Debbie Harry by Andy Warhol.
 
On December 8th, 1977, Blondie were set to make their first appearance in Brisbane, Australia. But the show didn’t go on as scheduled, and it would become known as the only show the band would be forced to cancel. In Australia, Blondie’s first record, Blondie was a huge hit, and fans were rabid as they waited at Her Majesty’s Theater, a former opera house, for the band to take the stage. And, as the title of this post indicates pretty clearly, that never happened. Here’s the story about how Debbie Harry’s alleged overindulgence on a fruit close to my heart, cherries, resulted in a good-old-fashioned punk rock riot.

As the story goes, the turnout for the show was about 1200 strong. After waiting around an hour for the show to start, drummer Clem Burke came out on stage to personally apologize to the crowd, letting them Blondie wouldn’t be able to play because Deborah Harry was “ill.” The cause of Harry’s illness was blamed on the singer eating too many cherries, and was apparently so acute a doctor was dispatched to the theater to treat the ailing singer. Ray Maguire, the band’s road manager, would later make a curious statement supporting the cherry-theory:

“In New York, we don’t see very much fruit, but out here, we’ve been going mad on it. I think that Deborah just had a few too many cherries over the last few days.”

I don’t know about you, but I had no idea there was some sort of fresh fruit crisis going on in New York in the 1970s. Anyway, after apologizing to the crowd, Burke was loudly booed and pelted with an object thrown by someone in the audience. As bottles and cans started to fly at the stage, Burke made a hasty exit while local Brisbane punk band The Survivors (known initially as Rat Salad, just like Van Halen) were begging show promoters to let them play. Some attendees started to leave while a group of five tried to get on stage and ended up throwing their fists at members of Blondie’s road crew. The fisticuffs continued backstage as crew members battled to eject the punchy fans, a few who were arrested by the police.

Meanwhile, other angry ex-Blondie fans somehow managed to remove a huge iron gate and iron bar from the premises and using their makeshift weapons to try to bust open the door. They were eventually able to hurl the iron bar over an opening at the top of the door, where it nearly landed on top of fans trying to leave what was pretty much a riot in progress. A riot attributed to an unnamed, unemployed twenty-year-old youth and three minors charged with willful destruction of property. The youngsters were tried in Children’s Court.
 

An article in the Telegraph describing the riot at Her Majesty’s Theater.
 
In a fantastic twist to this story, Australian writer and culture vulture Clinton Walker (author of many books, including the incredible biography on Bon Scott, Highway to Hell: the Life and Death of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott) literally had a front-row seat when the riot began and, according to Walker, his pal Bob Farrell (later of the band Laughing Clowns) was one of the kids who stormed the stage. In Walker’s account of the riot, cherries were perhaps not to blame for Harry’s illness, but instead the ingestion of potent Australian heroin. The acclaimed author admits it was a “scurrilous” thing to say, but confirms it to be very much a part of the mythology behind the cancelation of Blondie’s first gig in Brisbane. Walker was also at the poorly attended make-up show ten days later on December 18th at Her Majesty’s Theater, where the band concluded their set by smashing up their instruments. Nice.
 

Blondie live at CBGB’s in May of 1977.

 
Did you know that the banana was a berry? Yep. Me neither. I also had zero clue that the US was gifted the concept of fish sticks from the Soviet Union as a post-war food. I mean—seriously—what? After reading Christina Ward’s thoroughly enjoyable and informative book American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Spam, Bananas and Jell-O, I have now realized that the sum total of what I knew about food history before I encountered this volume could have fit neatly inside a deviled egg.
 

 
From wealthy people renting exotic fruit like pineapples (before pineapples were readily available) as a dinner table centerpiece to flaunt their class status, to kitchen technology, diet recipes and the development and evolution of canned and potted meats, this book covers a variety of topics that handle far more than “what’s on the plate.” More often than not, Ward’s book is a textbook of incisive connections between invisible or overlooked histories and what is now commonly considered kitsch imagery.
 

 
Each chapter of American Advertising Cookbooks is different and equally rewarding. From the design of the book to the writing and image content, it never fails to educate and entertain in tandem. Images of a recipe for “SPAM ‘n’ Macaroni Loaf” and advertisements for a 1969 Pillsbury meat cookbook are delightfully placed perfectly next to chunks of text discussing the government’s Meat Inspection Act and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, allowing the reader to gain insight and react to the dark humor.

