bernot

MACCARONY CHEESE

For our inaugural recipe, we thought, why not start with an eighteenth-century mac-and-cheese?  It’s a modern-day American classic and perhaps the ultimate comfort food.

This recipe comes from UPenn Ms. Codex 1038, a collection of recipes most likely written and bound between 1765 and 1830. (Thanks to Mitch Fraas for pointing us to this particular “maccarony cheese.”)

http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/d/medren/3947224

The Recipe

Maccarony Cheese

Two Ounces of best Glocester Cheese, 4 Ounces Cheshire Do. grated – put it into a Stone Mortar with two Eggs, two or three Spoonfulls of Sack or Mountain Wine, beat it ’till it’s well mixt and Light – Boil the Maccarony in Water very tender, then drain it well, put it on a Dish or Plate and lay the prepared Cheese all over it and brown it with a Salamander.

This recipe, unlike some others to be featured, discussed, and puzzled over here in the next few months, features no ingredients that are mysterious, challenging to obtain, or downright unappetizing. Cheese, eggs, and macaroni are all familiar. Even sack wine can be approximated. Defined in Samuel Johnson’s 1737 Dictionary as “A kind of sweet wine, now brought chiefly from the Canaries.” Also known as “Canary wine,” sack identified a few varieties of sweet, fortified light wine. One of these later became known as “sherry,” so sherry is what we turned to here. For Gloucester cheese, we substituted a sharp, aged cheddar; for Cheshire, a milder cheddar.

Note that although the recipe provides specific measurements for all ingredients of the cheese sauce, the amount of macaroni is left unspecified. Based on the amount of cheese sauce, we determined that approximately half a pound of pasta (ex. fusili) would most likely have been used.

Early modern cooks used salamanders to brown dishes. A salamander was a piece of cast iron with a handle attached; it would be heated in the fire and then held on top of a dish to warm it. Essentially, a salamander was a hand-held broiler. We debated using a culinary torch but decided that an oven would provide more even cooking.

So, our modern version of the recipe looked like this:

2 oz. sharp/dry cheddar

4 oz. mild cheddar

2 eggs

2 tsp. sherry

8 oz. dried pasta

Heat oven to 350F.

Grate the cheeses and beat together with eggs and sherry. Add salt and pepper to taste. Cook and drain pasta.

Transfer pasta to oven-proof dish and evenly distribute cheese sauce over the top. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until cheese is melted and lightly browned.

The Results

In a word: delicious. The eggs cooked with the cheese to form a dense, satisfying mac-and-cheese that was remarkably easy to make. And the sherry flavor came through in a unique, rich way. We both agreed that this would be an easy way to throw together a pasta dish for one or two people, using up any scraps of cheese. Even more impressive: unlike many modern recipes for mac-and-cheese, this one does not involve any milk or heavy cream.

All photos by Chuck Choi courtesy Studio KCA

If you visited Governor’s Island in New York last summer you most certainly saw the billowing, cloud-like structure that sits in the middle of the lawn. And if you’re anything like my kids you probably dashed up to it to see exactly what thing was. But it’s not until you get up close that you realize it’s made from many, many plastic bottles stringed together. “53,780 used plastic bottles,” says designer Jason Klimoski, “the number thrown away in NYC in just 1 hour.” Klimoski and his team at STUDIO KCA collected the bottles – a combination of milk jugs and water bottles – and lashed them together to create “Head in the Clouds,” a pavilion people can walk into, sit inside, and contemplate just how much plastic is thrown away every day.

The structure, however, was temporary and the team is now looking for its next home. If you’re interested in having this in your back yard get in touch with the designers.

Joanna Ebenstein is petite, soft-spoken and bookish. She’s also a woman who traffics in death.

“I don’t actually think it’s morbid at all to think about death,” she says. “I think it’s really weird not to.”

ANIMAL recently visited Ebenstein’s Morbid Anatomy museum, which she founded and curates in Gowanus section of Brooklyn. Ebenstein, 42, has turned what was once a hobby and a blog into a fully operating museum that welcomes the dark, the strange, and the sensational.

“I think everything we’re doing is going to offend some people,” she says. “I don’t know how people in the midwest would view us. I don’t know if they’d come in here and see the babies in coffins and say this is [satanic].”

