COOKING THE EAST EUROPEAN WAY: POTAPSI

There are times in my life when I think I will just give up on real food and be happy with appetizers. At really meaty restaurants, the appetizer menu is often the only refuge for a vegetarian, and a couple of appetizers are usually enough to take care of my appetite.

There is a Yiddish phrase I learned, "“A lek un a shmeck," which means "a taste and a smell" and isn't generally used in a complimentary way -- the phrase either surfaces when somebody's portions are too small, or when somebody has done an especially shoddy job on something. "He was supposed to rebuild the engine, but listen to this banging!" someone will cry. "I asked for a complete job and he gives me a lek un a shmeck?"

But I'm not sure that I don't prefer a lek un a shmeck, especially when what I am tasting and smelling is delicious. The potaptsi, as an example, which Discover Ukraine insists in a popular Ukrainian appetizer. It's easy enough to describe: It's essentially an open-faced grilled cheese sandwich with garlic and tomatoes.

But, boy, a simple description does not do it justice. Listen, I am a patron of the American grilled cheese sandwich. A partisan, even. I like it on white bread with American cheese, even though I am pretty sure I am just consuming cheese-colored petroleum on bread-shaped sawdust. I judge greasy spoons on the quality of their grilled cheese, mostly because I usually can't eat anything else, but, then, if you can't make a descent grilled cheese how can you be trusted with anything else?

This being said, I'm not sure I can go back to grilled cheese. The potaptsi is superior to it in every way. To begin with, your typical grilled cheese sandwich is only fried on the outside, leaving the bread slightly spongy, while the potaptsi bread is grilled on both sides to a lovely golden brown. This makes the bread more toastlike, and firmer, which is not only helps it support its ingredients, but also means the sandwich gets more butter or oil fried into it.

There is a reason we so often pair grilled cheese with tomato soup -- the tomato's umami flavor balances the sweeter dairy of the sandwich cheese well. But it's hard to add tomato directly to a grilled cheese sandwich -- in my experience, the results tend to be a wet, sloppy sandwich. I suspect the grilling process liquefies the tomato somewhat, and it's the sort of thing a talented chef can correct for, but the potaptsi solves the problem in a simpler way. Once the bread is fried, you add the tomato and grated cheese, along with fresh minced garlic, and put it in the oven at a relatively low heat for 5-7 minutes. This melts the cheese and lightly bakes the tomato, but maintains the structural integrity of the sandwich.

Finally, the recipe I worked with called for adding "verdure," which, from context, seems to simply mean "herbs." I added green tomatoes, as I had them on hand, but one expects any of the herbs popular in Eastern Europe would be a nice addition: dill, bay leaf, maybe horseradish. Grilled cheese in the US is not typically served with garlic and herbs, and, for Pete's sake, why not? 

There was apparently a time when we were actually afraid of garlic. Anti-Italian sentiments in America blamed the supposed hot temper of the Italians on their "spicy" food, and the spice in question was garlic. Maybe that's why the American grilled cheese sandwich is so very plain. Well, I can't go back. I don't care if the garlic angries up my blood. I don't care if, as the Chicago Tribune complained in 1875, garlic is the unpleasant flavor of the workman's tenement. I don't care if eating it makes me somehow more Italian.

Besides, you cut the crust off a potaptsi, so it's a very small sandwich. Barely enough to make someone too ethnic.

Just a lek really. Maybe just enough for a schmeck too.

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IRISH-AMERICAN DINING: APPLE MARY

There’s a strange story about a stranger woman, published in the New York Herald near Christmas of 1886, telling of those who worked the piers and their preparations for Yule. Among these rough characters comes Apple Mary, an apple peddler, and I will recount the newspaper’s telling of her in entirety, introduced by a grizzled old longshoreman:

“Hello! there goes Apple Mary. There’s a character for you. I remember when she was as strong, as neat and as hearty a young woman as ever trod these streets.”

The reporter turned as the old fellow spoke and beheld in Mary the most wretched, unkempt and unsightly object that was ever permitted to roam civilization’s streets. She had on four dresses of various materials, as could be distinguished by the many holes in each; an old bonnet adorned her head, stuck with goose, hen and ostrich tips; her bare feet were visible through her shoes, a basket of tainted apples hung on her right arm, while her left hand grasped the strings of a change of head dress. She murmurs “Apples, apples” to every one she meets, but does not seem to care whether they purchase or not.

“There’s a character for you,” reiterated the old fellow. “Rumor has it that she was engaged to a young sailor that was drowned at sea. No one ever saw anybody buy an apple of her; no one ever sees any one give her money.”

DRESS FROM THE CANAL BOATS.

“For years she has trudged about these docks just as you see her now. She notices none, seems to care for no one. Rain or shine she is about here. They say she is a miser and has money. Ever Christmas the wives of the canal boatmen Coenties slip dress the old woman up, but in a week she is back, rags, apples and all, and no one ever knows what became of the new clothes. She has been sent to Ireland, but they cannot keep her. She is not a vagrant, she never begs, and she always supports herself in some way. Is she is asked why she dresses so slovenly her reply invariably is, ‘If I was a fine lady I wouldn’t need to peddle apples.’ Strange Christmases has Mary seen, no doubt. Whatever her history is she keeps it to herself, and I doubt if you can find one along this water front that does not know Apple Mary, and yet not one of them could tell you who she is, where she came from or where she lives. Yes, Christmases put strange gifts in the stockings of all as they journey through life,” soliloquized the old man as he wandered off to try and get work to buy a Christmas turkey.

After this article, and perhaps because of it, Irish apple peddlers in New York were, for a while, called Apple Maries.

The term may predate this story, and seems to have been popular throughout the country (here’s a collection of Apple Mary stories: http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/apple_annie_apple_mary), but this story seems to have set the public image of Apple Mary as elderly, impoverished, mourning, and perhaps mentally ill.

A poem from 1914 sentimentalized their experience, seeming to borrow from the original Apple Mary story, and reads as follows:

“Apples, apples! Please buy apples” –

‘Twas many years ago

And no one here remembers

In Broadway or Park Row,

For everything had changed about

And nothing’s quite the same;

New York was just a little town

When Apple Mary came.

“Apples, apples! Please buy apples!”

