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Excerpting Kingsley Amis’ Everyday Drinking at length in any discussion thereof is both crucial and inadequate: crucial because nothing anyone could say about it would be as entertaining as the text itself, and inadequate because the only way to convey how consistently funny it is would be to reproduce the book verbatim.

In their persistent humor and charm and their seeming effortlessness, these essays remind me of the best of Twain’s.
 

You may have come across a condensed version of Amis’ hangover recovery advice in the Daily Mail a couple years ago. I enjoyed it at the time, but now, having read that section of the book in full, I’m aghast that so much was lost in the cutting. Couldn’t the editors have omitted some of the day’s news instead?

Amis advocates a two-pronged approach to hangover recovery: the physical, and the metaphysical. The third step in his treatment of the metaphysical hangover (M.H.) entails embarking on either the M.H. Literature Course or the M.H. Music Course, or, if necessary, both in succession. “The structure of both Courses … rests on the principle that you must feel worse emotionally before you start to feel better. A good cry is the initial aim.”

Amis’ Rx for hangover reading:

Begin with verse, if you have any taste for it. Any really gloomy stuff that you admire will do. My own choice would tend to include the final scene of Paradise Lose, Book XII, lines 606 to the end, with what is probably the most poignant moment in all our literature coming at lines 624-6. The trouble here, though, is that today of all days you do not want to be reminded of how inferior you are to the man next door, let alone to a chap like Milton. Safer to pick someone less horribly great. I would plump for the poems of A.E. Housman and/or R.S. Thomas, not that they are in the least interchangeable. Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum is good, too, if a little long for the purpose.

Switch to prose with the same principles of selection. I suggest Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It is not gloomy exactly, but its picture of life in a Russian labour camp will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have, and who put up with it, if not cheerfully, at any rate in no mood of self-pity.

Turn now to stuff that suggests there may be some point to living after all. Battle poems come in rather well here: Macaulay’s Horatius, for instance. Or, should you feel that this selection is getting a bit British (for the Roman virtues Macaulay celebrates have very much that sort of flavour), try Chesterton’s Lepanto. The naval victory in 1571 of the forces of the Papal League over the Turks and their allies was accomplished without the assistance of a single Anglo-Saxon (or Protestant). Try not to mind the way Chesterton makes some play with the fact that this was a victory of Christians over Moslems.

By this time you could well be finding it conceivable that you might smile again some day. However, defer funny stuff for the moment. Try a good thriller or action story, which will start to wean you from self-observation and the darker emotions: Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, Gavin Lyall, Dick F

Muriel Spark’s 1992 autobiography has been characterized as purse-lipped, sterile, and withholding, a manipulative account designed to settle scores and divert attention from anything unflattering.

Curriculum Vitae may be more factual than confessional, but judged on its own terms rather than by the standards of the contemporary tell-all, the book is a charming, idiosyncratic, and closely observed personal history, one that manages to surprise even as it turns out to be almost exactly what you’d expect the author of Memento Mori, The Comforters, and A Far Cry from Kensington to offer up.
 

In an early passage, Spark explains the way children made tea in 1930s Edinburgh.

Sixty years ago is a short time in history. As recently as that I made at least one pot of tea for the family every day. It was delicious tea. Every schoolgirl, every schoolboy, knew how to make that exquisite pot of tea.

You boiled the kettle, and just before it came to the boil, you half-filled the teapot to warm it. When the kettle came to the boil, you kept it simmering while you threw out the water in the teapot and then put in a level spoonful of tea for each person and one for the pot. Up to four spoonfuls of tea from that sweetly odorous tea-caddy would make the perfect pot. The caddy spoon was a special shape, like a small silver shovel. You never took the kettle to the teapot; always the pot to the kettle, where you filled it, but never to the brim.

You let it stand, to ‘draw’, for three minutes.

The tea had to be drunk out of china, as thin at the rim as you could afford. Otherwise you lost the taste of the tea.

You put in milk sufficient to cloud the clear liquid, and sugar if you had a sweet tooth. Sugar or not was the only personal choice allowed.

Everyone who came to the house was offered a cup of tea, as in Dostoyevsky. What his method of making tea was I don’t know. (Tea from samovars must have been different, certainly without milk, and served in a glass set in a brass or silver holder.)