Since the museum opened on June 28, it’s gotten a healthy dose of media coverage. We stopped by this week to see the museum host its third singles’ night — billed as “Morbid Curiosity” — a gathering of 30-plus people in search of connecting with like-minded souls. Another reporter from a blog was also shadowing the event. Yet the night of Hendricks Gin-sponsored mingling was unremarkable in its normalcy, save the taxidermied animals, games of disease Pictionary and ice breakers that began with, “My friend is a mortician in San Francisco…”

Ebenstein’s dream is to pattern the museum after circus ingenue P.T. Barnum, who once housed an eight-story edifice in New York City that included freak shows, performance art and live animals — channeling an era of vaudeville and the World Fair. For now, though, Ebenstein’s building it small.

“I don’t ever want it to be a slick, fancy art museum,” she says. “I wanted to provide New York with something I wish had existed which was more homespun and immediate and accessible to more people.”

Moulage masks, and other “death masks,” litter the upstairs library. Masks like the one pictured above are patterned off diseased body parts and molded into wax recreations, used primarily as educational tools.

“I’m really interested in these ostensibly scientific objects that are at the same time art objects,” Ebenstein says.

Ebenstein walks me over to a bookshelf in the library, and opens Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, a best-selling, 18th-century annual guidebook that detailed the names and specialties of different prostitutes. There were 250,000 copies made, distributed at Christmas time.

Ebenstein reads an excerpt, “This lady is about 30 not a very advantageous stature but her fine eyes cannot be looked upon without exciting all the thrilling emotions and desire of the soul.”

When asked where she’d draw the line, Ebenstein says she has no interest in abortion exhibits, and says while lynching photography is an important historical medium, she doesn’t think she could live with it each day for six months.

She has limits.

“I wouldn’t show dead babies in jars, no.”

But she does have a pig fetus, and other skeletal remains from bats and birds to stingrays.

A big function of the business is the events and lectures hosted by Morbid Anatomy. Ebenstein got the idea for a singles’ night when Daisy Tainton lamented about having to explain to a potential partner why she was picking up a dead kitten at a friends’ house.

“That was pretty much a conversation stopper,” Tainton recalls.

Ebenstein suggested Tainton and the museum host a meetup for singles at the museum. On the very first singles’ night, Tainton met someone who she is currently dating. With a liquor license on the horizon, events like these are all part of the museum’s growth plan. Each one brings in more people, a particular kind of people.

“We’re trying to showcase things no one else takes seriously,” Ebenstein says. “Maybe they seem macabre and they end up sitting in back rooms or private collections, but we want to give them a home and a voice.”

(Photos: Amy K. Nelson/ANIMALNewYork)

The post A Night At the Morbid Anatomy Museum appeared first on ANIMAL.

These are my only 2 facial expressions.

The mid-1970’s, when 7-year-old me was roaming the mean streets of Odessa, was a great time to live there. Odessa’s Jewish population somewhat recovered from the devastation of the World War II and the pogroms and devastations before that and, while the Soviet Government had a firm grip on the emigration spigot, prospered as much as was allowed. Jewish actors, teachers, musicians, artists, restaurant singers, underground business owners, doctors, tailors, professors – Odessa’s Jewish population was having another one of its golden ages. Maybe I should say “Odessa’s adult Jewish population” because many kids like me didn’t know we were Jewish.

Recently I ran across a website where Jews of my generation were describing how they discovered that they belonged to the Tribe. Not one of them found out from their parents. It was always a neighbor or neighbor’s kids, some lady at the store, an angry classmate, an opponent in a fistfight, someone throwing an insult or a backhanded compliment; Jewish kids were last to know about the most important thing in their lives. And then I understood why we don’t always see eye-to-eye with the American Jews, the ones carried to a Rabbi on the 7^th day to have parts of them snipped, and taught how to participate in the great world Jewish conspiracy from their early days. Unlike them, we made it to adulthood intact, without ever seeing a Rabbi or even knowing the word Rabbi, or anything about being Jewish or the conspiracy we were born to participate in. While they were able to proudly announce their Jewishness in more languages than one, our nationality was conveyed in a series of winks and tongue-clicks with an understanding look and a sad face.