Oh the sunshine in the song;

All up and down the wharf they knew

When Mary passed along,

Swinging her basket on her arm,

So modest like and shy,

‘Twas “Laddies, get your pennies out,

Apple Mary’s passin’ by.”

“Apples, apples! Please buy apples!”

North River, Bowling Green;

But when the ships came into dock,

‘Twas there she would be seen.

“She’s lookin’ for her Sailor Jack,”

They said when eight bells rang,

And when ‘twas frosty ‘long the wharf –

Then Apple Mary sang.

“Apples, apples! Please buy apples!”

No more we hear the cry;

A dear old face has vanished;

We miss a mild blue eye.

No more about the dangerous streets

Her faltering footsteps roam,

For a voice down through the skies has called –

Poor Apple Mary home.

The phrase was still well-enough known in the 1930s that the comic strip Mary Worth started off titled Apple Mary, and told of an elderly apple dealer. When Frank Capra adapted the Damon Runyon story “Made La Gimp” into the 1933 film “Lady for a Day,” he converted Runyon’s Spanish flower peddler into Apple Annie, an aging apple peddler.

Apples were one of the original American street foods, and with good reason – they grew in abundance and required no preparation, so they could easily be sold from a basket, a barrel, or a pushcart. This may not seem like much of an Irish-American recipe -- apples in a basket? But I feel sure we can spruce it up a little.

One might consider pairing it with cheese. Gala apples are supposed to go quite well with Irish whiskey cheese, although I'm buggered to think how that might be presented as a street food -- one does not simply hand somebody an apple, a hunk of cheese, and a knife and let them fend for themselves.

Another option might be to cut an apple into slices and then top them with a soft cheese -- Ireland makes a number of soft bries, and you're going to want to pair a sweeter apple with this, but once the apple is sliced it should be treated with lemon juice to keep it from immediately turning brown. You might even create a caramelized apple chutney, combine it with brie, and serve the coupling in a paper cup with a plastic spoon.

Likewise, you could consider making an apple coleslaw, with carrot, apple, cabbage, spring onions, and parsley. Or you might simply put a stick in an apple and dip it in boiled brown sugar, an American invention most popular on the Irish holiday of Samhain. Of course, we're not children, so I would suggest experimenting with hot pepper powder and sea salt to give the candy apple a more sophisticated palate.

It would be very shabby chic to dress up in multiple dresses and an old bonnet, load a basket with these paper containers of contemporary apple-based street foods, and wander the docks crying "Apple, apples! Please buy apples!" I might do it myself.

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COOKING THE EAST EUROPEAN WAY: HOMEMADE KVASS

Sooner or later, I was going to experience the real foreignness of foreign food. We Americans like to think we have an international palate, because we grow up eating food that calls itself Mexican, and food that calls itself Chinese, and food that calls itself Indian.

It's all delicious, and it's rarely a challenge. Your average Mexican restaurant in the US, as an example, doesn't serve food made with corn smut, a corn-destroying fungus that is seen as a delicacy in Mexico. You're probably not going to get snake soup in Chinese restaurants or bullfrog in an Indian restaurant. Heck, it's pretty hard to get black pudding in Irish pubs in America, and that's a mainstream British treat.

Foreign foods can run pretty far afield of the American palate, and, unless a restaurant caters to an immigrant clientele, their menu will be Americanized. I've been to many Eastern European restaurants in my life, including having been a regular at the legendary (and recently closed) Nye's Polonaise Room in Minneapolis, and so I reckoned I'd had a lot of what Eastern Europe has to offer, and I was wrong.

It's only my second blog entry in this series, and I have already strayed far from mainstream American tastes. Because I made my own kvass.

For those of you who don't know, kvass is an enormously popular beverage in Slavic and Baltic countries, where it is vended in the streets. It is slightly sour and fizzy and mildly alcoholic. It tastes like rye or black bread, which is what it is made of. It's not widely available in the US, because we drink sweet drinks, and we don't drink bread.

I drank it once previously. I peeked into a Russian grocery store once, curious, and bought some candies and some cookies. I also saw a massive bottle of what looked like a brown soda pop, so I bought it, and it tasted like a tart beer. I shrugged it off then -- who would drink a beer soda pop? -- and threw the rest away. I was younger and ignorant, because millions of people drink the stuff, and it is the basis for several popular recipes.

I am older and not quite so ignorant, and so I made my own kvass. There are a number of recipes online, and they are all pretty similar: Soak bread in boiling water for a while, add in sugar and yeast and let sit, cool and drink. Sometimes you add something else -- I added raisins, which is a popular choice.

You can use any hearty bread, and you cook it or scorch it before adding it in, to make the drink extra bitter. It's not hard to make, although it is a little time consuming -- all told, it was about three days from toast to kvass.

There are other types of kvass as well, including a beetroot variation that I have not made yet. The kvass I made seems fairly straightforward, and I am not yet acclimated to the taste. I used rye bread, and I am a fanatic about the taste of rye, but it is taking a while for me to appreciate it as a soft drink. Also, because I fermented the stuff on my own stove, I was terrified it might kill me, but I have had several glasses now and managed to survive.

I also tried mixing it with other beverages, which I don't believe is typically done in Eastern Europe, but American bartenders have started to experiment with the drink as a mixer.

I added lemonade and touch of lemon seltzer to give it more fizz, which seemed logical -- kvass has a beer-like flavor, and people have been mixing beer and lemonade together forever and calling it a shandy. The kvass shandy was pleasant enough, although the combination seemed to highlight the fact that kvass is not beer. It tasted somehow off, which is the risk you run when you try to just substitute one ingredient for another, less familiar ingredient in a drink you are already familiar with.

I suppose the next step is for me to try other recipes and, over time, I will be familiar enough with the flavor of kvass to know what to expect, and what I like. It's happened to me with other drinks. I have developed a real taste for an herbal liqueur called fernet, which is about as bitter as you can imagine -- as bitter as a married couple discussing the terms of a divorce.

In the meanwhile, I will start looking for cooking recipes that use kvass. I barely understand how to drink the stuff, so why not cook with it?

Said nobody ever.

