Mimsy Were the Borogoves

A couple of days ago I heard a clip from a Larry Kudlow interview in which he said that the reason the economy is so bad under the Biden/Harris administration is because “the left hates businesses.” This is completely backward. It’s another example of conservatives buying into, instead of rejecting, the institutional left’s opposite-talk, their lying with fake terms and fake outrage. The left doesn’t hate businesses. The left hates you and me.

The left is fully aware that their regulations cause businesses to raise prices, and the left is fully aware that it is you and I who pay those prices. They hate us, and they love that they can use left-friendly monopolies to screw us over.

In general, the Left loves businesses, if those businesses are run in a manner easily coopted by government. They love businesses that are run as conglomerate-by-committee. They love businesses that are run by fellow members of the beltway crowd. They especially love businesses that are run like the left runs government, although these tend to fail spectacularly the more they emulate the left.

They loved Twitter, when it was run by committee. They hated it when Elon Musk took over. The businesses they hate are businesses run by individuals. Because they don’t hate businesses. They hate people.

Everything they do that the right claims is “bad for business” isn’t bad for big businesses. It’s bad for individuals running a business—and it’s bad for individuals who no longer have the choice of buying from a local, responsive business.

It’s great for well-connected national and global businesses run by disconnected beltway billionaires and bureaucracies. It kills their local competition. It monopolizes their customers. Amazon is not going to starve from Biden’s or Harris’s “anti-business” policies. If Disney dies it won’t be because of government policies but because they act like the left. And none of the board members will suffer from its death. Only Disney fans and retirees invested in Disney, often involuntarily via big, monopolizing investment firms run by the left’s beltway billionaires.

This is the regressivism of the left: to return to a time when only the rich could afford to be businessmen. When only the rich could afford to be investors.

“I remembered something my dad told me,” Doucette said. “He had a cooking show on NBC television for years… he knew the business. He said to me, ‘Be yourself, and nobody else. Don’t be an imitator; be a creator.’ Those words always stuck with me.”—Eddie Doucette III

In February I chatted for a few hours with sportscaster Eddie Doucette about his father the chef, whose recipes I’ve collected in Tempt Them with Tastier Foods.

“I think most people don’t remember Eddie Doucette the cook,” his son said toward the end of our talk.

Most people if they remember anything with the name Doucette it would be because of my more recent time in the media. It’s a shame, that someone like him who was truly a legend in his profession, that there’s not much notoriety for him today.

That certainly seems to be the case. The 1985 Chicago Celebrity Cookbook by Ann Gerber doesn’t include any mention of Eddie Doucette. Nor does Mike Douglas’s 1969 The Mike Douglas Cookbook, even though by then Eddie had made several appearances on the show.

When I first ran across the name, it was atop a few pages of recipes a viewer had typed up from his Chicago-area television show, Eddie Doucette’s Home Cooking.

He had savoir faire, that ability to make you want to sit up and move closer to the TV, grab a paper and pencil and start writing it down.

Despite the title of the show being typed across the top of the documents, the eBay seller I bought them from thought it was from an old defunct restaurant—probably because that’s the only food-related hit that came up in an Internet search on Eddie’s name.

New England

The earliest reference to Chef Eddie Doucette that I can find is the 1940 census for Felchville-Natick (JPEG Image, 1.0 MB), Massachusetts. His occupation is listed as “Chef” at a “private school”. He has a wife Teresa, and a son Edward. The Doucettes are 26, 24, and 2 years old, respectively. He’s working year-round (52 weeks a year) and full-time (48 hours a week). He makes $2,080 annually. They’re living on 7 Atherton Street in Natick.

Except for the Date Sticks the recipes aren’t impressive (so far). But the presentation is fascinating.

I have no idea how recipe-based advertising campaigns were designed in the heyday of promotional recipe books at the beginning of the twentieth century. One of the best such recipes I’ve seen is a Dromedary/Hills Brothers recipe for maple coconut candies, which I’ll be talking about later when I get to some of those cookbooks. It was one of three recipes in an ad for their Dromedary Fresh Keeping Cocoanut, a coconut-in-a-can product.¹ It’s an amazing candy, and yet I’ve never seen it in any of the contemporary Dromedary cookbooks. Did they have separate recipes for their ads? If so, how would they choose which goes in a book and which in an ad? Would they use their best recipes in the ads or in the cookbooks?

