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Augustine and attachment.

St. Augustine, in Book 1, Chapter 7, of The Confessions:

Who is there to remind me of the sin of my infancy (for sin there was:  no one is free from sin in your sight, not even an infant...); who can remind me of it?  Some ... tiny child now, in whom I might observe conduct I do not remember in myself?  

What then was my sin at that age?  Was it perhaps that I cried so greedily for those breasts?  Certainly if I behaved like that now, greedy... for food suitable to my age, I should provoke derision and be very properly rebuked.  

My behavior then was equally deserving of rebuke, but since I would not have been able to understand... neither custom nor common sense allowed any rebuke to be given.  

After all, we eradicate these habits and throw them off as we grow up.... so can we suppose that even in an infant such actions were good -- the actions of a child who

• begs tearfully for objects that would harm him if given, 
• gets into a tantrum when [persons] will not comply with his whims, 
• and tries to hurt many people... simply because they will not immediately... obey his commands, commands which would damage him if they were carried out?  

The only innocent feature in babies is the weakness of their frames; the minds of infants are far from innocent.

Yeah, I know.  It grates on me too.  But Augustine's writing about original sin, and that's not something I can reject out of hand.  Let's see what we can do about it.

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It grates because it sounds too hard on the normal, natural instincts of babies.  These are the instincts that drive maternal attachment and are their only means of communicating their needs to the adults that are charged with their care.  Those "greedy" cries are the same cries that stimulate a mother's milk, that activate compassion and an urge to protect the helpless child.  

You read something like that, and you kind of cringe, because someone is bound to take it too far and try to punish babies for crying.  (Though if they do, it's not Augustine's fault:   he approvingly describes parents and nurses who "charm away" and "cheerfully condone" babies' behavior, and says right there that "neither custom nor common sense" allows for a baby to be rebuked.)

Now that we know what we know about the biological basis of human attachment, can we really say that the "greediness" of babies is anything worthy of rebuke, or even that it is a consequence of original sin?

My edition of The Confessions (Ignatius Critical Editions, 2012) has a footnote here:

Critics of Augustine often point out how harsh he is toward babies... The point here, however, is not to condemn children for their seemingly selfish behavior when hungry or tired, but simply to point out that... we are born wholly "I-centered" with only our own interests in mind.  In a very mundane way, this now shows the noxious effects of the concupiscence Adam brought about when he turned himself and all his descendents away from God.  This is why we must learn to "speak" anew, to come to God with desires and intentions not turned in on self but on him.

Just like the parents and nurses Augustine describes, I'm used to treating infants' demands as necessary and natural communication.   So, if it's necessary and natural, how could it also be worthy of rebuke?  (Even if you add a modifier and make it "objectively" worthy of rebuke, the implication being that subjectively -- considering the infant's position -- it is not worthy of rebuke).

Consider this:  the adults who are charged with care of an infant, any infant -- its mother, father, siblings, other members of the household -- are themselves fallen creatures, self-centered, "I"-centered.  Perhaps we could consider the "wholly I-centered" nature of a newborn baby as a defense mechanism against the I-centeredness of adults.  If babies were not so relentlessly demanding, maybe more of them would be left unfed, unwarmed, untouched.  

And that makes it not so odd, then, to turn it around and say:  If adults were not themselves, by nature, "I"-centered, then babies might come programmed with an entirely different set of mechanisms to communicate their needs.  Maybe they wouldn't even need to communicate their needs because adults would provide for them before a need ever made itself known.

It's kind of like pain.  Pain is, we are told, a consequence of original sin.  Pain is objectively bad, but necessary in a world full of hazards; it communicates a bodily need.   So we can listen to it, and often we should immediately do its bidding.  We should be grateful for it, considering the circumstances in which we live.

• Move your hand away from that hot stove.  
• Stop walking and take the thorn from the sole of your foot.   
• Rest this limb until it feels better.

So it is with the "greed" of babies:   a necessary fault, one we should listen to and respond to immediately -- "cheerfully" even -- and be grateful for, considering the circumstances in which we live.

Once man and woman had fallen, maybe we could not have survived unless the most innocent -- those who have that feature, "the weakness of their frames" -- also shared the ability to clamor greedily from the very beginning.   Unless the greediness of the parents is somehow transmitted to the offspring, perhaps the offspring would not have had a chance in a world full of "I"-centered grownups who have the power to provide food and warmth, or to withhold it.

Parents who stay in touch with our babies know that the "greediness" of babies is something they need to have to make their way in the world, and so we respond to it.   We can appreciate the power they have of making their needs known, of drawing us outside of ourselves by clamoring from their own center.  We regard it, properly, as not a bug, but a feature.

