Wow, I'm tired. It's been a grocery store/cooking day. I'm having old friends for dinner tomorrow night--a couple, once my neighbors, that I've known since before our third children, respectively, were born--and those kids are 36 this year. My good friend Charles lives in their garage apartment (that was connived and not an accident), and he'll come with them. They'll pick up another friend, Cissy, recently both widowed and displaced from her apartment by the relentless urge to tear down and rebuild. I remember serving Bill and Sharon an antipasto platter one night that they thought was wonderful, so I'm doing a more substantial version, sort of dinner on a platter--a strip of salmon, an herbed chicken thigh, a half ear of corn, a dolma, and a small baked potato Southwestern style for each. Then piles of cherry tomatoes, asparagus, hard-boiled egg halves, artichoke hearts--all laid out on a long platter that goes down the center of the table (it's a wonderful maple platter that I brought from Appalachia years ago). And fresh sourdough bread at the far end. I've got most of it cooked by tonight, except the salmon. Also I made a brandy/chocolate bread pudding that I'll serve with whipped cream and frozen raspberries (fresh are just too precious). So I did all that cooking and then fixed myself dinner--a bit of spinach, left from the remolaude sauce I made for tomorrow, a half ear of corn (corn doesn't come in five halves!), the excess stuffing from the potatoes. I had bought bay scallops for my entree and followed a recipe that combined them with crispy browned brioche bread crumbs (the brioche was in the freezer), sliced mushrooms (also left over and in the fridge), and a bit of shallot. Delicious but way too rich. I have scallops and potato for lunch tomorrow!
In between all this cooking, I truly have spent the weekend editing. We'll do a wondereful book next fall called True West: The Heyday of the Western in Popular Culture, with only about 20,000 words of text but lots and lots of illustrations drawn from the author's incredible collection of paraphernalia (I keep wanting to say ephemera)--movie posters, book jackets, comic books, sheet music, you name it. The text is funny--and so knowledgeable about the popular western. That was the field I studied in graduate school--though I was in the 19th century and this author is in the 20th. Still I remember writing a scholarly paper on McCloud, the western--was it Arizona?--sheriff who ended up on duty in NYC--and who is duly mentioned in this new text. Editing has been fun.
Rachel Ray is on my TV right now, cooking polenta egg cups with chorizo but wearing a sort of peasant dress with flowing sleeves and a huge dangly necklace that comes almost to her waist, along with a tight spiral bracelet on her wrist. Do you realize what would happen if I tried to cook in an outfit like that?
Showing posts with label American West. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American West. Show all posts
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Scotland on My Mind
When my kids were little, they listened to Neil Diamond tapes endlessly--those old eight-tracks--on cross-country trips, and to this day they can sing most of his songs, including "Georgia on My Mind." But these days it's not Georgia but Scotland that's on my mind. We've made our reservations, and I've paid for business-class tickets--a hefty investment, but, hey, this is a once-in-a-lifetime trip. Today I went through the photo and application process to renew my out-of-date passport. I'm really going to Scotland!
I've been reading How the Scots Invented the Modern World, a fascinating book that taught me a lot of Scottish history and made me believe that without the Scots we would be primitive intellectually and morally. I really have learned a lot. But last night, reading about Sir Walter Scott, I was struck by a comparison. In graduate school, my dissertation was on the development of the myth of the American West, the ways in which our mythologized and romantic view of the West shaped out whole sense of ourselves as a nation--we still either glory in it or suffer from it, depending on your view of the wannabe cowboy in the presidency.
The Scottish Highlands were for centuries considered rough and uncultured territory. Kilts were "barbaric frummery" and were at one point outlawed. But for an 1815 visit to Scotland by the Prince of Wales, tartan kilts turned up on civic officials who only twenty years earlier would not have been caught dead in them. The difference had been rendered by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, who rescued Highland culture "from the rubbish heap of history" and made it respectable. He gave it a panache that has made us identify Scotland by the Highlands ever since.
Scots who came to America in the 19th century found a similar land in the American West: inaccessible, governed by tribal warriors, about to be displaced by the forces of progress. Until the novelists and the artists got hold of the American West, it was often dismissed as a rough land, uncivilized, needing only to be conquered and civilized. But then novelists like Owen Wister (The Virginian) and artists like Charlie Russell and Frederic Remington saw the imaginative possibilites of the American West. They mythologized it, and it became the symbol of American virtues and strength--courage, fearlessness, strength, determination, a certain willingness to endure hardship, and a large dose of heroics. Those are pretty much the virtues of the Scottish Highlander too--our heroes wear buckskin; Scottish heroes wear kilts. Either is, to most modern minds, outlandish. Wister, Russell and Remington did for the American West what Sir Walter Scott did for the Highlands. And both myths endure to this day.
It might be a bit much to draw parallels between the Highland Clearances in the 19th century, with the potato blight, and the removal of Native Americans to reservations and the disappearance of the buffalo that sustained their way of life--still, the thought lingers.
And where do I most want to go when I go to the United Kingdom? London? Edinborough? Nope, you've got it--the Highlands. I want to go to Inverness, where's there's a MacBain Memorial Park, and to St. Bean's Kirk at Fowlis Wester, north of Inverness, where early MacBains are buried. And I'll find the homestead, no longer in the family but still standing. I haven't read Scott in years, but maybe I should again.
I've been reading How the Scots Invented the Modern World, a fascinating book that taught me a lot of Scottish history and made me believe that without the Scots we would be primitive intellectually and morally. I really have learned a lot. But last night, reading about Sir Walter Scott, I was struck by a comparison. In graduate school, my dissertation was on the development of the myth of the American West, the ways in which our mythologized and romantic view of the West shaped out whole sense of ourselves as a nation--we still either glory in it or suffer from it, depending on your view of the wannabe cowboy in the presidency.
The Scottish Highlands were for centuries considered rough and uncultured territory. Kilts were "barbaric frummery" and were at one point outlawed. But for an 1815 visit to Scotland by the Prince of Wales, tartan kilts turned up on civic officials who only twenty years earlier would not have been caught dead in them. The difference had been rendered by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, who rescued Highland culture "from the rubbish heap of history" and made it respectable. He gave it a panache that has made us identify Scotland by the Highlands ever since.
Scots who came to America in the 19th century found a similar land in the American West: inaccessible, governed by tribal warriors, about to be displaced by the forces of progress. Until the novelists and the artists got hold of the American West, it was often dismissed as a rough land, uncivilized, needing only to be conquered and civilized. But then novelists like Owen Wister (The Virginian) and artists like Charlie Russell and Frederic Remington saw the imaginative possibilites of the American West. They mythologized it, and it became the symbol of American virtues and strength--courage, fearlessness, strength, determination, a certain willingness to endure hardship, and a large dose of heroics. Those are pretty much the virtues of the Scottish Highlander too--our heroes wear buckskin; Scottish heroes wear kilts. Either is, to most modern minds, outlandish. Wister, Russell and Remington did for the American West what Sir Walter Scott did for the Highlands. And both myths endure to this day.
It might be a bit much to draw parallels between the Highland Clearances in the 19th century, with the potato blight, and the removal of Native Americans to reservations and the disappearance of the buffalo that sustained their way of life--still, the thought lingers.
And where do I most want to go when I go to the United Kingdom? London? Edinborough? Nope, you've got it--the Highlands. I want to go to Inverness, where's there's a MacBain Memorial Park, and to St. Bean's Kirk at Fowlis Wester, north of Inverness, where early MacBains are buried. And I'll find the homestead, no longer in the family but still standing. I haven't read Scott in years, but maybe I should again.
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