Monday, February 24th, 2020
Tennessee Williams. Tortilla Chips. Dinosaur Eggs. Wild Boars. River Shrimp. Shrimp Hill. Shrimp Shells. Shrimp Dip. Too Many Cooks. Fish.
Tennessee Williams died today in 1983. We all know his contributions to American theatre, but he was also a devotee of New Orleans restaurants. His favorite hangouts in his last days were Marti's (which became the sadly defunct Peristyle, and Galatoire's.
Edible Dictionary
river shrimp, n.--In Louisiana, a medium-size shrimp that lives in freshwater, notably the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers. Most of the shrimp we eat comes from saltwater or brackish water, but many species are found in freshwater streams. Rarely are they big enough to be worth catching for food. But the bluish-colored shrimp from the major streams in Louisiana are not only caught but prized. They're medium-small, about 65 to the pound. Their flavor is subtle and almost sweet, such that they're best cooked without the usual crab boil--just some lemon slices and salt. River shrimp are highly seasonal, usually showing up in enormous numbers for a few weeks in the early spring. They are mostly eaten by the people who catch them and rarely make it to market. In the old days, they were often disdained. Now they're considered a delicacy.
Delicious-Sounding Places
Shrimp Hill sounds like a joke, but it's a substantial, 1670-foot mountain towering 500 feet above Loyalsock Creek in northeastern Pennsylvania. It's sixty-five miles west of Scranton, in the Allegheny Mountains. The Loyalsock is a tributary of the Susquehanna, which runs into the Chesapeake Bay, where there are shrimp--but I doubt any of them make it to their namesake mountain. The nearest restaurant is the Tally-Ho Country Diner, six miles east in Dushore. If you find shrimp there, good luck.
Deft Dining Rule #160: If the shells on small shrimp are soft, just pull off the heads and eat them without peeling. You'll eat more shrimp that way.
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez: You're better off if you never make shrimp dip, shrimp pate, shrimp molds, or shrimp mousse.
Food Calendar
This is National Tortilla Chip Day. Tortilla chips are a big issue around my house. We all like guacamole and salsa here, and we have those recipes down. However, we still have a great controversy as to which chips are the best. We seem to have settled on thin, white tortilla chips. Yet to be resolved is the matter of shape: triangular versus round. We also find that some brands are so bland that we're tempted to just throw them away. On the other side of the spectrum, flavored tortilla chips give the same effect you get from flavoring coffee. The current favorite among the commercial chips is Santitas, a relatively new product from Frito-Lay, which created the whole category with Fritos in the 1950s. (They were so novel then that people were raving about them all over the country.) What is certain is that we eat a great many tortilla chips, and I'm glad they took the trans-fats out of them.
Ancient Food
In 1989 on this date, a 150-million-year-old dinosaur egg was found in Utah, still inside its fossilized mother. Unfortunately, it was not fresh, and a dinosaur embryo was found (by use of a CAT scan!) to be well-formed inside the shell. No omelet there. But what a thought!
Annals Of Wild Boars
The serving of wild (they really aren't, usually) boars in gourmet restaurants has been expanding in recent years. But the animal has long been in our lives. The first product made of nylon was a toothbrush. Dupont premiered it today in 1938. It replaced hairs from the necks of wild boars (this is no joke). . . On this day in 1979, in Stamford, Texas, the highest price ever paid for a single pig was negotiated by breeder Russ Baize: $42,500. It was a boar named "Glacier." The record stood for eighteen years.
Cooking For The Stage
A play called Too Many Cooks, written by Frank Craven premiered on Broadway on this day in 1914. We need a sequel, set in New Orleans of 2006, entitled Not Enough Cooks.
Food Namesakes
Abe Vigoda, who played the character "Fish" in the TV series of the same name, splashed onto the big dock today in 1921. . . Simeon Rice, a pro football defensive end, was born today in 1974.
Words To Eat By
"Between the ages of twenty and fifty, John Doe spends some twenty thousand hours chewing and swallowing food, more than eight hundred days and nights of steady eating. The mere contemplation of this fact is upsetting enough." --M.F.K. Fisher.
