#A Guide to Modern American Cooking

[cooking-pol-martin]

You are on an Adventure: "Hearty Pasta Salad"

I'm beginning to realize there's a process like the stages of grief when undertaking a Pol Martin recipe. First, you read through a recipe, and if it isn't completely bonkers like "Chicken with Grape Sauce" or "Banana Omelet", you think Other than that one thing, this is pretty normal. The recipe you come across is called "Hearty Pasta Salad." You head to the grocery store with a photo of the recipe in order to pick up ingredients. You read through it standing in the produce section, and you realize you've completely missed an ingredient so obscure you have literally no idea what it is. For the purposes of this essay, let's call that ingredient "Chinese lettuce."

After a web search, you determine that "Chinese lettuce" is referred to as "Celtuce" in the US, and it sounds like it would be delightful but utterly impossible to source. You are smack in the middle of the continent and the closest Asian market is 150 miles to the south. (You also wonder where Pol got such a thing in Canada in the 80s.) You decide you'll sub with iceberg lettuce because they both have lettuce in the name and that's where you are emotionally. You're tired. Eggs are still $9 for a dozen, but you've been chicken-sitting for a neighbor, and her ladies are laying unlike your own chickens who are lazy bullshit.

You get home and you and your kid -- you have an adult son, in this scenario -- read through the recipe again while laying out all the ingredients in preparation. You put on water to boil for both hard-boiled eggs and bow-tie pasta, and start cutting things up. Both you and your son have a crisis when you realize that Pol's instructions have you doing something so incomprehensible you wonder if it's written in natural language or if it's some dream anomaly. You remember you read somewhere that you cannot reread the same thing twice in a dream because what you're reading has no objective reality, so you reread the recipe again. The words stay stubbornly the same. Fine, you think. I already have dinner in the oven so fuck it, I'm not going to starve or anything. You have learned your lesson.

You begin to assemble the salad, which consists, like most salads, of a sauce and the things you pour the sauce on. The sauce is where the madness lies: after whisking together an egg yolk, garlic, and mustard, Pol directs you to press a hard-boiled egg through a sieve into this mixture. You think back to how your kid gave a friend of his four Pol recipes to choose from for this attempt at Cooking Pol Martin, and when they chose this one, they said, Oh, this is dire.

While you stand over a sieve with an egg in it holding a pestle, you consider the series of life choices that ended in this exact moment. You think about the vast randomness of history and genetics, the way life has braided and twisted through circumstance from the beautiful alchemy of the primordial soup through hundreds of millions of years to your existence, standing in a kitchen. You are related to the original animal of this dark earth. We all are. You are one with the universe.

You smash the hard-boiled egg with the pestle. It doesn't seem to work until it miraculously does. Pushing the egg through the weave of the wire renders it into a fluffy, fine-grained emulsion that will mix beautifully with the yolk-mustard mixture. You feel both exultant and chagrined, exhilarated and a little freaked out. Your kid texts his friend that it worked so much better than expected. The friend texts back, Don't like that.

You finish up the sauce with lemon juice and olive oil, and begin to assemble the dry ingredients. You are cautiously hopeful but wary. You don't like the idea of beans and pasta together. You think back to the Wet Ass Pol situation and how the mix of kidney beans and spaghetti was one of the many, many reasons that dish was the hottest of messes. You hope that the iceberg lettuce isn't a titanic disaster. You pour the sauce over everything and toss.

You fill up salad bowls and sit down at the table. Actual dinner is still in the oven, but you're hungry, so this seems the most auspicious way to experience this Hearty Pasta Salad. You take a bite, and then another. You keep eating. Hunger is the best pickle, but this salad is objectively good. The bright sourness of the lemon with the slight olive tang of the oil and the creaminess of the egg is perfectly, delicately balanced. Even the beans add a smooth density to the crunch of the various vegetables and the lightness of the pasta. Your husband goes back for seconds.

This is the best thing you've made out of a Pol Martin cookbook. This precipitates its own kind of crisis. You are used to going though the stations of Pol -- incredulity, anticipation, resignation, confusion, revelation, fuck it, and so on -- but you are also accustomed to standing over either the dog dish or the trash at the end of this cycle. The next morning you wake up and put the leftovers in your bag for work. You eat the salad in the break room, and the salad is even better on the second day. You have an out of body experience. You do not understand this life you're living, but you're alive, and in this one moment, life is good.

[shrunkenheadmanlibrary-blo-blog1]

A Guide to Modern American Cooking

Call number: food.Wrld.US.Mart

[cooking-pol-martin]

Lasagna Cordon Bleu

One of my formative experiences with food fads happened when I was a young girl, probably sometime in the early 80s, when I was staying with my grandparents. I spent a lot of time with them in northern Minnesota. They were outdoorsy Scandinavians, so I spent a lot of time out of doors running around in the woods getting really hungry. Now, Grandma's cooking was really traditional in a lot of ways: she always baked their bread, used a lot of local ingredients like wild rice and lake fish, and maintained a lot of Old World food traditions like lefse or krumkake. She was also susceptible to health food fads to often not great results.

This particular time was just after being out sledding on the massive hill the snowplow made; if a kid were industrious enough, they could tunnel right in and make a fort. So my sister and I came back inside, and Grandma Dory asked if we wanted some hot chocolate. Would we ever! We divested ourselves of our wet outerwear, sat at the table in anticipation, and she set two steaming mugs in front of us. I blew on it and then took a right big sip. At which point the world did the focus-in dolly-out thing from horror movies.

Grandma hadn't made us hot cocoa.

She'd made us hot carob.

Probably most people reading this have never had carob, which is meet and right. Carob was part of a whole health food craze called the natural food movement* in the 1970s wherein people would take actual good food and replace it with something so terrible you didn't actually want to eat anymore. Chocolate was replaced with carob; butter with margarine; coffee with chicory; and so on. It's entirely possible that carob is just fine in whatever Mediterranean dish** it is traditionally in, but I will never know because a cup of hot carob when you are anticipating actual edible food is permanently scarring.

Food culture can be really faddish, and that is nowhere more evident than in health food or weight loss diets. You can chart the last couple centuries by the rise and fall of fad diets, from Victorians ingesting tapeworms or arsenic to the Keto and Paleo diets from the turn of the millennium. There are also foods that, due to novelty or whim, become associated with a time period or a generation -- the Jell-O and deviled eggs of the 1950s, all the fondue of the 70s, or the fermented foods of the last decade or so -- food that would have been more emblematic than widespread. Then there are the foods that end up being everyday essentials, the foods that, due to the vagaries of the supply chain or general zeitgeist, become the staples of food culture in any given span of time.