Tea at five o’clock was an occasion for visitors. One ate bread and butter first, graduating to cakes and biscuits. Five o’clock tea was something you ‘took’. If you had it as six you ‘ate’ your tea.

Tea at half-past six was high tea, a full meal which resembled breakfast. You had kippers, smoked haddock (smokies), ham, eggs or sausages for high tea. Potatoes did not accompany this meal. But a pot of tea, with bread, butter and jam, was always part of it.

In my continuing quest to set the world record for dullness, tonight I’m picking up some sausages on the way home and following Spark’s instructions with the pretty tea set (above) that Lizzie gave me for Christmas. Too bad I don’t have any darning to do. Afterward, naturally, I’ll go out on the balcony and water my plants.

My only complaint about MFK Fisher’s delightfully bossy How to Cook a Wolf, a hard-times cooking manual first published in 1942, is that it has given me something new to worry about doing wrong: boiling water.

“It can be said,” Fisher admits, “with few people to argue the point, that water boils when it has been heated to two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit.”

Having read a few chapters into the book, at this point you will probably have the sense that she is getting ready to disapprove, and she will not let you down.

Myself, I would say that when it bubbles with large energetic bubbles, and looks ready to hop from the kettle, and makes a rocky rather than a murmuring noise, and sends off a deal of steam, it is boiling. [A friend of mine who grew up alongside a samovar has only one way to describe water proper for tea: "A mad boil." In the same forceful way she never says rolls or toast must be hot, or very hot. They must be "hot-hot-hot!"...]

At this point, full of sound and fury, it is ready to be used… The quaint old fiction of the kettle simmering all day on the hearth, waiting to be turned into a delicious cup of tea, is actively disturbing to anyone who cares very much whether his tea will be made from lively water instead of a liquid that in spite of its apparent resemblance to Webster’s definition is flat, exhausted, tasteless — in other words, with the hell cooked out of it…

It is safe to say that then the water boils, as it surely will, given enough heat under it, it is ready. Then, at that moment and no other, pour it into the teapot or over and around or into whatever it is meant for, whatever calls for it. If it cannot be used then, turn off the heat and start over again when you yourself are ready; it will harm you less to wait than it will the water to boil too long.

With its mix of useful advice, withering commentary, and obsolete references of historical curiosity, this book would make an excellent gift for anyone who’s spending less and cooking more these days — provided he or she does not suffer, as I do, from a touch of the OCD.

At first I was afraid that Fisher’s instructions would set me off on an endless loop of pointless activity — i.e., is this really the moment that the water rose to a boil? Was the steam intense enough? The bubbling insane enough? Maybe, just in case, I should turn it off, let it cool down, and then start over… Fortunately, my caffeine addiction has (so far) forestalled descent into this kind of madness.
 

See also: Kate Christensen on Fisher’s Consider the Oyster.

I intend to try Alex Balk’s method of cooking a fucking steak, although I’m pretty sure the first principle of the native Texan’s catechism is “use a grill.” I don’t think you’re even allowed to call it steak in my mother’s house if it wasn’t cooked over an open flame (or maybe chicken-fried). For another tempting pan-cooked variety, see Norman Mailer’s technique, which “scares the hell out of pets and children.”

Both of these recipes remind me of Peter De Vries (pictured), author of one of my very favorite novels, who contributed to The Great American Writers’ Cookbook his secret recipe for “Frazzled Eggs,” and who asserted in a 1949 New Yorker essay (or is it fiction?) that the “gourmet and the person who is merely fond of food have no connection.”

The person who is fond of food likes things that are edible but not necessarily delicacies (steak, sweet corn, apple pie with cheese), while the gourmet likes things that are delicacies but not necessarily edible (brains, kidneys, snails, etc.). One of several cooks who recently banged their luggage in and out of our door had a formidable history of ministration to the latter. Eighteen years in the employ of an aging friand called Pomeroy had left her skilled in the frazzled nuance but helpless before a family pot roast… One gland after another crossed our table, leaving as its single nutritive effect hunger at midnight. I took to padding downstairs in slippers and robe to the icebox, there to find nothing but food for thought — leftover chicken livers and the cooling lobes of cattle…

I know, I know, a cook. High-class problems, heart bleeds, etc. It’s an entertaining essay, though.
 

