isoglossia

For any who never had the joy of working in the food service industry, a “sheet tray” or “sheet pan” is a heavy-gauge aluminium rectangle with a high lip and far more uses than simply turning out large, flat cakes, the function for which it was designed. A “full sheet”, at 18 x 26 inches (45 x 66 cm) is rather enormous and unwieldy, but the “half-sheet” is easy enough to handle and indispensable for many kitchen tasks.

The summer following my tenure as Salad Boy I graduated to Head of Food Preparation at the same seafood restaurant on Block Island. This was a good job as restaurant jobs went. I had daily tasks to perform at my own pace within banker’s hours, and I was almost entirely insulated from the frenzy of weekend dinner rushes and unpredictable crises that working on the line inevitably entails. I could enjoy my shift drink at the bar at a decent cocktail hour rather than gulping Long Island Iced Tea from a soggy paper milkshake cup while mucking out the Frialator^® at 1.00 am. For these perks I traded beach time, but it was a good job.

I spent my days stocking and portioning. Through the morning I’d be up to my elbows in fresh haddock and sole, portioning it into baking dishes and ladling drawn butter over it before dusting it with paprika to prepare it for cooking. The completed pre-cooked fish, ready for broiling that evening, would go onto half-sheets and be covered with plastic wrap before being refrigerated within easy reach of the broiler (name of both appliance and operator). For the cook assigned to saute I would portion scallops to top linguine, make seafood stuffing for gigantic shrimps, and garlic the holy hell out of scampi. Anything fried, which I also spent long hours portioning out, would leave the kitchen accompanied by a glop of cole slaw dumped from an ice cream scoop onto a bed of lettuce by any of my various replacements in the role of Salad Boy, so in the course of that summer I also created one hell of a lot of cole slaw from endless cases of fresh cabbage. About 16 tons of cole slaw, by my calculations, of which only the smallest fraction was ever consumed.

But this is not the story of cole slaw, or of scampi, nor even of scallops, that most noble of bivalves. This is the story of a sandwich.

I give you the BLT.

I was responsible for opening the kitchen in the morning, before any cooks or salad personnel arrived. The first order of business was a matter of debate; should I T.C.B. or nourish the body with a BLT? Fortunately, the two were not mutually exclusive.

As I write this I cannot recall what it was that called for so much bacon in that kitchen. We did sell an enormous number of burgers, many of which were apparently of the bacon-cheese- variety, but there must have been some other reason I spent the first half hour of every day cooking off half-sheet after half-sheet of bacon in the broiler. The bacon came in a large, flat box (the same size as a half-sheet) on layered waxed paper, about 20 slices per layer. I would cook a few hundred slices of bacon, scooping them out of their own golden grease and layering them up on absorbent paper pie plates until the stack of bacon/pie plate/bacon etc. was in danger of collapsing. Once the bacon-cooking was in train, I would toast some whole wheat bread lightly, and then repair to the walk-in to seek out the nicest-looking head of iceberg lettuce and the ripest tomato in the place.

The BLT is a model of synergy, a perfect example of ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’. All of the ingredients in the BLT are humble, but it’s the commingling of them that makes the sandwich, the way the tomato’s juices combine with the grease of the bacon and the mayonnaise, the give of the toast and the crunch of the lettuce, the tang of the tomato and the salt of the pork. In the best BLT each element is sublime, but gives itself over to the whole. The BLT is the chamber music of sandwiches. I ate one every morning of that 16-ton summer and never grew tired of the beautiful marriage of bacon, lettuce, and tomato.

Sometimes I added cheese.

This entry is part of The Sandwich Party

Other sandwiches at the party:
Simon’s chip butty
Ham and macandcheese
Erik’s eggy Spanish goodness

[UPDATE]
That’s as far as I got before lethargy took over, and now it seems unnecessary to link to each sandwich individually when the organizers have already done all that lifting here and here. These ladies know how to throw a party.

Today the car is in the shop and I am not going home for lunch, a change in routine which I do not welcome. Each day I go home to find that Magda has prepared a delicious quick meal for me, and today there is none of that and this makes me cranky and somewhat nostalgic for lunch, the lunch I am not eating today and all the lunches I have enjoyed in the past, in this hemisphere and others. The salad days. Actually, the salads were particularly delicious. Maria would make them massive, apparently from ALL the vegetables in the kitchen in whatever combinations and proportions seemed to strike her that day — her daily chance to be creative. Beets, celery, diced onion, slices of cold potato, hard-boiled egg, grated carrot, and so on, all in a large steel mixing bowl and drizzled with a simple vinaigrette.

