The Weekly MetaFunSnark Compendium is a weekly compendium of the funny, touching, tangential, and querulous.
Using diary tags means that the list will catch things that don't necessarily fit, and miss things that should be included. If you know of a diary that fits the list, but isn't included here, please share it with us in the comments.
Scroll on down to see the list, but before you do, we bring you this delicious intermission:
Last week (as has happened every week since time began), someone plaintively posted, "Pie Wars, please explain." Suffering from an unbearable case of boredom (and suddenly missing Calvin's Dad) I entertained myself by pulling answers out of my ass. It had something to do with evolution, I said. Actually, Markos compared fraudsters to lemon pies. Armando made an ungentlemanly remark about Maryscott's "pie." An early 80s video game about ghost pies that eat cities became a metaphor for the 50-State Strategy. It was all great fun in my brain.
But, the truth is, the real Daily Kos Pie Fight was as interesting and pregnant (ahem) with social, political, and cultural substance as you could want. It was unpleasant, yes. But, it was the ultimate community Rorsach, the ink blot upon which we each projected our desires and fears and frustrations relating to an online community that had become critically important to us.
It was also not the first time a well-placed pie provided the lens through which we could view ourselves with sudden and cream-covered clarity. But, first things first...
"The fine arts are five in number, namely: painting, sculpture, poetry, music and architecture, the principle branch of the latter being pastry." - Antonin Careme |
The History of Pie
Soon after the great black obelisk fell from the sky or emerged from the earth or whatever, man began crushing grain, mixing it up with some tree sap, and cooking it on rocks. It was a long way from Baker's Square, but a short trip to wrapping it around some fruits, nuts, and animals. And pie (such as it was) was born.
As evidenced by pictographs in Egyption tombs, encasing savory items in dough has been a tasty and popular option for thousands of years, but it wasn't until someone thought to add fat to the basic flour and water mix that we began to see true "pies" as we now know them. Flour and water is just bread. Flour, water, and fat is that particular slice of culinary heaven known as pastry. And pastry could only have become possible once humans found themselves flush with stable crops of grain, and plenty of domesticated animal fat... and someone clumsy enough to knock the butter into the dough.
Many (perhaps most) early pie crusts were not, in fact, intended to be eaten. They were hard, inedible affairs, designed to hold, cook, serve, and store the food within them. In fact, in the 14th-17th centuries, pie crusts (called "coffyns") were architectural marvels that often housed live animals, tiny people, and even entire orchestras. "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" really were 24 blackbirds in a pie! Fortunately (or, unfortunately, if you're a blackbird or a starving musician), we have at least one recipe detailing how such a feat is accomplished: "make the coffin of a great pie or pastry, in the bottome thereof make a hole as big as your fist, or bigger if you will [...] put it full of flower and bake it, and being baked, open the hole in the bottome, and take out the flower. Then having a pie the bigness of the hole [...] you shal put it into the coffin, withall put into the said coffin round about the aforesaid pie as many small live birds as the empty coffin will hold." Mmmmm... tasty.
Interestingly, as common and important as pies and pie crusts became in midieval Europe, no recipes for pastry can be found before the 16th century. Recipes often call for pastry, but it is assumed that the reader already knows how to make this most basic of meal ingredients. Historians speculate that this is because the earliest written recipes were meant for professional cooks who would have been well-trained in such basics. Recipes for the fundamental building blocks of most meals probably didn't appear until there were cookbooks aimed at family households.
As with so many things, pastry ideas really began to flower in the Renaissance. All across Europe, professional pastry makers experimented with ever more tender, tastier, flakier crusts, but nowhere did the pie take hold quite as tenaciously as England. The pie was everywhere in England. Wrapped up in pocket form (a frequent alternative to fish and chips), served uncovered as a tart, or sliced traditionally, you could not swing a dead Saxon without making a pie out of him. It should be no surprise that early American colonists brought a fierce love of pie with them to the New World, and spread the gospel of pie everywhere they went. Manifast Pastry, indeed.
"When you say that something is 'as American as apple pie,' what you're really saying is that the item came to this country from elsewhere and was transformed into a distinctly American experience." - John Lehndorff, American Pie Council |
|
Baseball, Hot Dogs, and America
You would think Americans invented apple pie, for all the yammering we do about the stuff. The truth is, like virtually every pie ever dreamed of, apple pie was already plenty popular in England long before the colonists first killed shared a slice of pie with the natives.
So, why all the hubbub about it? Why has apple pie become synonymous with America?
Well, simple economics provides one answer. Pies were a very effective way of stretching limited food resources for the struggling colonists. While pies were common in England, they became absolutely ubiquitous in America. Served with every meal (in round pans to "cut corners"), pies quickly became the metaphorical center of family and social life. And apples, though not native to the colonies, flourished there (and yes, there really was a Johnny Appleseed), and America quickly became the largest exporter of apples in the world.