Which brings me somewhat long-windedly to cooking with Pol Martin. So far, just about everything I've made from Pol's cookbooks has transported me back to when I was a kid in the late 70s and 80s. Sometimes this is good; sometimes less so. My most recent outing "Lasagne Rolls" was the first time I could actually identify what it was about the recipe that invoked this involuntary memory. So, first things first, let's talk about the recipe.

I chose "Lasagne Rolls" because it seemed slightly unusual, but not so unusual I was going to end up dumping it out for the chickens. Also, it's from one of my new acquisitions, A Guide to Modern American Cooking, which sounds like such an auspicious topic for a cookbook penned by a French Canadian.*** Basically, instead of layering lasagna noodles, a meat or veggie filling, and whatever sauce to make lasagna, you roll up the fillings in the lasagna noodles and then pour a white sauce over everything.

Making the rolls was pretty straightforward, not so far from what I would normally do to make a pan of lasagna. (And I make the most ridiculously good pesto lasagna, so I know what I'm doing.) Of course, there was some signature Pol weirdness: the filling called for ground veal, natch, because Pol ❤️s veal so much. I subbed with Italian sausage. The filling also calls for diced ham, which is weird but fine, you're the boss, Pol. It was when I hit the white sauce that things got David Lynch.

The recipe calls for 4 cups of white sauce (basically a béchamel), so I duly peeled back to the separate white sauce recipe. (Having a recipe span pages is a pet peeve of mine, because there's a non-zero chance I'll miss that I'm supposed to have something ready ahead of time, and the recipe is now borked.) First he had me make a roux of flour and butter, then pour in hot milk and bring to a simmer. So far, so good. Then he had me put nutmeg and whole, uncut onion studded with a single clove to float in the sauce while it simmered. I mean, what the actual fuck. But I did as instructed, poured it over the assembled rolls, and slid it in the oven.

When it came out, we all tried it with some trepidation, but it was fine. Weird, but fine. The nutmeg in the white sauce was especially strange, but it made me remember that my mom's scalloped potatoes recipe -- which is probably from this era -- also calls for nutmeg. Everything about this recipe felt like it was made of things that were real baseline in the early eighties: tons of ham, a white sauce, a Swiss cheese. It was more or less Cordon Bleu, a dish I associate with that era, rolled up in lasagna noodles. (And like most casseroles and soups, it was significantly better the next day.)

The strange nostalgia effect of his recipes on me isn't because he's making recipes emblematic of the era, dishes like Chicken Kiev or Cordon Bleu, which set designers put in period pieces for verisimilitude. More it's because of the aggregate effect of various ingredients and cooking styles. I've been joking about how if you fed all of Pol's cookbooks into an LLM, it would spit out recipes with veal, mushrooms, and Gruyère, all slathered in a white sauce. Some of this is probably just stuff Pol likes -- such as his beloved veal -- but some of it is more the spirit of the age, such as it is.

It's been neat to pick apart these recipes to find out what makes them dated, and also makes me wonder what signature combo we're subconsciously using in contemporary cooking. Probably something like Tide pods and a brick with glue on it.

*I'm not being entirely fair here. The natural food movement was about getting away from packaged & processed slop, and spending some care on how our food is produced. Yeah, a lot of practitioners were and are insufferable, but I'm actually amenable to making the food supply chain more sustainable and equitable, both for the people eating the food and those producing it.

**It turns out carob is traditionally used as animal feed and only eaten by humans when they're starving.

***The one and only Goodreads review: "I have been a cook for a long time and it is pretty bad when I don't save a single recipe to try. This one was not for me." lol

[cooking-pol-martin]

Don't Look at the Microwave: Strawberry Sauce

When I was a lass, I knew this guy called Todd. He told me this story once about visiting a friend of his -- I can't remember the exact situation, but it was something like going over to this other person's house because they were working on a school project together. So Todd didn't know the guy that well and had never been in his house. He's let in by the dad, who is flanked by an enormous mean-looking dog. The dad informed him that the dog is indeed mean, but, quote, it'll be fine as long as you don't look at him, unquote. So of course the whole time Todd was in the house, the dog sat directly at his feet, looking up at him, daring him to look down so that the dog could RIP HIS FUCKING FACE OFF.

Meanwhile, Todd spent the whole time both trying to do whatever bullshit he was there for and chanting don't look at the dog don't look at the dog don't look at the dog in his head as his eyes kept dipping involuntarily before being pulled straight in a rictus of fear.* The phrase don't look at the dog ended up in the general lexicon for use in any situation that called for not reacting to obvious fuckshit. If you've ever worked retail, this phrase comes in handy a lot, the general public being absolutely made out of obvious fuckshit.

Which, inevitably, brings me to Pol Martin. In the beginning, I had some gauzy idea that I would recreate something Pol made in the videos of his microwave fuckshit -- even going so far as researching the weird plate Pol uses to seer chicken livers or the hearts of his enemies or whatever. (Turns out, they are indeed a thing; they're called crisper plates and they're material proof that capitalism was a mistake.) When I got roughly one grillion Pol Martin cookbooks, this goal shifted to working up to microwaving a trout for four minutes a side, a recipe which is easily the silliest/least advisable in the whole Pol Martin oeuvre.

That said, I've only attempted two (2) of Pol's microwave recipes, out of the two dozen plus that I've attempted. The first was a tomato soup, which was a qualified success: it was fine, better than Campbell's, but certainly not better than the more high end grocery store tomato soup brands like Pacific or Imagine. Unless I desperately need tomato soup and have run out of Campbell's, I won't be making that again. (I cannot imagine how such a situation would come to be; writing prompt.) The other microwave recipe, an ostensible casserole, was such a miserable failure that it spawned all the boomer-style joking about Wet Ass Pol. After that hot mess, I decided that I was done with microwave recipes for the foreseeable.

Which is where don't look at the dog comes in. I have been steadfastly not looking at the dog, which in this scenario is Pol Martin's microwave recipes. I haven't even paged through them semi-casually, trying to look at them out of the corner of my eye. The microwave was dead to me. Instead I just blundered into a microwave recipe for strawberry sauce by accident on a Tuesday, with absolutely no build up or trepidation, in a no-stakes situation. I forgot there was a dog, and so didn't need to not look at it. 100% the way to go.

So. Here was the situation I found myself in: we had a party last weekend and therefore had a bunch of odd things to use up: a baggie of cut peppers, some lunch meat, half a watermelon. I also found a little less than half a quart of scared-looking strawberries in the basement fridge. So I busted out some Pol cookbooks and scanned through the indexes looking for recipes that used a lot of strawberries. I found the recipe for strawberry sauce in Pol's American cookbook. As per usual with Pol Martin, I looked through the recipe and just didn't clock that I'm to use a microwave to make the sauce. (I swear he does something to my reading comprehension.)