Around that time every resident of Odessa worth his eggplant caviar recipe had to have an underground recording of so-called Odessa songs. These were the songs usually performed in restaurants or weddings, sometimes funny, sometimes stupid, but always entertaining and good for dancing. Some of those included faux Yiddish lyrics and even when the original Yiddish had some meaning they were copied from musician to musician so many times that they lost all or most of it in the process. My household of course had a tape like this and I played it enough times to remember all the words in Russian and Yiddish. Except I didn’t know it was Yiddish, just like I had no idea I was a Jew and many other things a 7-year old not supposed to know. I also didn’t know I couldn’t sing.

I am at the center with my usual facial expression. Girl whose father was a part of the panel of celebrity judges is on the left wearing glasses. Odessa, 1976

That didn’t prevent me from volunteering to perform in a school concert. The casting committee consisted of my first grade teacher with the last name Rosenberg* and the father of my classmate with the last name Schneider*. I went on to perform a hit “Rahilya, May You Croak, I Like You”.

It went something like this:

Rahilya, may you croak, I like you.
I can’t live without you, Rahilya!
Rahilya, we’ll get married, you’ll plump up
And we will live on the beach together.

And then the Yiddish part started. I dutifully repeated every word with an exceptionally joyful intonation, perfect projection and a smile on my face. At that moment I was Pesachke Burtstein reincarnated if I only knew who he was.

Afn boydem bakt zikh knishes,
They are making knishes in the attic

Funem tukhes shit zikh mel.
And flour is pouring out of the ass

Az der tote trent di mome,
When Papa is banging Mama

Kinder makhn zikh aleyn.
Kids are playing alone.

Rahilya, you are beautiful like Venus,
But you will grow a large belly
And if not, let the cholera take me
But let it take you first!

Rahilya, we will go to Yessen-tukhes**,
Where sun comes up between the blue mountains,
And if not, kish mir in tukhes***
But my patience has run out.

Tears filled my teacher’s eyes and streamed down her face. My classmate’s father, a gentlemen in what then seemed like his 70’s but probably in his 40’s, was shaking and crying like a baby. We didn’t have Kleenex then so they wiped their faces with newspapers and rags. I finished with an especially well-done kinder makhn zikh aleyn and triumphantly looked over my teary-eyed audience of two.

This is the original song I was performing that day from the infamous tape.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8j1_ksW61M

My parents were friends with my teacher, so she just called them that night and asked them to try and contain my singing talents at home.

My Mom still reminds me about this every once in a while.

I never found out why I wasn’t featured in the school concert.

I still remember the words to this and other songs from that tape but nowadays my only audience is the shower curtain.

I don’t remember how I found out I was Jewish but I don’t think it was from my parents.

And that’s how I was a Yiddish singer.

*Unmistakably Jewish names
**Play on word combination Yessentuki, a famous Soviet resort, and a Yiddish word tukhes (ass).
***Kiss my ass (yeah, I know lots of ass-words in this song)

Big thanks to my friend Yelena S. for her Yiddish expertise in preparation of this post.

We get a lot of tips about Johnny Manziel, and most of them read something like this: "Hey, I have a [photo/video] of a [drunk/high] Johnny Manziel [singing along to Drake in a club/rolling up a joint/reaching for a bong/popping bottles/snorting coke]. How much will you pay me for it?" Here is our answer: nothing.

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"let me show the secrets of WHITE WITCHCRAFT" (1981)

The Supreme Court ruled on the Hobby Lobby case on Monday, outraging every reasonable person in the country.

People took to Twitter to vent their rage. And sadly—since the Supreme Court doesn’t have an official Twitter account—they started attacking an unaffiliated blog that merely covers the Supreme Court, despite the fact that their bio clearly reads “A private blog about the Supreme Court.” On the bright side, at least people are passionate about it, right?

When you start reading our description. MT @ProgressivesWin: @SCOTUSblog When will you start honoring the constitution. #5OldBigots

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 30, 2014

File a petition MT @yenisargueta: Thanks for not giving me the choice to my own body @SCOTUSblog Can I get carrots banned cause I want to?

