entry Sept 2015
Allegro ma non
troppo #2 original pub. date, Lion
Magazine Jan 1995
I get
by with a ladle help from my friends
Well, it’s that
time of the year again: the beginning. Time
to look ahead. First, however, let’s see
just what other ninety-fifth years in
various centuries have accomplished, in
order that we might have a “target” for
1995. This is an invaluable exercise and
occasionally a valuable one.
For example, religious intolerance moved
into the big-time in 1095, when the First
Crusade was proclaimed. So far, we seem to
be meeting those high standards, but I think
we can do better. We certainly can do better
than 1395, when, according to my little
historical timetable, absolutely nothing
happened. This may strike you as unfair, but
life is unfair. History is unfair. I am
unfair. (Anyway, I think “nothing” is
something to shoot for in the coming year).
Looking at 1895 I see that there were great
advances in medicine, such as the discovery
of x-rays by Röntgen, and, in technology,
the invention of the Diesel engine. These
pale, however, beside the great innovation
of “planned obsolescence”; for 1895 was the
year in which King Camp Gillette invented
“something which will be used once and
thrown away, so the customer will come back
for more”. That throw-away convenience was,
of course, the disposable razor-blade.
Thanks to Gillette’s foresight, we are now
free to view air, water and the tropical
rain forest as throw-aways! A tough year to
beat!
In 1795 the “Limey” was born when the
British Navy started passing out lime juice
rations aboard all naval vessels at sea
after confirmation of James Lind’s theory
that citrus juice would prevent scurvy. Also
in this year, Ludwig van Beethoven made his
debut as composer and piano virtuoso,
performing his own Piano Concerto #2
in Vienna’s Burgtheater. Beethoven never
contracted scurvy, either —a fascinating
historical coincidence. A good year.
So was 1595, when William
Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet,
Richard III, and A Midsummer
Night’s Dream. In 1495 The Diet of
Worms proclaimed Perpetual Peace! That
particular bit of potential
benevolence was, however, outweighed by the
fact that, also in 1495, syphilis struck
Naples in the first recorded outbreak of the
disease. The disease infected the army of
Charles VIII, which had just taken the city.
It was the beginning of verbal sniping which
continues to this day: the French call the
malady the “Neapolitan disease,” and the
Italians call it the “French disease”.
As momentous as some of this things are,
they are truly nothing next to the events of
1695, for I see that in that year, “the duc
de Montaussier invented the soup ladle, an
advance over the two-handled soup bowl
passed round the table to be sipped from in
turn.”
Students of culinary science
will recall that the problem of how to
imbibe soup had stumped even the great minds
of the Renaissance. Knives, of course, had
been around almost as long as fingers, but
spoons and forks, not to mention the exotic
spatula and ladle confounded even Leonardo
da Vinci. Sure, his helicopter prototype was
eventually the model for our modern
egg-beater, but the Big L cagily avoided the
real problem: soup! Then, in the mid-1600s,
came the first philosophical inklings with
Descartes’ famous dictum on bowl sharing
(the first known combination of an inkling
and a dictum, by the way): “I think,
therefore I am going to throw up.” The great
Pascal, too, tackled the soup problem. At
dinner one night he said: “Hey, you
oinkers, what’s with the trough?! Don’t
you realize that the gauge pressure of a
liquid is the difference between the
pressure of the liquid measured at a point
in the liquid and the atmospheric
pressure?” This should have led to
the invention of the straw right there on
the spot, totally preempting the ladle,
except that no one could figure out what
Pascal was talking about. As it was,
soupophiles blundered through years of
misadventure, trying to suck liquid up
through a solid stick, failing miserably and
producing little more than lots of drool and
many lips with splinters in them. The
problem seemed intractable.
Finally on the right track by the 1690s,
kitchen tinkerers came up with the first of
many ladle prototypes. There was the early
version of the ladle: it was entirely flat
and was great for splashing soup on your
neighbor across the table simply by slapping
it down onto the surface of the liquid.
“Hey, Pierre, look up for a second, will
you?” Splat! You sure had fun,
but you didn’t get much soup. Shortly
thereafter came the profoundly interesting
convex ladle: shaped like the surface of a
hemisphere, it was perhaps centuries ahead
of its time in design, but it dripped almost
all of the soup back down into the bowl.
Finally, de Montaussier stumbled upon the
ladle. Really. A cook left the convex
version lying around and the duc tripped
over it, damned near breaking his neck;
however, when he looked down, the implement
had flipped over into the now familiar
hollow configuration! Intellectual lightning
doesn’t strike like that more than once in a
life-time, friends. “Sacre-bleu,”
said the duc, “that looks like one souped up
ladle to me!”
Happy
New Year.
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