The ingredients all seem normal though. I was amused by the inclusion of booze, but this is Pol we're talking about, so fine, I'm into it. I go out and gather the ingredients other than the stawberries, an activity which included me standing in the liqueur section of the liquor store wondering if I should spring for the Contreau or say fuck it and get the Triple Sec in the plastic bottle. After having flashbacks to a particularly ill considered night of drinking fuzzy navels when I was in college, I went with the plastic bottle.

I come home, start chopping up the strawberries, and after the second read-through of the recipe, realize it's cooked in the microwave. I don't even bother dithering over whether to use the range because, fuck it, these strawberries were so desiccated they were going into the guinea pig cage otherwise, so it's no big deal if I wreck them. In they go with currant jelly and the liqueur. They don't look great after the first go round, and kind of smell weird. Observe:

Fine, whatever. Let's fucking go. I mix in corn starch dissolved in water and send the strawberry mixture for another round of nuking. Now, I have basically zero faith in this. Pol really likes cornstarch as a thickener -- I know for sure he uses it in his rhubarb pie and the disastrous microwave "casserole" -- but it absolutely did not work in either of those recipes. I legit thought cornstarch couldn't work as a thickener in a microwave because blah blah something food science. So I was gobsmacked when the sauce came out of the microwave with beautiful color and a perfect consistency. It didn't smell weird either, it just smelled like strawberry sauce. Like I even made my husband come in and look at this which was confusing for him because he was like, yeah, I see, strawberry sauce. Do we have any ice cream?

I got out the parfait glasses and called in the household. Even the younger kid -- who isn't nearly as on board with the Pol Martin project -- didn't make suspicious noises before digging in. I don't particularly like strawberries, but the tart of the currant jam and the hint of citrus from the booze really worked. This was my biggest microwave success so far, hands down. Dammit, Pol, you win this round.

So what to take away from this outing? That one should always accidentally on purpose sidle into microwaving a trout? I had this trout innocently, officer, and the microwave was right there? No, because while general insouciance on my part because there were no stakes and I didn't care certainly helped -- I was not not looking at the dog -- but then also the recipe was dead simple. Like how hard is it to make a sauce with three ingredients, and a heat source is a heat source. Simplicity can confer success.

Uh. But you know what's even simpler than that?

[focus in, dolly out]

*I had a similar situation when I worked on this horrible painting project for a family which had a Airedale terrier -- no terrier should be that big -- that would fucking attack you if you turned your back to it. I had to back out of the house every time I left. There was so much wrong with that project that I have dozens of stories.

[cooking-pol-martin]

The Art of Food Photography: Kebab It!

I started this ill-considered Cooking Pol Martin project because of some videos where Pol does unholy nonsense with a microwave. Most of his cookbooks have a microwave section -- tellingly, Chef Pol Martin's Favourite Recipes does not -- and he also has a whole ass cookbook devoted to microwave recipes. The microwave is his thing, for better or for worse. That said, he also has a pretty serious thing for kebabs. At least three of his cookbooks have "Kebab It!" sections, and I just now discovered he has a whole cookbook of kebab recipes -- also called Kebab It! -- that seems so utterly out of print that I despair of ever getting my mitts on it. Long story long, I decided I should attempt some of his kebab recipes.

The two recipes I decided to try were "Cocktail Sausages on Skewers" -- which consist of bacon, cocktail sausages, and mandarin orange sections -- and "Pineapple Chunks and Water Chestnuts" -- which are made up of pineapple, bacon again, and water chestnuts. The former was basted with barbecue sauce, and the latter lemon and maple syrup. Everything about these recipes is so delightfully dated, from the cocktail weenies to the water chestnuts, and I love that about them. I can absolutely see my Grandpa Ed making something like this for fancy. Both ended up tasting okay, but were so infuriating to make that I will never make them again. Especially the one with water chestnuts.

I don't know if you can tell from the photo, but most of those water chestnuts are split in half. Trying to skewer something as inflexible as a water chestnut with a decently large blade ends in significantly more broken water chestnuts than skewered ones. The mandarin oranges were also annoying, but more because they were too soft and ripped instead of too brittle and snapped. I could sort of shove the orange sections in place though, unlike the water chestnuts. I honestly liked the lemon-maple marinade, and can see using that as a sauce for less infuriating ingredients.

But also, I'm going to be real here: the main reason I decided to do some kebab recipes is because Pol has these fucking sick sword-shaped skewers that I became utterly obsessed with. Observe:

[image description: sausage chunks and shrimp skewered on a sick sword-shaped skewer sits on a plate with pink and green lines on the rim]

I immediately jumped onto Ebay and tried to find something like this, and I was completely shut out. I did find tons of very cool skewers -- just stupid sweet antique Turkish stuff -- but the single sword-shaped offering was some antique French skewers that were $150 for four. Absolutely not. What is wrong with the world?? I cannot be the only person who thinks that sword-shaped skewers are dope as shit; why aren't there any made in this century? I did find some pretty brass ones for my attempt to kebab it(!), but they are not nearly as badass as I would prefer.

So here is where I would like to spend some time talking about Pol's food photography. This didn't occur to me until very recently -- like yesterday -- but it is notable how many photographs are in Pol's cookbooks. I have several cookbooks of this vintage, and exactly none of them have photographs of the included dishes. Sometimes there are line drawings -- like for tricky techniques or table settings -- but no photography. Some of my contemporary ones do, but even then, they tend to be more sparse, coming at chapter headings or for signature dishes. Pol not only uses photographs for almost every dish, but he also includes dozens of photographs with step-by-step instructions, so you can know exactly what the recipes look like. Here's one for making crêpe batter:

[image description: a series of six photos with the heading "Technique: Basic Crêpe Batter" which shows step by step instructions for making said batter.]

I've always said Pol is kind of a mensch, and this sort of thing is exhibit A: so often when I'm making a dish, I'll get freaked out because I don't understand how things are supposed to look or work, and this careful documentation is really helpful to me. Cookbook writers not detailing the steps properly is a huge annoyance for me, so I like this. Amusingly, Pol often isn't as careful with specifying ingredients -- the fuck is pepper cream cheese? what do you mean wine vinegar? Literally all vinegar is made from wine -- but we'll take what we can get.

I also really appreciate how egalitarian Pol's photos can be. Both my kid and I would swear on a stack of bibles that there was a photo in one of these cookbooks -- I have seven Pol Martin cookbooks; no, I don't have a problem -- that included a bag of Doritos, but I was unable to find it for this missive.

[image description: tomato and rice dish on a black-rimmed white plate sits in a yellow mesh tray with a can of Coke in the background.]