Here’s De Vries on his eggs, which I’ve never attempted to replicate:

I con’t cook — except for steaks and chops, which isn’t cooking, and one conceivable slight invention which might rate inclusion in this collection. A breakfast I call Frazzled Eggs, which consists in frying them so you scarcely need the bacon, and thus cut down on your cholesterol, if that’s an aim. Have two eggs broken and ready in a crock, or cup, or ramekin. On a hot burner set a small skillet with plenty of cooking oil in it… When the oil is so hot it smokes, slide the eggs together into the skillet. They will instantly brown and blister up, like potato chips. Take the skillet and roll the hot oil around so the eggs are browned well to the edges, which should crinkle and fluff up. Let them simmer for a few minutes on a lowered flame (all the searing you want you will get immediately) either turned over if you want them over easy, or under a lid with a few drops of water in the pan to steam them a little, puffing them up, if you prefer them basted sunny-side up. If you’ve browned and potato-chip-blistered the whites just right, you won’t miss the bacon too much, though of course with bacon, ham or sausage they’re always that much better. This with a wedge of hot cornbread slathered with marmalade or jelly, together with a cup of strong

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This year, instead of a tree, we decorated Max’s beloved pole lamp. He calls the result a “3-way collision between Festivus austerity, Xmas kitsch, and midcentury modernism.”

I call it, “We can take all that down on the 1st, right?”
 

Christmas Day was an intimate and jolly affair. Joseph brought his cornbread-sausage-fennel stuffing and his chocolate bourbon pecan pie. Max made the salad, kept the wine flowing, and struggled against the rising tide of dishes. I tried Hannah Green’s “Ford Maddox Ford’s Garlic Chicken” recipe (from The Great American Writers Cookbook, which also includes Eudora Welty’s eggnog, and Harry Crews’ rattlesnake), although it required some guesswork: oven temperature, size of bird, etc. After our feast, we could barely straggle out to meet a friend for a 7:15 showing of Milk.

I hope your holidays have been merry and bright, however you’ve celebrated them, and that 2009 brings you only good things. I’ll leave you till early January with Green’s recipe (and a few of my own [bracketed] notes).

Ford Maddox Ford’s Garlic Chicken

I call it my garlic chicken, but I sometimes also call it Ford Maddox Ford’s garlic chicken because the idea comes from his Provence. His recipe calls for at least a kilo of garlic — but that may be the result of his grand hyperbole when it comes to anything Provençal. (”Is it any better in heaven, Ford, than you found it in Provence?”) At any rate I’ve modified that kilo down to 3 or 4 whole garlics [I used 4 whole heads], all peeled, so the cloves are placed in the roasting pan in such way as to form a bed on which the chicken is placed to roast. In this way, as Ford points out, the garlic perfumes the chicken, the sauce, (even the whole house where it is being roasted), but only those who want to, need eat the garlic. (Ford, however, mentioned this garlic in a tale set down to prove that if you eat enough garlic, a great deal of garlic, that is, you won’t have garlic breath.) (And whether that is really true or not, I may never know.)

Here are my directions mixed with my inventions:

The whole bottom of the roasting pan should be covered with a thin layer of olive oil, and into the olive oil set the peeled cloves of garlic in a shape more or less like an almond so that the chicken can rest on them and cover them. Rub the chicken with lemon, and salt it, and pepper it. Stuff it with a tomato which should in turn itself be stuffed with a clove or two of garlic and salted and peppered. It should also, if possible, be stuffed with a few sprigs of rosemary and of thyme. (When I first started making this chicken in the winter of 1975, we were staying in a house in Provençe, and part of the cooking of the chicken consisted of running out into the garden at the last moment before the chicken went into the cover with scissors, a flashlight, an umbrella sometimes, often in a long skirt and high heels, to pick a few sprigs of rosemary and of thyme and a leaf or two of sage. [I used three sprigs of rosemary, five of thyme, and one of sage.] The chicken has always been good, but the fragrance never so intoxicating as there in Provençe with the herbs fresh from the night garden.)