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 30, 2014

It won’t be televised here MT @cjnkira: @SCOTUSblog you ruled against the working people, especially women, today. Revolution is coming. — SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 30, 2014

We thought blogging seemed very 21st century. MT @Iiuslep: @SCOTUSblog want to obliterate any progressive acheivement of 20th century. — SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 30, 2014

Least we could do. MT @HeathNOLA: @SCOTUSblog oh they can still get coverage? How generous of you.

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 30, 2014

Failure of democracy. MT @Rockinwil: Time to do away with the @SCOTUSblog since they are no longer representing citizens of the US.

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 30, 2014

Sticks and stones RT @Im_X1: @SCOTUSblog You disgust me. The very antithesis of all the United States stands for. You all should be ashamed. — SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 30, 2014

Noted. -Scalia MT @ypiddle: @SCOTUSblog You sided with the crazies. Good job!! Tell your boys to keep their thingies in their pants. — SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 30, 2014

But you complete us. MT @stevenwishnoff: @SCOTUSblog You disgust me.

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 30, 2014

Source: @SCOTUSblog

sorry haberdashery that’s been in business since 1890, your last hat was sold to a man whose previous clothing purchase was a white t-shirt emblazoned with the words “LIKE A BOSS”

During the end of a performance at the Bristol Old Vic, artistic director Tom Morris invited the audience to come to the standing area in front of the stage to “Clap or whoop when you like, and no shushing other people.”

Things got a little out of hand, however, when they launched into a searing rendition of Handel’s “Messiah.” Dr. David Glowacki—a Royal Scoiety Research Fellow and expert in non-equilibrium molecular reaction dynamics who also puts the “wack” in “wacky”—got carried away during the “Hallelujah Chorus” and attempted to crowd surf.

Audience members annoyed by the mad scientist proceeded to grab him and drag him out of the concert. According to Morris, this is the first such incident since the 18th century.

Strangely, this was kind of Morris’s goal. “The Bristol Proms are contributing to a ground-breaking way of thinking which will pave the way for a new kind of classical concert,” he said to The Independent. “David was investigating what the nature of the rules are using the skills that made him an extraordinary scientist.”

“Classical music, trying to seem cool and less stuffy, reeks of some sort of fossilized art form undergoing a midlife crisis,” explained the punk rock scientist. “Witness what happened to me when I started cheering with a 30-strong chorus shouting ‘praise God’ two meters from my face: I get physically assaulted, knocked down to the floor and forcibly dragged out by two classical vigilantes.”

Watch out, classical music fans: A punk as fuck Dr. Glowacki might come kick down the barriers of your stuffy institution and knock your fucking teeth out.

Source: Indepdendent | Image: Emerging Civil War

Hey guys, a straight cis dude fucked a trans woman even though he knew she was trans. Isn’t that amazing? Should he not be awarded the Nobel Prize for Enlightened Cock for putting his dick inside a woman who used to have a dick? After all, “she said she had all of her lady parts” and she did so that’s totally cool, right, bro? Maybe this bro will score sweet tang off the Hampshire grads he meets in a nearby coffee shop, because Love. Anyway, obviously this is on Thought Catalog and obviously you need to read an excerpt, which I shall provide here.

…I thought she was attractive before, so what’s the problem? None. There’s a first time for anything, anyway. She rocked me and made me fee like a stud. She even cleaned my dick with a cold wet rag after I came. It was great. And then I left.

All right listen, I’ve done my fair fucking share of ridiculous Internet wordsmithing. I’ve written about butts and pussies and puke and baton twirling (not a euphemism), among many, many other things. Do I regret some of these things I have written ‘pon the Nets? Of course I do. Do I still like the vast majority of the stuff I’ve spewed forth like so much progressive heady dank jazzle into the orifice of a nice lady who happens to be trans and presumably did not ask to be held up as some example of the author’s coolness? Yes. Yes, I do like most of the things I have written on the Internet. But I do not like this thing Richard LePow has written on the Internet.

I do not like this thing because I think it posits the liaison with the trans woman as some sort of badge of honor for this young man, Richard LePow, who is probably very nice once you get to know him. But he writes things like “There has to be an older woman out there craving a cub as much as I craved a cougar.” And this makes me feel very, very strange inside my person. Not good strange, either.