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COOKING THE EAST EUROPEAN WAY: GREEN BORSCHT

There are books on Jewish cooking, of course. I have a few. Most are pretty general about where foods that are typically seen as Jewish come from. Oh, sure, they'll mention that Ashkenazi Jews adapted local recipes to fulfill their dietary requirements, but often that's as far as it goes.

As a result, we don't generally learn that the bagel is Polish in origin and dates back to the 16th century, and was as popular among Slavs as it is now popular among Jews. Our beloved blintz is also Slavic, and apparently pagan, as the pre-Christian Slavs reportedly saw them as symbols of the sun.

So it goes, with cholent perhaps coming from the French, knishes deriving from either Ukranian or Russian antecedents, and kugels borrowing from the Germans.

I've decided to just go ahead and claim all of East Europe's food as my own. Why not? It's where my family came from, and they claimed their share. I'll follow their lead and modify it to serve my own needs, as I am a vegetarian, but the basic recipes will be those from my ancestor's countries: Russian, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and Moldova, as well as broader influences -- my Moldovan connection gives me license to explore Romanian food, while Poland leads me to Lithuania, and Ukraine gives me Mongolian and Turkish food.

I know this is all just an exercise in making excuses to eat food I want to eat, but if you invaded or were invaded by one of my family's ancestral homes, I'm going to go ahead and eat your food.

I started with a Ukrainian dish. Ukraine is a global breadbasket as a result of huge reserves of farmland (it's one of the reasons people keep invading), and so Ukraine is a country with an extensive and varied cuisine -- they have something like 30 varieties of borscht, which is a commitment to borscht you just don't see all that often.

Borscht was to be my first meal. Borscht is still something I am learning to love, and I blame my American upbringing. Americans have a notorious sweet tooth, and so a soup that could fairly be described as "sour" isn't going to be the first thing we turn to. Borscht is generally made with beetroot, which is also not something common in American cuisine, and it's often made with pickled ingredients and served cold, and this is about as far from a candy bar as it is possible for a food to get.

I started with green borscht, which does not have beetroot, but is typically made with sorrel instead. It's not that easy to get sorrel in my part of town, so I used a common substitution: spinach. One website suggested adding a splash of citrus to duplicate sorrel's acidity -- although spinach is alkaline, apparently it doesn't have that sour punch that is so distinctive of sorrel.

The other ingredients for the soup include diced potatoes, a smattering of rice, sour cream, and dill and green onions for flavoring, as well as a hard-boiled egg that has been chopped up. There are other recipes out there, but this is a good combination -- the resulting soup is a bit like cream of potato, but the spinach, dill, and green onions give it a sharp, earthy flavor.

I'm not usually in the habit of chucking an egg into my soup, but I made my own ramen last week and that also called for a hard-boiled egg, so I am starting to think everybody else puts egg in their soup and I've just never noticed.

This is a soup that Jews absconded with a long time ago, re-dubbing it schav or shtshav in Yiddish, although that's barely a new name, as it is called szczaw in Polish, so our Yiddish name is a bit like we claimed the hot dog, insisted it was a Jewish food, and it's Yiddish name was the khat dag.

Green borscht can be served hot or cold. I've only had it hot so far, and, let me tell you, it's a great partner for a grilled cheese sandwich on a rainy night. Or perhaps I should refer to the sandwich by its Yiddish name: grill kez.

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IRISH FIGHTING ARTS: NIGHTSTICK TWIRLING

The Irish, at least in the popular imagination, are a people of the cudgel. I don’t know how many battles are still fought with shillelaghs in the streets of Dublin – precious few, I expect – but the blackthorn club looms large in the American imagination.

What is it that the Boston Celtics leprechaun is leaning on? A shillelagh. What is it that the Fighting 69th of the United States Army National Guard carry in parades? Shillelaghs. What is it that early Irish police officers in New York are supposed to have sent home for to replace the standard issue nightstick? Shillelaghs, shillelaghs, shillelaghs.

But we’re not here to discuss Irish martial arts (in this instance called “bataireacht”), but to discuss Irish-American fighting arts. And so, rather than discuss the shillelaghs, let us discuss the nightstick. Specifically, I want to discuss a particular nightstick art, one that very near was lost, and one that could use reviving. I speak, of course, of nightstick twirling.

But first, let’s establish our bona fides. We will be discussing the nightstick as an Irish-American weapon because, in any city where there was a substantial Irish-American population, Irish-Americans flooded the police departments. The best example of this is New York, where, in 1900, five out of every six policemen were Irish-American, including my great-great-grandfather, James Monaghan, who was a police officer in the 19th precinct .

Another example would be Baltimore, which likewise had a largely Irish police force at its start, and I mention Baltimore because this is where nightclub twirling became an art form.

Let us get our terms right. The nightstick is actually one of two sticks once carried by the police; there was a shorter day stick intended for daylight hours. Baltimore evolved their own version of the nightstick (and generally only used them at night), and came up with their own name for the baton: espantoon, which is probably a corrupted version the word for a British pole weapon, the spontoon.

For the most part, this stick looks like the sort of billy club you typically associate with the police – a 24”-26” wooden club with a smooth, rounded end and a barrel end that looks like a grip, attached to the wrist by a leather strap. But the officers in the Baltimore police department modified the strap, elongating it to about the length of the stick itself, and jointed the strap with a swivel that allows for long and complex spinning tricks.

Baltimore police would twirl their batons for a few reasons, enumerated on the Baltimore Police City History website. Firstly, officers would often call to each other by striking their batons on the ground or walls; the straps allowed them to do this even at a distance. Secondly, the twirling discouraged people from coming too close. Thirdly, it communicated that the officer was skilled in wielding his nightstick, offering the same visual spectacle that gun twirling served in Wild West movies.

There was a time when the Baltimore Police Department was stripped of its espantoons, between the years 1994 and 2000, when Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier took over the force. He disapproved of the nightsticks, and saw them as a tool of intimidation, and so he replaced them with a streamlined baton and training in a California-based martial arts school called Koga.

Many officers rebelled and simply went out and purchased their own espantoons, in the way an earlier generation is supposed to have written home for shillelaghs. When Frazier’s tenure ended, the classic Baltimore nightstick made an official return, although the department did not mandate its use.

