Light reading

We have one credit card between the two of us, and most of its use goes towards ordering books off Amazon (the UK site). And one of the things that we are now in possession of is Dick's Encyclopedia of Practical Receipts and Processes: or, How They Did It in the 1870s. Behind the formidable title lies a formidable book: in it are directions, "in plain language", for how to make cosmetics, soap, and patent medicines. How to preserve meat, purify metals, bleach anything, dissolve bones, preserve wood, polish Alabaster. In short, how to do everything and anything, without everything and anything that we have today.

It's a fascinating read, actually, particularly the section on patent medicines: the recipes range from hopelessly useless to if-this-doesn't-kill-you-then-you'll-probably-survive-the-disease. Recipes call for orange oil, rhubarb root, fennel, molasses...and things like nitric acid, belladonna, and laudenum. "Cures" for things like whooping cough consisted of pulverizing roasted onions and making a poultice wrap and setting it on your throat (alas, this arrived after my bout with Bordatella pertussis, so I did not get a chance to try it--purely in the interest of proving that such sh*t doesn't work). Preserving milk--keeping it "sweet"--meant boiling it with baking soda.

Supposedly, it is a very "practical" guide, assuming that you can get things like hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, saltpetre, etc. And that's to say nothing of some of the more fantastic concoctions, such as "essence of morphia" (morphine), opium, and cocaine (and people have issues with legalizing marijuana!). Try getting your hands on things like brimstone, cyanide, and benzene--the last, incidentally, was a cure for head lice (and the child who was thus afflicted, apparently)--these days. The scary thing, then, is not that all of these things were used. It's that they were apparently readily available enough that a "collection of popular and domestic receipts" thought nothing of including them.

There are two things I have concluded from perusing Dick's. The first is that the days of "all natural" things are an illusion we've made for ourselves. We tell ourselves that things were better off in the days before additives and preservatives with names I can't spell and can barely pronounce, but do you REALLY think using hydrochloric acid to preserve your meat is that much better? Anti-vaccine whackos (who really should be charged with manslaughter by negligence) have got all of us worried about autism, but going back to the days when a mashed onion was all that stood between you and death-by-diphtheria isn't exactly my idea of paradise. People in the 1870s would probably kill to have what we do, today: reasonably safe and effective cleaners (for all that I mislike using Purple Stuff, it is a good deal safer than cyanide), refrigeration for meat and dairy products, and medicines that actually work. "All natural" is overrated, and is the kind of thing that only people who've never actually had to live without can wish for.

The second is that people who wish for less government regulation really have no idea what they're wishing for. The free market in 1870 was probably a lot more capitalist than it is today, but if you wanted to sue your doctor for giving your kid a deadly dose of "chlorodyne" (laudenum and chloroform), you'd be hard up to try. When you read through the lists of recommended "receipts and processes", it's a miracle that anybody lived long enough to reproduce, and had enough functional internal organs to do so.

Buried Alive

I've been a fan of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, ever since a friend of mine pointed it out to me (unfortunately, during finals week of medical school). The series, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is a ripping fantasy rife with scheming, backstory that's as good as the plot, cruelty that makes waterboarding look like a dip in the kiddy pool (not saying that makes waterboarding okay, but I think I'd rather be dead than Reek), unlikely heroes, and a healthy dose of literary irony. What makes it so appealing is that the story just as often progresses through the eyes of "the bad guys" as much as it does through the protagonists, so you end up with an incredibly nuanced story that makes ripping through the first 3200 pages a breeze--it's not light reading. Equally appealing is that you can't count on your heroes surviving, nor can you count on your bad guys dying: like the real world, our heroes are mortal, and they do die. And sometimes evil (or really, better poisoners) does prevail. But more often than not, good people make bad decisions, while even the worst characters can find redemption.

The first four books (out of a planned 7, supposedly, although I suspect it will end up being 9) came out in relatively quick succession--1996, 2000, 2005--if you consider the length, depth, and scope these stories encompass. But A Dance with Dragons only came out this year, and only after some 2 years of "It's coming next month". Karel surprised me earlier this week when he handed me an Amazon.com box filled with a 900-page tome, and, well, the rest is history. I tend to get a little compulsive about these things.

This was a (very late) Christmas present, but the fact that I got it so soon after it was released is one of those marvels of the Internet that, if you think back just 10 years ago, would have been unlikely. 20 years ago--impossible. Karel and I aren't that much into movies--I might have been had I stayed in the States, being fed on a constant diet of indie movies at the Ritz--so not being anywhere near HP7B fans on opening day was nice. Film culture in the Netherlands doesn't seem to make the distinction between the cheap thrill and the highbrow art affair. Some movie theaters are more devoted to the European art-house flick than others, which import subtitled trash (sorry, but it'll take a director of Chris Nolan's caliber to elevate Transformers anything more serious than a 30-minute after-school cartoon) directly from the US, but even those theaters will still show "serious" (not necessarily "good") movies like "Sonny Boy".

