Just The Caffeine Talking

Historical Perspective

Like most of the rest of the world I've been thinking about diseases lately. What I've been thinking about is how mild the coronavirus epidemic has been. No, stop shouting at the screen and look at some numbers.

         

The Spanish Flu: the post-World War I influenza epidemic caused 17-50 million deaths; I've seen the figure of 20 million most frequently so let's use that. World population at the time was about 1.8 billion, so that represents a death rate of 1.1 percent of the entire population (not just the infected).

 

Coronavirus: deaths currently stand at just over 200,000 people. Let's be pessimistic and assume twice that many die of it before the epidemic subsides. The world currently has 7.8 billion people. That would be a death rate of 0.005 percent. The influenza was 200 times more deadly.

 

I'm not trying to minimize the current crisis. What I am doing is pointing out that modern civilization has weathered much, much worse. A pandemic today would have to claim about 86 million people to be as bad as the Spanish influenza. That's about the population of Germany or Iran.

 

A death rate like that nowadays would be an inconceivable tragedy. But in 1920 . . . not so much. Sure, the world had just come through World War I, and wartime controls on news may have limited how much people knew about the epidemic. But I've read a fair amount of literature from that era, both fiction and nonfiction, and it's kind of surprising how little attention the influenza got compared to the war itself. My collection of H.L. Mencken's writings doesn't touch on the flu; James Thurber references the Dutch Elm disease epidemic but not the Spanish Influenza. Hemingway, Graves, Isherwood — nothing that I can recall. 

 

In historical fiction set in that era, written by later writers, there's likely to be mention of the terrible epidemic, and it may even claim a minor character or two. But at the time, writers just shrugged it off. And the world's economy pretty much shrugged it off, as well.

 

I have a few theories about why it wasn't such a big deal.

 

The Greater Trauma: I think that a lot of people at the time simply lumped the epidemic in with the Great War. After all, for all of recorded history up to that point, wars were invariably accompanied by plagues. World War I was something of a turning point in that more soldiers actually died of wounds than disease, but it was not a huge margin. So the epidemic and the battlefield deaths were all part of "The War" in most people's minds.

 

People Get Sick: It's also worth remembering how much more prevalent and deadly infectious diseases were, right up to the mid-20th Century. Epidemics may have been less widespread, but they could still generate shocking local death tolls. Germans in 1920 could remember the cholera outbreak of 1892, which took nearly 10,000 lives. Americans at the time might recall their grandparents talk of the cholera epidemic of the 1870s, which caused about 50,000 deaths. 

 

And it's not as if the Spanish influenza was the only fatal disease around in 1920, either. People still died of typhus, smallpox, scarlet fever, yellow fever — and the undefeated historical grand champion killer, malaria.

 

For modern Americans (and increasingly for modern people all over the world), dying is something that happens to the very old, or to soldiers in wars. But for most of human history, right up to around the time I was born, people could die at any age. An epidemic with a death rate of one percent was just part of the "background noise." This leads to my final explanation.

 

We Care More: Medicine, nutrition, and sanitation have worked miracles in the past half century. Increasingly, people just don't die of infectious diseases. They die of old age, cancer, and violence. This is a wonderful thing, but it has encouraged a dangerous way of thinking. For most people nowadays, dying before you're in your seventies means it's somebody's fault. The product was defective, the pilot made an error, the driver was drunk. This is also why we often slide into victim-blaming when people get sick. He was obese. She smoked. He should have taken better care of himself. She should have stayed out of the sun. We have lost the easy fatalism of our ancestors. We don't want to think of death as a random event. We want it to be a solvable problem.

 

Hence the widespread paranoia about "toxins" in foods or consumer products making us sick. Hence the "anti-vaxxer" movement. Hence the anger about the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. And hence the current omnidirectional finger-pointing and rage about COVID-19. I think there is some good in the view that illness is a problem to be solved, rather than something you just have to live with. But the problem with this virus is the virus. Not the people you already disagree with.

 

  

Kitchen Report: Tortillas

The little locally-owned supermarket up in Greenfield has a good selection of Mexican items — I don't mean Mission brand tortillas or Paul Newman salsa, I mean stuff like masa flour, corn husks for making tamales, and big bags of dried beans. This probably has something to do with the fact that this is farm country and we get a lot of seasonal workers on the farms during the growing season. So when I want cornmeal I get the five-pound bag of masa flour. It makes good cornbread and fine polenta.

But I'd never tried making tortillas before. Somehow I had it in my mind that they require a lot of labor. In a way that's true, but the drudgery comes in turning dried corn kernels into finely-ground masa flour. Nowadays we have machines for that, rather than some poor ancient Aztec woman sliding a chunk of stone back and forth. So the only drudgery involved is going to the supermarket for masa flour, and waiting in line at the checkout.

With that step automated, the actual process of making tortillas consists of:

Mix flour with water,

Roll into balls,

Squash the balls flat into tortillas, and

Cook on the griddle. 

It was quick, easy, and the resulting tortillas were sturdy but tender. They tasted a lot better than the premade ones from the store. So I think I'm just going to make them myself from now on.

Kitchen Report: The Elvis

If you suddenly went from poverty to vast wealth, and could have more or less anything you wanted, what would you eat?