The Baltimore Police City History website also offers some introductory suggestions for how to twirl the espantoon, although with repeatedly providing us with the extremely helpful advice that the barrel end, although it looks like the handle, is actually the striking end, and that the ball on the barrel is especially useful when striking pressure points or nerve clusters. They also quote an officer saying the best use of the espantoon is to rap people on the shins, which usually gets them moving pretty quickly.

Patrolman M. J. Madigan demonstrates the side-swing

But we’re here to discuss spinning, and here are a few basics:

The forward flip: “The policeman holds the free end of the thong and the free end of the slick, then releases the end of the stick as he swings his arm forward. The stick swings out, pivots where the thong is fixed to the handle, does a complete turn and slaps back into the patrolman's hand”

The backward flip, or outside loop: Exactly the same as the forward flip, “with the patrolman catching the end of the club, palm down, behind his back.”

The side-swing: “The patrolman gives the club a full turn, this time laterally from a curbstone position.”

The overhand: “Nothing more than another side-swing with the thong passing over the back of the hand in the starting position unwinding as the maneuver is completed.”

The recover: The policeman dangles his nightstick by the strap, spinning it. Then, "with the club in a fast twirl, snaps his wrist expertly and the club straightens out to an upright position, where the policeman seizes it.”

The spin: “The policeman simply increases the speed of the twirl until the club takes on the appearance of a spoked wheel in a horizontal position.”

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WEIRD WESTERNS: SUNDOWN: THE VAMPIRE IN RETREAT (1989)

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★★★☆☆ 

An enjoyably New Wave Weird Western, featuring a Western town full of vampires trying to survive on artificial blood, and not doing a very good job of it.

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I sometimes think about creating a blog called Cult Films That Never Found Their Cult, made up of films that should have found a devoted following, but for some reason never did. "Meet the Hollowheads," as an example, a 1989 film set in an alternative universe made up entirely of tubes. Or "Crimewave," a 1986 Sam Raimi film scripted by the Coen Brothers that I am increasingly convinced nobody else has ever seen.

Add to the this 1989 film "Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat," which got lost as the result of a studio closing. It was produced by Vestron Pictures, a delightfully eccentric outfit whose catalogue could be the starting point for my cultless cult film blog. "Street Trash," a 1987 film about an alcoholic beverage that makes hobos melt? "The Lair of the White Worm," Ken Russell's bonkers adaptation of a Bram Stoker story featuring Hugh Grant menaced by a demonic snake? "Hider in the House," scripted by the superb Lem Dobbs and featuring a perfect idea for a thriller: Gary Busey has secretly moved into your house and sneaks out at night to steal your food and watch you sleep.

"Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat" is an overstuffed, slight new wave vampire comedy set in Moab, Utah, so its features Monument Valley-style bluffs and canyons towering over the action of the film. This unavoidably makes the movie feel like it is supposed to be a cowboy film, and director Anthony Hickox doesn't really resist this at first, and gives into it completely by the film's end.

But, properly, this is a vampire film, telling of a small community of bloodsuckers who have retreated to a town that is on no map and are trying to develop synthetic blood rather than continue to murder people. The community is marvelously represented: All wear sunscreen to protect against the sun, all wear big hats and walk under umbrellas at all times. It's a magnificently weird-looking world in this film, especially as many of the locals wear Victorian costumes with Western embellishments.

There are too many stories in this film for any one to really get the time it deserves. The main story is essentially a remake of a classic western theme, in which cowboys want their herd to graze freely while townsfolk want to bring civilization, with its plots of land and fences, to the west. In this case, though, the cowboys want to preserve their own rights to graze freely, and they want to graze on humans.

John Ireland leads this group of cowboys. Ireland was a genuine western movie star, but here he seems enfeebled and vaguely embarrassed -- he just can't seem to manage the vampire physicality demanded of him, and so the melodramatic flourished demanded by the role come off more as shrugs. He is planning a revolution against the town leader, played by David Carradine, who acts as though the whole movie were a bit of a lark. By the end of the film, they have raised armies against each other, all dressed in proper cowboy gear, and the spend a lot of time shooting at each other with wooden bullets.

At the same time, the film tells of a the scientist who invented synthetic blood and the bullying vampire who is very jealous of him, of a child who might have either the scientist or the vampire as her father, of two sets of punkish couples roped into the battle (including Twin Peaks' Dana Ashbrook, barely present in this film.) At some point, a Van Helsing show up, played as a loudmouth bungler by Bruce Campbell, and a local vampire immediately falls in love with him; she is played by the superb Deborah Foreman, making the most of a minuscule role.

If the film is overstuffed, it benefits from an entertaining cast, mixing eccentric character actors (including the always enjoyable M. Emmet Walsh) with unknowns who largely seem like they should be headed to a Flock of Seagulls concert after filming, and all give the film an appealingly anarchic quality. There's a deep well of weirdness in this film, playing itself out under Moab's towering western landscape, and it feels right.

It feels like the sort of place anyone might go, buy a town, and go quietly balmy in it.

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IRISH-AMERICAN DINING: THE EMERALD SALAD

On April 21, 1906, the Wilkes-Barre Times of Wilkes-Barre, PA, offered suggestions for St. Patrick’s Day that were almost exclusively based around color green. Green domino masks! Sandwiches bound with green ribbon! Green streamers! Green candles! Pistachio ice cream!

They did, however, also suggest a recipe that frankly sounds delicious. They called it an Emerald Salad, and, in their conception, it is made in this way:

Emerald Salad—Cut tops from green peppers; remove every particle of seed and membrane; let stand in salt water for an hour; then wipe dry and fill with the following, which has stood in dressing for twelve hours; cut one pint cold boiled potatoes into small dice; add enough thinly sliced cucumbers or pickles chopped to measure one-third more; then fill up measure with thinly sliced celery; season with pepper, salt if needed, and onion juice. Place a pimolas on top of each pepper, which is stood in a cup made of lettuce.

“Pimolas” is a stuffed olive, especially one stuffed with pimento, by the way.

This wasn’t the first appearance of the emerald salad, by the way. The Trenton Evening Times had printed an almost identical recipe (identifying the salad dressing as French), just as fetishistically green, three years earlier. But the Wilkes-Barre authors connected it with St. Paddy’s, and that’s where it would continue to appear. As an example: The Margaret Ellen Tea Room in Lexington, KY, offered Emerald Salad as part of a 1915 St. Patrick’s lunch that also included cream potatoes, shamrock rolls, and pistachio cream.