I was able to find many examples of food photography that included chips, cans of Coke, or other everyday foodstuffs that are not considered fancy enough for your average cookbook. Say what you will about Pol Martin, but the man is not a snob. I mean, can you imagine an Ina Garten photo spread with a Redbull in the background? ATK knocking back a can of Diet Coke? Gordon Ramsay garnishing a recipe with some Hot Cheetos?

[image description: brown earthenware plate with a burger, sliced tomatoes, and a handful of ruffled chips.]

That said, I know from my own inexpert food-blogging how tricky food photography can be. It's super easy to make food look gross, and if the food is gross, it's doubly hard to make it look good. I've dinged Pol many times for how wet and moist his recipes turn out. That wetness is in evidence in so many of his photographs.

[Image description: tomatoes and pineapple in some sort of kebab situation, glistening.]

I have already spilled enough ink on how sopping Pol's recipes can be, so I will refrain. But this is not an appetizing photo of food. I do kinda love the random plastic-looking forks in the background, potentially for scale? I can see the photographer zooming in, thinking this needs something so the red background doesn't merge with the tomatoes, and then Pol digging through the utensil drawer for something and coming up with that. Be happy it wasn't corn holders, I guess? Corn holders would be hilarious though.

[Image description: artfully arranged triangles of sweaty pastrami dotted with god knows what all rosettes of maybe also pastrami? And also a pickle on a skewer. On top of a bed of lettuce, of course.]

I didn't make note of what the recipe this photo illustrates, sadly, because what the actual fuck is that? Oh and this next photo doesn't really work for the category of moist that I'm trying to illustrate, but it's so weird you should check it out.

[image description: one inch sections of crêpe rolls affixed all over two oranges with toothpicks.]

The instructions on this recipe for crêpe rolls finishes with: "Use oranges for creative presentation, if desired," which lol. I'm trying to imagine my family's response if I plunked down something this weird on the dinner table. And they've even been broken in on Pol's particular weirdness. (Though I do have to say I take uncharitable delight whenever the younger kid -- who is not part of the Cooking Pol Martin project -- tremulously asks me, this isn't a Pol Martin recipe, is it? when I make something new.)

After you look past the glistening, you start noticing auxiliary materials, like the dishes, cutlery, and arrangements. I've already mentioned the sick fucking skewers. There are also dozens of strange plates.

[Image description: beef and eggplant on a dish with line drawings of birds -- which appear to be some sort of heron or crane -- with text that reads "The Falconer" in a chinoiserie style.]

I wish I could see what is pictured in the middle of the plate, because I do not understand this crockery at all. I don't think those are falcons painted on the rim; they don't have the hooked bill that all raptors have. Is the food covering a drawing of a falconer? Who is going to ...what, sic his falcons on the cranes? Because I don't think falcons are big enough to fuck up a heron. The script is also strange, like something I'd expect from a circa 1970s playbill for The Mikado or something equally culturally sus. I find this plate confusing.

[Image description: Some sort of egg and mushroom canapés on a plate which appears to have a line drawing of a cow sectioned into a butcher's cut chart. Two wine bottles and a cork are in the background.]

I legitimately think dishes that have ostensibly living animals apportioned into the chunks of them you eat is fucking serial killer-y. I've said this before: I live with the cognitive dissonance of eating meat when so much of meat production is unethical -- both to the animals and the people who raise and slaughter the animals -- but I don't need to see a happy cow with dotted cut lines on its body like yay! eat me! This is probably also a dated thing, because while I have the vague sense I encountered such a thing in my youth *cough cough* years ago, I don't think I've seen anything like this recently.

You'll also notice that there are two wine bottles and a cork in the background. This brings us to the third layer of Pol's photography: the items around and behind the plated food. A big sub-category is booze, as one would expect from Pol Martin.

[Image description: the very edge of a dish of unknown meat and scallions. In the background and taking up most of the photo is a wicker-wrapped bottle of Chianti. I did not crop this photo for effect.]

The wicker-wrapped Chianti bottle is another super 70s thing: that kind of bottle used as a candle-holder was the height of fancy at a certain kind of Italian restaurant. (The one I went to as a kid was Casalenda's in Minneapolis. That place was dope.) Like unsliced bread, I don't think you can find this sort of bottle produced in the last 30 years. I don't even like Chianti, but all the bottles I run across in the liquor store are just regular bottles of wine.

[Image description: some sort of green olive pasta on a shell-shaped dish in the foreground. In the background -- which is 2/3 of the photo -- are not one but two glasses of Chardonnay, in addition to a full bottle of wine and a bottle opener.]

This picture has all the elements of a classic Pol photo: super moist looking food, massive amounts of booze, and a weird plate, in this case a shell-shaped dish. I've previously freaked out about the shell-shaped dish because it, like sword-shaped skewers, seems very hard to find in the year of our Lord 2025. Pol refers to these dishes -- both the plate and recipe -- as coquilles, which means shell in French, natch. You can find vintage ones on Etsy or Ebay, but I don't think they're produced anymore.

[Image description: stuffed mushrooms on a white china dish, behind which are no less than four glasses of red wine.]

I think this is the ne plus ultra of Pol Martin food photography: booze, booze, booze, booze, sketchy canapés, strange garnishes, a china plate on a silver charger, and really trashy looking napkins. It's such an odd mix of fancy and a little trashy, which is a decent description of the 70s in general and of Pol's whole oeuvre in specific. He's a French chef trained in France, but he's also unafraid to microwave a trout.

Once you journey beyond the alcohol, you find stranger things. Some are whimsical; some are cursed.

[Image description: stuffed tomatoes in a white dish with a prone nutcracker in the background.]

Why does this photo have a nutcracker in it? How did he get here? Why is he lying down? Are you prepared for the answers to his position and existence? I'm decently sure I'm not. I also don't understand what that ... tin? with ... potpourri? is doing in the background. Like, who looks at a dish of pretty decent looking stuffed tomatoes and thinks what this needs is a haunted doll and dried plants?

[Image description: some sort of baked fish with mushrooms and artfully arranged snow peas. In the background there's a cane with a brass handle shaped like a duck, and a newspaper.]

Is this Pol's cane? I feel like this whole photo is a writing prompt: what kind of lunatic enjoys their supper with a newspaper and a cane? Like the previous picture, I don't understand the thought process behind the collection of objects assembled here. Ok, what can I do with this? I've got my duck cane? and ... uh, a newspaper? and a lemon and some snow peas. Obviously, I'm going to use my fake Zen-looking plates. Let's fucking gooooooo... (Only Pol probably wouldn't cuss in English. Tabarnak!)