Potatoes should be peeled [I did not peel them] and placed around the chicken to roast with it. [I threw a couple sprigs of rosemary and a couple of thyme, on top.] I’ve never yet lived in a house with an oven that had a temperature regulator, so one of the secrets of this chicken seems to be a very hot oven, so the chicken gets crispy and brown on the outside. [I preheated my oven to 475°.] It needs constant attention. The potatoes need to be turned so they get brown on all sides [I need to do this next time], and at the same time the chicken should be basted with the hot olive oil it is cooking in, at least 4 or 5 times. Before it goes into the oven a little olive oil should be smeared on top of it, too. [I also put some on the potatoes.] It needs about an hour and 15 minutes, perhaps a little more, depending on the size of the chicken. [Mine was almost 4 pounds, and it took about 90 minutes. It never did get very crispy — maybe I used too much olive oil? — but it was moist & garlicky all the same.]

At the last minute, take out the potatoes and put them in a serving bowl, and throw in a little boiling water, perferably the water of the green vegetable, which should just itself have finished cooking. Asparagus is wonderful if it is in season. But broccoli or green beans or spinach are also good with it. [I wilted some spinach.] If there seem to be too many people for one chicken it is a good idea to make hollandaise sauce for the broccoli or the asparagus.

This makes a fine dinner for 4 people or even six [I wouldn’t say six], but it is also a great dinner for two… Perhaps I should add that the chicken should be served with a red wine. [Red gives me migraines, so we had white.] I supposed that a Chateauneuf du Pape would be the ideal wine, but it also does quite well ith a Chaors, a Medoc, a Chianti. A green salad with oil and vinegar — no spices — should be served after it. [Our salad was dressed with a little lemon, olive oil, salt, and pepper.] The first course should be something light — perhaps watercress soup or sliced tomatoes with parsley, oil, and vinegar. [We had no such course.]

When the chicken is gone, throw the bones into a pot, cover it with water, add a few sprigs of celery leaf and an onion [I used potatoes and onion, and some thyme], and boil it for about two hours. Take out the chicken bones, pick off all the chicken, to put back into the soup, add some white beans, another onion, leeks, potatoes, carrots, a bit of cabbage, and a few pieces of pumpkin or melon, and you have a wonderful soup…

Something I learned this Thanksgiving, and really should have known or at least researched beforehand: a 19-pound turkey for seven people is ridiculous, ridiculous overkill, especially when one of those people is a vegetarian. The past few days have been punctuated by ever-more-creative (and unappetizing) turkey concoctions, and endless naps.

Today, in search of a recipe to counteract the relentless sameness of the bird, I pulled my old copy of The Great American Writers’ Cookbook down from the shelf, and flicked around till I arrived at Harry Crews’ instructions for preparing snake steak.
 

Not only am I pretty sure I can’t find the ingredients here in Brooklyn, but even if I were down south, I’m thinking it’s possible that the author is pulling our legs about how easy it is to smoke out, bag, and gut a rattlesnake.

Once upon a time, there was apparently a Tampa-area town called Rattlesnake, where a cannery produced rattlesnake in “supreme sauce” to be shipped around the world. But the place has been renamed, and rattlers are scarce now. All my time in Florida, even hiking out in the Everglades or on Paynes Prairie, or descending into the Devil’s Milhopper, I never saw a diamondback in the wild. Nor was I itching to.

But at the moment I’d happily agree to prepare and eat rattlesnake (caught and killed by someone else) rather than turkey next November. It’s in that spirit that I post Crews’ recipe here.

Snake Steak

Take one diamondback rattle snake.

(Fifteen feet of garden hose, a little gasoline in a capped jar, a croker sack, and a long stick will be all you’ll need to take the snake. On a cold day, 32 degrees or colder, find the hole of a gopher — the Southerner’s name for a land tortoise. Run the hose down the hole until it is all the way to the bottom. Pour a teaspoon of gasoline into the hose. Cover the end of the hose with your mouth and blow Shortly, the rattlesnake will wander out of the hole. Put the stick in the middle of his body, pick him up, and drop him in the sack. On the way home, don’t sling the sack over your shoulder, and generally try not to get struck through the cloth.)

Gut and skin the snake. No particular skill is needed for either job. Cut off the head six inches behind the eyes. Cut off the tail 12 inches above the last rattle. Rip him open along the stomach and take out everything you see. Peel him like a banana using a pair of pliers as you would to skin a catfish. Cut the snake into one inch steaks. Soak in vinegar for ten minutes. Drain and dry. Sprinkle with hot sauce, any of the brands out of New Iberia

Amazon’s Search Inside feature doesn’t turn up Crews’ snake steak in the second edition of the book, The New Great American Writers Cookbook. But William Harrison does tell you how to cook a timber rattlesnake.