Anyway, everybody go read this clickbait post on Thought Clickbait and drive their traffic up so that we get more posts from our new bard, Richard LePow, who is probably a good friend to his friends. Here’s hoping he sleeps with A Lesbian or A Republican soon.

[ThoughtCatalog]

The post We’ve Reached Peak Thought Catalog: ‘I Had Sex With A Trans Woman’ appeared first on Happy Nice Time People.

Given its history of cartoonish stunts—like trying to assassinate Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar—to straight up crazy-evil shit like COINTELPRO and Project MKUltra (in which they dosed unsuspecting volunteers with LSD in hopes of creating a “Manchurian Candidate”) there’s probably not a whole lot the CIA could do to surprise anyone.

This might though. According to the Washington Post, back in 2005, the CIA considered a plan to thwart Osama bin Laden using dolls–err, excuse me–action figures. The plan was to create a bunch of Osama bin Laden dolls and distribute them to children in Pakistan. The catch? They had peel-off faces. Like, the faces were made with a special heat-dissolving paint that would “reveal a red-faced bin Laden who looked like a demon, with piercing green eyes and black facial markings.” I assume this is like, the same paint they used to use for Tinkerbell peel-off nail polish, and not like, lead paint.

The plan, I guess, was to turn children and their families against bin Laden, because they would be so traumatized by the peel-off face demon thing. Which I suppose is possible.  I mean, I’m super creeped out by dolls. I still have nightmares about several of my sister’s dolls, particularly “Baby Alive,” the “Talking Michelle Tanner Doll,” and this one other one that you were supposed to fill with water and put in the microwave so it would be scalding hot like a real baby. Though I always try to assume that other people are slightly less neurotic than I am. At least I hope they are.

The code name for the project was “Devil Eyes,” which is disappointing  as they clearly missed out on an opportunity for a prime Tod Browning reference. I mean, hello! “Devil Doll?” That movie where Lionel Barrymore is an evil scientist who creates a machine that can shrink people down to doll-size? It’s pretty amazing.  You should definitely watch it if you like things that are awesome.

The dolls were created by a fella named Don Levine who used to make G.I. Joes for HASBRO and had some sweet sweatshop connections in China. According to some sources, hundreds of the dolls were produced, but according to the CIA, only three were ever made. Either way, at some point, stepped in and said “Uh, does anyone here actually realize how stupid this is?” and they listened to that guy and worked on coming up with a less stupid plan. Of course, we don’t actually know what that plan was, because it’s the CIA and they don’t usually tell us about their plans.

A Vladimir Lenin statue in Nowa Huta, Poland has been re-erected for Krakow’s 6th Grolsch ArtBoom Festival, reborn in fluorescent green as The Fountain of the Future sculpture. His hands, which are customarily depicted tucked behind his back or pointing towards the alleged Communist Utopia ahead, have also been altered — one of them is now holding his pipe-penis, which spurts out water in a realistic stream. The former leader now appears to be pissing, like so many of those pissing cherub statues.

The original statue was removed from the Central Square in 1989 after the collapse of Communism in Poland. Anti-regime activists attempted to blow up twice — once in the 1970s and in the 1980s.

This gaudy resurrection reminds of artist David Černý’s pointedly pink’ed Soviet Tank No. 23 in 1991, and the constantly vandalized bronze relief of “liberating” Soviet forces in Bulgaria. (Photos: Metro, Fotopolska)

The post Pissing Lenin Statue Erected In Poland appeared first on ANIMAL.

 
My introduction to the work of Lars von Trier came by way of his brilliant supernatural mini-series The Kingdom—a kind of a Twin Peaks-style hospital drama in which Udo Kier has a terrifying roll as a doomed baby from the netherworld. Still,...

Here's all the proof you need that America is a wonderful land where any dream can come true: a place exists in Texas where two lowriders bounce up and down and ridiculously fight each other. I mean, this is better than BattleBots.

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Tumblr is a computer generated dream world, built in order to change a human being into this *morpheus holds up poorly drawn anime dragon*

— Eiffel 65 - Blue.wav (@ABigBagOfKeys) August 7, 2012