Mimsy Were the Borogoves

I also rewatched Jacques Pépin’s wonderful Heart & Soul cooking show.

“I can’t advise you to start drinking heavily,” said Johnny Depp as John Belushi in Fear and Loathing on Saturday Night, “but it’s always worked for me.”

This year I started experimenting with old-school drinks from three sources. From matchbook covers I discovered the very nice Gin Rickey: ice, gin, lime juice, and soda water. At New Braunfels in October I picked up The ABC of Cocktails, a 1957 collection of similarly-abbreviated drink recipes, and discovered the Bee’s Knees: honey, lemon juice, gin, and ice. Both are marvelous, refreshing drinks. I recommend adding rosemary, but it’s wonderful either way.

From Barimetro, the sliding drink recipe card of the Hotel Las Brisas in Acapulco, I discovered the Bourbon and Vermouth Manhattan, flavored with bitters and a red cherry. As well as a very dry Martini: 1-½ ounces of gin with 1/16 ounce of dry Vermouth. Quite good with a good gin, such as The Pianist.

And therein lies a story. I’ve never been a fan of gin, but it is useful to keep on hand for certain drinks. Especially now that I’ve discovered the above three cocktails. Last year or the year before I discovered The Pianist, and it’s the first gin I’ve really liked. So, when I ran out at the end of the year—due mainly to discovering these three wonderful gin cocktails—I went to get more… and discovered it’s been discontinued.

Being as I am not a gin connoisseur I just bought the next interesting one on the shelf, Shiner gin. It’s not a bad gin and like The Pianist it’s from Texas. But it highlighted that I really do prefer The Pianist to random gins off the shelf. So I went back online and started searching area liquor store web sites to see if anyone still had it in stock.

The book year for me began in earnest over Valentine’s Day travel in San Diego—and on the way to it. Driving through west Texas and El Paso I listened to Mike Rowe’s interview with Nikki Stratton about her grandfather, Donald Stratton, and the book he wrote with Ken Gire about being on the USS Arizona during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

I’ve long been aware of a Stratton on board the Arizona. While I’m pretty sure we’re not related it did of course interest me. So, when I happened to see Don Stratton’s All the Gallant Men a few hours later at Coas Books in Las Cruces, I couldn’t resist buying it.

To Donald Stratton, the attack on Pearl Harbor mirrored the September 11 attacks, and he lamented that the lessons we learned on December 7 are being forgotten. One of those lessons is a question: “Am I worth dying for?”

To paraphrase Kevin Smith, the Arizona wasn’t even supposed to be there that day. It had been involved in an accident and stayed in place for minor repairs. It accounted for “nearly half of all the Americans who died that day”.

We were so young, those of us who enlisted—eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old… If we were not quite men on December 6, by midmorning of the 7th we were.

It’s an incredible story. He covers not just the morning of December 7, but also his recuperation back home in mid-America and his return to the United States Navy to finish out the war.

Though I may have left Pearl Harbor on a stretcher, I had returned on a Destroyer. I had recovered my strength, as had my country.

While in San Diego I picked up a book at the big monthly University Heights Public Library sale that was to occupy my time on and off literally up to the end of the year. I began reading Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Il Dolore in March while traveling in and around Barcelona. I finished it this morning as I write this post, New Year’s Eve, 2025, making it my “last review of the year” according to Goodreads.

Also available on Amazon^• and Lulu.

I hope you have great plans for this summer! This New Year marks a great milestone in American history: Independence Day 2026 will mark the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

In celebration, for the next eight months, through the summer picnic and reunion season, The Padgett Sunday Supper Club will feature even more recipes from our 1976 and 1876 celebrations, and from 1796.

I have collected most of the recipes from my last three Independence Day posts into a small cookbook, The Padgett Sunday Supper Club Sestercentennial Cookery (PDF File, 7.0 MB). The book also includes a handful of recipes I’ve tested since those posts, and from the same sources. It collects bicentennial, centennial, and vicennial recipes, the latter from America’s first native cookbook, the 1796 American Cookery. That’s three centuries of American independence: the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

The Battle of the Kegs, as depicted in John Gilmary Shea’s 1872 A Child’s History of the United States.

You may know Francis Hopkinson as one of the less-prominent signers of the Declaration of Independence. But he was much more than a Founder. He was also a poet. I’ve included his wonderful “For a Muse of Fire” in The Padgett Sunday Supper Club Sestercentennial Cookery, which will be the next post in this series. And— he wasn’t just a poet: he was also a satirical poet. This Sunday, January 5, marks the 248^th anniversary of the battle that provided him his finest hour as a writer. If there’s a second thing that Hopkinson is remembered for, it is his darkly humorous account of The Battle of the Kegs in rhyme.

