One hundred years ago yesterday a compact was signed in Denmark allocating March 8 as a day for women. It was done to commemmorate the horrifying deaths of many women who had been working, locked in, in a New York shirtwaist factory when it caught fire. Rescue was impossible. That tragedy inspired many laws protecting workers in the United States, some of which are ignored even today with tragic consequences.
In Europe the day is the occasion for summing up advances and reporting on failures in the search for equality for women. The one is reported in millemeters, the other in meters. It has been decades since women hit the streets in the United States and demanded equality. We still don’t have it. Girls are still being reared not to expect it.
Recently a man in a group to which I belong compared married women to prostitiutes. When I chastised him for disrespecting women, let alone his own wife, I was told off as a shrill feminist. By a woman.
It happens that I don’t care if a women chooses to be a prostitute because there is after all, and always has been, a market for that. I only care if she is forced or pressured into it and doesn’t get her earnings. But I know men like that man and most citizens do despise sex workers. They don’t spend much time talking about the character of men who seek sex workers, however.
It sometimes seems to me that we’ve gone backwards, that there was more attention paid and more understanding required back in the Seventies than now in the 21st century. Women are still being stoned, burned, imprisoned and shot for refusing a man. Women are still being painted and displayed to sell cars. Women in Italy are paid from 10 to 30% less FOR THE SAME WORK as a man is paid. The last statistic I saw for the US was 67% paid to women compared to men.
I find this failure disgraceful to women. With the exception of women in countries where armed men are set to control them, the fault lies with women. Women rear men who think like Neanderthals and women allow industry to discriminate against women. It should not be left up to the women who is feeding two children on the proceeds of a third class job to see that she is paid commensurate with a man. Women at the top should be looking out for her. If every single woman refused to work on March 8 until parity for workers was achieved, industries from movie making to the corner cafè would feel it.
What is our problem? Are we afraid men won’t like us if we insist on fairness? Are we afraid to be called shrill feminists? There are more women than men. Stand up and show the world that we are to be reckoned with.
Have you ever wondered what your life would look like on the screen? Who would play your part? How honest would you be in the script? It’s too bad we can’t each of us write it the way we wish it had been and cast it the way we wish we’d looked. But the essence of biography is that by the time there’s enough story, we’re too old to play ourselves and for that matter, bio-pics are not usually contemplated until all the protagonists are dead. But not always.
There will shortly play on Raiuno a bio-film about Sofia Loren. At least that’s what they say it is, but it appears to me that it may be about Sofia’s mother, who has always been referred to by Sofia as the engine that made Sofia go.
Maria Scicolone
There is reference as well to Sofia’s sister who has a career right now as domestic commentator on TV with International Orange hair. I’d be more convinced if she hadn’t reared Alessandra Mussolini, our Fascist-in-chief in the parliament.
Alessandra Mussolini
But back to Ms Loren, who it seems is to be portrayed by a quite ordinary looking actress who to my mind is prettier than Ms Loren, but definitely not gorgeous as was Sofia in the day. I’ve recently decided that all pretty girls look much alike, whereas both ugly and beautiful vary and sometimes swap positions. I remember a lot of the famous part of Ms Loren’s life, or at least I remember it as it was reported in magazines and newspapers. There’s plenty to know and lots of story there, so why do I think this movie is about Mamma? Because Mamma is played by Sofia Loren herself, and I don’t see her taking a minor part. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she played herself, since she has maintained the look she had in her forties right up into her seventies. Some of the gorgeous has disappeared into pretty in that effort, but she’s still amazing. For her age. Which is a great deal older than her mother was at the time of this film.
So Mamma will be portrayed, it seems, as a sort of Momma Rose figure whom we know from “Gypsy.” Loud, pushy and successful at dragging her two girls from obscurity in a small town near Naples to marriage into the Mussolini family for one daughter and a durable international cinema fame for the other. No secrets will be revealed, I think, but we’ll get a taste of what Sofia wants us to see of her family. And we’ll get more than a glimpse of the Sofia of today.
The film is called “La Mia Casa E’ Piena di Specchi” which means “My House Is Full of Mirrors”. And I bet it is!
These are good. Not as good as the ones full of rice and sour cream, but good and such a nice break from a piece of grilled this or a slice of roasted that. This felt like a weekend at a warm beach near your house as compared to a week at Ipanema. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t turn down a weekend at a warm beach anywhere.
This is what a serving looked like the first time I made it. Because I was using the outermost leaves of the cabbage, the rolls were bigger and there were only six. When I made it again from the next layer of leaves there were eight. The only other difference is the first time I cooked them in canned peeled tomatoes and the next time with tomato juice. The broken up tomatoes are much better.