Ostensibly I'm talking about books and not movies, but when you live in a country where English isn't the first language, you have to learn to accept that your book selections will be limited, both in time (not-so-recent recent releases) and scope, as most books tend to be fiction (unless you live in Amsterdam and have access to Waterstone's, which I do not). These days, with the Kindle and other e-book readers, you don't need to go to a brick-and-mortar store to get a paper-printed book, but I have always been attracted to the methodical passage of pages and a bookmark's creep down the length of the spine. For huge books like A Dance with Dragons, it feels like more of an accomplishment. I don't doubt that one of these days, we'll get an iPad or an e-reader--it's a question of commitment, really, and whether we'd use it enough to warrant the €700 price. But I'm sort of saddened to think that my generation might be one of the last ones in which you can, somewhat literally, be "buried in a book".

Stranger than Fiction

I'm in the middle of Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle. It's a rip-roaring adventure story of life in the late-1600s, as the Enlightenment was coming about, the scientific method was developed, calculus was invented, and finance took shape. The main critique of the books (3) is that they tend to be a bit logorrheic, but they are amusing in their own way, and, because it's so steeped in history, has me constantly typing search terms into Google to see just what was true and what Stephenson made up.

A fair amount of the story takes place in the Netherlands, which is worth mentioning because there are several instances in which a modern reader, modestly acquainted with Dutch culture, thinks, "Tja, ik hou van Holland."

Instance the first: Jack Shaftoe gets conscripted into the task of digging more land out of the North Sea, for reinforcing the dike. I'm not sure if the Dutch actually did this--my superficial research into the matter suggests that the democratically-elected waterschappen (water boards) were responsible for collecting the fees and the labor for maintaining the dikes, but has been inconclusive as to whether or not any random, healthy-looking stranger would be grabbed off the steets and handed a shovel. You don't run the risk of being forced to do a hard day's labor any more, but people still pay taxes towards maintaining the dikes.

The second instance is in the description of the VOC. At one point the VOC had more ships than the entire continent of Europe. But that's not what makes the VOC so recognizably Dutch. In The Confusion, Jack Shaftoe explains, "'It seems that in the days of Vroom's apprenticeship, shipwrights were held in high esteem by the VOC and Admiralty, and given a free hand. Each ship was built a little differently, according to the wisdom--or, as some would say, whim--of the shipwright. But recently the VOC have become prideful, thinking that they know everything about how to build ships, and they have begun specifying sizes and measurements down to a quarter of an inch--they want every ship the same.'" The modern-day manifestation of this desire for uniformity lies in the everyday miracle of being able to tell which black omafiets is mine in a rack of 50 similar bikes.

The last example is when the Bob Shaftoe (Jack's brother and sergeant in the English army) realizes that the main reason that the Dutch aren't dropping dead from dysentery is because they keep their camp so clean. I haven't had any luck verifying the cleanliness of the Dutch military (historians, feel free to chime in), but the cleanliness of the Dutch had been alternatively admired and ridiculed for some 200 years by the time the story takes place, and would continue to be admired and ridiculed for another 150 years or thereabouts after the 1700s. My own experience in the Netherlands has left me with mixed opinions about the fanatic cleaning--I like being able to coexist with Noodle without antihistamines, but I don't think I'll ever learn to keep the kitchen as clean as Karel would like it.

It's fascinating, to be immersed in another culture, and then read about what an outsider sees fit to comment about. It's also a bit funny that what outsiders have been commenting on hasn't changed all that much in 300 years...and gives me pause to wonder what on earth I will be writing next.

Cookbook Flip Flop

We received several cookbooks this year as presents, lavishly illustrated and, in case the titles weren't obvious enough, written in Dutch. The only one that's written in English is Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and I have to say that, despite its weird-as-hell format, it does have several excellent illustrations. Amongst them, how to dice an onion.

In my opinion, one of the hardest things to get used to as an expat from the US is the fact that the rest of the world is logical and uses the metric system. For me, the change is somewhat easier because I work in the sciences, but I still, to this day, think of liquids in terms of cups/pints/quarts/gallons (though sodas are in liters). For baking, then, I'm still used to cups of flour and sticks of butter--and while it's easy for me to convert an American recipe to metric measurements, going the other way is something I still haven't figured out.

Metric measurements mean, amongst other things, that flour is weighed, and while weight is a more precise measure than volume, for some reason the idea of "grams" of flour just rankles me the wrong way. This is one of my few American habits that I just can't seem to shake, no matter what. I've figured out that one ounce is 28 grams, one cup is 248 mL, and 200° C equals a "really hot oven" (I've decided that oven temperatures are best expressed as "low, medium, hot" rather than exact tempertaures, but nobody but nobody's oven is ever exactly right). But I have never bothered to check how much a cup of flour weighs, and something tells me that, short of my scientific curiosity getting the better of me, I never will.

Part of this is because our primary baking book, Dorie Greenspan's Baking, is an American book. But a huge part of it is that, until now, volumes have worked fine for me--"Don't fix what ain't broke" and all that jazz. Measuring flour is a bit of an art when you use volumes, and it's one that I've developed a reasonable mastery over. It's something I'm reluctant to give up, I think, because on a microcosmic level it becomes a herald of my own obsolescence. It detracts from the mystique that surrounds baking--anybody can weigh out 200 g of flour, but not everybody can measure out 1 cup properly--and the reliance on a scale, rather than your own sense of how the recipe is falling, reduces the art to a science.

But maybe this year things will change. Maybe I'll finally get over my aversion to weights and learn to love the metric system as it totally takes over my life.

On the other hand, maybe not: I've always preferred doing a little extra math if it means I don't have to change my ways.