The Bay City Times offered their own version in 1918:

Emerald Salad—Mix lightly together a can of French peas, very green in color, and 2-3 of a cupful of green pepper chopped fine. Toss lightly with a little mayonnaise dressing and serve on a lettuce leaf with small cheese balls made of fresh cottage cheese mixed with cream and rolled in chopped pistachio nuts.

Another, decidedly non-vegetarian version appeared in the Rockford Republican in 1926. This involved a goose liver, boiled, chopped, and worked into a paste with a packet of cream cheese. Pepper, salt, sugar and Worcester sauce is added to the liver, along with a chopped sweet pickle and onion juice. Then sweet cream is added, just enough so that the paste can be molded into little balls, which are then served in lettuce leaves and garnished with olives.

I won’t be trying that one. I might try the following, however; as a native Minnesotan, the idea of a Jello salad is not as odious to me as it might be to those who have never seen vegetables floating in gelatin. The recipe is from the Oregonian from March of 1951, which seems to be the epicenter of Jello salads. The recipe is as follows:

EMERALD SALAD

1 package lime gelatin

1 cup boiling water

1 cup pineapple juice

½ cup diced grapefruit

1 cup crushed drained pineapple

½ cup diced marshmallows

½ cup diced emerald cherries

Dissolve gelatin in boiling water. Add pineapple juice and cool until mixture begins to thicken. Fold in remaining ingredients and chill until form.

You may have noticed something about these recipes: The first few started with potato, which made it, at least ostensibly, a little bit like something people might actually have eaten in Ireland. This newer menu, however, was squarely as American as a recipe could get. Marshmallows! Pineapple! In some ways, this recipe is the most fully Irish-American in the group: It’s just like any dessert that you would make on any occasion, except green, because green means Irish.

By the 1970s, things had deteriorated further. The word “emerald salad” exclusively showed up in announcements for special St. Patrick’s Day school lunches, such as the following, from Marietta, GA:

“St. Patrick’s Day Leprechaun Lunch with chili dog on bun, crispy Irish potatoes, emerald salad, shamrock cake, orange juice, and milk.”

I’m going to go ahead and wager that this was just a typical daily meal, with the Irish potatoes being everyday French fries, the emerald salad consisting of limp lettuce and cucumbers, and the shamrock cake distinguished merely by green frosting. I seem to recall eating this sort of thing in the 70s, and being depressed about it.

Honestly, the first option is the most appealing to me. I don’t think it needs to be as compulsively green as it is, and I am not convinced the olives at the top are a good idea, but the idea of mixing up vegetables and potatoes and serving them in a green pepper seems fundamentally sound to me. I’d probably experiment with a variation of a common Irish pub salad, which typically includes sliced hard-boiled eggs, cheddar or blue cheese, and a dressing made of mayonnaise, vinegar, tarragon and Dijon mustard.

Then again, I might just go for the Jello. I’m Minnesota Irish, after all, and we can barely resist a green salad.

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WEIRD WESTERNS: BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA (1966)

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★☆☆☆☆ 

The first of two Weird Westerns made back-to-back by William Beaudine in which Western outlaws battle monsters. John Carradine starred as Dracula, and regretted it.

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By Max Sparber

I'm going to peek in occasionally on a subgenre of Western films, called the Weird West, which combines westerns with supernatural elements. It's a surprisingly popular genre nowadays. If a western isn't a prestige piece featuring a big budget and serious actors acting serious, it's probably a Weird Western.

Wikipedia has a small and not especially insightful entry on the Weird West, identifying it primarily as a mash-up genre. The entry quotes author G. W. Thomas, a contemporary pulp novelist who wrote an essay called "Crossing Horror: Using Horror in Other Genres," which is the source of Wikipedia's quote. "Unlike many other cross-genre tales, the weird Western uses both elements but with very little loss of distinction," Thomas wrote. "The Western setting is decidedly 'Western' and the horror elements are obviously 'horror.'"

That's true of the movie I am about to write about today, and, to be fair to Thomas, is often true of Weird Western tales. But, as you'll see, it's not entirely true, and I'm not even certain it is mostly true. Because there is another tradition in the Weird West, and it's one that feels as though it rose indigenously with the story of the west. These are the frontier equivalents of Britain folk horror tradition: Tales that borrow from cowboy ghost stories, or Indian legends, or undiscovered monsters that might inhabit the vast, rugged land that stretched west of the Mississippi. We'll get to some of those films later.

But our first film, "Billy the Kid vs. Dracula," is the sort of mash-up Thomas describes . Even though the film was lensed in 1966, it is untouched by the revisionist sensibilities that had started to dominate the American Western, and has more in common with the sorts of juvenile oaters produced by Poverty Row studios a decade or so earlier. There was no effort to recreate the historic west, nor to revisit it with fresh eyes. Instead, the story takes place in a nondescript Western town that was actually the Corriganville Movie Ranch, built in the 1940s as a movie set and looking like it. It featured stock characters, and it's first 10 minutes, featuring a drunk and a stranger on a "Stagecoach," seems an explicit nod to the great 1939 John Wayne western "Stagecoach," which also featured John Carradine.

Carradine had been playing Dracula for a while, debuting in the role in "House of Frankenstein" all the way back in 1944, and his version of the vampire made terrific use of his Mephistophelean features, stagey mannerisms, and sonorous baritone. Carradine was often a very good actor, especially in westerns, as he was part of director John Ford's stock company. He is, it must be said, not especially good here. He may have disliked the role when he was doing it, and later regretted the film — here's the actual quote: "I only regret 'Billy the Kid Versus Dracula.' Otherwise, I regret nothing."

Nothing really works in the movie. Billy the Kid is Billy the Kid in name only here — he's a reformed outlaw, and the filmmakers seem to have no actual historical understanding of the character, so he's presented as an amiable dreamboat, played by a young fellow named Chuck Courtney and looking like a Tiger Beat model. The actual Billy the Kid was jolly, loved to dance, was fluent in Spanish, and a recently discovered photo of him shows Billy in a striped sweater playing croquet. There's none of this here, and Courtney could be playing any retired gunslinger with a boyish face and indistinct but cheerful mannerisms.

