Category: Curiosities

When I was a grad student at the U of Chicago, I cooked in a restaurant, and one of the duties I relished most was making fresh mayonnaise, 2 quarts at a time.

During this period of sheltering-at-home, I’ve made several 1 cup batches, so I thought I’d share my recipe and encourage you to give it a try. Incidentally, mayonnaise is beautiful on just about everything savory, and many things that aren’t.

Elements

Ingredients (according to me):

• 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon white pepper*
• 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
• 1 fresh egg yolk
• 1 tablespoon vinegar*
• 2 teaspoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 1 cup oil*

*A few comments about ingredients:

White pepper is not “traditional,” but I started putting white pepper in my mayonnaise decades ago, and I’ve never looked back. No one has ever complained, either. I will admit that sometimes I double the white pepper and skip the mustard altogether. When I’m feeling particularly oppositional, I use smoked paprika or cayenne pepper. Live dangerously.

I generally use apple cider or white wine vinegar, but today I’m in the mood for rice wine vinegar. You can use most vinegars but I would avoid balsamic vinegar (on aesthetic grounds). Besides, if you are going to have balsamic vinegar, why mix it with anything?

Now the question that’s been burning since the first days of emulsion-as-condiment: Which oil makes the best mayonnaise? Maybe it’s a flaw, but I’ve never been a person with “favorites.” No favorite color, no favorite dish, no favorite Spice Girl. And no favorite oil for mayo, either. I’m just like that.

Today, I’m using grapeseed oil, which makes for a lovely, light flavor that lets the lemon’s brightness shine. I often use avocado oil, which is a bit heavier, but it has a detectable flavor, so you’d want to be in the mood. In general, go for a light oil (and taste it first: If you wouldn’t drizzle it on some roasted veggies, it doesn’t belong in mayo).

Truth and Method

Let’s start with some truth: The key ingredient in good mayo is patience. If you try to move the process along too quickly, your mayo will break and you’ll be sad. “Break” means the emulsification didn’t work and you ended up with something resembling dingy-yellow curds-and-whey.

It happens to all of us in our time. I’ve been known to eat broken mayo anyway, out of kindness, but it’s not nearly aesthetically pleasing as creamy-smooth, beautifully emulsified mayonnaise.

Whisk the sugar, salt, white pepper, and mustard together with the yolk until smooth.

Mix the vinegar and lemon juice and whisk half of it into the yolk mixture.

I do this phase by hand; the rest is left to a stand mixer, a nasty habit I picked up in professional kitchens.

Put the bowl under the stand mixer and turn the whisk on high. Add a few drops of oil at a time until your emulsion takes off.

Give it a little time. You’ll know you’re emulsifying when the mixture turns a bit lighter and thicker.

Now you’re ready to drizzle a very thin stream of oil into the bowl (still whisking on high), until you’ve added 1/2 cup. Don’t worry if you see a little oil around the creamy blob in the middle. As you drizzle, the oil should become incorporated into the mixture, which should remain creamy and fairly thick. At this point, drizzle in the rest of the vinegar and lemon juice, and continue drizzling the oil until you’ve incorporated the rest.

Leave your mayonnaise at room temperature for an hour, then refrigerate. I’m told that mayo is good for five to seven days, but I can’t vouch for that.

At this point, it’s polite to ask your mayonnaise aficionado what to do with this magnificent emulsion. My answer at about lunch time today: sardines and freshly grilled green beans.

I recently came across this story in National Geographic about St. Pancras Station:

The Unlikely Rebirth of a London Legend

The poet whose campaign saved St. Pancras was Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984), who was poet laureate of the United Kingdom from 1972 until his death.

One of Betjeman’s most famous (and controversial) poems is “Slough,” which expresses, let’s say, dismay at the dehumanizing forces of industrialization in and around the town of Slough, in ten neatly rhyming stanzas. Here’s the final stanza, as a taste:

Continue reading “The Poet who saved St. Pancras”

The Apostrophe is English’s most duplicitous punctuation. Does this title mean “three is company” or the company three keeps?

I can look at just about any number and tell you, almost immediately, if it’s divisible by three. How do I do it? It’s not superior brute-force calculation. It’s a number theory trick.

Just add all the digits of the number. If the result is divisible by three, then the number you started with is, too. For instance, the forbidding number 67,392 is divisible by three, because 6 + 7 + 3 + 9 + 2 is 27, which is divisible by three. My ACC office telephone number, 512.223.2630, considered as a number, is not. (But my number without the area code is. Try it for yourself.)