To authentically work with content that a younger generation might adore for a “so bad it’s good” angle or for its camp possibilities is not easy, but this book does it gracefully and with a level of respect for the topic that is obvious. Works like these are harder as many tend to go for the easy laugh or quick sell based on surface nostalgia. Ward’s attitude towards this material is wholly different and that is what makes this book so brilliant. She skillfully places dozens upon dozens of beautifully printed “weirdo” images into historical context giving Ham Banana rolls, Piquant Turkey Loaf and Perfection Salad a whole new life!
 

 
Foods that modern audiences no longer consume in large (or any) quantities like packaged meats and gelatins make them seem very foreign. But today’s food preservation techniques are different. Hey, refrigeration, what’s up? Indeed, many people I’ve met may think aspics look disgusting. I honestly looked at many of these images and saw so much art and dignity put forth in their representation. While this wasn’t something actively discussed, there is no way that one could view all these images and not see people trying to make these dishes look appetizing. Sure, Creative Cooking with Cottage Cheese may not have the same appeal as watching Anthony Bourdain but the Up North Salmon Supper looks really good. And there is something to be said about class aesthetics here. The idea of a home-cooked meal and working-class values is something that Christina Ward most certainly focuses on in the writing, making this book extra gratifying to some of us old school class-consciousness punk activist-y types!

If the mind-blowing plethora of elegant and fastidiously researched recipes, adverts and book covers seems odd or silly to a reader, they are clearly not looking at what a quality piece of literature this book is. Ward’s thorough research, accessible discussions on colonialism, Puritan and Calvinist practices, racism as a marketing ploy (Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben anyone?), and the Christian Missionary connection to, well, fruit make American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Spam, Bananas and Jell-O a necessary addition to anyone’s library who is interested in food, US history, social politics or simply a damn good book.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
The bad news first: the episode of Boy George’s nineties talk show Blue Radio on which Poly Styrene appeared, though she said she almost didn’t make it because of a close encounter with a spaceship, has not yet entered the worldwide digital video stream. Pair that with Lora Logic singing “Bow Down Mister” and you’ve got yourself the beginnings of a quality Dangerous Minds post!

But while scouring the intertubes in search of material for the Boy George/X-Ray Spex/Hare Krishna ultramegapost already inked in the book of my dreams, I came across this curiosity. Half of Meathead is like every other animal rights movie you’ve ever seen—emetic camcorder tape of fowl, ruminants, canines and hogs trudging through their relatives’ offal in cramped pens, proceeding inevitably toward the animal-snuff-film equivalent of the money shot—but half of it is a black-and-white narrative about a rich guy with an insatiable hunger for gore, fed by his maid (Lene Lovich) and a hamburger-juggling clown (Captain Sensible). If you make it to the end without hurling all over your keyboard, you’ll see Boy George’s interview with director Gem de Silva. Beware: you may blow chunks.

Never having listened to Captain Sensible’s 1995 double album Meathead, I can’t say if the connection between the CD and the film extends beyond a shared disgust with flesh food. But I guarantee the film is much shorter.
 
Watch it, after the jump…

 
I wish I’d paid more attention in religious ed. class as I’m sure some ancient dude in the Bible said something about one of the signs of the End of Days was the turning of pizza into cake. I could be wrong but along with the prophecies of plagues of locusts, autotune ruining music, and a belligerent orange cartoon character in the White House, I guess it seems about right.

So, behold, ye non-believers, the Pizza Cake.

This savory-looking confection is the tasty handiwork of Natalie and Dave Sideserf of Sideserf Cakes from Austin, Texas. You may have seen this couple on TV making their very fancy cake designs featuring the likes of decapitated heads or Ninja Turtles or rainbow-farting unicorns. Or possibly you’ve seen some of their fine work on DM. Now this talented couple may have fulfilled some ancient prophecy by creating the Pizza Cake.

If you want to know how to make it then follow the instructions in the video below. Suffice to say, it involves an oblong slice of sponge, some orange-colored butter icing, some more white icing, some food dyes, and a lot of patience to create and paint the pepperoni and tomato sauce (which is actually jam and cake crumbs) topping. The end result will certainly satisfy those who can’t get enough pizza or cake in their lives.
 