Ingredients:
6 to 8 whole cabbage leaves, simmered in salted water for 3 minutes.
250 g /1/2 pound lean ground beef
250 g /1/2 pound lean ground pork
a heaping tablespoon of prepared horseradish
a heaping tablespoon of prepared mustard
2 tablespoons diced onion, sauteed until soft
1 egg
about 3/4 teaspoon salt
pepper
All you do is squish all that together with your hands. Then laying the drainedcabbage leaves down on a board, make an elongated meatball from some of the meat and put it on a leaf. The picture below shows the first one open with the meat, the second one with the bottom folded up, the third with the sides folded in (that toothpick was just for making stay for the foto and I took it out later) and the last is all rolled up.
That’s all of them rolled and in the casserole.
There they are with tomato juice, salt and pepper and water poured over them. For the first batch I used a 14 ounce can of peeled tomatoes, chopped up a bit and 1/2 cup/125 ml of water. When I used the juice it was a tiny 6 ounce bottle with the same amount of water. I added a bit of salt and pepper. I think you should feel free to vary the seasonings any way that appeals to you. I know I will.
I also grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese all over it and then popped it into a 175°C / 350°F oven for 50 minutes.
With a big dollop of Greek yogurt on top I was maybe not in Brasil, but at least in a warm and sunny place filled with slender people who eat low carb.
Lots of people are going to say, “That’s not lemon curd because lemon curd isn’t opaque.” And those people are right if they aren’t on a diet. That’s what lemon curd looks like when made with Splenda. That flakey stuff they use to make it measurable also takes away that gemstone clarity the British spread for bread offers. Of course toast doesn’t figure in my days right now, but after searching high and low for a lemon dessert without corn starch or flour, it was this or nothing. I don’t mind, however, because it makes a great dessert with minimal carbohydrates.
I’ve made two recipes now. The first one was a bit too tart, the second not quite tart enough. Both are intensely lemony, however, and so I pick recipe number two because the butter didn’t granulate when it was chilled. I might just add a bit more lemon juice next time.
Lemon curd
makes about 1.5 cups or 12 fluid ounces
3/4 cup in volume of Splenda (weights won’t work for this)
3 large eggs
grated rind of two lemons
juice of 2 lemons
3 ounces/85 g butter (6 tablespoons) cut into bits
I make this in a double boiler, or really, in a stainless steel bowl over a pot of simmering water. You don’t have to, but it is easier if you do.
Put the Splenda, the eggs, the lemon rind and the juice in the cooking bowl. Use a whisk to thoroughly blend them. Add the butter bits. Put the bowl over the hot water and start whisking. The eggs cook at the warm surface, so be sure to get at those surfaces very well. It takes only a few minutes to get to heat and to start thickening, so keep whisking. As it thickens, occasionall pull the whisk through the lemon curd. When the whisk leaves a trail, it is done. Remove the bowl from the hot water.
Empty out the hot water and fill the pan with cold water and ice cubes. Put the curd over it, and whisk it until it is room temp. This seems to prevent the butter becoming grainy. Refrigerate, covered, until you need it. Well, no one actually needs lemon curd, but if you taste it, you’ll think you do.
This is just lemon curd and Splenda whipped cream layered in a wine glass. It was good. Very good.
What a subject for a rainy day. But Lent began Wednesday and Lent may be the most famous example of institutionalized privation in the western world. Ramadan would easily seem to be second best known nowadays, whereas only a few years ago most people would have responded, “Rama what?” if you’d said it.
I have not studied very deeply all the religions of the world, but of the ones I know there is a dose of privation and discipline in each. There is something you cannot eat, cannot drink, cannot do or even cannot think. Remember President Jimmy Carter’s lust of the mind? I felt deeply sorry for him because he felt guilty about having perfectly human thoughts in response to perfectly human signals. If God hated you to think that way, he wouldn’t make the opposite sex so cute, right?
My experience of privation began very early. One of my parents was Catholic and the other was not. The non-Catholic parent had only the sketchiest idea of what was required, but undertook to rear us kids Catholic anyway. Why someone on the Catholic side of the family didn’t decide to step in and set out the simple rules, I don’t know, but no one did.