Likewise, the film doesn't seem to have a clear sense of what a vampire is. Carradine does sometimes turn into a bat — albeit one of the worst movie bats I have ever seen — and cannot be seen in a mirror, but the film has him allergic to wolfsbane rather than garlic (and the wolfsbane looks like red peppers), and he frequently seems to be out and about during the daytime, although this might be the fault of director William Beaudine, who did not seem to know how to lens a day-for-night shot.

Knowing that it is not a very good film, however, does not preclude "Billy the Kid Versus Dracula" from being an enjoyable film. There is a tension created in the film, and it's fun to watch the film wrestler with it. In fact, there are two tensions, one in the text, and one on the subtext.

Firstly, this film legitimately is a mash-up. The filmmakers took a bland cowboy movie and welded in a bland vampire movie, and every seam shows, to the extent that the cowboys are genuinely bewildered to find themselves in a vampire movie and the vampire seems to have no idea why he's in a cowboy movie. The only moment when Carradine seems remotely interested in the film is when he discovers there is a pretty young girl with a cave on her property, and the entire film consists of his plan to kidnap her and put her on a fairly nice antique bed in the cave, as though he can't wait to get out of the Corriganville Movie Ranch to someplace that felt more appropriate to the vampire.

Billy the Kid is likewise a bit helpless. He is, after all, a gunslinger, but here's a guy who can't be harmed by bullets, and Billy the Kid doesn't have anything else he knows how to do. I am about to give away the film's climax, but, trust me, it won't ruin it for you when you see it: When Billy the Kid fails to kill the vampire by shooting him, he just tosses his gun at Dracula, the way frustrated villains used to do in the Superman television show. Unlike in Superman, however, this works: The gun knocks Dracula out, and Billy the Kid calmly stakes his unconscious body.

In fairness, there is no vampire legend that says they can't be knocked out by hucking a gun at them, but it's still something of a surprise. There's actually a cowboy in Bram Stoker's "Dracula" — the Texan Quincey Morris — who has a gun, and apparently the original vampire novel could have been much shorter if Quincy had just lobbed his sidearm.

But, as I mentioned, there is also tension in the subtext, and it's a pity it goes unexplored. There is a moment when John Carradine gets angry at a vaguely European housekeeper who suspects him, shouting that the immigrant needs to be talked to. But Dracula was also an immigrant, and, a generation back, so was everybody except the Native population of this country.

The story of the so-called taming of the West is actually one of an immigrant population seizing a land from the original inhabitants, and it is a mark of the film's lack of self-awareness that they didn't realize that Dracula is a perfect metaphor for that. After all, Stoker's "Dracula" is an invasion story, about a murderous immigrant coming to London to stalk and murder its population.

It might have been fascinating to parallel the story of Dracula with the story of the West, and the film seems to nod at at, as the first person we see Dracula attack is a Native American, which then prompts a war party to kill everybody in the stagecoach that carried him.

And why would the Indians distinguish between white men and vampires? Both were pestilent European invaders who murdered Indians to steal from them. In fact, the Lakota and Dakota Indians had two words for white men, one punning. The first, wasi'chu, which simply means "non-Indian." But the other word is wašin icu, and it means "taking the fat," and references white men who simply drained a place of its stolen resources, which seems appropriately vampiric.

This sometimes makes me want to take issue with the idea that the Weird Western in a mash-up genre. The West itself was a mash-up, and Western stories are often about the conflicts between two different stories. For instance, the range war film is, essentially, a mash-up between a pioneer story and a cowboy story, with the two groups competing for the same resources.

Believe it or not, it is entirely possible to tell a story about indigenous Americans in which no single white man appears, as they were here for thousands of years before Europeans made their way to these shores. This sort of film isn't made very often, but could be.

It is likewise possible to tell pioneer stories where they never meet gunslingers, cowboy stories where they never meet Indians, and so on. But the Western has always enjoyed pressing these groups, and their competing stories, together and seeing what happened, especially since what happens is usually violent conflict, and violent conflict is one of the absolute staples of narrative storytelling.

And so, yes, the Wild Western is often a mash-up film, but it's just mashing something new into a genre that already relied on mashing things up. It's no real invention to tell a story in which a monster moves west across America — that's always been the story of America. It's just that the monsters have changed.

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IRISH-AMERICAN DINING: POTATO CANDY

In February of 1903, in the Kalamazoo Gazette, there appeared an ad of unsurpassed strangeness. “TO SAVE COAL is the problem this winter,” it started, and then immediately dropped the subject, adding “but that has nothing to do with the fact that our new confection has struck the popular chord and has sprung suddenly into favor.”

The company was the German-American-owned Frielink Candy Company, and their marvelous new confection was made of potato, “but you never would know it!” they insist, a tacit admission that this was an act people would question.

They named the confection “Irish Potato Candy,” and I don’t know if they were the first to concoct such a thing, but this is the oldest reference to such a candy I could find. They also made something called “Sea Foam Chips,” and ordinarily I wouldn’t suspect a candy company would make a product using actual sea foam, but with Frielink, anything is possible.

It’s possible the Frielinks were inspired by Cubans, somehow -- a 1908 article in the Jersey Journal from New Jersey claims that there is a popular potato candy in Cuba made by mashing potatoes, combining it with pulverized sugar, adding vanilla, and pressing a walnut into the center. But, then, outside of this one article, I can find no evidence Cubans ever ate such a thing.

But similar recipes continued to appear in American newspapers from that point on. The simplest version appeared in the Cleveland Gazette in 1912, consisting of nothing more than a mashed up potato mixed with confectioner’s sugar; the combination is then rolled into small balls. An identical recipe appeared in the Grand Forks Daily Herald in the same month, suggesting that newspapers were sharing their recipes (or stealing them from each other), or that there was suddenly a national appetite for sugared potato balls.

Similarly, in 1914, a recipe for chocolate potato candies appeared both in a New Mexico newspaper and a Louisiana publication. This was the same recipe as above, but then dipped in melted chocolate and topped with a walnut. And so it went for decades, year after year bringing subtle variations of this basic recipe. In 1916, the Boston Journal suggested adding butter to the mix. In 1917, the Oregonian made the recipe into a nougat by adding nuts and fruits and making the whole thing into a loaf, which they then dipped into fondant.

