Showing posts with label Samuel Pepys. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Samuel Pepys. Show all posts

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Hash? Sheesh!















So we trekked all the way to Seattle to meet a garrulous group who had trekked all the way from Whidbey Island; we rendezvoused at the Sorrento Hotel, which refers to itself as "the longest running luxury hotel in Seattle" (I didn't see it move, let alone run), and we "brunched."

To my mild astonishment, if astonishment can be mild, corned beef hash was listed on the menu. It was easily the most interesting dish listed, and the sight of the words made me a wee bit nostalgic, so I had to order the dish.

Alas and alack, I was served, not hash, but simply strips of corned beef. I managed to find sustenance in what I ate, but nonetheless, I was disappointed that I hadn't actually been served hash, which is ground-up meat. My parents and many in their generation routinely made hash with a cast-iron meat-grinder. Hash of this sort is connected with some social-class issues and "stretching a dollar." If you have a piece of tough meat left over, one way to use it is to grind it up into a hash and serve it for dinner or breakfast or both. Probably through the 1950s and into the 1960s, hash was also a mainstay of diners' breakfast-menus. One hardly ever sees it now. It''s much too folksy, and it probably takes too much time to make, although I think you may still buy it in a can.

A fellow I was dining with had also remembered hash of the old-fashioned kind, and he opined that, in this economy, corned beef hash might make a comeback. He also observed that Spam (referring to meat in a can, not to unwanted email messages) has become much more popular and that in Hawaii it has remained popular because Hawaii has to import most of its meat. "Spam and hash are inexpensive ways of getting protein," he said, cutting to the economic and metabolic chase.

According the the OED online, hash (as referring to ground-up meat), goes back linguistically to the 17th century, and Samuel Pepys's (pronounced Peeps) famous diary is cited as a source. Not too long thereafter, "hash" took on a derogatory connotation, meaning a mess, as in "he made a hash of things." A poem by Alexander Pope from 1735 is cited in this case. Pope uses the term figuratively and writes of a "hash of tongues," a mixture of languages--not ground-up tongues.

Then the term "settle [his] hash"--as in vanquishing a person--came into the language in the early 1800s. I almost never hear the term anymore, and in fact I didn't hear it all that often in my childhood.

Apparently, hash-browned potatoes, as a term, arose in the language after 1900. Probably most of us think of hash-browned potatoes as fried (browned) potato slices, but some people think of them as bits of potatoes fried--hence the link to hash, I assume.

As to corned beef itself: it refers to salted beef. "Corning" is a form of "curing" meet, and the connection is to corns or pieces of salt, not to corn itself. A "corned beef and cabbage" meal is still associated with Easter Sunday and with Irish cuisine. I rather liked corned beef and cabbage when I was growing up. The (boiled) cabbage (of the light green, not of the purple, variety) was served with vinegar.

"Hashish" actually pre-dates "hash," going all the way back to 1598 and referring, of course, to processed Indian hemp-plant, which was also called "bhang." I think I prefer "bhang" to "hash" in this instance--not that I know anything about smoking hash, but I did have a friend once who smoked it, and according to him, it was mightily more powerful than marijuana and had the effect of removing the top of his head, gently. "Hash" as referring to "hashish" came into the language in the 1950s, at least according to the OED online, which cites Norman Mailer, of all people. Perhaps things got a little complicated in big cities when people walked into diners and asked for "a plate of hash." "Would that be the Irish or the Indian hash, sir? There's a bit of a price-difference, and are you a cop?"

Being a nerd to the third power, I had to wonder of "hashish" was related in any way to "assizes," as in "the court of assizes" in Britain. Nope. "Assizes" refers to judgments, and it's related to the Old French "assise," which concerns sitting down. So if you go to the court of assizes, you and the judge and your expensive barristers and solicitors sit down, and you get your judgment, unless you're stuck in Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Bleak House, but then that's the court of chancery.

And finally, on a football (American) field, there are small white dashes or marks toward the center of the field, and these are called "hash-marks," but the linkage is to marks on a military uniform, also called "hash-marks," and as far as I can tell, there's no connection to smoking hash or eating corned beef hash, although the rules of American football seem to have been devised by people who had smoked hash, and I know at least one NFL referee who seems to make rulings on the field without benefit of the top of his head.

Oh my goodness, I've made a hash of this post.

Sunday, October 7, 2007

Hot Chocolate in the Coffee House, Hold the Conflict

The essence of drama is conflict, they say, and probably the same can be said of fiction, short or long. It's not necessarily so of poetry, which certainly may have or represent conflict but which is also free to work at the edges of conflict, step back and meditate upon it, or go so far into conflict that it reaches a calm center. Poems are allowed merely to think, in words (as opposed to musical notes or pigment); readers are allowed not to like such poems or to like only an infrequent diet of them, certainly. Nonetheless, the meditative powers of poetry are useful.

The following poem thinks, so to speak, about one of those experiences that arguably compose the greater part of our lives, even if the conflicts compose the more vivid, telling, decisive parts. The poem is essentially about visiting a cafe. No one is murdered; no one even has an argument; and everyone seems happy with the fare, which includes hot chocolate. Of course, I had to look up "chocolate" in the OED online, and the word seems to have entered the English language in the early 17th century, probably about the time products from tropical cacao trees entered England. It seems as if "hot chocolate" was originally made from the seeds of the cacao tree, whereas now hot chocolate or cocoa is made from what the OED calls a "cake"--what we might call a powder or a bar, I suppose--derived from cacao beans. By "cake," the OED does not seem to mean "chocolate cake" in the sense of a birthday cake, composed chiefly of flour. Samuel Pepys ["Peeps"], in his famous diary (1664) speaks of going to drink "jocolatte" at a coffee house in London. --Interesting that "latte" has persisted--and indeed taken over the world in the form of a beverage sold by Starbucks, which seems to open a new "store" every day somewhere on the planet. Meanwhile, the lovely "joco" has been domesticated into "choco-" or "cocoa." Was the "cocoa" dissolved in water back then, as the OED suggests, or was it dissolved in milk, as Pepys's "latte" may or may not suggest? Considering the absence of refrigeration, I do hope they boiled the milk first. Considering the squalor of London then, I do hope they boiled the water. I guess it doesn't matter now.

Meanwhile, here's a poem in which hot chocolate makes a cameo appearance in a Swedish cafe. Conflict stays outside the cafe, as it should; after all, we go to such places to get away from or to treat, with the cafe's folk-medicine, the stressful effects of conflict. (Boden is a small city not far from the Arctic Circle in Sweden; it is a "garrison town," has a timber industry, and is surrounded by some farms.)

Café in the North of Sweden


There were tables under dappled birch trees,
dappling on white table-linens, waitresses snug
in skirts and starched white shirts, the fresh
Swedish breeze, a tinge of Nordic sadness,
which is composed of history, stoicism,
and routine. There was Swedish spoken:
efficient, supple, sounding like a creek.
There we were; we were there. Some
laughter, not much. There was cardamom
in the rolls, a flower in each vase; hot
chocolate and coffee. There
was a sense in which our lives had been
established by others for others and were
to include this interlude at an outdoor café—
a kind of play that wouldn’t presume
to have a major theme or conflict. There
is this clarified memory of the scene, café
outdoors in Boden, north, far north in Sweden.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom


I might just add that cardamom is one of my favorite words and one of my favorite flavors. Here's hoping a satisfying warm beverage is in your near future.