chaplin moustache from the trenches during the First World War.

Chaplin is one of the greatest figures of the 20th century, famous for his signature character, the Little Tramp.

The survivor of a tough workhouse childhood, he became one of the best-known film stars in the silent movie world before the end of the First World War.

Chaplin's oldest surviving son Michael has said the idea of Chaplin being a gypsy born in Smethwick, the West Midlands, does not bother him.

He believes the letter must have been significant for Chaplin to have kept it.

There are plans to turn the Chaplin family home in Montreux into a museum.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1358970/The-secret-letter-claims-Charlie-Chaplain-son-gypsy-queen.html#ixzz1mg83qgbn

 

Victorian kitchen discovery

Now there's an Aga with a saga: Victorian kitchen that has remained untouched for 60 years discovered in stately home renovation

• The treasure trove of Victorian items included a 19th-century cook book
• Also found were pastry cutters and antique fire extinguishers
  

By JAYA NARAIN

Last updated at 9:23 PM on 15th September 2011

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2037644/Victorian-kitchen-remained-untouched-60-years.html#ixzz1mfOSns3l

 

Shrouded in a thick layer of dust and hidden under piles of junk, a complete Victorian kitchen lay forgotten for more than a generation.

Archie Graham-Palmer and his wife Philippa discovered the incredible time capsule when they began rummaging in the basement of the family home.

They found an entire kitchen kitted out as if the cook had just stepped out for a breath of air.

The old cooker in the Victorian kitchen, which has been uncovered after decades of gathering dust

Cooking utensils from the Victorian era remain in place on the walls, shelves and sideboards

House proud: Archie Graham-Palmer and wife Phillippa discovered the relic in the basement of their home 

The kitchen's entrance had been blocked since the Second World War with a collection of unwanted belongings

The kitchen was stocked with everything the staff needed to prepare meals for the household

As well as a full cooking range, they discovered kettles, pots, pans, pastry cutters, antique fire extinguishers and jelly moulds.

 

There was a spit for roasting pigs on, as well as a table and benches in the middle of the room which could easily seat 20 staff.

CEFN LEA PARK'S HISTORY

The current house at Cefn Lea Park was built around the turn of the 19th century, the previous building on the site having been destroyed by fire in 1794.

In the 18th Century it had been the home of the Griffiths family before passing on to the prominent Kenyon family of Gredington.

The house was sold in 1830 at an auction held at the Wynnstay Arms Hotel. It was bought by Rev Nathaniel Roberts whose wife, Frances, was daughter of John Matthews, attorney of Chester.

However, another fire that same year meant that the house needed extensive renovations. 

What we see today is likely to date from this period.

On Frances' death in 1850, Cefn Park passed to Sir William Henry Roger Palmer, Bt, of Kunure Park, Dublin, who was married to Frances' sister Eleanor. It subsequently went to their son, Sir Roger William Henry Palmer in 1854.

The kitchen is thought to date back to the 1830s when the house had a full complement of servants.

Unused for more than 100  years, the kitchen was apparently briefly recommissioned during the Second World War because it offered protection from air raids. 

But it was mothballed after the war and became a dumping ground.

Cefn Park near Wrexham, North Wales, has been passed down through the family since it was bought in 1830.

Mr Graham-Palmer, 41, who  worked in commercial forestry, moved back to the family home  this year to take over the estate from his  father.

With his wife, Philippa, 37, he began investigating the nooks and crannies that had been left undisturbed for decades.

‘The basement had been a dumping ground for years,’ he said. ‘We discovered that the room was as it would have been.

‘We even found a cookbook. Most of the recipes would have needed an army of cooks.’

He and his wife intend to preserve the kitchen because of its links to the estate’s Victorian past and it is being redecorated in colours  from the era.