None of these variations were referred to as Irish, however. They were just recipes, concocted by lunatics, to satisfy the needs of maniacs who wanted to dip potatoes into chocolate or frosting. We wouldn’t hear of Irish potato candies again until April of 1940, when the Springfield Republican published a home recipe from Glen Raven, North Carolina, shared by a woman named Maggie Lee Cooke. She offers this recipe:

IRISH POTATO CANDY

1 Irish potato, size of an egg

1 pound pulverized sugar

1 small jar peanut butter

Boil potato until done, leaving on the peeling until cooked, then peel and mash with a fork. Work in the sugar making a stiff dough. Roll thin like piecrust with a rolling pin, then spread a thin layer of peanut butter all over the crust. Roll up like a jelly roll, and cut in one-inch squares. Chill and serve.

Substantially the same recipe emerged again many years later, in 1979, in a letter in the Trenton Evening Times. The only new addition here is a teaspoon of vanilla, which is added in to the potato after it is mashed. The author of the letter was Shirley Y. Denuk Acheson of Lowell, MI, and she identifies the recipe as having been her mother’s.

For whatever reason, even though makers of the potato candy were rolling it into little balls, nobody has yet thought to make it look like a potato, although, in retrospect, doing so seems thuddingly obvious.

It wasn’t until 1983 that potato mimicry had started to become a trend in Philadelphia sweet shops. The Greensboro Record of North Carolina tracked down one such recipe, and pondered about it, with the puzzled author both saying that such candies may be popular in Ireland but that Irish people she had spoken to had never heard of such a thing. The recipe had grown more sophisticated, and was as follows:

IRISH POTATO CANDY

1 medium-sized baking potato

1 pound confectioners sugar (or more, depending on amount needed for proper consistency)

1 to 1½ cups flaked coconut (optional)

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

¼ cup cinnamon

Turn out hot baked potato pulp in a bowl. Beat with mixer until it almost resembled mashed potatoes. Mix sugar in well. (If potato isn’t hot enough to melt sugar, set the bowl in a bowl of hot water to keep it warm.)

Beat in vanilla and salt. Add coconut if desired. Or you may need to add more confectioners’ sugar, working the mixture until it reaches a consistency that will hold together when shaped like a ball.

Store mixture in jar in refrigerator for a day or two to ripen. Shape into small potato shapes, about 1-1 ½ inches long, then roll in cinnamon to depict potato skin. The blunt end of a toothpick can be pressed into potatoes to make “eyes.” Store in cool place.

It’s still with us, and sometimes still made with potatoes, although saner versions sub in coconut cream. It’s still a sort of a tradition in Philadelphia, especially around St. Paddy’s day, and an Irish-sounding company called Oh Ryan’s apparently makes a seasonal killing shipping the candy, and they can be purchased on Amazon.com, although their version lacks any potato content at all, and, the more I think about it, the odder it seems to me that there is now a candy that looks like a potato but tastes like a coconut.

See’s Candies likewise makes an Irish potato candy, and their version is chocolate, nougat, and walnuts, with a few pine nuts used to make realistic looking potato eyes, which essentially makes it just a Snickers bar. Why would you want your Snickers bar to look like a potato?

You know, I’ve come around. The Frielink Candy Company had it right at the start. If you’re going to make a candy and name it after the Irish potato, there should be some truth in advertising, and something that distinguishes it from every other candy bar on the market.

I know I’ve gone a bit sideway on this, but suddenly I very much want a candy made from potato.

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IRISH FIGHTING ARTS: WRESTLING

Whenever the fighting Irish are represented, it's with fists raised, in a traditional boxing stance, and why not? The American Irish did produce a series of world-class boxers: Your John L. Sullivans, AKA the Boston Strong Boy; your Jack Dempseys, AKA nonpareil.

But there are more ways to fight than the sweet science offers, and, by God, I mean to tell them all. Someday we'll tell the story of "Dandy" John Dolan of the notorious New York street gang the Whyos, who wore shoes with an ax blade embedded in them and put copper eye gougers on his thumbs. Someday, but not today.

Today we look at wrestling. America has gotten a bit dull on this topic, reducing the mat arts down to two: Greco-Roman wrestling, which seems to be the primary way high school and college students accidentally spread Herpes gladiatorum to each other; and catch-as-catch-can, which is the style that professional wrestling draws from, comes from England, and appropriately, surged to popularity in carnivals.

But there were a lot of folk wrestling styles, and one of the most popular, Collar-and-Elbow, came from Ireland.

Wikipedia gives a nice summary of the sport, and points out that while the style originated in Eire, it gained an early foothold in the US and was, for a long time, one of the country's most popular pastimes.

Who was great at it? George Washington was great at it -- he was a county champion, and, really, never stopped tossing people around, flinging seven volunteers in Massachusetts into the air when Washington was in charge of the Continental Army.

What was Collar-and-Elbow like? The St. Albans Advertiser from 1877 offered up the rules, such as they were:

The men shall wear knit shirts and short coat or jacket, not extending below the hips, with strong collar and elbow for grasp of the opponent, and thin rubber sandals for his feet; each man shall take hold of the collar of his opponent with his right hand while with his left he must take hold of his elbow. Both men shall stand up, breast to breast, and show fair and equal play, either man who shall break his hold with one or both hands to save himself from a fall shall forfeit the said fall; kicking the limbs strictly prohibited, and the offense forfeits the contest; the falls must be square back falls, or two hips and one shoulder, or two shoulders and one hip, to strike the ground or floor, to constitute a fall; striking upon the face, side or knees, is no fall, and nothing shall be allowed for forcing a man from such a position to his back; going down on one or both knees is fair, as long as both men keep their hold; no butting shall be allowed under any circumstance; not less than ten or more than twenty minutes rest is allowed between each wrestling bout; the match shall be first fall, best two in three or three in five, according to stipulation.

Now that we know the rules, what was the match actually like? The Advertiser gives us a sense of that as well:

The floor upon which a "collar and elbow" contest occurs must be carpeted or covered with sawdust. In opening, the wrestlers seize each other by the collar with the right hand and by the right elbow with the left hand. Then follows a series of rapid plays with the feet, which are kept in constant motion, till a "lock" is secured, then follows a desperate effort on the part of one contestant to secure and on the other to prevent a fall. There are about a dozen well-known locks, but every wrestler has a number only known to himself, and which he only calls in play in closely contested matches. The play is always lively and graceful, and demands skill rather than brute force.

