Ask Sandy Ingber, executive chef of the famed Oyster Bar in New York’s Grand Central Terminal, to recount his most memorable experience at the restaurant and he doesn’t hesitate: “It was a Saturday night, in the summer. There was a flash fire from one of our refrigerators. It was a five-alarm fire – it nearly burnt the terminal down.”
“Here was wealth greater than ever known before — wealth gained not by men as producers but as masters of capital, middle men, investors and speculators; wealth that held the living of the many in its hands, but which had largely lost the sense of stewardship. And here was work that lacked dignity; wages fixed without bargaining; regulation and control in place of the old freedom.” The United States in the 1840s and 1850s; from Avery O. Craven’s Civil War in the Making, 1815-1860
Pagan Britain. By Ronald Hutton. Yale University Press; 400 pages; £25. To be published in America in February; $45.
Ronald Hutton describes his new book as a history of religious belief from the “Old Stone Age to the coming of Christianity”. So it is, but also it is more provocative than that. With “Pagan Britain” he has written a thoughtful critique of how historians and archaeologists often interpret ruins and relics to suit changing ideas about religion and nationhood. Intriguingly for a historian, Mr Hutton makes plain just how little evidence there is for belief systems of the distant past.
First a confession. Turkey would, frankly, never be my first choice for a bird to roast, even a wonderful turkey like this one from The Ginger Pig (sorry, chaps. But I adore you all the same). I mean, there’s just so much of it, isn’t there? But at Thanksgiving — especially an expat Thanksgiving — what are you going to do? So here’s my turkey. And it was extremely tasty — it’s just that even with a crowd around the table, there was plenty left over.
So there’s ginger in there and jalapeño and cayenne, too — for the most part this is going to be David Tanis’s kicky cranberry sauce in The New York Times. (You will have noticed how fond I am of their food pages.)
THE dance between politicians and the press can appear awkward, largely because both sides want to be the ones who are leading. Doris Kearns Goodwin, a popular scholar of American politics, traces the early days of this fraught negotiation in “The Bully Pulpit”. Here she tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt, America’s 26th president, who at the turn of the 20th century became the first to install a press room in the White House.
“At present I am heated by Spirit lamp till I stream with perspiration, & am then suddenly rubbed violently with towels dripping with cold water: have two cold feet-baths, & wear a wet compress all day on my stomach… I feel certain that the Water cure is no quackery.”
It’s pretty pleasing when your kid asks you to bake a cake that isn’t a chocolate cake — so five stars and a round of applause, please, for Melissa Clark and her Red Wine Honey Cake with Plums, a Rosh Hashana recipe that’s not just for the New Year. Click the link for her wonderful piece and the cake recipe, which I couldn’t possibly take credit for.
The Blood of Heaven, by Kent Wascom, Atlantic Books, RRP£14.99/Grove Press, RRP$25, 456 pages
Kent Wascom’s brutal bildungsroman starts in 1861 as the state of Louisiana celebrates its secession from the no-longer United States. That Angel Woolsack – the vicious, compelling narrator of this sprawling debut – marks his own jubilation by pissing blood down on to the cheering crowds below his window offers a warning to the reader who may be faint of heart. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here, for The Blood of Heaven is a tale of fire and brimstone, the ballad of a man, and a nation, forged in a crucible of suffering.
The Goldfinch. By Donna Tartt. Little, Brown; 784 pages; $30 and £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
AT THE start of Donna Tartt’s third novel, her hero Theo Decker is 13 years old. His mother—adored and adoring, artistic, thrift-shop glamorous—has taken him to see her favourite painting, a small miracle of 17th-century Dutch art. Carel Fabritius’s picture (right) gives the book its title, “The Goldfinch”, and in the opening scene it is hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.