Accounts differ in minor points, but sometime around January 5, 1778, David Bushnell—who had previously made the first combat submarine—released gunpowder-filled kegs onto the Delaware River near Bordentown, New Jersey. His hope was that the kegs would explode on contact with British ships patrolling the harbor.

Most sources say that the plan was performed with the knowledge and approval of General Washington. Presumably, then, there was more to the plan than “gunpowder-filled kegs randomly floating down the river”. The kegs are often described as “contact mines”. The few accounts that describe how the mines were to be ignited describe the fuse as a flintlock fuse.

Also available in print.

Tomorrow is Christmas, and have I got a gift for you! I was driving across Missouri when I found this tiny little 1916 pamphlet/book in a library sale’s discount box. And by “discount”, I mean anything in the box was ten cents.

The full title is Table and Kitchen: A Practical Cook Book (PDF File, 15.3 MB). It’s an advertisement for the Royal Baking Powder Company’s “Dr. Price’s Cream Baking Powder”. Dr. Price’s was a single-action baking powder, that is, it did not contain alum. It used only cream of tartar as the acid.

While the cover is wonderful my initial thought was to leave it. I’m not a huge fan of how recipes were written in that era. I’ve seen other baking powder cookbooks, and have not been impressed by them. Further, there was practically no cell service in the area, so I couldn’t look up whether the book had been scanned online or not yet. But at ten cents I decided I couldn’t leave it: its next stop would certainly have been the recycling bin out back.

When I got to the hotel that night, I discovered that (a) it was not yet available anywhere, which meant I would at least get a good blog post out of it, and (b) there were a lot of very interesting, if sparsely-described, recipes inside.

One particular aspect of these old recipes that annoys me is a tendency to use what I call reverse Polish notation, or, as my gamer friends would say, Hastur he who must not be named oh shit. I wrote about the same writing “technique” in A Vicennial Meal for the Sestercentennial and Table and Kitchen’s eggnog recipe is a good example of the form:

Egg Nog. —Six eggs well beaten (white and yolks separately), one quart milk, one-half cup sugar, one cup brandy, nutmeg. Stir yolks into milk, with the sugar first beaten with yolks. Add brandy, then whites of eggs. Whip well.

“…the best part of free health care is that death is always free. And fast. While it may take months to see a specialist, ‘the median wait time between first request and referral was 1 day’ for Canada’s free death health care system. Beat that or die trying.”

“There’s no medical problem that free government health care can’t solve by killing you. For free.”

“Earlier this month, Fulton County admitted that approximately 315,000 early votes from the 2020 election were illegally certified but were nonetheless still included in the final results of that election.”

“Five years after the election—when it is too late to rectify the crime, and never mind all the injury inflicted on those branded ‘election deniers’ for protesting this fraud—we learn the truth… Here you have more than 300,000 ballots illegally included in the tally, which is nearly 30 times more than Biden’s margin of (alleged) victory in Georgia.”

I’ve managed to acquire a few caches of early OMNI magazines, and recently read the February, March, and April 1980 issues. With a likely three-month lead time to publication, the essays and editorials in these issues would have been written in November or so through January. That is, at the very end of the seventies and the height of seventies malaise. President Carter was still president. While the Iranian hostage crisis was weighing on his presidency, there was as yet no obvious alternative to Carter in the Republican Party.

On January 1, 1980, Carter seemed more vulnerable from an opponent in his own party—Ted Kennedy—than from any Republican. President Reagan wouldn’t even start showing his strength in the Republican primaries until March. Like President Trump in 2016, candidacy would be treated as a joke until it wasn’t.

Emblematic of the era is a cartoon in the February issue showing a maitre’d controlling entry to a gas station. Under rationing and price controls, being able to both afford gas and have time to access it was becoming a class marker. That America was entering a period of decline was a widely spoken mantra in the beltway, and would continue to be until President Reagan’s new policies started taking effect in 1981 and 1982.

Most people in publishing and politics thought higher prices and higher unemployment—stagflation—was America’s inevitable future. They had no idea everything would change in just over one year when gasoline price controls would be rescinded and gasoline prices—along with prices for everything that relies on gasoline—would drop.

Tying into this seventies malaise was another surprise for me: a Thomas Szasz-like rant about the psychiatric industry that opened February’s “Continuum”¹—and seeing by the signature at the end that it was in fact written by Szasz! Everybody wrote for Omni. As I recall from reading one or two of his books, Szasz had a lot of very good points—obscured by a near-complete rejection of potential physical causes for mental issues.