I'll return to Collar-and-Elbow in future posts and introduce you to some of the legends of the sport, including a gloriously bewhiskered fellow, John McMahon, who started in the Union Army during the Civil War and ended in a circus, and would sometimes wrestle for three continuous hours.

In the meanwhile, track down some rubber sandals and a short wrestling coat. Collar-and-Elbow is an almost entirely lost Irish-American art, and these things don't revive themselves.

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IRISH-AMERICAN DINING: ONION AND DRIED CODFISH

It's always my desire to help the aspiring foodie. After all, if any trend is au courant, perhaps the au courantest is taking regional, ethnic, or peasant food and refashioning it with the techniques of fine dining. And we Irish-Americans are falling behind the rest of the world in this.

Our forebears from Erin have kept apace with the trends, and it is now possible to get exquisite renditions of rustic Irish foods. But wither thou, Hiberneo-Americans? Where are our foods?

Actually, now that I think about it, what are our foods? Irish-Americans have never stopped looking to the auld country for cues, and so whatever trend emerges in Ireland will break on these shores shortly afterward. So contemporary Irish-American pubs offer chips and curry, a trend that probably dates back no further than the 1970s in Ireland.

We do have corned beef and cabbage, yes, and that certainly is an Irish-American innovation, although less so than we might suspect. The Irish actually made corned beef, but primarily tinned it and sold it to the British navy and North American military. The amount of grazing land turned over to a consumer market abroad increased the native Irish dependence on the potato. The Irish are right when they say corned beef was not part of their diet; it was part of their starving.

It's not clear how we Irish-Americans took to corned beef during the successive waves of Irish immigration. Some say it was because the food was readily available in pubs, which then offered free meals with alcohol. Some say we absorbed it from our Jewish neighbors. And some say Irish-Americans started eating it because it was a luxury item in Ireland but widely available here, the way our Jewish neighbors took to smearing cream cheese on a bagel, which would have been prohibitively indulgent in Europe but was suddenly cheaply available in the U.S.

Whatever the case, I don't want to talk about corned beef and more than I want to talk about green beer. Instead, hither and thither, I will look at some of the foods available to Irish-Americans in the early years of our American experience, in the hopes of inspiring a foodie renaissance of specifically Irish-American meals.

Firstly, lets go all the way back to 1859, and to Macon, GA, where the Macon Weekly Telegraph offered up a vivid description of the experience of riding an omnibus in New York City -- an omnibus being a horse-drawn enclosed bus.

"I was indelibly impressed with the beauties, comforts, and conveniences of city traveling," our author states, and then immediately reveals that he's being pissy. The remainder of the article is a prolonged snit about the experience of sharing public transportation with "passengers of all classes, clean or dirty, black or white, drunk or sober, monkeys, all kinds of vegetables, beef, mutton, and pork."

He has the misfortune to share the bus with a "son of Erin" who is busily belching up his lunch, eaten at a "first-class Irish Saloon," and here the author gives us a sense of what early Irish-Americans ate. Inventive chefs, take note! The lunch consisted of:

.. three cent whiskey and a free lunch of onions and dried codfish.

I know this isn't much to go on, but Iron Chef challenges often give their contestants less.

The onion is due for a comeback anyway. I'd go ahead and declare onion to be the new kale, but I think I'd seem dated, as kale hasn't been the new kale for months. Onion is the new version of whatever has supplanted kale. Chia? Onion is the new chia. What could be better? Onions are low-calorie, low in fats and sodium, but are rich in flavors and nutrients.

For us to do this right, we have to look past our supermarket onion, which are often imported from abroad (China is the world's largest exporter) and represents only a few varieties.

No, firstly, let's look to heirloom onions -- I would experiment with a variety called New York Early, which was grown in New York in the 19th century and who knows, maybe was the onion that our gassy Irishman ate before climbing aboard the omnibus. It also is reported to have a relatively tender skin, which you're going to want, because we're going to bake and eat this onion.

How do we do that? Well, the simplest option is just to throw it in the oven and cook it for a while. In the south, they will take Vidalia onions, peel them, press some butter onto them, and cook them at 400 degrees for an hour. That could do it. But I'd like to suggest something else:

Old John McSorly, who founded the ancient bar that still bears his name in New York, used to hollow out a heel of french bread and stick a whole onion into it, and then he'd eat that. You could do that. McSorley's still offers onions -- you pile sliced raw onion onto American or cheddar cheese, dab some spectacularly spicy mustard onto it, and just eat it like that.

I don't have recommendations for how to take this decidedly working class cuisine and elevate it, but I'm sure someone can figure it out. Start with the heirloom onions and work your way out from there.

As to the dried codfish, well, you have two choices here: salted or unsalted, and the latter goes by the name stockfish.

This is a classic of North Atlantic cuisine -- so much so that the cod population has been depleted and other fish are often subbed in. There are Irish recipes for the stuff, but we want an Irish-American version here, so we can borrow liberally from anybody our 19th century Irish-American ancestors might have met -- and, this being a New York recipe, they might have lifted versions from sailors in from Norway, or Newfoundland, or Iceland, or even the Faroe Islands. Try them all and stick with whatever you like. It was Norwegian? It's Irish-American now!

As to the whiskey -- well, the combination of onion and salted cod is going to be, shall we say, flavorful, so you're going to want a bold whiskey to go with it. I'm going to go out on a limb and recommend Connemara, which is a small-batch, peated whiskey, so it will have the sheer, brute strength to compete with the other flavors.

It won't cost you three cents, but, then, if you want to do it on the cheap, just chew on an onion, munch on some fish jerky, and wash it down with Kilbeggan. I won't judge you. Heck, I'll praise your authenticity, as the meal enjoyed by our son of Erin in the above story probably wasn't the sort of thing that would earn any Michelin stars.

It's not a meal that would make me want to be on an omnibus with you, but I'm not here to explore foods that will make you popular in enclosed spaces. I'm here to discuss early Irish-American foods, and I'll let omnibus riders fend for themselves.

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