The End of the Line ... Dessert

The question is:  How did we get to eating dessert at the end of a meal?  Our expert is Michael Krondl.  He wrote Sweet Invention:  A History of Dessert in 2011.   Krondl’s book chronicles the evolution of the sweet course by visiting six regions that roughly reflect sugarcane’s spread across the world: India, the Middle East, Italy, France, Austria and the United States.  Although science has established that our love of sweet things is rooted in evolution, ­Krondl posits that “dessert is a purely cultural phenomenon.” Thus the Sacher torte, “an edible manifestation of an urban, cosmopolitan Vienna, as smooth and fitted as a little black cocktail dress,” embodies Austria’s tradition of skilled artisanal pastry cooks. Contrast this with America’s “rural and profoundly unaristocratic” apple pie, an expression of our nation’s “almost religious attitude about home baking.” Medieval European cooks added a lot of sugar to their savory dishes, and at a documented Italian meal in 1529 the eel in marzipan was featured. Krondl reports that anchovy salad was served alongside sugar-dusted cream pies.  By the mid-17th century when La Varenne wrote “Le Cuisinier François,” a line had been established between sweet and savory. Sugar was banned from salty dishes, but sweet foods were still served concurrently with meats and fish. Service was eventually sequenced over time and 150 years later, dessert was at the end of the meal.   And what about cheese?  Where does that fit in? That's for tomorrow. We see a wonderful model at the Minneapolis convention.

How Do I Look?

That's a question that has changed drastically in our time.  It is a 'loaded' question.  The expected answer is a positive one complimenting a person's style choice.  It is particularly targeted to women and became a popular television series built around the style-impaired in need of a makeover, according to two of the victim's friends.  The fashion victim's two friends turn her/him in and they all get to pick out a clothing collection she/he likes best.   Every culture and every age has had its standards of beauty.  However in this age, that standard has changed towards the comfortable and casual.   So while I may lament the sloppy way of dressing in North America, it is here to stay - it is now considered middle class normal. This from Deirdre Clemente of Zocalo Public Square:  "I study one of the most profound cultural changes of the 20th century: the rise of casual dress. I study casual dress as it evolved on the beaches of Miami. I study casual dress as worn by the Black Panthers and by Princeton undergraduates. As a professor, I teach seminars on material culture and direct graduate students as they research and curate costume exhibitions, but my bread-and-butter as a scholar is the “why” and “when” our sartorial standards went from collared to comfortable. " Find the article in Time magazine HERE.  She says that casual clothes are "the uniform of the American middle class and that everyone in America considers themselves middle class." I think the emphasis is on comfortable - here's a visual summary of the king of comfort style: Our pictures today show a previous convention contest winner - A Maine Lobster Wharf by Don Railton.

Water Tales

I've never retrieved the countdown calendar before.  So I took a look - it is the 84th day of Summer and the 37th Wednesday of 2018. The days to go to today are 0.  An extraordinarily ordinary day - no major holidays or observances in Canada for this date. But just below this is this heading - Possible Ogopogo video.  What is Ogopogo?  It is the legendary creature of Okanagan Lake.  Okanagan Lake is a large, deep lake - 135 km long and 232 metres maximum depth.  "Whether it was truly the sighting of the legendary lake monster – or just a rogue wave, as science has shown in other sightings – their experience proves one thing: Ogopogo may be elusive, but the legend is very much still alive for those who want to believe". I had hoped to see something in the Video HERE. However, it turns out to be a shaky video of water.  So I found this statue to give us a sense of the mighty creature of the deep. Our pictures today come from the Contest Room at the Minneapolis Convention.  The square footer contest is what it says it is - a model built on a square foot.  The winner was our friend Al Collins' water tank - itself a Mount Albert kit.

Trains Ahead

We're headed for Denver, CO for the Narrow Gauge Train Convention.  There's a long list of railroad attractions in the area so we'll be busy enjoying train rides with fantastic mountain scenery.  Here are a few scenes from the Sundance Central Railroad layout, now in Odessa, Florida.

Train Day

Hi everyone,
It is a train day today, and these are pictures from the 2012 train convention in Seattle.  WHen we look at the photographs, it is hard to tell they are scale replicas.  Standing at the layouts, everything appears so real as though we are Gulliver travelling in a special world.