There Will Always Be An England, Music Hall Department

My favourite English comedian has to be Kenneth Williams. Not only an erudite autodidact, but a master of innuendo, the saucy laugh ("Ooooh, Matron!" he would giggle at Hattie Jacques), and the pun ("Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me!").

I had never come across this video before. "Oh, what a beauty!" is an old music hall song that manages to be extremely smutty without actually ever using profanity or sexual language at all. It's all how you sings it, Matron...

From Twitter 08-27-2010

• 07:43:18: Good morning, all. Kind of grey this morning. Off to breakfast.
  
• 08:42:50: @dchizzle Yes. While Staten Island has few (but good) attractions, the ferry is a good place to get pics of the Statue of Liberty @ low cost
  
• 08:45:39: @dchizzle @jonk Typical tourists, bah! Statue of Liberty is overrated and crowded. Likewise the other venues.
  
• 08:48:03: RT @infernoxv: Alright uncle, you don't wanna whistle at me, I'm a cold, dead soul inside this body. <-maybe he's into necropaedophilia
  
• 19:00:40: #ff @arjunbasu , because he tells the best 140-character short stories.
  
• 19:51:51: Waiting for HWMBO so we can eat our chicken stew...
  
• 21:42:56: The chicken stew was lovely, if I do say so myself. The best I've ever made. The egg-beater was the secret...
  
• 23:21:35: Well, just about ready to hit the hay. Sorry I haven't done but 1 #FF but I've been busy making and eating stew. Next Friday fo' sure.
  

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There Will Always Be An England, Department of Vital Statistics

Yesterday's Grauniad had an obituary for John Aris, a computer analyst who participated in the first team that applied computing to business objectives: the LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) system, for J. Lyons, then a major food business in the United Kingdom.

Aris began his academic study in mathematics in secondary school, but decided that classics (the study of Latin and Greek) was more interesting and pursued that subject through Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated with a degree.

In 1958, when he was recruited to the LEO project, the prevailing wisdom was that only mathematicians were fit to program and operate computers. This opinion was the prevailing one through the mid-1970's—when I attended Columbia University, the Computer Studies Department only accepted people from the mathematics and philosophy departments (philosophy because logic was taught as part of that discipline).

What attracts me to Aris is this quotation:

At the time, the prevailing view was that work with computers required a trained mathematician. The Leo management thought otherwise and recruited using an aptitude test. John, an Oxford classics graduate, passed with flying colours, noting that "the great advantage of studying classics is that it does not fit you for anything specific".

I have found in my life as a Latin and Greek graduate of Columbia, that truer words have rarely been spoken. Aris went on to other major posts in computer companies and retired from active work in 2000. But he should be remembered not only for his participation in LEO, but for explaining why an education in the classics is uniquely fitting for life in the modern world. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

Chicken stew

After tweeting yesterday: The chicken stew was lovely, if I do say so myself. The best I've ever made. The egg-beater was the secret... I got a request from momshapedbox for the recipe.

Well, who uses a recipe? My mother (God rest her soul) just put stuff in a pot and boiled it. That worked fine. However, I wanted a thicker stew, so I have a little secret. Thus, I will share my method for chicken stew. By the way, method is often used in preference to recipe by older cookbooks and especially English cookbooks.

Mother Hansen's Chicken Stew

1 or 2 onions, chopped
4 or 5 ribs celery, chopped
1 or 2 green peppers (capsicum), chopped
3 to 5 cloves garlic, minced
1 box button mushrooms, washed and scrubbed (20-30 mushrooms)
2 to 3 tbl olive or other vegetable oil, or butter or margarine
1 bouquet garni
salt and pepper to taste
2 qts chicken stock, homemade preferably
8 to 10 large chicken thighs or drumsticks or both, skin on
4 or 5 carrots, peeled and sliced into 1/2" drums
10-15 new potatoes, washed, unpeeled, and quartered
1 swede/rutabaga/turnip, peeled & diced (optional)
15 to 20 small or baby onions, peeled (optional)
2 cans beans such as kidney, haricot or other similar bean, NOT green beans or lima beans (my choice, YMMV) with liquid
2 or 3 tbl cornstarch
boiling water

Put olive oil in stewpot large enough to comfortably contain 3-4 qts of liquid and stew. Don't put this in a pot in which it will be a tight fit, as it will boil over or otherwise spoil your cooking. Put over high fire long enough to heat the oil and add the onions, celery, green peppers, and garlic. Turn down heat and sauté until onions are transparent. Add the chicken, sprinkle them with a little salt and pepper, and shallow fry them, turning a couple of times. When the chicken is a little browned but not cooked through, add the chicken stock, then the mushrooms, then the beans with their liquid. Put a bouquet garni into the pot (you will have to fish it out before serving as it might end up in someone's bowl, which would be awkward but not poisonous) and add salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil and then reduce heat to bare minimum and let it simmer for about an hour. Then add the carrots, potatoes, swede, small/baby onions as you prepare them. Stir everything up and let it come back to the boil, increasing then reducing the heat as necessary to continue simmering.

Boil some water in a separate pot or your kettle, and put around 1/3 cup in a large bowl. Slowly add the cornstarch and stir until you have something between a gravy and a paste. Then take an egg beater and beat the mixture, adding a bit of water if it's too much like library paste, until it is a liquid and has minimal lumps in it. Add this to the stew and stir it in well. Let the stew come back to the boil, increasing then decreasing the heat as necessary to continue simmering for as long as you like. I would recommend a minimum of 2 hours but it can be longer. Once the chicken, potatoes, carrots, and swede are done, you may turn the heat off and then reheat when you serve. The gravy should be relatively thick but not like gelatin.

Serve in bowls with lots of French/Italian bread/baguettes/batons and a green salad. Remind everyone that there are bones in the stew (probably not worth your while to pick the chicken out and remove the meat back to the pot but you can do that if you like; it's easier just to provide small bowls for the bones.) and, if you haven't found the bouquet garni, warn them that it may be around and perhaps award a prize to the person who finds it and returns it intact.

Note #1: In the United Kingdom, the root vegetable that is commonly known as a "yellow turnip" or "turnip" or "rutabaga" is called a "swede". It's always tasty in stews but you might find it a bit strong.

Note #2: This stew gets better the second day. Refrigerate and then reheat thoroughly the second day. If the bouquet garni is still in what's left of the stew, try to get it now as it might be a bit disconcerting for the bag to disintegrate and release the contents into the stew.

Note #3: My mother never made this exactly the same except for the essentials. Onions, celery, green peppers, chicken, potatoes, carrots. Everything else was additional as and when and if she had any. The beauty of this recipe is that you can put anything you want into it as long as you have the essentials. If you have no chicken stock, use stock cubes or water. She always used water, and that will do just fine, but that's because she was raised in the 1930's and 40's, and stock of any kind was a mysterious substance that the French used for something-or-other. She would not have known what a bouquet garni was if we'd dumped a carload of them on her—she just added spices (oregano, basil, maybe a bay leaf if she had any) but I find the bouquet garni much neater. If using spices rather than a bouquet garni, always use dried spices, not fresh ones. Their flavour is more intense. I also use garlic a lot: in the 1950's and 60's American moms rarely cooked with garlic unless they were cooking food relating to their non-American ethnic background. I am certain that if she cooked with garlic it would have been garlic salt.

Note #4: When making beef stew, substitute beef stock and 2 lbs stew beef for the chicken stock and chicken. Everything else is the same. Two recipes for the price of one.

Bon appétit!