 
H/T Geekologie.
 

via Zero Equals Two

A couple weeks ago, Vince Clarke from Depeche Mode, Yazoo, and Erasure stopped by the set of Extra Crispy, Time, Inc.‘s “digital editorial brand dedicated to obsessively documenting breakfast, brunch and the culture surrounding it all.” He charmed them silly while fixing beans on toast, a dish he touts as nutritious (?), inexpensive, and good for a hangover. (On the road, Vince apparently makes a hell of a grilled cheese sandwich with the hotel room iron, too.)

The Guardian reports this is nine out of ten Britons’ “preferred way to enjoy beans.” In the U.S. of A., we use a hose and a funnel, so I’m curious about these here beans prepared in le style anglais I heard tell of oncet or twicet; it is said that one eats them with one’s mouth.

The ingredients: sharp cheddar, Irish butter, well-done toast, and Heinz baked beans. The equipment: butter knife, can opener, cheese grater, saucepan, toaster, stove, broiler. Where’s my bottle of HP Sauce? Where’s my button that calls the paramedics?
 

 
H/T Zero Equals Two

Paul Bowles in Fez, 1947

Paul Bowles’ contribution to The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook appeared under “Jams, Jellies and Confections,” opposite Robert Graves’ recipe for Sevillian yellow plum conserve. In it, Bowles explained how the people of Fez make one of his favorite treats: majoun keddane, a kind of jam that requires some dates, figs, walnuts, honey, spices, butter, and wheat, and at least two pounds of cannabis.

Embedded in this recipe was another, for an even more exotic and labor-intensive Moroccan dish called Beid El Beita F’kerr El Hmar. This was a kind of breakfast recipe said to bestow magical powers:

Buy an egg. Find a dead donkey, and the first night lodge the egg in its anus. The second night the egg must be put into a mousehole on top of a Moslem tomb. The third night it must be wrapped in a handkerchief and tied around the chest of the person desiring to perform the magic. The following day it must be given for breakfast, prepared in any fashion, to the other individual, who, immediately upon eating it, discovers that the bestower is necessary for his happiness. (Or her happiness; the sex of the two people seems to have nothing to do with the charm’s efficacy.)

More after the jump…

 
During the mid-Seventies, when David Bowie subsisted on a diet of cow’s milk and cocaine, one of his favorite books was Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defense. It’s an instruction manual by a major-league Golden Dawn magician for diagnosing and guarding against attacks by other sorcerers.

Marc Spitz’s biography points out how one part of Bowie’s coke-and-milk diet violated a basic tenet of Dion Fortune’s program (“Keep away from drugs”), but the magician probably would have nixed the other staple, too. She didn’t invent soymilk, but she played an important role in its history as an advocate and experimenter. During World War I, while working in a laboratory for the Food Production Department of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fortune apparently discovered a means of making soymilk, as well as a method of turning it into soy cheese. In 1925, writing under her birth name, Violet Mary Firth, she published a book on the subject, The Soya Bean: An Appeal to Humanitarians.
 

David Bowie, 1969 (Photo by Brian Ward)
 
While I haven’t gotten my hands on a copy yet, a volume called History of Soymilk and Other-Non Dairy Milks (1226-2013) reproduces the table of contents and some of the foreword. Part I considers the ethical reasons to avoid animal products (chapter three: “Milk Is Not A Humane Food”), and Part II describes the wondrous properties of the soybean. She argues that commercial solutions to the problem of animal exploitation are more effective than “individual abstention from flesh-food.” The foreword begins:

The manufacture of a vegetable milk from the soya bean is a matter in which I was much interested during the war, and I think I may claim to be the first person, in this country at any rate, who succeeded in making a cheese from vegetable casein.

In Sane Occultism, however, Dion Fortune cautions against making “a religion” out of vegetarianism and says the practice is not for everyone, so maybe she would have just advised Bowie to lay off the yayo and put a few more sandwiches in his diet. Below, the Thin White Duke guzzles lowfat milk from the carton in a scene from Cracked Actor. (Maybe someday John Oswald will get around to making a Plunderphonics version called Lactose Cracker.)
 

 
La Jolla potatoes are no longer on the menu at Chez Jay, looks like, but patrons used to chow down on this dish cooked up by owner Jay Fiondella and his quondam roommate, Leonard Nimoy. The L.A. Times:

“Star Trek’s” Leonard Nimoy, with whom Fiondella roomed in the 1950s, helped him create what became a signature dish: La Jolla potatoes, a melange of mashed potatoes, bananas and cheese.