It was accepted that one did not eat meat on Friday. If I could list the dishes we were presented on Friday nights you would understand perfectly why tuna noodle casserole and macaroni and cheese were occasions for joy. If you have never heard of salmon wiggle, count yourself among the lucky ten per cent of the world. It’s something of a miracle that I am not sitting at the family table this very day, graying hair, ragged clothing and uneducated because I was not allowed to leave the table without finishing it. I will never know how I gathered the strength to swallow the last cold remnants of it. Today fish is expensive and a real luxury for many, but still it is on our list of foods for fast days. Not salmon wiggle, now or ever. I would rather bare my neck to the sword!
Lent was understood to begin on Ash Wednesday and end on Easter. So far so good, but no one apparently ever mentioned carnival. Privation was applied, but there was no preceding period of richness, silliness and feast. Will it surprise anyone that the non-Catholic parent was a direct descendent of the Puritans? You would see the people of New Orleans parading in glorious dishabille for Mardi Gras, and the mind-boggling gyrations of Brazilians samba dancers at Carnival, but as they say these days, “What happens in New Orleans stays in New Orleans.” We had no idea that those parties had anything to do with us or our lives. All we got was the chance to eat salmon wiggle on Wednesday as well as Friday.
Come Easter we had a really nice meal after unpacking our Easter baskets. I don’t know about you, but although Easter baskets are pretty cool, I don’t find them adequate exchange for Carnival.
I admit to some leftover prejudices from those early years of wholesale, half-informed religious training. I can’t eat rabbit. It turns my stomach to think of it because I was taught it was “unclean”. I have for years used Lent (Quaresima) as a period in which to do something difficult, usually an end of the winter diet, because after all, anyone can do almost anything for forty days. Besides, Lent occurs mostly in a period of very changeable weather of a type that restricts activities, so why not get something accomplished in it?
There used to be a tradition of giving something up for Lent, and announcing it at school, which was pretty cool. I was trying to think of something to give up for Lent, and since I am already on a diet and continuing to be cigarette free I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t be damaging to my health, mental or otherwise. It’s taking pretty much all my self imposed discipline just to do what I’m doing. It would be too easy to claim to give up something you can’t get anyway. Dates with movie stars, cheddar cheese, flights to anywhere … I can deprive myself of all that and more. I am also doing without pedicures, massages and gossip magazines.
Even if these privations were real, what could they mean compared to gathering with millions to walk into a river and wash away my sins? How many die in those crushes every year? Or how about walking hundreds or even thousands of miles in a pilgramage to some place holy to one’s beliefs? Think of never killing anything. Not a spider nor a mosquito nor even a poisonous snake. Millions swear to remain celibate all their lives. Others surrender all control over their reproductive processes and bear as many children as are sent to them.
Privation and the discipline with which to bear them are common to all belief systems that I know. If there is a form of suffering, someone exploits it as a way to do something to yourself. Being cold, hot, wet or dry; starving and feasting; pushing your physical boundaries or remaining completely still; raising your voice or taking a vow of silence; reading one thing all your life; following laws which have no application in modern life; refusing to follow any laws made by man: all these and more appear in belief systems.
I used to wonder why they all seemed to be about privation and then I realized that once upon a time, unlike our day of ease and plenty, no one had much and so giving up something was meaningful. Even rich people were poor compared to us.
How much more meaningful, it seems to me, to vow to do something positive instead. I could clean up all the trash along a part of my road, for instance, or I could gether up threads and twigs and leave them in a safe place for the birds who will be nesting here soon. Or I could give up one meal per week and donate the money saved to one of the Haiti rescue funds. I could actually do all of those things, because each one is so easy.
So what do you think? What can modern people do that feels relevant, and is this kind of spiritual discipline still of any use to us anyway?
After all, even these efforts seem pretty mild compared to daubing one’s nude body with mud and standing on a plinth in a public space for years. I think it’s clear why that one never got beyond the Indian sub-continent.
List me some disciplines. I may just take some of them up.
photo of a Sadhu courtesy of BBC
February 19th, 2010 in
Italy,
philosophy |
8 Comments
Simple: just make one big cookie. Then, if you like, you can use a cutter to make this:
Those two are for you. I took the rest of them to my neighbors for San Valentino, even though I am celebrating San Faustino, patron saint of singles. I don’t know what shape represents him, so hearts will have to do.
This is a butterscotch bar or brownie. I don’t have a jelly roll pan, so I use two tart pans for a recipe or one for half a recipe. It works. It takes only 15 minutes to bake in that size, too.
I am doing this recipe because eg had some bad luck with a similar recipe from “The Joy of Cooking” which she said came out as firm as a surfboard. I am giving you the whole recipe, but I only made half this amount. They’d be even nicer iced with melted dark chocolate bars. Just lay a couple on the hot cookie and spread it when it melts. When it is all cool, it will be firm and shiny. Or, you can make a ganache using chocolate and cream and spread that over.
