What's Cooking?

What’s Cooking?

It’s not that I can’t cook, I can, very well by comparison with some men my age, but I’m lazy. If it involves precise measurement, timing, greasing and prepping pans and especially baking, I’m not interested.

One of my favourite dishes (and a favourite among those who try it) requires a pot of water and a bowl. Spaghetti (or in my case, Linguine) Carbonara was invented when allied troops were bivouacked with Italian country people during the war. They would give their ration of eggs and bacon to their hosts for breakfast, and were met with blank stares. Eventually, an enterprising Nonna boiled noodles, stirred in the eggs and crackled the bacon over it.

My version skips the bacon. Boil a pot of pasta. Mix in a bowl: 2 eggs, a bunch of ground Parmesan cheese, some heavy cream, a good dash of gin or vodka, a little hot sauce, salt, pepper and garlic flakes and beat until thick and smooth. Then chiffonade some basil and chop a tomato finely and add them.

Strain the pasta and hold hot, while you melt a good two or three tablespoons of butter in the warm pot on a low flame. Dump the pasta back in, coating it with butter, then dump the contents of the mixing bowl in. Tong vigourously to coat the hot pasta, and to allow it to cook the egg mixture. In three minutes, it’s done, and it’s fabulous.

My chili is pretty spectacular, but everyone has a chili recipe, so I won’t bore you with it. I once threw a party that specified everyone wear white, and served nothing but chili and sangria. Cruel, really.

I do have what I call my “pants off” meal, when you have to impress a date on short notice, with no skill. Start with the fresh linguine, the green stuff that is soft when you buy it. Get a can of crabmeat, a small jar of mayonnaise, and a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup. Top it off with a ripe avocado.

Boil the pasta briefly while you cook the Cream of Mushroom soup (without the added water or cream). It will be the consistency of a nice mushroom cream sauce for the pasta. Slice the avocado in half, mix the crab meat with a little mayo and fill each half. Arrange on two plates and the rest is up to you.

Then there’s the Breakfast of Champions, or Idiots, maybe. Fry up six rashers of bacon, flip them and just as the other side is getting done, slice a fat onion, and drop a few big onion rounds in the pan. Break three eggs into the onion rounds, to give them shape. Drape three or four slices of cheddar across the tops of the eggs, splash hot sauce on top, and put a lid on the frying pan to finish the top of the eggs. This breakfast will set you up for a full day’s work or send you back to bed.

The proper implements aren’t hard; a chef’s knife with an 8 to 10 inch blade, if sharp, will do most of the work described above except slicing bread, for which you need a serrated Ginsu from the supermarket. I prefer cast iron pans to more modern ones. You don’t wash them, you scrub them out with oil and salt to keep up their finish. One Teflon fry pan is necessary for scrambling eggs (done very slowly on a very low heat for maximum creaminess). One pasta pot, obviously, which will double as a soup pot, although you need two for the “pants off” meal. And tongs. Asparagus, corn, salad, pasta, all require tongs.

It isn’t necessary to be a foodie to cook well and graciously, and you don’t have to measure anything. Most proportions are pretty obvious. You just have to know how to sautée, tong, whip and fold, things they don’t teach on Masterchef, but which you’ll figure out once you try them twice.

The best thing I ever cooked myself was a trout I had just caught. The pan was in the fire on the beach, the butter was crackling and the fish went from the lake to the pan with a stop for filleting. It was sensational, and simple.

Noblesse Obliged

Noblesse Obliged

I ruled a small Barony on the Welsh marches at one time. I’ll tell you how it came about. Late in 2001, disgusted with the generally shitty state of the world post 9-11, I started to look into history for some solace, focusing on my family’s background. I knew we came from an old family on my father’s side, whose forebears had invaded with William the Conqueror, but I knew little else.

A little study revealed the first of my line in England was a Norman baron called Hugues le Corbeau, or Hugo the Raven. He and his two sons, Roger and Robert, joined their lord, William, Duke of Normandy, in his expedition against Harold Godwinson, the Saxon Earl who had declared himself king of England on the death of Edward the Confessor.

Now, a Norman lord was like the head of a great mob family, and his vassals, like Hugo, were his Capos, violent, loyal and obedient (most of the time). In return for making the dangerous trip across the Channel (the last time England was invaded) and bringing horses with him, William made Hugo, already a Baron in Normandy, the lord of a large swath of Shropshire, on the Welsh borders, to hold against the rebellious tribes.

Hugo didn’t long survive the Battle of Hastings, but Roger and Robert split their father’s estate, and Roger, as the eldest, became Baron of Caus, named after their home in Normandy. He built a Norman motte and bailey castle atop an Iron Age hillfort in the marches west of Shrewsbury, and set a watch. What’s left of Caus Castle is still there, although it looks like an Iron Age hillfort again.