What did Nimoy contribute to the recipe? The bananas? The cheese? The garlic? The mashing? The browning? The “textural contrast”? I put it to you that, as Americans, we have not only the freedom, but the duty to investigate these questions. For as Leonard himself reminds us in a penetrating study of the Bermuda Triangle: “To say, in essence, that science need not investigate is to destroy the rationale for any scientific quest.”
 

Chez Jay in Santa Monica (via TripAdvisor)

 
This recipe for La Jolla potatoes from L.A.‘s Legendary Restaurants serves six:

8 x 8-inch baking pan, buttered
2 lbs. russet potatoes, peeled and cut into large chunks
2 larges cloves of garlic, minced
2 tbsp. unsalted butter
1½ cups half-and-half
2 tsp. salt
½ tsp. freshly ground black pepper
2 large, ripe bananas, peeled and sliced
4 oz. Jarlsberg or Gruyère cheese, grated

1. Preheat the oven to 350ºF.
2. In a large pot of salted water, boil the potatoes until just tender (about 15 minutes). Drain into a colander and allow the potatoes to steam for 5 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, wipe out the pot, add the garlic and butter and return to the heat. Allow the garlic to turn golden, then add the half-and-half, salt, pepper, bananas, and potatoes.
4. Using a hand masher, roughly mash the potato mixture. You want to have a textural contrast of smooth and rough pieces. Season to taste, then transfer the potatoes to the baking pan and top with the grated cheese. Place in the oven to heat through and brown the cheese, about 15 minutes.
5. Serve at once or set the oven at 200ºF and keep warm until ready to serve.

Heavy cream, salt, cheese, starch and butter are the fuel that keeps healthy bodies frugging to “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” all day long. Live long et cetera.

 
For the benefit of future generations, the 1988 cookbook Rock ‘N’ Roll Cuisine collected the recipes for Rod Stewart’s “SANDWHICH [sic] FOR HANGOVER,S [sic],” George Michael’s risotto, Ian Astbury’s “dangerously spicy” chickpeas, Debbie Harry’s nutty shrimp, Ozzy’s chicken curry, and so on.

Ronnie James Dio’s contribution, set in blackletter type, was something like the bill of fare for a feudal baron’s Christmas feast: roast suckling pig with bread sauce, served with cups from the wassail bowl. Not just any wassail bowl, either, but “The Wassail, prepared by Charles Dickens for the entertainment, on Christmas Eve, at the Charity of Richard Watts, Rochester, Kent, England, 1854.” People needed this kind of hot, sugary booze back then. I bet a few good slugs out of this here wassail bowl could make a person forget all about the symptoms of smallpox, typhus and the measles, not to mention the cares of the 10-hour factory shift.

Wassail Bowl

1 quart ale
1/4 ounce ground nutmeg
1/4 ounce grated ginger
1/4 ounce grated cinnamon
1/2 bottle sherry
2 slices toasted bread (1/2 inch thick)
1 lemon, juice & peel
sugar to taste
2 well-baked apples

Put ale in sauce pan and cook gently till it foams, then stir in the spices, add the sherry, lemon peel and juice with sugar. When sugar is dissolved, set pan aside on stove for twenty minutes to infuse. Then warm up, pour into punch bowl, let the toast and apples float in this and serve in cups.

Continues after the jump…

Johnny Cash is all of us this holiday season. Drunk, hiding in the bushes and eating cake.
 
On average, people gain anywhere between seven to ten pounds over the holiday season. The annual feeding frenzy is now in full swing ready to send our cholesterol into outer space while we simultaneously pour all kinds of delicious booze all over our livers. While I love pie and bourbon just as much as anyone else, I also like to cook so I thought it would be fun to share some fun celebrity recipes from yesteryear.

Most of the recipes below were published in the 1978 charity cookbook, Habilitat’s Celebrity Cookbook, 1930’s What Actors Eat When They Eat, and 1981’s Celebrity Cookbook. I’ve included a nice selection of recipes shared by icons such as Cary Grant’s barbequed chicken, Boris Karloff’s guacamole (which calls for sherry mind you), and Johnny Cash’s “Old Iron Pot” family style chili. The majority of the recipes are of the traditional variety—such as beef stew and meatloaf, though there are a few curve balls. Like Bette Davis’ “Mustard Gelatin Ring” which sounds about as appetizing as the rat she served to Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), and actress Bea Arthur’s fancy-sounding “Avocado with Jellied Madrilene.” For those of you who lack Arthur’s gastronomical refinement, madrilene is a cold tomato consommé. Check them all out below!
 

 

 

 
Many more after the jump…