A Love Letter to Libraries, Long Overdue, New York Times, Elisabeth Egan and Erica Ackerberg, February 14, 2023

I love this:

There are the sturdy armchairs, the picked-over magazine racks, the award-winning dioramas on loan from adolescent creators, the study carrels etched with decade-old graffiti. There’s the water fountain spouting the coldest beverage in town, a different vintage from the lukewarm dribble in the school gym or the violent torrent at the Y.M.C.A.

I remember, years ago, my childhood church had the coldest, cleanest, most refreshing water fountain I’ve ever seen. At least, that’s my memory.

This is a delightful, heavily illustrated piece featuring libraries all over the country. Read the whole thing.

Tandoor-Style Grilled Chickens or Cornish Hens Recipe, Serious Eats, J. Kenji López-Alt, August 30, 2018

Indian cuisine is largely spice- and sauce-based, but tandoori-style chicken relies more on its intriguing cooking technique than, say, a carefully balanced curry.

See, tandoor ovens—the large, bell-shaped coal or wood-fired ovens used in traditional Indian baking—were traditionally used only for making naan. It wasn't until the early 20th century that an enterprising Punjabi restaurateur named Kundan Lal Gujral created culinary history by saying to himself, “Hey, I wonder what happens when I stick a chicken in there?”

Now that I have a (gas) grill, I might be able to make something like this credibly. Serious Eats does the whole “long story/background + recipe at the end” format really well, and I enjoy reading these thorough cooking articles/narrative recipes. I also like Indian food, and now, with a source of very high heat, tandoori chicken seems like a relatively easy recipe to make at home.

The Traditional Latin Mass and Asian Peoples, The Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, Rev. Daniel Horgan, Spring 2015

The PDF from the Wayback Machine version of this page (the real webpage gives an error) has copying disabled, so I can’t quote a piece of it. It’s a very interesting article from a traditionalist Catholic organization arguing, with some evidence, that the Japanese tea ceremony was to some degree influenced by the Tridentine Mass. This claims pops up from time to time, and I can’t tell you if it is true. But I could believe it.

In fact, the first time I traveled to China with my wife, one of her family friends invited us over for tea, and did something like the Japanese tea ceremony. I remember thinking, long before I’d ever heard this claim, that it resembled the Catholic Mass. Perhaps all rituals sort of resemble each other; and after all, the core of the Mass is a meal, something human and universal.

Bone Sour Shame, Hodgeman’s Thoughts on The Great Outdoors, September 26, 2012

I awoke the next morning, sore from previous day's hunt, and went to garage to check on the meat. It was cool, dry and the steady airflow had crusted the meat over beautifully. I made an appointment at the local game processor for the early afternoon to hang the meat and age it and then butcher the caribou into roasts, steaks and burger ready for freezing and storage and eventual consumption by my family. At the requested time (2:00p) I placed the pieces in clean game bags and transported it to the processor where it was tagged, weighed, and hung in a large commercial cooling unit. I've processed game in my home before and while home butchering is quite simple, it is time consuming and with my busier fall schedules the last few years it is simply more convenient to let the pros handle it. I turned the clean, cool meat over the processor and watched them move it into the cooler at 2:40p. A bit over 22 hours from the time the trigger was pulled and I feel like the care I gave the meat during the interim was about all I could have possibly done. I'm not worried about losing one scrap to improper field care. I tell you all this to set the stage for what I witnessed while waiting to check in my caribou and some of the horrendous mistakes I saw.

I sometimes discover and scroll through random old-school blogs, and this is a good example. It’s from a hunter in Alaska, on the proper field care of successfully hunted animals to avoid spoilage.

I’m probably never going to hunt or live in Alaska, which, I guess, is part of the appeal of reading these little slices of life.

Related Reading:

New and Old #53

New and Old #54

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