[Image description: two very normal looking half-sandwiches with a pickle and some potato chips, as well as a glass of beer. Behind which hulks a black mask with red nostrils, lips, and eye outlines.]

what the actual fuck

But seriously, I don't even know a) what the fuck that is b) what minstrel show nonsense ended in that being a good thing to put in the background of a pastrami sandwich on rye. I can't put my finger on why, but I feel like this is vaguely racist; maybe it's the oversized red lips and gaunt cheeks? It feels like a caricature. All I know is I don't want anything that freaky sitting on my table while I eat. Why does Pol own this? Where do you get something that cursed? Whhyyyyyyy?

So, here we are, at the end of another exploration of It's Pol's World, We're Just Living in It. I think the amount of food photography in any given Pol Martin cookbook is notable. He even uses it as a selling point: Over 620 photographs in full color! the cover to A Guide to Modern Cooking announces. Full color photography is not cheap even now, but it would have become much more approachably priced in the 70s and 80s than previous decades. In terms of production, that many color photos is an indicator of quality, if not in the culinary sense, then in the lithographic.

I suspect that Pol's use of that many full-color photos is an outlier the way that his embrace of the microwave is: other cookbook writers at the time -- and even now -- didn't embrace new technology. He's trailblazing in a way, trying out new things. Obviously, not everything new can be a success, she said, gormlessly. It's getting increasingly hard to find a good recipe on the Internet as LLMs regurgitate half-chewed slop as fast as they can hoover up our data.

I've developed a grudging respect for Pol for many reasons -- his willingness to try new things, his populism, his attention to detail, and, yes, even his fucking weird shit. But in a world where humanity's greatest repository of information is being degraded by the day by bullshit capitalist plagiarism machines, having an honest to god paper cookbook written by a person with quirks and personality feels like a bastion against the tide of enshittification.

[cooking-pol-martin]

More Baking with Pol!: Rhubarb Pie & Almond Brownies

Like a lot of people of Scandinavian extraction, my family is fucking serious about rhubarb. While other ethnic cuisines often use rhubarb in savory contexts, rhubarb is almost exclusively used in desserts by Scandinavians; so much so, it's sometimes referred to as "pie plant." Admittedly I have a lot of cookbooks, but I have two whole cookbooks devoted to rhubarb: one from my Grandma Dory which was first published in 1978 and includes recipes she's pasted in from the newspaper, and one by local chef Kim Ode published a dozen years ago. Weirdly, both are titled Rhubarb Renaissance.

My cousin and I were just excitedly comparing our rhubarb plants -- mine had to be moved last fall, so it's in a recovery year -- because it's gotten warm enough here for them to really get going. The plant I currently have I got from my friend Joanna in the late 90s. She called me in a panic one day. She was living in a fourplex not far from me, and her landlord was being a dick and ripping out a hundred year old shrub rose in the back yard. Under the shrub rose was a rhubarb plant of the same vintage. Even shaded by the rose, this thing was enormous. I tossed a spade and some buckets into the car and busted over there. In it went into some garden boxes on the side of the house.

It only took that creature about three years to get so fucking Jurassic that it began flowering. I don't know if you've ever seen a rhubarb flower, but those things are downright disturbing. The flowers are a pretty skin color blushed pink -- which is a description so cursed I'm sorry I wrote it -- and it absolutely looks like it's going to lay eggs in your thorax. I've split the plant and given it out so many times I'm reasonably sure that one plant has a half a dozen colonies. I dug it up and brought it with me when we moved north. If there's ever a rhubarb-based alien infiltration and/or zombie apocalypse, it'll be this plant. Sorry.

Anyway, because my plants are in a restructuring year, my friend Kathy -- who has one of the paleontological colonies of the rhubarb plant -- dropped off a couple pounds of rhubarb last weekend. I made some rhubarb bars from a recipe from Grandma Dory, and then my thoughts turned to pie. I'd clocked a couple rhubarb recipes when paging through the Pol Martin books on the shelf, and I figured, what the hell? Let's do this.

Now, I have made a lot of rhubarb pies, so I have opinions. I am aware that strawberry-rhubarb is the traditional pairing, but that shit is incorrect. Strawberries get gross and slimy when you cook them. Most strawberries you get at the store are so genetically engineered they don't taste like anything, plus putting them in my mouth makes me think the word fleshy. Which, shudder. Just about any berry is better: blueberries are contained in an interesting way, and blackberries are beautiful. But raspberries are the best: they're sweet and a red that compliments the red/green of cut rhubarb.

I'm also a strong believer in minute tapioca as the best thickener. Almost all fruit pies need something in the fruit filling to make the pie gel. With apple pie, this is usually flour; something about the starchiness of the apples makes this work. But rhubarb definitely sheds more liquid than apples, so you need something more robust. You could probably use pectin or gelatin, but I've always liked the way minute tapioca -- which is made from the roots of the cassava plant from South America -- gels in a non-slimy way.

This is, of course, not how Pol does it. And legit, this was a selling point for me: Pol has surprised me several times with things I would never do, but they turn out great. The opposite is also true -- and a lot -- but the spirit of discovery is why I'm doing this ill-considered project, non? Pol's rhubarb pie recipe is very simple, but there are two key differences from recipes I've used in the past: he uses corn starch as the thickener, and uses equal parts white and brown sugar.

I'm going to admit right now I made some changes to the recipe. I added raspberries because, as I said, they're the best. I also added a splash of almond extract -- almond is another thing that Scandinavians are v. serious about -- and about a teaspoon of cinnamon. I don't know why, but people don't spice fruit pies enough, especially rhubarb which has a strong enough flavor to really handle some spice. I otherwise included all his ingredients in the ratios listed, including what seemed to me a truly bonkers amount of lemon zest.

Reader, this pie turned out fucking amazing. While I thought that the corn starch didn't add enough structure, the inclusion of brown sugar was a stroke of genius and the insane amount of lemon zest somehow perfect. Rhubarb is pretty tart so all the lemon seemed a little redundant, but the zest added an interesting brightness. And I'm using half brown sugar from here on out: it adds a delightful caramel vibe and color to the finished pie. All told, a pretty massive success.

I also made Pol's "Almond Brownies," which ended up being a more typical Pol Martin baking experience. In that I read through the recipe, thought it was normal, and then was blindsided by something fucky halfway through making it. Honestly, I don't know why this keeps happening. I'm a godamn professional writer who spent years (decades) writing book reviews; I should absolutely be able to close-read a fucking recipe. But nope! Something about Pol's specific weirdness just slides off my brain.