"Apple pie" became a metaphor for everything good and wholesome about America. Chevrolet, of course, cemented the usage forever in its ad campaign, "Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and Chevrolet." Though it has been decades since the ad campaign ran regularly, the phrase "Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and..." is still commonly used to connote the wholesomeness and essential Americanness (whether in earnest or in irony) of, well... everything. A Google search of the phrase turns up a small sampling of Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and... history, LNG, CPAs, ballet, the Zone of Insolvency, genocide, profiting from human misery, Omaha, severed heads, technology, great reading fun, faith, dominoes, wi-fi, math, lemonade, crop circles, fireworks, mom, Ducati, Desperate Housewives, burqas, the Glock 9mm semiautomatic, jazz, acetal, second chances, a trip to the mall, My Lai, bitches, babies in trashcans, global warming, O.J., submarines, and, well... you get the idea.
"The pie is so bold it can't be ignored. It breaks through the thick veneer of public relations that surrounds the powerful, and it upsets the tables of the moneychangers. It takes power from the powerful - if only for an instant." - Tooker Gomberg, NOW Magazine |
|
The Pie as Politics
The pie has an honored place in the pantheon of American cultural metaphors though which we seek to define and understand ourselves. But, this too is simply a uniquely American spin on a more universal human trait. I mean, let's face it: pie is just funny. There's something disarming about its charms: the messiness and stickiness of it, the wholesome innocence it represents, the connotations of sweet indulgence. You simply can not resist pie. I suppose we'll never know why the first guy to throw a pie at someone chose to reach for the pastry, but I like to think it was the very absurdity of the act that drove him to it, the layers of irony thick like the cream on his poor victim's nose. Whatever the reason that first pie was tossed, there's no doubt that smashing a pie into someone's face is guaranteed comedy. Comedic geniuses from Charlie Chaplin to Bugs Bunny have tossed pies for laughs, and we never seem to tire of it.
This silly slapstick fun, however, has given rise to an incredibly creative bit of political theater: the pie as protest. In the past few decades, dozens of the most pompous and self-important leaders of politics, punditry, and industry have been "pied." Credit for the first of these generally goes to Aron Kay, a Yippie, who nailed virulent anti-gay activist Anita Bryant (do check out the link - the image is worth it) during a televisted news conference in 1977. Since then, numerous VIPs have been hit, presumably for various crimes of windbaggery and jackassery. Here's an abbreviated list:
- Steve Bracks, Premier of Victoria, Australia
- Pierre Bourque, Mayor of Montreal
- Jerry Brown
- Pat Buchanan
- William F. Buckley, Jr.
- Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden
- Prince Charles
- Jean Chretien, Prime Minister of Canada
- Ann Coulter
- Gabor Demszky, mayor of Budapest
- Milton Friedman
- Bill Gates
- David Horowitz
- Lionel Jospin, Prime Minister of France
- Lech Kaczynski, President of Poland
- Ralph Klein, premier of Alberta
- Helmut Kohl, Chancellor of Germany
- William Kristol
- G. Gordon Liddy
- Ralph Nader
- Fred Phelps
- George Ryan
- Phyllis Schlafly
- Andy Warhol
etc.
"Accurately delivered, a cream pie is an uncannily precise barometer of human nature." - Noel Godin (aka Georges Le Gloupier) |
|
Although there are pie-ing aficionados everywhere, the primary leaders of the pastry revolution are the San Francisco-based Biotic Baking Brigade, the Canadian Entartistes, and the Belgian "entarteur" Noel Godin (aka Georges Le Gloupier). Godin, in particular, takes his craft very seriously. "Every victim," he says, "has to be thoroughly justified." The pies, too, have to be top-rate. "Quality is everything," says Godin. "If things go wrong, we eat them."
Godin has taken it on the chin, literally, for his exploits. Frequent target, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, has never taken his pie gracefully, and has landed a good number of punches in return. Godin doesn't care. Seeing "the peak of French intellectual thought so thoroughly snowbound" was such an entrancing delight that the beating simply didn't matter.
Godin's fascination with this moment of incongruence gives us a peek at why pie-ing is such an effective attention-getter. The VIP covered in cream, spluttering and sticky, briefly out of control, is suddenly no longer any different from us. He is removed from the rarified air of beings who matter more than we do and becomes human again... just another schlub with pie on his face. And in that moment, the VIP's true nature emerges. Does he fight, laugh, run, toss the pie back at his assailant, or press charges? Does he whine about it to the media, or does he enjoy the fun at his expense? Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard responded by intervening to protect Godin from being forever banned from the Cannes Film Festival. Bernard-Henri Levy threatened to "kick [Godin's] head in." Ann Coulter (the victim of the vicious terrorist group, Al Pieda) pressed charges against her creamy assailants. David Horowitz complained that it robbed him of the dignity and authority he was due while speaking at the podium... thus missing the point entirely.
To Be Continued...
Oh, there's so much more, but it's already 15 minutes into Saturday, and this Friday diary is now officially late.
You'll have to come on back for the sequel, in which we explore Holiday Pies and Other Traditions of Pie Culture. We'll save that one for next week.
Now, here's your MetaFunSnark Compendium...