In San Jorge, Argentina the high point of my day was usually lunch. I would cycle slowly home in the midday heat. “Home” was the Hotel Jardín, where I lived for nearly a year in room #14. There were only 14 rooms. Mine was at the end of the upstairs hall on the left. Immediately next to my room was the door that opened onto the very large terrace, all white stucco with a thick, low parapet and no railing. I would often spend the long hours of siesta on this balcony, napping in the sun, occasionally immersing myself in the knee-deep pool of tepid water that was kept there for pretty much my exclusive use.

But before going up to the terrace, or to the dim small confines of my coolly shuttered hotel room, there was the languid ritual of lunch. It would begin when I entered the small dining room/bar on the ground floor. This room managed to be both cozy and bright, with big mullioned windows opening onto the Ford dealership across the street and a low ceiling that Maria and Silvia kept completely free of cobwebs. These two were full-time chambermaids and they pursued any trace of impurity with a relentlessness you don’t see in so many chambermaids anymore. They also shared the cooking duties in the small kitchen behind the bar, and the more serious scullery in an outbuilding across the back garden. I loved them like sisters and they treated me like a child, based no doubt upon my syntax.

The ritual began like this, day-in day-out, rain-or-shine, River-Plate-or-Boca-Juniors, in lazy Argentine Spanish:

Maria: Child, what are you going to eat?
Me: Oh, I do not know, Maria, what is there to eat?

Maria would then list the perhaps four things to choose from. These things varied almost not at all. Occasionally she would surprise me by telling me that her son had shot a hare just for me, but usually the list was woefully limited:

Bife de carne = grilled steak without embellishment
Bife de pollo = grilled chicken with lemon wedge
Pa’ta = pasta with an elided pre-consonantal /s/
Ñoquis = gnocchi with a post-alveolar sauce

These things, as noted above, did not vary. In addition to the fabled hare, which Maria would do fantastic things to, occasionally there would be home-made raviolis in place of the ñoquis, for example. All of the food was wholesome and delicious, particularly those salads, but a year is a long time with no variety. Nostalgia relies for its existence upon our ability to strip away the mediocre and disappointing and to focus only on the memorable and positive. Why it may require five years of hindsight to be able to consider our existence in such favorable yet sad light is a mystery. During my year in Argentina I often grew weary of the same food day after day, the lack or even distrust of seasoning. I grew manically frustrated by the small variety of food available in this small town marooned in the vast flat pampas. I missed many flavors, notably the hot, the tangy, the extreme spice. I longed for the scalp-tickling thrill of wasabi.

But none of that is important now, because I am feeling nostalgic for those lunches, and for the one I am not eating now. Forget that with every lunch we eat comes the chance to be nostalgic for something else.

Yeah, as usual: quite short on the sides and front, with something kind of like this, you know?

Maybe even a little bit shorter. Sure, that’ll be good.

I’m a little overdue for this. I hate it when I put it off too long, then it gets all poofy and crazy, and if I put gel in it the day I do finally make it to the frizer it gets all sticky when she mists it. Magda gives me shit if I use gel, “I didn’t know you were one of those guys”, but it gets all out of control at the end of the cycle if I don’t stay on top of it, I need to use a little gel during the last week. When I was a kid my mother gave me virtually every haircut right up til I went away to school. First barber chair I ever sat in was Joe’s in Lawrenceville. Had the complete Time-Life set of World War II books, what was that about? I sit in these chairs and come up with stupid theories, for example, you can judge the quality of the barber’s work by the magazines they have available: the older and drier the reading material, the snappier the haircut you’re going to end up with. Like most theories, it’s got a fatal flaw: Bob the Navy Barber behind the Custom’s House in Portland. Always had that day’s Boston Globe, New York Times, the Sunday magazine sections, lots of borderline pr0n, but he still gave a damn good cut. One of the few barbers I could make small talk with, too. I hate small talk, especially guy small talk — the assumption that I give a flying fuck how the Sox’re doin’. Bob’s conversations were memorable whether I was participant or Maxim-reading eavesdropper. I recall my haircut of August 2000:

Bob: You take any summer vacation this year?
Haircuttee: I’ll go downeast for a coupla weeks. You?
Bob: Yeah, matterafack I just got back from France.
Haircuttee: Oh, no kidding. How’d you like it?
Bob: You know somethin’? Didn’t like it.

