Thursday, February 21, 2019

MOSE THE FIREBOY: THE SLANG

As I have mentioned, one of the really pleasurable qualities of "Glance at New York" is that it serves as a sort of omnium-gatherum of slang of the era, quite a lot of it from the character Mose, and, presumably, an accurate representation of the Bowery Boy's distinctive cant, called Flash. It's interesting to note that a few of Mose's phrase's...

IRISH-AMERICAN DINING: POTATO CASSEROLE

Mrs. Miller, inventor of an Irish potato casserole. It's hard, of course, to track down the first Irish recipe published in a newspaper in the United States. One of the first I was able to find is a joke, actually -- in 1872, the Daily Illinois State Register did a story about tachyhippodamis, which, they assured us, was not an Irish recipe for...