Should you go rattlesnake hunting and catch one that bites itself, here’s a what to do.

Image of the Rattlesnake, FL, post office, taken from the St. Pete Times.

The delightful Jack Pendarvis, author of Your Body is Changing and fellow fan of Peter DeVries, lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where he’s the visiting writer-in-residence at Ole Miss. (Look for him next time you’re eating oysters at City Grocery.)

His first novel, Awesome, will be published by MacAdam Cage in July. It’s “about a happy, rich, sexy, handsome giant who goes on a scavenger hunt,” Pendarvis told SmokeLong Quarterly. “I had been bemused by the critical consensus (even in good reviews) that I write about ‘losers.’ I had been wondering a lot about what people think a ‘winner’ is. Is it a happy, rich, sexy, handsome giant? But the way I wrote him, I suppose everyone will say that he’s a loser, too.”

Below the Alabama native shares a sausage and peppers recipe inspired by Mario Batali and Goodfellas. “I am sure I make [it] the exact wrong way,” he says. “I apologize to everyone who cares!”

For the first several years of my unemployment, during which I was “finishing” my extremely ill-fated 400-page sequel to Tom Sawyer, I mainly sat around the apartment and watched TV. One thing that made me happy every single day was watching Molto Mario starring Mario Batali on the Food Network. I don’t think that show comes on anymore. But Mario Batali led me to believe that I might do exciting things with my time. He helped me come to my decision to make sausage and peppers.

I don’t believe I ever saw Mario make sausage and peppers, but I had heard them discussed in great movies like Goodfellas. I learned a general trick from Mario, though, which was to add some of the salty, foamy, carbohydratey water from your cooking pasta to your pasta sauce at the very last minute. That comes in later!
 

I improvised my sausage and peppers recipe based on some of the things I had seen Mario do and some things from movies. First I put some olive oil in the bottom of a nice big pot made out of something called “Magnalite.” It was my grandmother’s pot, and it’s great to cook sauce and soup in. I put the oil on about medium or medium high, and browned some (three? four?) links of spicy Italian sausage, squeezed out of their casings into the pot, in several pieces. (This was on a gas oven, which I miss. I still haven’t figured out how to judge things correctly on an electric oven.)

Then I removed the browned sausage and put in some chopped onion, chopped red bell peppers (or sometimes orange or yellow) and chopped garlic, all three chopped poorly. Sometimes I put in a whole bunch of peppers, like six. I let the onions and garlic get pretty brown, the way Mario likes them, then I dumped in a good bit of wine, as much as I could stand to dump in rather than drinking. Oh, before I dumped in the wine, I threw in a whole bunch of red pepper flakes and let them sizzle in the oil, but just for a second — not so they turned black or anything, just a heartbeat.

Now, adding the wine so early is something I never saw Mario do. He always adds the wine after the tomatoes. He would probably faint to be associated with my practice! But I seemed to recall reading in the New York Times that adding the wine first, and letting it cook WAY down (like to half the volume it was before) can give a tomato sauce a “deep, smoky flavor” (or something like that). So I let the wine cook way, way down, on a simmer. After that, I added a box of tomatoes - there are these delicious chopped Italian tomatoes that come in a box rather than a can. I threw the sausage back in, brought it to a boil for a couple of minutes and turned it down to a simmer.
 

Should I mention that I never salted the sauce? Sometimes I would put in a little sugar (because they do it in The Godfather). Sometimes just a tiny bit of dried basil toward the end. I was never in a big hurry to start cooking the pasta because I liked to really, really let the sauce cook down, simmering. As I had seen Mario do, I would scrape the dark, nearly burnt specks of sauce that had hopped up the side of the pot (I believe technically it might be a Dutch oven) and make sure they made it back into the sauce, all caramelized and everything. It was only after all of this that I would fill another pot with water and put it on to boil. Making the pasta so late helped me be patient with the slowly cooking sauce.

