Last night I made a vegan version of Jasper White’s Southwestern Corn Chowder via Matthew Amster-Burton. Here’s what I did:

• 3 ears yellow corn, grilled
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 red onion, cut into half-inch dice
• 1/2 teaspoon minced fresh thyme
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin (roasted whole, then ground)
• 1/8 teaspoon turmeric
• 1 pound red potatoes, peeled and cut into half-inch dice
• 3 cups corn broth (see below)
• salt and pepper
• 1 large poblano chile, grilled, peeled, cored, and diced
• 2 teaspoons arrowroot
• 2 tablespoons minced cilantro
• scallions and cilantro for garnish
• 1 dried chipotle, soaked in warm water

1. Grill the corn per Cook’s Illustrated: remove all but the last layer of husk, leaving the kernels barely visible. Grill for about 6 minutes, turning occasionally.
2. Grill the poblano: core and remove seeds, then split and flatten, smear with olive oil, grill until the skin blackens. I couldn’t be bothered to peel all of the skin and we all lived.
3. Dry-roast the whole cumin. There’s a trend here: I wanted to maximize the flavors of all the major ingredients since we were doing without the bacon. I’m not sure if this was detectable in the final product, but it felt like Cooking.
4. After husking, cutting and milking the corn, I put the cobs into 4 cups of boiling water, added some garlic, peppercorns and parsley, and made a broth while preparing the other ingredients. I had bought some commercial veggie broth but the corn broth actually had pretty good flavor, so I never used it.
5. Follow the recipe as given with obvious substitutions.
6. At the end I added a few tablespoons of the chipotle soaking liquid. I could’ve added more, and probably gone ahead and added actual diced chipotle, but I didn’t want to end up with chipotle soup.

I used red onion instead of yellow because that feels more “southwestern” to me. The store didn’t have Yukon Golds so I went with low-starch red potatoes, but I think in a vegan soup a better mix would’ve been diced red potatoes for substance, but a baking potato for starch. I’ve been told that Potato Buds® are a popular vegan trick for making thick chowder.

People seemed to like it, but there was still plenty left over, which strikes me as ideal.

What I remember about reading early American fiction in school is that I found it tiresomely obsessive about the great expanses of amber waves of grain and rugged individualists who forged this great blah blah blah. That was one reason why I put off reading American works in any number until year two of this project. So here I am.

In the novel, young Jim Burden describes growing up amid American and Eastern European homesteaders in what was then the wilds of Nebraska. He is especially taken with his neighbor, Ántonia, and describes her teenage years and subsequent adulthood in detail.

I do not think Willa Cather and her contemporary Upton Sinclair really saw eye-to-eye about the merits of an agrarian lifestyle. I’m going to have to go with Sinclair here; if subsistence farming in a pre-electrical world is so great, why doesn’t everybody do it? A few hippies tried it in the Sixties and they grew up to be stockbrokers. Even Cather lived her whole adult life in New York City.

But she wrote this famous book which is a paean to rutting around in the dirt. “I used to love to drift along the pale yellow cornfields, looking for the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon turned a rich copper color and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem.” Yes, yes, this is very pretty. The descriptions are all like this — relentlessly beautiful. Meanwhile major characters are shooting themselves in the head or beating their wives or gnawing on the boiled bread-like mash of whatever was mouldering in the cellar three months into winter. I didn’t sense that the genuine hardships she describes were meant to be ironically juxtaposed against the rugged beauty — when the characters come to town they get restless and the townies they meet are almost uniformly amoral jerks. Starvation’s okay, it builds character, and manual labor builds big strong muscles on Ántonia.

Famously, nothing really happens in the novel. The plot moves along, and the characters age, and while there are some dramatic twists, they happen off-screen. Cather did not want to write melodrama. This makes for a curious relationship between the narrator, Jim, and Ántonia, whom critics seem to universally assert he loves. If so, it’s a weirdly platonic love. They do not get together in any meaningful way despite no social barriers to doing so. He instead sees Ántonia as some kind of untouchable womanly- (but not feminine-) ideal. His other relationships are stilted or loveless. “People said there must be something queer about a boy who showed no interest in girls of his own age, but who could be lively enough when he was with [Ántonia] and Lena or the three Marys.” Or maybe he’s supposed to be gay.