In the almond brownies, the weirdness was that there was no leavening agent in the batter. I've encountered this before in the "Midnight Snacking Cake," so it's not like I'd never encountered this before. Unlike the snacking cake, Pol lightens the batter by folding in meringue, which worked way better than expected. The almonds in the recipe are slivered which I thought was perfect: they add crunch, but they're not overwhelming or chewy. Oh, and speaking of Scandinavians, I added another splash of almond extract to the batter, which made everything taste like cherries. It was good. I would do it again.

So far, overall Pol Martin is good at baking, even if the recipes make choices I don't expect. Sometimes this is really great, like the brown sugar in the pie or the meringue in the brownies. Sometimes less so, like the flat and dry stoner cake. That said, I will absolutely be making more of Pol's baked goods.

[cooking-pol-martin]

Wet Ass Pol 2: Lo-Fried Fish Slop Meats to Oil Up To

Back when I started this ill-advised Cooking Pol Martin project, I spent some time spitballing some sort of rating system. A simple star-rating didn't seem right, because quality wasn't exactly what I was measuring. I thought about this friend who ran a review blog back in the day for real exploitation pulp films* -- he's also an exploitation filmmaker -- where the metrics were how many greased apes he would wrestle to watch the film, and how many whiskeys it took to get through it. They were real flexible metrics, because both a good and a bad film could warrant a lot of whiskeys. When you're rating trash cinema, quality is not the issue, enjoyment is.

Point being, I couldn't come up with a metric before I started in on this project, because I didn't know what was in store for me. I feel like I'm beginning to close in on one, and it's something like a cackle-o-meter. When I start laughing manically, it's because Pol just had me do something completely bananas. Not just something nuts -- because that is table stakes with a Pol Martin recipe -- but something so utterly bonkers that there is no coming back from it. I think the most extreme example of this was when he had me boil leeks for thirty fiscal minutes. I just about had a fucking aneurysm. This most recent recipe definitely ranked on the cackle-o-meter, though admittedly nowhere near the OG Wet Ass Pol Situation.

So let's get into this recipe. I'm going to own this cock-up a little because I kept saying I was not going to make entrees from Pol Martin recipes anymore; the danger of ruining dinner is simply too high. But I read through a recipe called "Fish and Vegetable Salad" which was too bonkers NOT to make. Pol calls it a salad -- I guess because it has vegetables in it? -- but it's served hot and has fish in it. German potato salad is also served hot, so that can be a thing ... but you know what? This is me justifying nonsense. This recipe made my eyes roll back in my head, and then in a fugue state I went to the store and got all the ingredients.

So before I get into Pol's white nonsense, I'm going to get in the way-back machine and talk about food culture in the Midwest in the 70s and 80s a bit, as experienced by yours truly. When I was little little, so more 70s than 80s, my only experience with Asian food was this one place my parents used to get take-out from now and then. Mum had these cool dishes with lids on them she'd get out for the occasion, and I was obsessed with them. So not really much experience at all.

But by the time I was a teenager in the late 80s, there was a thriving community of mostly Viet, Hmong, & Cambodian people in the city, and the restaurants began to reflect their foods and cultures. After my parents divorced, I went out to dinner with my dad every Wednesday night to a place called Rainbow Chinese, which was owned by the family of a friend of mine. (It's still open, these many years later.) It's where I learned to eat with chopsticks without looking like a (complete) idiot. Anyway, take home being, if you were white in the Midwest in the 70s and 80s, you could probably live your whole life and never learn a thing about Asian cooking. Idk about the same time period in French Canada, but I'm guessing same.

This deep into the Pol Martin project, it's clear to me that Pol loves to experiment and try new things. This is commendable! Honestly, the spirit of improvisation is one of the major reasons I've kept on this ridiculous endeavor. I like learning new things, and Pol's surprised me several times with weird shit that was nonetheless nifty.* That said, it is clear to me that this recipe is what happens when white people hear tell of something called "stir fry", and then attempt to recreate it through vibes. He's got the high heat and the big pan part right, but everything else about it is goofy as fuck. This recipe is ass-backwards.

Ok, so a note on stir-fry. Stir-fries are easy, except for the planning. In the Platonic stir fry situation, basically you cook whatever meat first, pull it out of the pan, and then add the spices to bloom -- typically ginger and garlic as a baseline -- and vegetables in descending order of cooking time, all the while splashing everything with soy sauce, mirin, fish sauce, rice vinegar, hot sauce, or whatever else strikes your fancy. At the end, the meat goes back in, and then Bob's your uncle. The big thing is you have to have everything ready because stir-fry cooks fast.

This is not how Pol rolls. First Pol has us pre-cook most of the vegetables. Okay, fine, I thought, I can do that. It was when I read through the instructions for the "salad dressing" that I started cackling. Instead of adding the ginger and garlic to the pan so the flavors could infuse the ingredients while cooking, I was just supposed to ... pour all that shit cold over the top of everything after it cooked. (This is not even getting into the fact that he calls for ground ginger instead of fresh, but whatever.) I try to follow his dumb instructions, but I legit couldn't bring myself to pour raw garlic & ginger on this mess. That shit went into the pan with the (weirdly pre-cooked) vegetables.

What really got me cackling was the "salad dressing" itself. Pol had me mix together a half a whole ass cup of olive oil -- which doesn't work linguistically, but that's where I am emotionally -- with one (1) hilarious tablespoon of "soya sauce" and three tablespoons of "wine vinegar". This last ingredient I found particularly funny, because literally all vinegar is made from wine. Specifying the "wine" part without being specific about the kind of wine -- red, white, apple, rice, etc -- is so godamn funny. I decided on rice vinegar because that seemed most appropriate for this misadventure.

So I weirdly don't actually stir fry the fish and vegetables, and then pour all this mess into a salad bowl, as per Pol's instructions. At this point I take the "salad dressing" -- I would like to emphasize this "dressing" is a half a freaking cup of olive oil and a splash of soy sauce, basically -- and pour it over the "salad" and toss. At this point I was just a sentient cackle. Like my entire body became horrified laughter with enough kinetic energy to manipulate salad tongs. I'm not proud of this, but it's where I am as a people.

So we set to eating. The fish is bland as hell, which I admit might be my fault: the local grocery store didn't have the sole the recipe called for, so I subbed with cod which the internet claimed was a valid substitution. Cod is fine, but it's the basic bitch of white fishes. Cod is not actively shitty like tilapia, but it's the fish most often used for fish sticks because it's bland but can be improved with deep frying.

My husband has some kind of psychotic break when I tell him the boring white stuff is cod; he thought it was tofu or something. Honestly, we were all so punch drunk at this point that I don't even know. He compared the whole "salad" to lo-fi hip hop -- bland aural wallpaper -- which I think is probably a sicker burn to both lo-fi hip hop and this "salad" than he intended. Also, the fact that you can burn both things in the comparison is notable.

