Writing

Love Famine (A Prosatio Silban Tale)

(Five-and-a-half printed pages, and a bit ribald. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.)

THE KEEP’S NAME WAS “CASTLE Cautroffs,” after an ancestor of its then-current occupant. But Prosatio Silban was to remember it as a test of his tact, delicacy, and personal taste.

Castle Cautroffs was perched on a high cliff overlooking the Uulian Commonwell’s southwestern coast, about a week’s galleywagon-journey from cosmopolitan Soharis. The castle anchored the holdings of m’Lord Lakgor Tario, an elderly but still-vital Heir Second overseeing the local sea-frontier, a lightly forested hillscape, and a sprinkling of mostly productive villages.

Prosatio Silban had been hired by the noble to instruct his daughter in the art and craftship of cookery. She was somewhat younger than the beefy cook; tall, poised, and possessed of the classic Heir Second bearing. Her soft brown curls reached almost to her waist, and she had the sort of face and proportions about which Uulian poets enjoy rhapsodizing at length. She fixed piercing grey eyes on her proposed teacher as her father made polite introductions.

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Writing

Chopped Roots (A Prosatio Silban Tale)

(Eight printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.)

WHETHER IT WAS THROUGH A dream or a vision, Prosatio Silban knew one thing with absolute certitude – his beloved mentor was dead. He arose from his galleywagon bunk, bowed his head and let out a gentle, almost imperceptible moan.

It was unexpected news. The Cook For Any Price had not heard any word from or about Master Trentum Urdoin for quite some time. The last he knew, from some ten years ago, was that the man was still in good health and good spirits.

But he was convinced of the communication’s inherent truth.

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Food, Living

Why I Love: My Dad

The man, the legend (click to enlarge).

IT’S HIS CONTAGIOUS JOIE DE vivre. It’s his insistence that I watched Sgt. Bilko, Jack Benny and Ernie Kovacs reruns with him when I was a kid. It’s the skiing memories. (It’s also the memories of the Plymouth, New Hampshire diner he used to own.) It’s his contagious menschlichkeit. It’s his liberal use of Yiddish. It’s his generosity. It’s the way that, though I am 58 and he turns 84 today, he insists on always looking after me. It’s his delight in food, both cooking and eating it. It’s that he taught me right from wrong. It’s his didactic-without-being-didacticness. It’s his instilled-in-me restaurant practice of ordering whatever’s unfamiliar on the menu.

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Hatch ’em, match ’em, dispatch ’em.”
— My friend, the Rev. JT, deconstructing pastors’ duty toward their flock

Writing

Prosatio Silban and the Fellow Seeker

(Four printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.)

SOME MORNINGS, THE FOOD BAZAARS in many-quayed Soharis are a-bustle with moneyed and caffeinated customers; others substitute sustained novelty for their pitiful lack of custom.

Prosatio Silban sighed inwardly. The beefy cook’s galleywagon had been parked for three days near the entrance to the bayside city’s main victual market. While the first two days had been reasonably profitable, he was beginning to despair of the third. It’s still early yet, he reminded himself. And fortune’s wheel has many turns.

He considered his painted menu board, which advertised eighteen modest but effective satisfactions for the appetites of hungry marketgoers, under the three-color declaration “The Cook For Any Price.”

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Food

5 Thoughts: Lessons Learned by an Autodidactic Home Cook

1. THE SMALLER THE KITCHEN, THE greater the discipline. And the organization.

2. Thrift rules. In other words, there are no such things as “leftovers” — only the beginnings of future meals. (Thank you, Tamar Adler, for this bit of back-pocket wisdom.)

3. Keep your most-used recipes hanging over your main prep-counter/stove. Keep also a folder for (annotated!) recipes already cooked, in addition to filing future-use recipes by preparation media (“skillet,” “sheet pan,” “slow cooker,” etc). Organization, remember?

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Writing

An Arrow Escape (A Prosatio Silban Tale)

(Four-and-a-half printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.)

THE LAW IN STONY-HEARTED Tirinbar mandated that all escaped slaves and their liberators were to be killed when located – but that could not deter Prosatio Silban from trying to do the right thing.

The beefy cook, born and raised in the less-pitiless parts of the Uulian Commonwell, acted with decency as a matter of course. But when the slight, copper-skinned young woman appeared late one evening on the figurative doorstep of his buopoth-drawn galleywagon (parked in the only location he could find, which had turned out to be a seldom-visited spot hard by the mountainside city’s main marketplace) his first motivation was profit.

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