Butterscotch Bars
preheat oven to 175°C or 350°F
makes a bunch
4 ounces or 113 g butter
2 cups or 500 ml packed brown sugar (in Italy, at your equo e solidale shop)
Put these into a pan twice as big as you think you need and put it over low heat. Heat and stir until it is bubbly, the take it off the heat to cool. Don’t rush with higher heat or it WILL burn!
2 eggs
Beat these one at a time into the cooled butter and sugar mixture.
2 cups or 276 g flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
Mix these together and stir thoroughly into the pot of warm buttery stuff.
1 cup chopped nuts. I used quickly toasted hazlenuts, but the recipe asked for walnuts.
Stir these into the battter.
Spread this heavy batter into a jellyroll pan if you have one, or into two tart pans if you don’t. Put them into the heated oven and cook the one big one up to 25 minutes, but check before then, because mine are always cooked before then and they should be still soft in the center to be chewy like a brownie. If making smaller ones, 15 minutes should absolutely do it.
If you are trying to be cute or romantic, cut shapes out with a sharp cutter. Otherwise, just cut them into squares and hide them. They also freeze quite well. The crumbs left from cutting them make me think that they’d go really well stirred into vanilla ice cream.
But this weather doesn’t happen very much. Not since 1984 has there been any snow in Rome, let alone a snowy colosseum. One person on TV today said he had not seen that amount of snow in Rom e in 50 years.
Here are some more pictures, one of them so like it might have been BC that I got a knot in my throat.
I mean the via Appia one that looks like no engine has ever been near it.
The following you have now seen too many times. How much is enough and who decides?
Snow as a story is becoming as fascinating as whether George Clooney really loves his Italian girlfriend.
February 12th, 2010 in
Italy |
4 Comments
Sure, the scientists offer two reasons that these are all facing in the same direction, but why are they REALLY that way?
February 7th, 2010 in
Uncategorized |
3 Comments
When I stepped out of my door last week, I saw my first bird visitor of the spring. She belongs to a flock that can break out any time of the year, but no one ever does until they feel spring coming. I decided that it seemed like time to get out and see where spring might be hiding on the only sunny day.
That looks sort of springy, but if we take a closer look…
there’s snow in the wood across the river. And here is the evidence of the flood I didn’t see during the hard rains. That affected area is about 40 feet by 100 feet! If it had frozen it would have been a nice skating rink. No, I take that back. Skating rinks are not nice, they’re cold.
I don’t know what Ivano has grafted to these apple trees, but it sure isn’t apples.
We don’t yet have any chicks, ducklings, cubs or kittens, but Alberta does. So maybe you have to look for spring at her farm?
February 7th, 2010 in
Beauty,
Italy,
animals |
4 Comments
December 8, 2008 I published a post on cheese mousse just in time for the holidays. I know several people have made them and I’ve heard that they gave pleasure, and that’s why I do this bloggy thing. But recently out of the blue a friend of manty years added a comment to that old post.
Here is the exchange between her and me:
“Susanne January 29th, 2010 at 14:56
I’m ever so grateful for this christmas present!
I’ve meanwhile used the mousses in various combinations, as a topping, a side dish, a snack etc.
Now I’m wondering whether I can use the gorgonzola mousse as a filling in cheese profiteroles. I’m a bit afraid that the mousse might soak the bakery. What do you think?”
“Judith in UmbriaJanuary 31st, 2010 at 09:27
I wouldn’t make them days beforehand, but I don’t see why they would be any wetter than chocolate. You can make the pastry way ahead and fill them within the last 24 hours perhaps.
Thanks for reporting back what you’ve done. I don’t get enough reports and I love them.”
“Susanne February 5th, 2010 at 16:29
Okay, I just did it and hoped it would work out. I made cheese profiteroles on the base of 1 cup of water, 5 ts of butter, 1ts salt, 2/3 of sifted Dinkel flour, 4 eggs, 1/2 cup of grated cheese (Pecorino), pepper and nutmeg. Then I baked them in tiny portions, just a mouthful each, let them cool and filled them with your Gorgonzola mousse. They were perfekt and all gone before they could even start soaking… ;)”
Is that cool or what? Now we do not have to worry about cheese shortages in the Dusseldorf area. Of course there is a post on the basics of making profiteroles , but of course Susanne didn’t need that at all.
And here is another tip for free. It’s almost impossible to make good pate choux when it is really hot out, so make them in various sizes/shapes/styles now and freeze them in zipper bags. Come July and those chilly mousses would be superb!