I cooked the pasta a minute or two less than instructed by the package. This is something I learned from Mario! I favored a very long curly (and expensive) pasta which is exactly wrong to have with sausage and peppers, I am sure. The reason that Mario likes to undercook the pasta in the first stage is this: You drain the pasta, turn the heat way up on your sauce, and throw the pasta in there, where it and the sauce finish cooking together. Stir, stir, stir! (I learned about the stirring from Goodfellas. I always wanted to slice the garlic with a razor blade like Paul Sorvino, but I’m too lazy.) Oh, and don’t forget, as mentioned above, right before you drain your pasta and it’s still roiling, scoop out some of the pasta water and throw it in your sauce. I always salted the pasta water pretty heavily, as Mario seemed to do (even when he called it “a pinch”). I made it almost briny. And that’s where the salt in the sauce comes from, vestigial salt was the way I liked to think of it. It made it healthier in my mind.

Of course I grated that really fancy Parmesan on top of each serving.
 

Once, my parents (who love my sausage and peppers) came for a visit, bringing fresh shrimp from Bayou La Batre, Alabama, my hometown. I added them to the sauce at the last possible moment (five minutes? Ten? Anyway, long enough to cook them through). It made something like jambalaya, sort of.

Another time (sans shrimp, which I only tried once) when I didn’t have any Italian sausage, I used Conecuh County sausage, a fantastic sausage from Alabama (don’t squeeze it out of the casing, just chop into a few pieces). I can’t remember if it turned out to be a success with the Conecuh County sausage, but if not, don’t blame the great sausages of Alabama! You can find a more appropriate use for Conecuh County sausage (an actual jambalaya, for example) and you’ll be glad you did. Spicy Italian sausage is the thing to use. I’m sure I’m leaving something out.
 

P.S. DON’T be tempted to stir your onions, peppers, and garlic too soon! Mario always lets them sit and cook undisturbed. I wouldn’t push them around until time to make a little swimming pool of oil for the red pepper flakes.
 

Anya Ulinich is a writer and artist who moved to Phoenix from Russia at 17 and ended up in Brooklyn.

Her recipe contribution (illustrated below) appears in her entertaining first novel, Petropolis, which was published last fall. The protagonist’s mail order fiancee teaches her to make this uniquely American delicacy — a food, Ulinich explains, “that my mother-in-law calls a ‘cheese crisp,’ despite its soggy nature.”

(I used to eat something similar in college, but my version entailed slapping some refried beans — straight from the can — onto the tortilla, then adding plain shredded cheddar. Also, salsa, when I had it.)

Jim Ruland is a writer and occasional NPR contributor, and the founder of Los Angeles’ beloved Vermin on the Mount reading series. In 2004 he attended Dublin’s centennial Bloomsday celebration, and somehow remained sober enough to write about the festivities for The Believer.

Below he shares his and his wife Nuvia’s St. Patrick’s Day tradition-in-the-making: the mighty — and spicy — Irish tamale. Better stock up on Guinness in preparation. Or maybe just look for last-minute deals on flights to San Diego.

 
My wife is second-generation Mexican-American. I’m third-generation Irish-American. We couldn’t be more different, but we share a lot of traits (hot tempers, hostility toward the clergy, an inexplicable fondness for accordion music). We’ve both tried to be as open as possible to each other’s respective cultures. In Mexico, I ate everything from crickets to armadillo. Whenever we go to a new city, we end up in Irish pubs. As I write this, Lila Downs is blasting through the speakers (followed by The Tossers, Café Tacuba, Blood or Whiskey, Shakira).

The Mighty Irish Tamale has been in development for years. We first talked about it at Nuvia’s abuelito’s rancho in Valle de Guadalupe. It resurfaced during our travels in Oaxaca (where I ate fourteen tamales in eight days) and yet again during our honeymoon deep in the jungle of the Yucatan Peninsula. This winter we made our first attempt at a Hibernian-Mexicana fusion and it was a huge success, so we’ll be serving the Mighty Irish Tamale again at our first, but certainly not the last, St. Patrick’s Day party as a married couple. Want to join us?
 

Here’s what you’ll need:

* 1 tamale pot (also known as a lobster pot on the Eastern seaboard)

* 5 pounds of masa made with lard

* 1 8oz. package of dried corn husks

* 1 large Irish brisket (a.k.a. corned beef)

* 6 red potatoes

* 12 bottles of Guinness draught

* 4 dried chili peppers

* 2 white onions

* 1 small green cabbage

* 1 package of baby carrots

* 1 cup of rice floor

* 1 bottle of horseradish

* ½ teaspoon of ground chili pepper

* 1 jigger of Jameson’s Irish whiskey (Q: What’s a jigger? A: Enough)

* 1 shot of Don Julio Blanco (of course)

* Several dashes of Tapatio (never Tabasco)

The night before your tamale-making adventure, place the corned beef in the crock pot with not-quite-enough water to cover the meat. Don’t trim the fat as it will help hold it together and add flavor. Add a bottle of Guinness draught and cover the brisket with foam.

