Blog the Fortieth: "The Glories of the Pea"

In Transcendental Array

It’s spring intermittently down here just south of the Mason Dixon line, which means tis the season for N.P.R.’s donor marathon. I never donate to N.P.R., even though for decades it has been my primary and often sole news source as I cook supper. I’m attached to it on uncle Niccolo’s advice to keep your enemies closer than your friends, as well as for the antidote it provides to my own bias in the daily exercise of having to decipher the news under its. In any case, I will to my dying day be grateful to N.P.R. for this quotation from the diary of a Lady-in-waiting to Catherine de Medici during her reign over the cuisine of the court of Henri II: “Nothing else has been spoken of at Court this week but the glories of the pea newly arrived from Italy.”

Ah! Can you imagine a world in which peas are glorious?

So, I am abashed to offer you this post on what my people do with peas, because I feel as though my people’s recipes are not glorious enough for that quotation. The recipes are really, really good, but only in the usual way that our food is really, really good, and glorious should be even better than that, I figure. Anyways, I have one pasta recipe for you, a soup, a vegetable side, a chicken-braise, and a most unexpected calamari braise, in case there be an apologetical glory of sorts to be got from crossing kinds in transcendental array.

Blog the Seventeenth: Zucchini in Season

Oniony and finished with egg,  
or maybe mixed with pasta.

I think that any discussion of what to do with zucchini in season must begin with the concession that zucchini bread is only a way to use up zucchini, not use it well.

Zucchini is abundant, it being mid-summer.  What to do with it all?  What a strange problem to have!  We choke on our prosperity.  I once heard an N.P.R. interview in which an impoverished third‑worlder said of America, “I want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”  We’re not happy we’re fat, so why does being fat look beatific to someone hungry?  Is prosperity an optical illusion? 

How is it abundance becomes oppressive?  We exert ourselves to produce more than we need, and then need to exert ourselves some more to figure out what to do with it all.  We become indentured to our own abundance—the more we have, the more we need, to keep up and use up what we have.  Spending more to grow zucchini in our garden than it costs to buy it on the cheap in season at market, we end up with more zucchini in season than we know what to do with; so we spend some more on ingredients for zucchini bread, to use the extra up, ending up with more of that than we know what to do with; so we go get containers and ribbons to wrap it as gifts for other people who already have more than enough zucchini at hand, whether in their own garden or at the markets.  Conspicuous production leads to conspicuous consumption.