Marcher Lords were different than William’s barons in other parts of England. They could act on their own, raising armies and leading raids. They had a considerable amount of freedom within their baronies, and were relatively independent of the crown. The Civil War changed all that, as Oliver Cromwell eliminated the feudal titles. They were brought back during the Restoration in 1660, but they were also limited severely in their influence. Finally, in 1861, feudal baronies as independent fiefs were eliminated.

So, I was descended from an ancient family that once controlled a swath of lovely country in the west of England, and it had been taken away from us. Never mind that it had actually passed out of the immediate family in the 14^th century through marriage, it had once been ours, and I wanted it back.

I already knew about Sealand, the gun platform-turned-micronation off the coast of England. It enjoyed a surprising degree of independence, being outside the British territorial limit (Britain actually extended their limit to include Sealand, a move that was reversed in the UN). I also knew of the Hutt River Principality in Australia, ruled by Prince Leonard, a sheep farmer disgusted with taxation policy who had seceded from the homeland. As his sheep station covered several hundred square miles, it also enjoyed a surprising degree of independence. If these micronations could exist in the face of a world full of superpowers, surely there was a place for a small historical fief that sought only to rule its little corner of the Welsh border.

Late in September 2001, I declared the Restitution of the Sovereign Barony of Caux, bought a website, posted the declaration and a map of the historical borders of the Barony and sat back. By 2003, I had 100 subjects, all duly entered in the rolls, who had taken the oath of fealty by e-mail and promised to defend the Barony when called upon to do so. 

Some just wanted the crested polo shirt ($10, I got them cut-rate from a subject in Bangkok). Some hoped against hope I would issue passports, an idea I flirted with, but wisely avoided. Some of our most heartbreaking pleas for citizenship were from beleaguered sub-Saharan Africa. 

Some subjects were more involved. One, an octogenarian from Pittsburgh who had invented bulletproof glass (and had a framed thank you letter from President Nixon) wanted to be the Barony’s security chief. He insisted I carry a snub-nose .38 at all times for its stopping power. I had to tell him that, like the Dutch royal family during the war, the Barony was in exile in Canada until historical territory could be claimed, and, as such, was bound to observe Canadian handgun restrictions.

There were titles for anyone who offered even the least service. There were knighthoods for those who recruited the most subjects. Besides the polo shirts, I had a coinage minted (there is a very weird collector's market for coins from imaginary countries, and the mint which struck my coinage did so in exchange for one half the production). There was an annual Parliament planned, to rotate between Canada, the US and Britain. I was in touch with the current owner of Caus Castle and he was thoroughly amused. There was a quarterly e-mail newsletter that went out to every subject.

One of my best and brightest recruits was given the title of Lord Leighton for his extensive service. He recruited a dozen eager subjects in the deserts of Nevada and took them on weekend training hikes, He was building the nucleus of the Baronial Army, and he had big plans. Lord Leighton was tireless. He had a legal seal made for the Barony, and registered himself as an agent of state in California through a legal Apostille. In fact, when he was arrested for unpaid parking tickets in Reno, he showed his Baronial ID, claimed he had diplomatic immunity and got away with it. That’s when I should have started to worry.

I got good press for the Barony, was written up a couple of times in the London Sunday Times and did a radio interview with the BBC. We had extensive correspondence with other micronations, and belonged to all the small country alliances. We received official recognition from Burkina Faso (I think through an oversight). I got the British Foreign Office to send us a letter addressed to the Sovereign Baron of Caux at Caus Castle in Shropshire, which has to count as implicit recognition. We were making waves intermicronationally, getting known, but it took up a lot of my time.

By about 2010, I had worn my interest in Baronial affairs down to the nub, and had more important things to do. Not Lord Leighton, though. He stayed in touch, started practicing “Freeman on the Land”  kookiness, changed his name to something more Aryan, took a correspondence school security guard course and shaved his head. I mostly ignored him, hoping he would lose interest too. No such luck. Some people are born to rage against the country they live in, and have an unscratchable itch to make their own rules. Lord Leighton was definitely not model citizen material, not for the United States, at any rate. He wanted his own country and he wanted it bad. And he still had his army.

I eventually shut down the Baronial website and portal and moved it to Facebook, so there would be some public record left for any remaining subjects. I stopped visiting. A couple of weeks ago, I got an urgent Facebook message from Lord Leighton. He had e-mailed all the remaining subject (I had sent the quarterly newsletters to everybody, with all their addresses in the same field, thereby sharing my entire subject list. Not smart, now I think of it). In any event, he had alerted everyone that I had abdicated responsibility for the Barony and asked their permission to take over. He claimed to have assent from the majority of the remaining subjects (about 30 or 40 had stuck around). Well, I did the only thing I could do. I posted a message on Facebook saying “Lord Leighton speaks for me” and signed it with my Latin name. A strategic retreat, if you will. I haven’t stepped down, I’ve stepped aside. 