Chop up the 4 dried chili peppers and toss them in the pot. If your corned beef came with a seasoning packet, throw that in there, too. Add a ½ teaspoon of ground chili powder. We use the concoction we bought on our honeymoon in an outdoor market in Campeche for 10 pesos and stored in a Gerber baby food jar with no label. Irish food has a reputation for being bland. Not anymore.
 

If you have a particularly big piece of meat — and I’m talking about the corned beef — consider putting the potatoes, cabbage, carrots, and onions in a second crock pot. Chop up the vegetables and top them off with more Guinness. You’re probably thinking that if you leave a potato in a crock pot soaked with Guinness for 12 hours, you’re going to end up with mush. That’s exactly what you want.

Turn the beef over every few hours to prevent it from drying out. Add Guinness as needed. Prepare the corn husks by soaking them in warm water.

Before you go to bed, separate the husks and set them out to dry. Take some of the corn husks that have tears in them and rip them into long threads that you can use as string. Now get a good night’s rest. You’re going to need it.
 

When you wake the next morning, your house should smell like a Knights of Columbus assembly hall on St. Patrick’s Day. Trim all the fat off the meat, cut into slices, and shred. It should have the same consistency of machaca, only redder. Ensure that no sliver is longer than your knuckle.

Bring the masa to room temperature and knead it on a butcher block. Sprinkle in a quarter cup of rice flour and knead it some more. Repeat until the rice flour is gone. The masa should be firm, but cooperative, like the elastic in your underwear.

Take the masa preparada and spoon it onto the husk. Use the Guinness broth to help make it more malleable. Spread the masa almost all the way out to the edge like a blanket too small for its bed.

Add a mixture of corned beef, potato mush, and a dollop of horse radish with some of the Tapatio mixed in. Roll the tamal up tight and tie it off like a tootsie roll.

One down. Forty-seven to go.
 

Go ahead and crack open a Guinness because this is going to take a while. And don’t be surprised if, an hour later, you’re still at it. You might want to do this while sitting down. And bring some of that Guinness with you.

Stand your tamales on end in the pot and steam for up to an hour-and-a-half. Serve hot with shots of Jameson’s and Don Julio.

Slainte and salud!
 

(If you’re going to be in San Diego on March 17, drop us a line: verminonthemount [at] yahoo [dot] com. Seriously.)

For yet another made-up memoir. As a culture we've become convinced that only real stories are true stories, or do I have that the wrong way around?

Tangentially, does anyone else think it's hilarious that the book tour for an addiction memoir is sponsored by Starbucks?

Gregory Maguire and Susan Cooper, photo by Richard Asch


While the rest of you were chowing down on thousand-dollar-a-plate surf-n-turf at the National Book Awards (unless you were too busy fondling--oh ICK I can't even say it) I was scarfing cookies graciously provided by Candlewick Press and Simon & Schuster as refreshment for our evening of talk about fantasy, the reading and writing of it, with Susan Cooper and Gregory Maguire. The house was full (guarding the door, Cambridge P.L.'s Julie Roach told me she heard all manner of subterfuges--"my friend has my ticket"-- and brooked none) and the conversation lively. Greg is naturally loquacious and Susan more reserved, so my job as moderator kept me on my toes. MIT will be posting a video of the event on their MITWorld site and I'll let you know when that's up; in the meantime you can still catch Susan Cooper tonight, free, at 7:30 PM at the First Church in Harvard Square.

Yep, it's 96 degrees out there but we've started pulling together our "Holiday Books" review section for the November issue. We will have some good books to tell you about there, I promise, but meanwhile I thought I would mention three concepts that might need to go back to Santa's workshop for some retooling:

--celebrating Hanukkah with a dreidel piñata

--giving the crippled kid magical legs while the rest of the family gets real presents

--a Santa who can't stop farting

The elves are waiting for your call.