Cather, who never married, was intensely private (she insisted none of her letters be published, which this site seems to cheerfully ignore). When she was young, she dressed in men’s clothes and wore her hair scandalously short. Now I would be the first person to insist that this doesn’t prove anything, but what most obviously disproves any suspicion is having a relationship with a man, of which she had none. Biographers are curiously reticent to state the obvious: “…though it is true that her strongest emotional attachments (outside of her father and brothers) were to women, all the evidence points to a celibate writer, married only to her art.” Who do they think she is, Morrissey?

Look, here’s a novel with a male narrator with some unresolved sexual issues yet whose “mind was full of her”, full of this manly, powerfully-fecund farm woman who threshes wheat with her bare hands. The book is semi-autobiographical; Ántonia was based on a real person whom Cather knew in her childhood and visited again as an adult, just like Jim: “She was there, in the full vigor of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.” Biographers say, “If one defines a lesbian as a woman who has sexual relations with another woman, Cather cannot be called a lesbian on the basis of available records.” Fine. But to not call this a lesbian novel is to be disingenuous.

Whenever I saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest dust-plastered, I used to think of the tone in which poor Mr. Shimerda, who could say so little, yet managed to say so much when he exclaimed, “My Án-tonia!”

I know someone who claims to love this book. That is such a grandiose assertion over the merely unbelievable “I have read it” that I can only choose to accept its truth. However, he is English and therefore may be making some kind of joke.

I have read it, in the sense that I have turned 615 pages and processed the meaning of most of the words on each of them. The novel is so rambling and digressive that it’s hard to say I really read it. My final evaluation is that it’s a work best appreciated from a distance, like the distance between yourself and your television playing Michael Winterbottom’s movie. I didn’t love the book, but I loved the idea of it.

Let me reiterate the same talking points that are parroted by the characters in the film: it’s a meta-novel before there were novels to be meta about; it hardly gets around to getting started much less being finished; it’s got weird typographic stuff all over the place. All of that, and a lot more besides, is really great. It was just a total slog.

When I’m reading these books I tag passages that I think I will want to write about later. Re-reading them now, they are almost all dirty.

I define a nose as follows, —- intreating only beforehand, and beseeching my readers, both male and female, of what age, complexion, and condition soever, for the love of God and their own souls, to guard against the temptations and suggestions of the devil, and suffer him by no art or wile to put any other ideas into their minds, than what I put into my definition. —- For by the word Nose, throughout all this long chapter of noses, and in every other part of my work, where the word Nose occurs, — I declare, by that word I mean a Nose, and nothing more, or less.

“My sister, I dare say”, added he, “does not care to let a man come so near her ****”. I will not say whether my uncle Toby had compleated the sentence or not ; —— ’tis for his advantage to suppose he had, —- as, I think, he could have added no ONE WORD which would have improved it.”

Keyholes are the occasions of more sin and wickedness, than all other holes in this world put together.

I haven’t quoted any passages from the part about the hot chestnut in the guy’s pants, but it’s here if you want to do the honors yourself.

I also tagged all the famous metafictional bits: the black pages, the empty page for the reader to draw in their own portrait of the Widow Wadman, a missing chapter (including a jump in page numbers; in the original printing this resulted in the right-hand pages becoming even-numbered, although my Penguin edition resumed the numbering in the usual way).

But between all this there is a lot of book to get through, and that is what tends to bog down modern readers. I feel good about having read it, and even though the movie is about how no one knows the book, it’s extra-funny if you have. I recommend it the way I recommend dropping a hot chestnut down your pants: titillating at first, sometimes quite painful, but you can blog about it afterwards.

Is it not a shame to make two chapters of what passed in going down one pair of stairs?

On the other hand, I actually finished Tristram Shandy, which is more than I can say for The Mezzanine.

Featured Videos

Star Wars on a Banjo
01:42

This would be myself playing the theme music from Star Wars on my 1996 Gibson RB-3 banjo.

From: safetypants