Well, if you were Elvis Presley, the King of Rock 'n Roll, you'd have a sandwich. Specifically, a peanut butter-banana-and-bacon sandwich, sometimes on an entire loaf of bread cut lengthwise. 

Today for brunch Diane and I tried our hands at the King's favorite sandwich. I've seen some recipes which call for the whole thing to be fried, but we stuck with two slices of regular toast, two strips of fried bacon cut in half, one sliced banana, and about a tablespoon of peanut butter from a jar. The two of us shared one sandwich. 

It's quite good, really. I think eating more than a half-sized sandwich might quickly turn into a chore, but as a little brunch it was pretty tasty. If we do it again I think I'll sautee the banana slices with the bacon, to give it a little caramelization, and Diane suggested a little brown sugar. At the back of my mind there is also the question of whether some caramelized onion might go well with this, too.

Most people's reaction to the Elvis sandwich is an eye-roll, but I suspect that is partly cultural snobbery. Consider: peanut butter, bananas, and pork are all key ingredients in Southeast Asian cuisine. Make an Elvis sandwich on a baguette with some cilantro and a shot of hot sauce and you could persuade just about anyone that it's an exciting variant version of the Vietnamese banh mi. 

Hmm . . . 

Kitchen Report: Bucatini Alla Flamande

These weeks of enforced leisure have inspired me to go ahead and do some cooking projects I've long put off. I did the first of them this past Saturday, a dish called Bucatini Alla Flamande.

It's a molded pasta dish — you line a pudding basin or a rounded double boiler with semi-cooked bucatini, line the inside with a forcemeat paste, then fill with cooked meat and bechamel sauce, cover with another layer of bucatini, and cook the whole thing over a pot of boiling water for about 45 minutes. When it's done you invert the basin onto a platter and if everything has gone properly, you get a sort of pasta beehive or igloo full of meat.

Bucatini, incidentally, is a long pasta like spaghetti, but it's a hollow tube.

I got the recipe from one of my dependable pasta cookbooks: The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces, by Diane Seed. It leads of the section on "Special Occasion Dishes" and would definitely be a showstopper if it comes out right.

Making it was quite long and involved. I started the process about four hours before we could eat anything. Admittedly, one of those hours was devoted to making stock, and in the future I'll do that part a few days in advance. After that I made the sauce, essentially a puree of cooked celery-carrot-and-onion with some stock to thin it. So far, so good.

Then I made the "meat paste" — the layer that's supposed to go inside the pasta envelope and seal the cracks like spackle. The recipe was charmingly vague about what meat you should use, so I went with cooked chicken. In future I may try something a bit gummier, like maybe stewing beef. The book was also vague about how much bechamel to incorporate into the paste. I later found another vague recipe on line which did at least give an amount, and I had far underestimated it. So my paste was more like the sauce. In fact, given that it also contained pureed celery-carrot-and-onion, I realized that the meat paste was really supposed to be meat and bechamel with some of the sauce for flavor. In future I'll do it that way, which should knock another half-hour off the cooking time.

Getting the bucatini to coil around the inside of the double boiler bowl was very tricky and involved some swearing, but I finally managed to get it done, and then smeared meat paste (I just love saying "meat paste") all over the inside.

The filling was a mix of chicken, tongue, and ham. The ham dominated the flavor, but it was good so I have no complaints. The tongue added richness (and the leftover tongue became tacos de lengua the next day. I layered in the chopped meat and the remains of the bechamel, then topped with the last of the meat paste and made a flat layer of bucatini for the lid.

Forty-five minutes later it was time to serve. We got it inverted onto a platter in one piece, but had trouble getting the bucatini to leave the bowl (despite a lavish layer of butter). Diane suggested lining the bowl with parchment or foil next time, and I may do that.

And then we ate it all up. No leftovers. It was good, no question. But the ratio of 4 hours preparation to 15 minutes consumption is a little high. If I can get the prep time down to maybe 2 hours I'll try making it again.

What's interesting about the dish is what it doesn't contain: tomatoes. Also almost nothing in the way of herbs or spices, nor any cheese. There's garlic, salt, and pepper. That's all. The main flavors are ham and carrot. It's quite good, but very far from the typical red-gravy southern Italian culinary stereotype. I am inclined to think it may be a very old recipe, from before 1500, although the absence of spices argues against that. Every other Renaissance-era dish I've tried has a ton of saffron, clove, or some such in it.

I confess to a little dissatisfaction with the cookbook. Most of the recipes in The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces are clearly written and appear to have been tested, but I think this one got in through a back door. The author claims to have gotten it from a Neapolitan aristocrat, and I believe her because it reads as if she simply transcribed a handwritten recipe jotted down by someone reconstructing it from memory.

Anyway, now that I have the basic concept down, I may experiment a little. I have the idea that this would make an excellent seafood dish, using some gummy fish like cod for the spackle, and filling it with crabmeat and shrimp, or maybe a chopped lobster tail. The vegetable puree sauce is very much like my father's recipe for Crawfish Alla Nantua, so I think it would do well with crustaceans.

Now that Passover is approaching, Diane has taken over the kitchen, and after the big Seder meal we'll be dining off leftovers for a while. My next big cooking experiment probably won't be for two or three weeks. Watch this space.