These things are gross and bad for you but you’re not going to stop me from eating them at this time of the year so don’t even try.
Category Archives: Food and Drink
A JOHN SLOAN FOR TODAY
The Back Room At McSorley’s. During the summer of my 18th year I spend a lot of time in this room, before McSorley’s became a frat-boy hangout. It looked just the same as it did in this painting from 1912 and was about as crowded.
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A COMIC BOOK COVER FOR TODAY
Lang Clay sends this cover of a very curious comic book from the early 1950s. Hadacol was a once-popular patent medicine that originated in the 1940s. It contained various vitamins and even more alcohol. It was said to promote health when taken four times a day, one tablespoon diluted in water after each meal and before bed, though there were pharmacies in dry counties that sold it by the shot, for the alcohol kick.
The inventor of Hadacol, Dudley J. LeBlanc, a Louisiana state senator, published a comic book for kids that promoted the wondrous elixir. It starred a mild-mannered man who gained extraordinary powers when he took a slug of the stuff. Sales of Hadacol were enormous but it turned out that LeBlanc spent more on promotion than he took in in sales, and his enterprise collapsed. Wisely, LeBlanc had sold the company just before that happened.
For more on the medicine, and the comic, go here.
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O . K. . . . KALE
It’s trendy, everybody’s talking about it, everybody says it’s really good for you — all excellent reasons to avoid kale, but why be doctrinaire about it? I recently decided to give it a try, starting with a recipe for sauteed kale I found online.
Put three tablespoons of olive oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat. Add three or four (or five) cloves of garlic, thinly sliced. When they’re soft but not yet browned, add half a cup of chicken or vegetable stock and as much coarsely chopped kale as the saucepan will hold. Toss it all together, turn the heat up to high, cover and cook for 5 minutes.
After 5 minutes, remove the cover and continue to cook until all the stock has evaporated. Add salt and pepper and two tablespoons of red wine vinegar. Toss again and eat it.
Pretty damned good.
SEDONA
Our second stop in Arizona, and the place we’d set out to investigate, was Sedona. It’s about 30 miles southeast of Flagstaff and is situated at the end of the spectacular Oak Creek Canyon, seen above.
The forested canyon gives way to an equally spectacular landscape of sculpted red rock formations, in the midst of which Sedona is located. The area was a frequent location for Hollywood films, mostly Westerns, from the 1920s to the 1970s, which is partly why I was there, to do research for a book of short stories about the experiences of people involved in movie productions around Sedona.
My sister Libba was there to take video footage for a documentary she’s making about a sculptor from Flagstaff who as a kid worked as an extra on movies shot in Sedona. Behind Libba in the photograph above are the Cathedral Rocks just outside of Sedona. John Wayne rode a horse over Oak Creek near this spot, with the Cathedral Rocks in the background, in the movie Angel and the Badman, from 1947.
The town of Sedona is now a little boutique-y and twee, but it’s a pleasant place to stay for a couple of days. The landscape around it redeems its touristy vibe.
We ate dinner our first night there at the Cowboy Club, dining on buffalo meatloaf wrapped in bacon. It was served with buttery mashed potatoes, fresh asparagus and grilled mushrooms and was superb.
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[Correction — just watched Angel and the Badman . . . Wayne rode his horse over Oak Creek in some other movie.]
KINGMAN
My sister and I spent our first night on the road in Kingman, Arizona, a small but interesting town in the Western part of the state. Andy Devine grew up there and it was a waypoint on Route 66, mentioned in the song about that lost highway. The part of 66 that runs through Kingman has been renamed Andy Devine Avenue.
We stayed at the Quality Inn, apparently a place favored by rodeo participants, whose stays are memorialized on the doors to the motel rooms they once occupied. I stayed in 164, above, though sadly Shayne was long gone.
My sister stayed in Cody Custer’s old room — he was nowhere to be found, either.
We ate at the joint above — the shrimp tacos were excellent, and they had Pacifico on tap.
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A GEORGE PETTY FOR TODAY
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A LANGDON CLAY FOR TODAY
The good old days . . .
Photograph © Langdon Clay
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OYSTERS
Can’t start eating them again until September, but I can dream, can’t I?
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DINING ROOM
. . . on the Hindenburg.
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SALOON
Most Western saloons were not much more elegant than this — a fancy carved bar, a generous selection of spirits, a wood frame and canvas (or plain board) walls. Hollywood usually got it backwards — with fancily constructed and decorated rooms and only one kind of unbranded whiskey on offer.
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CUATRO EQUIS
Memories of Texas — waiting for the spare ribs . . .
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MAY I RECOMMEND
. . . the Ko-Ko-No-Ko Kooler? I mean, for starters.
With thanks to Bryan Castañeda . . .
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SKINNER AND DANIELS
In my youth in Wilmington, North Carolina, where I was born, this was the place to go for bar-b-q. It was where your grandparents took you for a special night out — grandparents who were just a generation removed from the farm, for whom the country cooking at Skinner and Daniels was an occasion for nostalgia. The sign with the pig in fancy dress seemed magical to me as a child.
The place is gone, the grandparents are gone, the sign is gone, the 23 year-old youth in the baseball cap is gone — but not really . . .
[Photograph © 1973 Langdon Clay]
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A JAPANESE BEER POSTER FOR TODAY