I think Bob was slightly offput by my coming regularly once a month and then disappearing for years at a time. I still make a point of getting in there for a cut when I’m back in Maine visiting. Christmas 2001:

Bob: Hey, how’s that house a yours comin’ along? That thing finished yet?
Haircuttee: They’re hanging the drywall now.
Bob: Oh, yeah, drywall. Comin’ along.
Haircuttee: G.C.’s a pretty good guy.
Bob: Now, what kinda a house is that exackly?
Haircuttee: Ranch.
Bob: Ooh, yeah, a ranch. I like a nice ranch.

I can get my hair cut in Slovene, but I can’t make small talk. I can eavesdrop half-decent, but have yet to find a haircutter in Nova Gorica the conversational equal of Bob The Navy Barber. In Argentina I used to force myself to make small talk, and could manage, I liked the barber, and my haircutting vocabulary was the better for it. I never did become terribly fluent in sporty Castellano small talk despite being infinitely more interested and invested in local football there than I ever have been about the Sox since like 1972. So my English sporty small talk is weak anyway.

No, no need to cut those, they’re okay.

In college I went to that French Canadian place tucked in behind the K-Mart. Seemed appropriate. No small talk there. Later I was always able to find a girl friend (the space is critical) to cut my hair. Trish would do it in her room at the top of that building that used to be Phi Delta Theta. No. Lamda Chi? Something with a Delta, the hockey frat. Lacrosse frat. Whatever. Hmmm. That is going to bug the hell out of me… She had one of those weird chairs with no back and a sloping seat, like Lisa Simpson has, supposed to be good for your posture. It was really good for the haircutting purpose, made you sit up all straight. She cut my hair one night in Boston, too, summer of 1984, that apartment she was renting and she had a kitten that would run laps around the place and vault out the open window onto the porch roof, using the small of my back as a launch pad. Not a good night’s sleep. I can’t remember what the quid pro quo was for a Tricia haircut, but in Florence Heather used to cut my hair on the balcony overlooking Piazza Savonarola. The hair would just blow away over the piazza, in theory anyway, and I’d buy her a bottle of wine in payment. Good haircuts. On All Saints weekend in 1984 Bill and I went to Caen to visit Nathalie and she cut both our hair and that was probably the most ass-kicking haircut I’ve ever had. I’ve got a blurry picture of myself with that particular haircut, I’m walking through the Vondelpark in Amsterdam. But that can’t be right, because Nathalie cut my hair after we left Amsterdam. Hmmm. That’s weird. Maybe it’s a Heather haircut in that picture…

I hope my sister finds that journal. I’d like to figure this out. I wonder if I can google that frat-house question. They shut them down before there was an internet.

Of course they cut our hair in basic. Shaved our heads right down to the skull, and little-known fact? You have to pay the guy. You don’t have to tip him, though. That obviously wouldn’t work. Then the sons of bitches shaved us again a week before we went home at Christmas, just to be spiteful. Our hair had grown out and we were just looking human again, not like a bunch of interchangeable baby birds. I got to like it short. The cut I had at Huachuca was pretty extreme. That one was by choice. “High-and-tight”, a mohawk, basically. Good for the heat.

I always kind of wonder what makes a person decide to become a barber. It seems like a nice enough way to earn a living, I suppose. I think it’d make me crazy, though, always having other people’s hair on me, in my nose, blowing around. When it’s really hot in the summer I can barely stand to get my hair cut, let alone imagine doing it all day, it’s a million degrees and you’re all sticky and clotted with itchy hair. I guess in a lot of cases it’s a family thing. This woman is obviously her daughter. And that place on Main Street in Missoula I ended up going to pretty regularly was a father-and-two-sons operation. Pretty good place and I swear to god that shop hadn’t changed in any way since Norman frickin’ Maclean got his hair cut there. Except for the Field and Streams. Probably still hasn’t. What was the name of that place? ‘Main Street Barbershop’, maybe? That’d be predictably creative. Near the Grizzly Hackle…

Man, what is she doing? Didn’t she already do that? This is taking forever.

Why do I get so impatient in the barber chair these days? Does it really take twice as long as it used to?

