Mimsy Were the Borogoves

An October 1, 1956 ad for WNBQ in Chicago highlights “Bob Murphy, Kay Westfall and Chef Eddie Doucette” as the station’s top sellers. (Click for full ad.) (JPEG Image, 360.5 KB)

I’ve just published the third printing of Tempt Them with Tastier Foods. With this release my collection of Eddie Doucette recipes exceeds a hundred pages. It is available as a free download in PDF (PDF File, 12.5 MB) and ePub (ePub ebook file, 10.9 MB) formats, as well as in print.

The new recipes come from several sources. I continue to be notified whenever a new reference to Eddie Doucette shows up on newspapers.com. And I continue to look for references on more general searches, which, among other things, netted a couple more matchbook recipes.

I managed to find a copy of his All-American Hog Dog pamphlet. I included recipes from images of it in the second printing, but it turns out there are recipes on both sides. The new, reverse-side recipes are now included in that section of the book. They include a fascinating-looking Hot Dog Pate and a Frank ’n’ Kraut Shepherd Pie that is very similar to the Oktoberfest Sauerkraut in the original printing but with hot dogs added.

I also decided to take a look at which newspaper most of the recipes came from, and then follow their IGA advertisements all the way through the sixties and into 1971. That turned out to be The Idaho State Journal of Pocatello, Idaho. A week in the newspapers.com archives netted several new recipes from the Journal’s regular Thursday IGA ads.

The image links to the Great Anniversary Festival recipe cards (PDF File, 4.5 MB), but this particular recipe is available in A Sestercentennial Cookery.

Sarah Hoyt invited me to post something about Bi/Vi/Centennial food on According To Hoyt, and it’s now up. Please read Food for the Great Anniversary Festival there! It features a special collection of Centennial-friendly recipes just for Hoyt’s Huns, and includes recipes not in A Sestercentennial Cookery. There are also different takes on the history of some of these books and foods than I put into the break-out posts.

If you came here for the Great Anniversary Festival recipe PDF (PDF File, 4.5 MB), you can download it by way of this link (PDF File, 4.5 MB)!

I’ve also linked the other eighteenth and nineteenth century cookbooks below.

The first four presidents. Two of them died on the Jubilee of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1826.

On July 4 we celebrate the Semiquincentennial anniversary of the Declaration of our Independence from Great Britain. Two hundred and fifty years have passed since the Declaration was adopted. John Adams predicted it would be celebrated with wild abandon… if it proved successful.

The 4th of July, 1776, will be a memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe it will be celebrated by succeeding generations, as the GREAT ANNIVERSARY FESTIVAL! It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to the Almighty God. It ought to be solemnized with pomp, shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations—from one end of the continent to the other, from this time forever!¹

Exactly two hundred years ago, fifty years after the Declaration, another momentous event rocked the country. Thomas Jefferson died in the afternoon, and John Adams in the evening. On the fiftieth anniversary, the Jubilee, of the document they had created, both died within hours of each other.

There were probably more orations after Independence Day than on the day itself, due to that amazing coincidence. As the news spread throughout our then-small country there were eulogies, commemorations, and the beginnings of legends. There were enough joint eulogies that at least one publisher announced a book collecting them. I collected two of them in A Sestercentennial Cookery: Edward Everett’s eulogy of August 1, 1826, and the semi-anonymous “Lady of Richmond’s” July 14 Lines on the Deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

There’s even a children’s book about how much of a foodie Jefferson was.

The Fourth of July celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was drafted by Thomas Jefferson. Why not add a couple of Jefferson’s or his family’s recipes to your celebration?

If there were a patron of American foodies, it would be Thomas Jefferson. He famously designed and possibly built his own pasta machine after enjoying pasta on an overseas trip to Italy. He is credited with introducing such varied foodie delights to America as waffles, macaroni & cheese, and vanilla pods.

His ice cream recipe from his time in France is widely copied and possibly the most common example of the foods he popularized. As reproduced by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s web site for Monticello, it is simple and likely very good, using cream, separated eggs, and sugar. It is churned using a “sabottiere”, which appears to be an early form of ice cream churn, a “sorbetière” in modern French.

And Jefferson didn’t just bring foreign foods to America. He also brought American foods to foreign lands. He considered the apples of France “vastly inferior to his prized Newtown Pippin from Virginia. So began a five-year mission to introduce his French colleagues to the great delicacies of his homeland.”