 

 

Archie Graham-Palmer and his wife Philippa discovered the below-stairs kitchen in the 200-year-old stately home in Cefn Park

 

The bells with which the servants were summoned, as well as an unidentified weighted pulley system, remain mounted on the walls

 

 

 

The Cefn Park house is surrounded by 50 acres of land near Wrexham

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2037644/Victorian-kitchen-remained-untouched-60-years.html#ixzz1mfOJuZNB

 

R.I.P. Dory Previn

Dory Previn, Songwriter, Is Dead at 86

By BRUCE WEBER

Published: February 14, 2012

Dory Previn, the lyricist for three Oscar-nominated songs who as a composer and performer mined her difficult childhood, bouts of mental illness and a very public divorce to create a potent and influential personal songbook, died on Tuesday at her home in Southfield, Mass. She was 86.

Larry C. Morris/The New York Times

Dory Previn performing at the Bitter End in New York in 1973.

Her death was confirmed by her husband, Joby Baker.

Ms. Previn rose to prominence as a singer-songwriter with a substantial cult following in the early 1970s and she enriched a period in pop music history that also saw the emergence of Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Laura Nyro.

She never became as widely known as they were (though she did record a live double album at Carnegie Hall), partly because her voice was never as big as theirs, but also because her lyrics — frank and dark, even when tinged with humor, and often wincingly confessional — were not the stuff of pop radio. They were, however, clear antecedents of the work of later balladeers like Sinead O’Connor and Suzanne Vega.

In “With My Daddy in the Attic,” Ms. Previn wrote of her complicated relationship with her disturbed father. In “Esther’s First Communion,” she wrote about a girl’s indoctrination into religious ritual and her revulsion at it. In “Yada Yada La Scala,” she wrote about women in a mental hospital. In “Lemon Haired Ladies,” she wrote about an older woman pining for a younger man:

Whatever you give me

I’ll take as it comes

Discarding self-pity

I’ll manage with crumbs.

Unusually for a pop singer of the day, Ms. Previn’s background was in neither folk nor rock. Her early success came in Hollywood, writing songs for the movies, generally as a lyricist working with her husband, André Previn, who later earned fame as a classical composer and conductor.

Together they were nominated for two Academy Awards: in 1960 for “Faraway Part of Town,” from “Pepe,” and in 1962 for “Second Chance,” from “Two for the Seesaw.” But their best-known collaboration was the theme from the 1967 film version of Jacqueline Susann’s drug-soaked show-business novel “Valley of the Dolls” (later recorded by Dionne Warwick), which begins:

Gotta get off, gonna get

Have to get off from this ride

Gotta get hold, gonna get

Need to get hold of my pride.

The halting, almost stammering progression of laments, Ms. Previn later said, came from her own experience of relying on pills.

In 1969, working with the composer Fred Karlin, Ms. Previn earned a third Oscar nomination, for “Come Saturday Morning” from “The Sterile Cuckoo,” which became a hit for the Sandpipers.

By then, however, the Previn marriage was in a shambles. Mr. Previn had begun an affair with the actress Mia Farrow, then in her early 20s, whom he later married, and Ms. Previn, who had a history of emotional fragility and mental illness, fell apart. Fearful of traveling in general and of flying in particular, she had a breakdown on an airplane that was waiting to take off, shouted unintelligibly and tore at her clothes, and spent several months in a psychiatric hospital.

The episode, as awful as it was, proved to be a turning point in her life and career.

Her first album afterward, “On My Way to Where” (1970) — the title was a reference to the airplane debacle — included perhaps her most famous song, “Beware of Young Girls,”about Ms. Farrow, and received polarized reviews. On her second, “Mythical Kings and Iguanas” (1971), many critics noticed a growing vocal confidence. Her third, “Reflections in a Mud Puddle/Taps Tremors and Time Steps” (1971), included a pained report of and reflection on her father’s death, and drew praise from the New York Times music critic Don Heckman.

“Ms. Previn is no great singer, her guitar playing is only adequate, and her melodies sometimes have an uncomfortable tendency to move in too-familiar directions,” he wrote. “But her message is stated so brilliantly in her lyrics, and the tales she has to tell are so important, that they make occasional musical inadequacies fade away.”