Now we come to the curiosities aspect of this post: Why does this work? Or more importantly, why doesn’t it work for any other number, like 7? It’s easy to show that it doesn’t work for 7: Consider 49, or 63. Both divisible by 7, but the sum of their digits isn’t, so it doesn’t

Here’s one way to explain the magic of 3. Think about any number in base 10. It’s laid out like this: a,bcd, which means:

(a * 1000) + (b * 100) + (c * 10) + d

This is the cornerstone of the decimal system, in which “places” represent powers of 10. But you can also write the number above like this:

a * (999 + 1) + b * (99 +1) + c * (9 + 1) + d

which amounts to this:

(999a + a) + (99b + b) + (9c + c) + d

Now think about this. If 999 is divisible by 3, then 999 times a is too. Same with 99b and 9c. The sum of numbers divisible by 3 is divisible by three (Why?), so 999a + 99b + 9c is divisible by 3. What’s left of our original number? Just this:

a + b + c + d

So if this sum is divisible by 3, then the whole number we started with is divisible by 3. That worked for the number a,bcd, but with a little mathematical induction, we can make it work for every number.

And I’m actually even lazier than summing. When I’m looking for divisibility by 3, I ignore all the digits that are divisible by three, and sum the rest. Consider my phone number again: 512.223.2630: Ignore the 3’s and 6’s and add up the rest: 14. Not.

This consummate laziness is brought to us by number theory: The sum of numbers divisible by 3 is also divisible by 3, so we actually don’t need to know exactly what that sum is to know whether it’s divisible by 3. But I don’t like to think of this as laziness. I call it the Principle of Least Effort, and accomplishing things with the least effort was Nature’s intent when she gave us this big brain.

All of which is to say that any number is divisible by 3 if and only if the sum of its digits is divisible by 3. QED.

While we’re here, what does QED mean? We use it to indicate that a proof or argument ended successfully. It’s an acronym based on the Latin phrase, quod erat demonstrandum, which means “what was to be demonstrated.” This phrase caught on just at the end of the Renaissance and was popularized by people like Galileo and Spinoza.

But this all started with Greek mathematicians and philosophers like Euclid and Archimedes, who were studied by people who wrote in Latin a lot. They wrote the Greek phrase ὅπερ ἔδει δεῖξαι at the end of a chain of reasoning. There’s a slight difference in meaning, though, because a reasonable (but stilted) translation of the Greek phrase is “the thing it was needed to prove.”

QED. Or if you prefer, ΟΕΔ.

If you haven’t heard this article by Shankar Vedantam (known for The Hidden Brain), do yourself a favor. The story explores why a career in nursing doesn’t attract more men. The research is fascinating, but what struck me was the message in the final few seconds:

Stereotypes are powerful because the stories we tell about ourselves are powerful. They shape how we see the world and how the world sees us. But in the end, they’re only stories. And stories – we can rewrite them.

Why More Men Don’t Get Into The Field Of Nursing

This is the core principle of “narrative therapy,” which has been around by other names for a very long time. The power of narrative to shape our understanding of ourselves and others is what attracted me to psychoanalysis in my twenties. If you’d like an example, read almost of any of Freud’s cases (preferably in Freud’s German), and you’ll see that one of the reasons for Freud’s influence is his ability to tell compelling stories.

This particular piece on nursing suggests that the way to combat stereotypes about nursing as a “women’s field” is to put up an alternate stereotype. In other words, just explaining why nursing might be appealing to men isn’t sufficient; a compelling story about men who are nurses is needed to provide access to a sense of identity.

The moral of this story: On the positive side, stories are compelling, but the negative side is . . . stories are compelling. And this brings me back to my training and practice in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Narrative has the power to constitute at least some the realities of identity, but whichever fire you choose, the danger is burning down the tower of reason. And so it was that my supervisors reinforced the importance of reality-testing in the revisionist narrative of psychotherapy.

But reality-testing the narratives that establish and sustain identity is really the hard part, not least because our access to the real is mediated by narrative.

That’s a lot to expect from “only stories.”

Some of you know that I am a classically-trained organist. What does that mean? Well, mostly it means that I know what all the knobs, pedals, and switches on an instrument like this are for.

I play for at Christ Lutheran Church, just up the road in Georgetown, where I’ve been principal organist for over thirty years. Thanks to a generous bequest, we’re replacing our aging organ with a new Viscount, like the one pictured above.

First things first: Where do you start when you go shopping for an organ? In the next several installments of this series, I’ll tell the whole story—mainly because I’ve had so much fun with this process. Along the way, maybe you’ll pick up a few interesting details about life in the world of organs. Continue reading “How to buy an organ, part 1”

When I was a naïve novitiate psychotherapist, I had the good fortune of a psych hospital’s support to attend professional conventions, partly to learn, and partly to represent the hospital. I remember my first psychoanalytic convention: I was thrilled to sit in the presence of famous psychoanalysts, soaking up their wisdom. I was at just such a convention when I had my first shot of Universal Solvent, neat.

Continue reading “The Universal Solvent”

I’m curious about what you’re curious about, and that’s the point of Curiosities. More or less.

There are questions, and there are answers. The trick is to find matching pairs.

More Curiosities coming soon.