The other kid came home at some point and pointed out that most of Pol's recipes are more ... moist that one would prefer. But "Fish and Vegetable Salad" isn't just moist, it's drowning in oil and some sort of weird outgassing from the vegetables. Like there's an unpleasant soup of Wet Ass Pol at the bottom of the salad bowl. What I want to do is put scare quotes on literally every word in that sentence, whether it makes sense or not.* Even then, we ended up eating a fair amount of this hot mess. But legit, it was more because I'd fucked up my "no Pol Martin entrees" rules and we were super hungry than anything. The leftovers ended up divided between the dog -- who loves salad, weirdly -- and the chickens. Thus ends the Wet Ass Salad Stir Fry. Amen.

I'm talkin' wap, wap, wap, that's some wet-ass Pol Macaroni in a pot, that's some wet-ass Pol, huh

I have a lot of fun stories about Scott. We became friends when I was at a scifi con and I overheard him say, "So when I was fired from Barely Legal magazine..." so then I swooped right in to listen to THAT story. Turns out, he was fired for writing his barely legal porn girl characters too accurately. The line that got him fired was, "You smell like my Grandpa." He's the best.

Sure, sometimes Pol's improvisation and experiments end in "Microwaved Trout for One" but nobody's perfect.

"Like" "there's" "an" "unpleasant" "soup" "of" "Wet Ass Pol" "at" "the" "bottom" "of" "the" "salad" "bowl."

[cooking-pol-martin]

Baking with Pol!: Stoner Cake and Banana Bread

Recently for my Cooking Pol Martin project, I'd decided I'm going to stay away from main dishes, and instead focus on more ancillary foods: desserts, appetizers, salads, and the like. It's just too much of bummer to ruin dinner and end up eating a sandwich over the sink while the dog finishes up the most recent most moist repast. This has been a winning strategy. While we've made some dubious dishes, we pretty much knew they were going to be weird going in and were okay with that, because we weren't going to starve.

While I'm a better than decent cook, I really found my way into the kitchen through baking. My Grandma Dory was a terrific baker and I got many of my first recipes through her. And baking can be a great place to start learning your way around a kitchen. Cooking is often improvisational, with a lot of jargon & specialized techniques, and it can be daunting to undertake a multi-step process that involves an open flame. Baking can be much simpler. Sure, learning to make pie crust or yeast breads is going to involve tears (ask me how I know) but simple cookies, cakes, and quick breads don't require any special knowledge: you just mix stuff up and pour it in a pan.

So I tried to pick Pol baked goods which were simple, approachable recipes. I kept looking at this insane recipe called "Bananas in Their Skins" because it seems delightfully serial-killery, but I would actually have to purchase specialized equipment and that is not auspicious. The first recipe I undertook was a plain yellow cake called "Midnight Snacking Cake" because I appreciate the stoned-at-midnight vibes of the name.

Like many (most? all?) of the Pol recipes I've made, I did the thing where I read the recipe, thought this is normal, and only realized deep into preparations that there was something fucky going on. This time, it was that the cake batter had zero leavening agent: no baking powder, no baking soda, zippo. I mean, the recipe also called for rum, which would be weird but then this is Pol Martin. Booze is a given.

Turned out fine! Not so good I would bother making it again, but everyone midnight snacked until it was gone. Unsurprisingly, given the lack of leavening, the cake was very thin and flat. I expected it to be moister -- legit, cake and towelettes are the only things you can call moist -- but it wasn't dry or anything. Also, and this is a pet peeve, the recipe was for a single round when what is pictured is two rounds. I ended up cutting the cake in half and then stacking and frosting it, which is fine but goofy. All in all, completely decent.

After the qualified success of the stoner cake, I decided to attempt Pol's banana bread. I have made a lot of banana bread in my day. It was a staple in the house when the kids were little, and I made it so much I can still make it without looking at my recipe. So that's not a particularly good thing to pit Pol against, I admit, but I had a bunch of bananas which were about to go off. Which is actually perfect for banana bread: as bananas ripen, their sugar content increases. By the time they're black and going weirdly translucent, they're basically candy. So pro tip: use really, really ripe bananas when baking.

Unlike the snacking cake, there was absolutely nothing weird about the banana bread recipe. Super straightforward, nothing that made me wonder if the weird shit was 80s weird shit or Pol-specific weird shit. I made one alteration: Pol's recipe calls for both walnuts and raisins, but I switched out the raisins for chocolate chips. This is because I, personally, have no problem with raisins, but the people in my household would bitch so fucking much about the inclusion of raisins, and I just don't need the grief.

I really liked the banana bread! It wasn't too dense or too sweet, a problem I find with quick bread recipes of this vintage. Like my banana bread recipe is adapted from the recipe in the 1979 version of The Fanny Farmer Cookbook, and the biggest alteration is halving the sugar. The 12th edition Fanny Farmer is an excellent all-around cookbook, if you're looking for such a thing, but know you have to decrease the sugar in just about everything. (Or maybe it's just me; I don't have much of sweet tooth.) The rest of the household declared it good, but the kids said my banana bread was better. (Aww.) So I'll end with my recipe for banana bread. You're welcome.

[cooking-pol-martin]

"Vegetable Sandwich Loaf": The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread is Unsliced Bread

After the qualified success of my last stunt-cooking Pol Martin attempt, I decided I should stick to non-essential recipes. Like I shall not be ruining dinner anymore, but will instead chose appetizers or desserts or other peripheral recipes. So my kid* was paging through the appetizer section in Pol's "American" cookbook -- whenever a Canadian says "American," there's a silent "North" -- and he came upon a recipe for "Vegetable Sandwich Loaf." There was a record scratch noise and then he declared we had to make this. I said sure, how bad could it be? therefore cursing myself to the most ridiculous sidequest of this here project.

But before I get into that, I want to talk about sandwich loaves for a hot minute. Now, I'm a white person from the Midwest. My people are experts at introducing cream cheese and/or mayonnaise into just about any appetizer you can think of. It was all the rage there for a while to make this horrifying dish where you layered cream cheese, cocktail sauce, and tiny potted shrimps onto a plate, and then ate that with like corn chips. (But also, my Dad makes this fucking amazing pineapple cream cheese salad which sounds awful but isn't.)

So I get, on something like a culturally chthonic level, what Pol is doing here. That said, I have never once encountered such a thing. So off I went to do a search. The top hits were a Betty Crocker recipe and a site that aggregates vintage & retro oddments. Okay, I thought, this is just one of those things that people did in the past because they were eating lead paint. That's true, as far as it goes, but it's also a lot weirder than that. Honest to God, making this ridiculous recipe turned out to be a ride. Buckle up, bitches.