Dorothy Veronica Langan was born in New Jersey — sources differ on the town, Rahway or Woodbridge — on Oct. 22, 1925, and she grew up in Woodbridge. Her father, Michael, was a laborer and a frustrated musician who pushed her toward music and dance. He had also been deranged, Ms. Previn wrote in a 1976 memoir, by his service in World War I. He had been gassed, she wrote, and he was convinced the gassing had made him sterile; therefore she could not be his daughter. For a while he locked himself in the attic.

Ms. Previn left home as a teenager and worked in summer stock and in commercials and sang in small clubs, writing new verses to popular songs. Her work came to the attention of Arthur Freed, the producer of MGM movie musicals like “An American in Paris” and “Singin’ in the Rain,” who hired her for MGM, where she met Mr. Previn. They married in 1959. She had been married and divorced previously.

In addition to her husband, Mr. Baker, a painter whom she met in the 1970s and married in 1984, she is survived by three stepchildren, Michelle Wayland, Fredricka Baker and Scott Zimmerman, and six step-grandchildren.

In the 1980s, Ms. Previn and Mr. Previn reconciled as friends, and she came to loathe the fact that she was best known for their breakup. But the pain and grief were the foundation of her art. In the hospital after her breakdown, she was encouraged to write down her feelings, and they emerged as poems.

“I was always afraid to write music,” she said in 1970. “I wouldn’t have presumed to with a musician like André around the house. But I play a little guitar. So I started working them out on the guitar, thinking I could interest some singer in recording them and that’s how all these songs were born.”

 

Hairstyles Worthy of an Oscar Nod

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS

Published: February 14, 2012

SINCE August, Ted Gibson has been campaigning on social media to get the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to award an Oscar for hair, a campaign that has gathered support from actresses like Ashley Greene and Jessica Chastain, who is nominated for best supporting actress for “The Help.”

“The Show Off” (1926) starring Louise Brooks.

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961) starring Audrey Hepburn.

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

“Cleopatra” (1963) starring Elizabeth Taylor.

Paramount Pictures/Photofest

“Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) starring Mia Farrow.

E

Leigh Johnson/Columbia Pictures

“Marie Antoinette” (2006) starring Kirsten Dunst.

“When I’m acting, I prefer to play characters where I get to transform, and I do a lot of that through hair,” Ms. Chastain said. She wore wigs for“The Help” and “The Debt,” and said that most people don’t realize how hard hairdressers work to get wigs to look good. “There’s a lot of skill required to work with a wig.”

So, if the award had been in place throughout the history of the Oscars, which films does Mr. Gibson think would have deserved the gold statuette?

“The Show Off” (1926), starring Louise Brooks (it actually predates the first Oscars in 1929). “Women then weren’t wearing haircuts — they wore sets, waved hair,” he said, but her straight haircut with bangs to her cheekbones “changed the course of how women wear their hair, it introduced women to a new way of thinking.”

 

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961), starring Audrey Hepburn. “That little black dress would be nothing without that hair,” Mr. Gibson said. “It was a French twist. She was the first to have a streak — reminiscent of the ’60s — a big streak of blond in the brown hair.”

“Cleopatra” (1963), starring Elizabeth Taylor. “There were so many hair moments, tons,” he said, adding that this movie’s virtue was its variety. “This is where Bo Derek in ‘10’ got her braids from. She has a band ornate with gold. You really got who this woman of the Nile is, by basically her hair.”

 

“Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), starring Mia Farrow. “WhenVidal Sassoon cut her hair off, it changed how women look at their hair. There have always been movies with women making a transition — whether she had a breakup like when Angela Bassett cut off her hair in ‘Waiting to Exhale’ — but at the same time with ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ it was a transformative moment. And it’s the pixie that Michelle Williams wears now.”

“Marie Antoinette” (2006), starring Kirsten Dunst. “The movie was terrible, but the costume, hair and makeup were so beautiful. But it was done by different people.” Costume design won an Oscar. However, all those edgy powdered wigs (and the visionary stylist behind them) deserved accolades too, he said, adding, “This isn’t special effects; this is down-and-dirty beauty that’s thought-provoking and emotional.