Ned was legendary. He was probably the most sought-after barber I’ve encountered, only cut hair by appointment, no walk-ins except for like Thursday mornings or something. I actually liked that, because you could count on getting in and out of there fast, you just had to plan ahead. And if you did try to go the walk-in route, you’d be in there for two hours because he was so popular and guys in Ellsworth don’t plan ahead. Ned’s reading material was, like, exploded diagrams of Pratt & Whitney turbines, medical journals from 1957, that kind of stuff. You’d die of boredom waiting for a Ned cut, but it was worth it. I knew guys who’d drive an hour to get a Ned cut. And the old riddle about how the barber with the worst haircut himself is the guy to go to? Because the other barber must’ve given it to him, and you don’t want him cutting your hair? Wrong in Ned’s case: he was the best-coifed man in Ellsworth. I swear that man cut his own hair in the mirror every single night of his life.

He might’ve been a little psychotic. He was like George McFly. Good haircuts, though.

No, no gel, no need. Mmm hmm, looks fine. Yes, back looks good, thanks.

No, the change is for you.

Now let me outta here. I got some stuff I gotta go google.

A friend writes: “Hey, do you have the list of grievances […] anymore? If not, why not?” She’s referring to some notes I kept back in school about one particular fellow student who seemed to register for every damn class I was taking. I was easily annoyed during those years. Regard:

List of Grievances

Unfortunately, the annexes have been lost to the mists of time.

I’ve just learned that even the U.S. president is getting in on the act now, and by ‘act’ I mean ‘using The Google’. Early adopters will already know that The Google is a ‘search engine’ that can help you find ‘pages’ on the ‘internets’. Some ‘web surfers’ even use it to find their way here, in focused search of specific reading material, no doubt for vitally important research projects. Here, without further preamble, is the Autumn 2006 version of the

“A few questions…”:
• Does isoglossia perchance feature girly vomit videos?
• Where should I direct my browser for spambot nightmarishness?
• How can I solve the puzzle of the Samorost sleeping taxi?
• Can I read about two tone bandicoots on isoglossia.com? wondered a searcher in Mexico

Economic interests, semantics, and uncertainty about liquid volume bring other searchers to isoglossia, with search strings like:
• twix market share
• meaning of the word segundus
• circus efemera [sic] Did you mean: circus ephemera
• objects that hold about 500 milliliters

The indexing ‘bots of The Google never overlook the strong parenting orientation of isoglossia, returning high results for queries such as:
• drop a coin ask if your [sic] pregnant
• pictures of kids eating and getting dirty (how can I express my deep sense of honor that isoglossia is the #5 hit on The Google, in the same exalted company as The BoingBoing and The History Place: Child Labor in America?)

And of course, with the parenting comes the scatological and, inevitably, the monkey-sexual:
• A reader in Valparaiso, Indiana was interested in finding Gross pictures of steaming pile of shit (with isoglossia ranking #3 of an alarming 105,000 results)
• Starting around 15 October, numerous people searching The Google for images (IMAGES!) of “colostomy bag” (WHY? WHY?) began to be referred to this picture here. This makes me unaccountably happy. Also to see that at least some people out there, even if it’s just colostomy fetishists, know that The Google loves “The Quotes”.
• copulating monkeys pics = isoglossia in The Google UK’s number 5 spot

And speaking of copulating monkeys,

“‘Sweet monkey Jesus!’ I thought to myself. ‘You’re on stage making out with Jane Goodall! Roll with it!’ But the translator failed to roll with it at all. He stared down at his sheaf of papers as if he were trying to ignite them with his mind. The audience, of course, was going nuts.”

“(YouTube is essentially the Great Alexandrian Library of Weird Al videos.) ”

“I may have intended to build a wall, but it was shaping up more like a tower of trash. Like a great number of weblog authors, I had started a mental recycling project.”

“New Years Eve 1998, Chuck Norris and I were at a party, when the clock struck twelve, instead of kissing someone, Chuck Norris roundhouse kicked everyone at the party. He then proceeded to roundhouse kick everyone on the street, and the whole city. He has been doing this ever since.”

“Kevin Kelly noted that the web currently has 1 trillion links, 1 quintillion transistors, and 20 exabytes of memory. A single human brain has 1 trillion synapses (links), 1 quintillion neurons (transistors of sorts), and 20 exabytes of memory.”

Previous meta entries: June 2006; February 2006; December 2005