Presumably, they had their own ideas about advertising. And, like oven terminology their ideas were different than ours in profound ways. One of the most fascinating relics of the era are these two sliding recipe cards from the Rumford Company. Recipes for Cake and Cookie Making is from 1926, and Recipes for Biscuits, Muffins, Rolls, Etc. doesn’t have a copyright date but, judging from the code, is from 1929.

Is this an easily securable space? (Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0)

One of the great things about Texas is that there are so few places that are safe for showboat killers. The reason you hear mostly about schools is that they’re among the very few such places. It’s also why you hear about mass murderers having driven hours or more to reach a movie theater or a church: so few of those locations have been made safe for mass murderers. It takes work to find places in Texas where only criminals are allowed to carry firearms.

Recently, the State Fair of Texas has decided to add one more vulnerable population to the list: the millions of visitors to the annual State Fair.

Guests will be channeled through weapons detection technology which screens for dangerous weapons in the presence of a licensed and trained security officer.

Not wishing to see such a prime target made safe for mass murder, I wrote a very short letter:

The decision to prohibit lawful carriers from defending themselves and others at the Texas State Fair is very disappointing and potentially very dangerous. By only allowing criminals to carry firearms at the Fair, the Fair meets all the classic requirements of showboat killers: dense crowds of young media-friendly targets, maze-like surroundings, and effective self-defense banned.

The critical flaw in their policy is that it amounts to only allowing criminals to carry at the Fair. An outdoor fair is not amenable to effectively screening visitors for weapons. Screening in such an environment is unnecessary for non-criminals and ineffective against criminals. The new policy is nothing more than a deliberate inconvenience to Texans visiting the fair (my guess is that the people running the fair are not the kind of people who go to an agriculture-themed, fried-foods-friendly State Fair). It won’t be any inconvenience to criminals for whom a giant open fair where everyone else is disarmed is prime hunting ground.

The Fair’s response was a canned text that addressed none of the dangers:

“Maybe batteries aren’t the best way to store energy.”

Francis Turner has a slightly different take than I did on What will a useful electric car look like?. But he starts from a very similar observation, that most writers on battery-operated vehicles “are missing the point. We don’t want batteries, we want efficient energy storage.” And there is a mountainous difference between the energy storage needs of portable electronic devices and transportation devices, i.e., cars.

He also goes into something I only mentioned tangentially, which is that energy storage for evening out intermittent power sources such as wind and solar is so many orders of magnitude different than portable electronic devices that it’s crazy we’re even considering using the same storage technology to handle it. The money we’re spending on trying to shoehorn traditional batteries into storing grid-level power would be far more effective using other energy storage techniques—and unlike the energy storage needed for battery-powered vehicles, we already know what grid-level storage techniques can look like!

He also comes to the conclusion that, because gasoline is so comparatively useful at energy storage, the best “battery” for electric vehicles will be “synthetic hydrocarbons”, that is, man-made gasoline created from the energy generated by intermittent sources. I suspect that this overlooks how incredibly poorly-matched modern wind and solar technologies are to mass energy generation (in his defense he’s explicit about not discussing this), but when we do find a good means of generating mass intermittent power synthetic gasoline probably will be the best way to store it. As I wrote in a footnote to my post, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the eventual winning ‘battery’ technology ends up looking a lot like a synthetic gasoline.”

Three different kinds of potato chip cookies: sandies, brown sugar, and chocolate chip.

National Potato Day is Monday. You might think that I would eventually run out of unique ways to highlight potatoes on their special day. That is the retrograde thinking of someone who does not appreciate the wonders of potatoes. If you feel that way, you might as well stop reading now!

This year I have a very unique cookie from the seventies, made with a very different potato chip than they would have been made with then. Back in the seventies and even early eighties, these would have been made with everyday thin potato chips, such as Lay’s or an off-brand, or, perhaps, to use up the dregs of a Charles Chips can before the next can arrived. By the time you got to the bottom of the can, they were pre-crushed, perfect for baking!