June 22, 2026, marks the fifty-first birthday of what was probably the longest-running gaming forum of its era, and probably well into the future. In the announcement for my personal cookbook, A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book, I wrote, about publishing personal and family recipes:

The preservation of food culture would be better if everyone did this or something like it. I wouldn’t buy everyone’s paperback, but I would download a lot of PDFs.

“A few of my friends”, I added, “make their Word documents and text documents of family recipes available on request”.

I very specifically had Lee Gold of Alarums and Excursions fame¹ in mind when I wrote that. Alarums and Excursions started in June 1975 and ran up to and including April 2025, almost fifty full years. I contributed to Alarums and Excursions from at least April 2008 to its end, with The Biblyon Free Press. At some point I started including vintage food, that being my other obsession after gaming. The road to seeing Lee Gold’s recipes began when I reviewed the ca. 1955 Home Cooking Secrets of Charlotte in the April 2021 issue, A&E 545.

Lee replied in issue 546:

I could email you our Recipes files if you want to see them. One file is my transcription of my father’s mother’s recipes, given her by friends and relatives when she left Virginia for Los Angeles (June 25, 1895). Another is my father’s and my mother’s recipes. The third is Barry’s and my recipes plus those of some of our friends.

When I replied that “I’d love to see your recipe files”, she sent three documents:

1. Some Recipes of Howard and Judith Klingstein
2. Leonora Wise Klingstein’s recipe book
3. Lee Gold’s Recipes

All of the recipes in these files come from either her file of recipes from her parents (Howard and Judith Klingstein, the first file), from her grandparents (Leonora Wise Klingstein, the second file), or are her own recipes from, among other sources, friends in the science fiction and gaming community (the third file).

Alan Moore’s best works provoke a lot of thought about the human relationship with social and technological progress. When I wrote The Five Faces of V I was also reminded quite a bit about what I wrote in Our Cybernetic Future. I ended up cutting most of those references because they didn’t really touch directly on the comics. But there are some very important questions in that crossover. One is the concept of the singularity. The other is the mentoring effect of the existence of the United States—or the idea of the United States—as a world power. The two are heavily related.

Much of Moore’s vision of progress could be said to combine John Von Neumann’s optimism—that for every technological problem an answer will be found—with Norbert Weiner’s entropy-inspired pessimism, that there will be a lot of degradation along the way.

The article on the left is about sharks not getting cancer. This is Omni, after all.

As I go through old Omni magazines, I am struck by George Eliot’s dictum that history is adept at changing costume while remaining the same.¹

One of those “changes in costume” is how political correctness doesn’t just shape a conversation, it shapes policy. And like most forms of censorship, it shapes policy out of dangerous ignorance.

In today’s world of men beating up women and calling it “sports” there’s an argument about “who does it hurt” on one side and “now it’s turned deadly” on the other. But political correctness hasn’t just turned deadly today. Political correctness has always been deadly and often, just as it is today, it’s been deadly to the people it was supposed to help.

Political correctness will always be deadly, because it is specifically a form of speech control that denies reality. It reaches into scientific research and denies effective research. It bars some data from the scientific conversation—and these are, by their nature, usually going to be the most relevant data.

I recently ran across a darkly humorous news item in the November 1981 Omni:²

Gay Diseases

Two mysterious diseases are claiming the lives of homosexual men in several American cities and are baffling epidemiologists at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta.

“We’re calling it an outbreak of decreased resistance,” says CDC investigator James Curran, “and it’s very, very serious.”

…

CDC field-workers in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are hunting for a reason. Since the diseases are not believed to be infectious and most of the victims don’t know one another, epidemiologists suspect something in the gay lifestyle causes these ailments.

“Inhalant anesthetics, such as butyl nitrate, are one possibility, since many gays use them [to enhance sexual pleasure],” Curran says, “but so far we really don’t know.”

“Since the diseases are not believed to be infectious” partly due to it “claiming the lives of homosexual men [who] don’t know one another” scientists were looking to non-infectious modes of transmission. They were looking at things in “the gay life-style” rather than behavior. Things like “inhalant anesthetics”.

Logo for Disney’s Swamp Fox miniseries on Walt Disney Presents. The background represents “Frontierland” at the newly-created Disneyland.

If poetry and music were the main pop culture mediums of the nineteenth century, television was the pop culture medium of the second half of the twentieth. Francis Marion was in on television from the beginning. He had a television series, sort of, in the fifties. Walt Disney Presents: The Swamp Fox was based on the Robert D. Bass book Swamp Fox: The life and campaigns of General Francis Marion.