Now that our tray tables are up, let's get into it. The method to this madness is to take a loaf of bread, cut it the long way so you have four long horizontal slices, and then stack them up, layering cream cheese and veggies between the slices. (Pol's recipe omits the cream cheese "frosting" you can find in many sandwich loaf recipes.) This is a little weird, but it also isn't so far from little finger sandwiches you get when eating an English high tea.

I myself have had afternoon tea at the literal Ritz when I was in London for a semester in my misbegotten youth, and that shit was delicious. (I can't be arsed to find them, but there are a lot of photos of me and my classmates sitting around in the Ritz bathroom because it was larger than my apartment and had more than one opulent couch. In a bathroom. The English are bananas.) So I head out to the SuperOne to get a loaf of bread, cream cheese, and a bunch of veggies. This is where the wheels come off.

I am unable to find "pepper cream cheese" -- one of the ingredients -- because honestly that sounds like something an LLM would make up. (Maybe Pol's an LLM, like Roku's Basilisk style?) That's not a big deal because I figure I'll just throw a tsp of black pepper into the cream cheese mixture. It's when I go to get a plain, unsliced loaf of white sandwich bread that I run into trouble. At the SuperOne, every single loaf of sandwich bread is sliced. There's baguettes and Italian loaves and maybe a boule or two, but nothing thick enough to get four horizontal slices out of.

Okay, fine, SuperOne is pretty budget, so I head to the upscale grocery near the university which has a legit bakery. (Like they baked me a cake for my trans kid's gender reveal party which was super good.) Zippo. So then I head to Cub. Nothing. Then I go to the hippy bakery with "Free Palestine" signs in the window. Zilch. Then I go to the yuppie bakery which only makes bread, which was closed, but with a perusal of their website, I can determine they've got jack shit too. Fuck.

This is actively nuts. I know I've gotten loaves of unsliced bread in my life. I have very clear memories of going to the Blue Bonnet bakery in Homestead PA, and when you ordered a loaf of bread, they'd ask if you wanted it sliced or not. If you did, they'd throw it in this gnarly-looking bread-slicing machine which I was utterly obsessed with. (See also: hammer typewriters.) Blue Bonnet was admittedly old school, but still: sometime in my lifetime, it became virtually impossible to find an unsliced loaf of sandwich bread. What even.

So my kid and I head home, and we have a come to Jesus in the kitchen. We've pretty much exhausted the available bakeries in the area because I'm not driving to Wisconsin or the Iron Range on some fool's errand to find a loaf of unsliced bread. That way lies madness. So now I have two options before me: baking a loaf of bread (which I'm not good at despite general competence in the kitchen) or sending the most embarrassing text known to man to Stephanie, my cousin's wife and good friend, asking if she can make me a loaf of white bread in her breadmaker. I opt for the latter, which is when things get interesting.

Now, Stephanie's family is largely from the South. She knew right away what I was talking about when I told her that I needed it for a sandwich loaf. She sent me a bunch of links to these insane sandwich loaves made by Scandinavians (yeah, idk either) with elaborate decorations on the cream cheese "frosting." She said they were a common thing at baby and wedding showers back in the day (which would be circa 2000) and pretty much the only good thing at said baby/wedding showers, other than booze. She also made me a loaf of white sandwich bread that day, because she's a fucking delight. She dropped it off, still warm, a couple hours later.

So now, I have a real problem. Am I really going to take this loaf of bread -- this still warm, fragrant, handmade loaf of bread -- and do a bunch of Pol Martin unholy nonsense to it?

Turns out, yes. The answer is yes. I'm not proud, but that's what happens.

So I slice the bread, mix up the spiced cream cheese, and assemble the sandwich loaf. I tried to recreate Pol's picture -- which included, of all things, baby corn as a garnish-- but when push came to shove, it turned out I couldn't waste a whole can on this silliness. Everyone took a trepidatious bite and then ... it was fine. Or rather, parts of it were fine? I ended up eating all the parts that had radishes, cucumber, and cream cheese, but everyone avoided the asparagus because it was not great. I admit I maybe overcooked it a little, but still.

If I had to do this all again (I'm not going to do this all again), I'd definitely figure out a way to slice the bread thinner. I'd also sub out the asparagus for something more overtly 70s like ham salad or pimento loaf, because fuck it, lean in. Also because you can talk shit about it all you want, but ham salad is delicious. (Pimento loaf though: you're on your own. What was it with pimentos in the 70s?) The sandwich loaf ended up being weird and fussy -- which most appetizers are -- but not a "Microwaved Trout for One" travesty or anything. Solidly 100% ok.

So, here we are again, at the end of another adventure in the World of Pol Martin: We're Just Living in It. As is becoming usual for these little forays into recipes written by a French Canadian chef in the 1980's, it's been a strange lesson in the cultural, material shifts that are largely invisible or taken for granted. I would have sworn I could get a loaf of unsliced sandwich bread, because I know I have in the past, and not even the distant past of my childhood.

But we're not in that world anymore. Best I can tell, the Blue Bonnet bakery shut down because of cultural inevitability culminating in the stake through the heart of Covid times. The neighborhood I grew up in in Minneapolis has gone the same way: in the last five years, virtually every store I remember has been shuttered due to Covid, the fallout of George Floyd's murder, and [gestures at everything]. Twenty-one year olds in America literally cannot remember a presidential election where Trump was not on the ballot.

I have lived through cultural moments that felt definitive, moments in time that I knew, with absolutely certainty, would be the fulcrum upon which everything would pivot. The teacher wheeled out the television and we watched while the first teacher in space burned up on reentry. I watched in horror as kids not that much younger than me jumped out of windows to avoid being murdered by their classmates. My sister called me from Midtown after the first plane but before the second. I don't feel like that happens anymore. We're in a long slow exsanguination, a death by a thousand cuts, which happens gradually and then suddenly. We're in the sudden part now.

Sorry, I'm doing it again. These dumb recipes, they dredge up the past, which draws inexorable comparisons with the present. Stupid 80's recipes -- often involving a microwave -- show me all the tiny, invisible ways that life has changed. I couldn't even tell you when they changed, because I didn't even know they had. And then I sit down to write up my little reports, and, as Hemingway** put it, open a vein and bleed. I mean, it's probably an indicator I need to get back to writing the novel, but whatever. This is what I have the bandwidth for for now. So it goes.

*I would like to note this was not the kid who has been stunt-cooking with me. Whenever I'm trying some new recipe -- like I test recipes for ATK a couple times a month -- he always gets this hunted look. This isn't another Pol Martin recipe, is it? It's also exceedingly hilarious listening to him try to explain the Cooking Pol Martin project to his teenage friends.

**There's a fair amount of dispute about whether it was Hemingway that said, "Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed."