Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Human Rights Law Blogs -> Never In Our Names

Human Rights Law

: Never In Our Names

Monday Night Book Club: Captain Trips Edition

By blueness

Tonight's regularly scheduled episode of Monday Night Book Club has been cancelled, as the show's hostess, Alexa, has been felled by a rude and abusive virus, known hereabouts as Captain Trips.

Your humble sub will attempt to fill the void with a wambling walkabout that will, among other things, discuss several home remedies designed to extinguish or at least arrest such viral outrages.
Applying the term "Captain Trips" to those nasty colds and flus that seasonally assault the human form derives from Stephen King's novel The Stand, in which an eternally shifting antigen "superflu," concocted by the US government, escapes from underground to make short work of roughly 99.4% of the earth's population, meanwhile allowing King to spin his "long tale of dark Christianity."

In his novel, King dubbed his superflu "Captain Trips," thereby committing a libel against Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, who had been known by that moniker since the late 1960s. King, a Maine person, is deeply suspicious of us folk out here on the Left Coast; thus, besides the libel against local saint Garcia, his Stand also sites the center of all evil in Las Vegas, and offers as his devil a thinly disguised Jim Morrison, once the fabled satyr of the Sunset Strip. Meanwhile, the author's Good Folk all hail from points east, like Maine, or Nebraska, or even--god help us--Texas.

The original Captain Trips, Jerry Garcia, did not die of any superflu. He died of a broken heart. The world he first perceived on LSD, and then lived, for a time, in the 1960s and 1970s, with every year just kept receding. And so he desultorily stuffed the temple of his body with heroin and nicotine and Taco Bell, until his heart quit, at age 53.

This is what Garcia had seen:

"The information we're plugged into is the universe itself, and everybody knows that on a cellular level. It's built in. Just superficial stuff like what happened to you in your lifetime is nothing compared to the container which holds all your information. And there's a similarity in all our containers. We are all one organism, we are all the universe, we are all doing the same thing. That's the sort of thing that everybody knows, and I think that it's only weird little differences that are making it difficult. The thing is that we're all earthlings. The earthling consciousness is the one that's really trying to happen at this juncture and so far it's only a tiny little glint, but it's already over. The change has already happened, and it's a matter of swirling out. It has already happened. We're living after the fact. It's a postrevolutionary age. The change is over. The rest of it is a cleanup action. Unfortunately it's very slow. Amazingly slow and amazingly difficult."

There is in cookbookery a fair-sized sub-genre that I call English People Who Have Discovered France. England may be known for many things, but food is not one of them. When Mark Bittman compiled his weighty tome The Best Recipes Of The World, more than 1000 dishes were offered, but not one originated in England. They can do cheese in England, but that's about it. Mostly the English just like to boil shit, until well after all the flavor and nutrients are gone. They are inordinately fond of blood, in various forms; atavism traceable to the Vikings (evolved into "Normans") who took over the place in 1066. Vikings pretty much liked eating meat fresh, raw, and steamy, and also came up with "party foods" like svartsoppa, a cauldron of warm pig's blood into which various spices, fruits, bird parts, and strong liquors are heaved. The English also go in for actual obscenities, like the giant quavering zit known as haggis.

Anyway. Occasionally an English person will journey across the Channel into France, and there discover food. Some of these people thereafter seek to make food a regular part of their diet. And some of these are eventually moved to write about it.

One such person is Jenny Baker. In Simple French Cuisine she writes about dishes she discovered in Provence and Languedoc. This is southern France, the France of olive oil, rather than butter. It used to be a quite separate region altogether, with its own language, Occitan, its own customs and costumes and faiths and fables. Fairies, for instance, here are as large as human beings, and live underwater, except when a lovely roams into town to fetch a man. Eleanor of Aquitaine set up her Court of Love here, and from here unleashed the troubadours; most of the best heresies of the Middle Ages were born in this region.

But we're not going to talk about any of that right now. Instead we're going to concentrate on aigo bouido, or Life-Saving Soup With Sage. This is an ancient recipe from the region that Baker includes in her book. The name of the dish is shortened from l'aigo bouido sauvo la vido, or "the life-saving boiling water." It has proven effective against many forms of Captain Trips. It may also be employed against self-inflicted wounds; as Baker puts it, it "restores even the most fragile stomach after a night on the tiles." I'm guessing that the sage is the key: oldsters were pretty much in awe of this herb. Somewhere around here is a book--for the present hopelessly lost--that offers all sorts of fascinating sage lore: for instance, immortality is conveyed if one consumes sage each May.

Aigo bouido is conjured as follows:

1 whole head garlic
1.75 pints water
4 sprigs fresh sage
3 tablespoons olive oil
pinch salt

Separate the garlic into cloves, peel, and crush lightly. Place in a saucepan with the water, sage, olive oil, and salt. Bring to a boil, then simmer briskly for 15 minutes. Remove the sage sprigs. Pour the rest into a bowl for the sufferer; s/he should consume as much as s/he can.

The French are big on pouring soup on bread. If you want to go there, toast a slice or two of bread sprinkled with olive oil, then pour the soup atop that.

That's sort of the pure and chaste version of warding off Captain Trips. If you prefer instead to go after the fellow with a battle-ax--with meat and hot peppers and the like--you can try this thing, which I came up with several years ago, when, beset by Mr. Trips, and, dying, stuck with what happened to be in the kitchen, I survived, after consuming this:

10-ounce can chunk white-meat chicken (in water)
several good jolts of Bufalo chipotle sauce
8 cloves minced garlic
2 minced green onions
1.5-2 quarts homemade chicken stock
4 ounces tiny pasta noodles (letters, stars, etc.)
3 dried chili peppers (the hotter the better) crushed
.25 teaspoon dill seed
.25 teaspoon caraway seed
generous amount fresh-ground black pepper
pinch or two dried sage

Drain the canned chicken. Dump in a skillet. Pound the bottom of the Bufalo chipotle sauce until you've produced enough of the stuff to generously coat the chicken. Add the minced garlic and onion. Briefly warm this stuff on low-medium heat.

Of course in a pot you've meanwhile brought the homemade stock to a boil. If you don't have any homemade stock around, convince somebody who's ambulatory to go down to the store and purchase a couple boxes of low-sodium chicken stock. Slowly simmer the stock, adding the dill, caraway, hot peppers, black pepper, and sage.

You're also of course meanwhile bringing a pot of water to boil, for the pasta. When the water's reached a boil, dump in the pasta and cook for however long the package says. Then drain, and add the pasta to the stock. Add too the warmed chicken/chipotle/garlic/onions. Let simmer all together for about 3 minutes. Then eat it.

What do you all eat, drink, or do, to make Captain Trips go back to his own good hole?

 

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on December 08, 2008 (boomark / email).