One of the amazing potato innovations over my lifetime has been the slow takeover of the potato chip industry by kettle-style chips. They’re better all around: crunchier, greasier, and more flavorful. I don’t know specifically when they first started appearing, but I do remember the first time I had a real kettle-style chip. It was in Los Angeles in 1990, on one of the side streets connecting Hollywood and Sunset. The chips were “Krunchers! Jalapeño Chips”, cooked in peanut oil. They had just a faint flavor of peanuts to go along with the jalapeños, something that Borden, sadly, viewed as a flaw and corrected soon after.

I always wondered where these chips were going… (Ezrawolfe, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

When I tell people that I want to stop acquiring more cookbooks and start using the ones I already have, this is one of the things I mean: researching weird cooking through the ages. About a year ago last April, I was looking over the clearance rack at one of the grocery stores I frequent, probably Big Lots!, and I came across a bunch of kettle-style jalapeño potato chips for $0.62. It reminded me that I’ve been wanting to try one of the ostensibly stranger cookie recipes that I see regularly in community cookbooks, potato chip cookies.

It occurred to me that if potato chip cookies are good, jalapeño potato chip cookies would be even better.

Why did I write A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book (PDF File, 10.0 MB) (also available in print on Amazon^• and on Lulu)? This is not why: a few years ago, a friend told me after a particularly great vintage dish I’d made for game night, that:

“You should write a cookbook.”

“Would you really want a cookbook filled with other people’s recipes?”

“Yes.”

This was, of course, a clamor of one, and did not result in my writing a cookbook. It only provided the working title—Other People’s Recipes—and that only after I’d come up with a focus for the book.

It may not be obvious browsing through the recipes, but this is a very focused and specific book.

Despite the fact that I enjoy finding obscure cooking pamphlets and making them public again, I have never had any desire to write my own cookbook. My focus was in scanning these old cookbooks so that they’re available for anyone to download and enjoy.

But I did have one habit that allowed me to share my favorite recipes for making while traveling. When I found a recipe that I particularly wanted to remember while visiting friends and family, I would photograph the recipe and keep the photograph on my phone and tablet. This meant not only that I’d be able to make it while traveling, but that when a particularly popular dish elicited requests for the recipe, I was able to easily share it.

I don’t think you can get more emblematic of the modern beltway class than this notion that US troops should be sent overseas and should not protect US borders. It fires on all cylinders: What they used to call imperialism is now the only moral use for the army. And that farm and industrial workers should make less money by undercutting their jobs with people coming here illegally and forcing those jobs overseas.

They denigrate Americans as lazy and snobbish for not wanting to do the jobs that they themselves have made it almost impossible to hire Americans for.

My mom used to do some of those “jobs Americans won’t do”, which in our farm-based area meant picking asparagus and other fruit and vegetables. Many women did that to pick up extra money to improve their families’ incomes and save for their kids’ education.

She did not stop doing it because she didn’t want to do those jobs. I’m pretty she never wanted to do those jobs, but she did them anyway. She, along with the other women, stopped doing it because the farms stopped hiring them.

She wasn’t alone. An Ace of Spades commenter writing under the nom de plume notsothoreau wrote about their experience in farm work:

I used to work cherry harvest. Typically you work 10 hour days straight for about 21 days. When I started, high school kids could still work there. Then Washington passed a law that kids under 18 could only work up to 60 hours a week and there were also limits on the hours in the day they could work. It wasn’t worth it to the company and they stopped hiring them.

The farms stopped hiring people like my mom because it became progressively more expensive to hire part-time workers due to the regulatory burden per employee. They stopped hiring people like “notsothoreau” because they were no longer allowed to hire high school kids for short bursts of long hours—arguably something teenagers are well-suited for, and which many prefer over longer-term commitments.

The paperwork and other added regulatory expenses made it too expensive to hire the Americans who wanted to do these jobs. The paperwork for hiring someone here illegally is by necessity a lot less than for hiring citizens and legal immigrants.