I’m afraid Lord Leighton could get into some major league trouble with an internationally recognized micronation to play with, which he now has, as well as a cadre of loyal subjects. And every time I (rarely) look at the Facebook page, there are more members. Sometimes I dread what I might read in the newspaper in the morning. Uneasy lies the head that wears, or used to wear the coronet.

Getting Planted

Getting Planted

For boomers, it’s getting into planting season, metaphorically speaking, when we’ll start burying our contemporaries more frequently. My friends and I have already buried our parents (most of us) and one or two friends. I suppose we’re lucky it's just a few. My old friend Barry, whose house I helped build, came from a high school class about ten years before mine, and it had lost half its number by the time I knew him, ten years later, Some to Vietnam, of course (he was American), but most to drunk driving on the backwoods roads in the remote corner of Vermont in which he grew up.

I’ve buried my parents-in-law and my parents. My parents-in-law both had lovely little funerals at the family plot, in a little country churchyard high on a drumlin in rural Ontario. We (my wife and I, and all her family) have plots together under the branches of a maple tree, with a sweeping view of southern Ontario, backed by the shimmer of the lake in the distance. 

My own parents, while both regular churchgoers (my father was a choir master and organist) were both firm non-believers, to the point where neither wanted a funeral or, in fact, any memorial at all. My mother had too many friends for that to happen, though, and we had a bang-up party in Niagara that I’ve described in another blog. When my father died, however, he demanded no funeral, no memorial, to be cremated (like my mother) and the barest of bones of a notice in the Globe and Mail. I was charged with writing his obit (as I had with my mother’s) and made sure both mentioned their service in the war, their rank, and were illustrated with photos of them in uniform.

As a result, we had no marking of the passing of my father, other than a round of phone calls across the country. His ashes and my mother’s still sit in their urns on youngest sister’s mantelpiece, and I think they’ll probably stay there. In fact, my father forgot to pick up my mother’s ashes from the funeral home before he left Nova Scotia for good to come to Niagara. Youngest sister had to send for them. I asked for a portion of them to sprinkle on Lake Ontario, on the shores of which my mother grew up, but youngest sister seems determined to leave them in their urns.

Actually, my mother would often speak enthusiastically of sprinkling her ashes on whatever body of water she happened to be living on at the time. In the Eastern Townships, it was the top of Foster Mountain, overlooking Brome Lake; in Vermont it was over Lake Champlain and in Nova Scotia it was over the Minas Basin. So far, she remains unsprinkled. My father had no such fancy notions, he didn’t care what happened to his ashes.

So I come from a long line of unadorned death rites, whereas my wife comes from a long line of pretty elaborate funerals. When her Uncle Ted died, there was imported heather decorating the pews of the tiny church on the hill, and Scots bagpipes on the sound system; her mother was wheeled out to Frank Sinatra singing Fly Me To The Moon. When my brother-in-law died prematurely, as a Catholic, he was massed and sung with full pomp and buried in a bulletproof bronze box lowered into a concrete-lined bunker.

Up the tree-lined road to the top of that drumlin in southern Ontario, in summer, the breeze usually keeps it cool under the shade of the maple tree. The caretaker is painstaking; the grass is always cut, the stones are always legible. My old grammar teacher is planted there. The tiny clapboard church was rebuilt entirely at the expense of my wife’s Great Aunt when the old church, there since the area was settled, burnt.

The Anglican Church wasn’t opening new churches at the time, especially in remote country churchyards, and they tried to persuade Great Aunt Dot not to rebuild it. But Dot had money and planned to be buried there and was damned if there wasn’t going to be a church for the service. So, the Anglican Church consecrated is first new place of worship in Ontario in decades. The little church is mostly used for box lunches served at summer funerals (there aren’t any winter funerals) and as a place to get out of the rain. All the best funerals are held outside on sunny days with the cows looking over the fence from the next field.

I have my funeral instructions in my will. Play Bob Dylan’s Forever Young, Leonard Cohen’s Bird On A Wire and the Grateful Dead’s Ripple before the service, sing the two sailors' hymns; I Feel The Winds Of God Today and Eternal Father Strong To Save; be buried in a pine box, wrapped in a sheet, with no preservatives so I can feed the grass, in the one piece of property I own free and clear, with a box lunch for the mourners.

The people being buried in the little cemetery now aren’t really locals. They’re the diaspora of the settler families, now living in cities and towns across Canada. But they come home to be planted after they're dead, That’s what I want. I have no roots there, I’m included by marriage only, but when I die, I want to be planted on top of that remote, sunny drumlin and feed the grass. That makes me feel better about my end every time I think about it.