A feature, that is, not of the original code, but instead of humanity's "plan B."  O felix culpa!  O happy fault!

Translations.

MrsDarwin is reminiscing about having translated Sartre's Huis Clos (No Exit) in college for a theater production, and I am sharing her distaste for English translations of it.

From her first post:

One thing I noticed quickly was that of the small number of translations I could find, none of them made use of Sartre's own phrasing, so essential in creating from the very first lines the ennui of Hell and the cyclical feel of the plot.

Garcin, il entre et regard autour de lui. -- Alors voila.

Le Garçon. -- Voila.

Garcin. -- C'est comme ça...

Le Garçon. -- C'est comme ça.

Stuart Gilbert's translation starts off:

Garcin [enters, accompanied by the Room-Valet, and glances around him]: Hm! So here we are?

Valet: Yes, Mr. Garcin.

Garcin: And this is what it looks like?

Valet: Yes.

You don't have to know French to see that Gilbert is padding here.

 

Even though I read French pretty well, I sometimes would rather read a work in English translation just so I don't have to work too hard to understand it. Not so with Huis Clos. Maybe it is just because the French isn't very difficult, but I have always found it easier to read in the original -- I encountered it first in the original, and all the English translations bug me because they aren't the play I remember.

MrsDarwin posts a sample of her own translation here. I much prefer it to the one she was working from.

Here is a little Sartre-translation story of my own:

In high school, fourth-year French, we read Sartre's Les Jeux Sont Faits, a novel with themes of powerlessness to change past choices. My teacher (really, a great teacher, one of my best) told us off-hand that the title meant something like "The Game is Up" or "The Jig is Up," but she didn't spend much time on it.

I remember being displeased with that rough translation. I knew from the context, roughly, what the title meant (along the lines of "There's no going back now"). I also recognized that neither "The Game is Up" or "The Jig is Up" really captured that meaning perfectly -- those have connotations of guilty discovery, which is technically a theme in the book but is a minor theme, not really worthy of the title. It bugged me.

This is before Wikipedia and Google, you understand.

Some years later I was watching Casablanca, some scene in the casino; extras, gamblers, placed bets in the background, and the real action was happening between the movie stars in the foreground. I would have to watch it again to find the specific scene. Suddenly my ears pricked up, because in the background the French-speaking roulette croupier was announcing that the time for placing bets was over: "Les jeux sont faits, les jeux sont faits."

I yelped, "So that's what that means!" confusing my companion. That is exactly what the title means. There is no going back now; we will only watch as the ball falls into place, and the table will be divided into winners and losers.

Idioms are fun, but you have to be able to recognize them. Googling the phrase now, I discover that the novel's title has been rendered most often as The Chips Are Down. I don't frequent Las Vegas often enough to know what roulette croupiers say there to stop people from betting as the wheel's turning begins to slow.

 

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If you are looking for spiritual reading during Lent...

...may I suggest you try Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales?

I blogged about it at great length a couple of years ago, and I still think it is wonderful -- astonishingly modern, given when it was written. I particularly recommend the "Everyman's Library" edition that is translated by Father Michael Day. You should look for a translation with a contemporary and conversational tone, because the advice is contemporary and conversational -- avoid a translation that sounds stilted and archaic. If you cannot wait, you can find it online, but believe me, it is worth it to get a contemporary and friendly-sounding translation. St. Francis really deserves it -- he needs to sound as contemporary to us as he would have sounded to the people he spoke with in person.

I recommend, too, either reading the whole thing swiftly (without following any of the advice) to get an overview of the "program" before turning back to digest it more slowly; or else, following the chapters somewhat out of order. There is a clear structure to the book, but a sort of rearrangement of the chapters rings better to the modern ear that is used to self-help books.

Here's my suggestion:

• First, see my post on the overall structure of the book.
• Then, if you like, bookmark my chapter by chapter blog series on it.
• Read part 1, chapters 1 through 3. (One short chapter a day is fine if you want to spread it out.)
• You can skip part 1, chapter 4, unless you are considering getting a spiritual director.
• Read part 1, chapters 5-7. These are more introductory remarks.
• Stop before going on to part 1, chapter 8. Beginning there, you will prepare for a novena of sorts -- nine days, ten meditations. Before reading and especially before trying to follow the advice, I recommend turning ahead to part 2 and going carefully through chapters 1 through 8 in that chapter, taking notes and marking pages. Part 2, chapters 1-8, is a primer on how to pray and meditate, and it will be extremely useful to have read it before beginning the program of prayer that is described in the rest of part 1.
• Now you're going to embark on what I call "St. Francis's Three-Step Program For Getting Rid of Mortal Sin And Attachment To It."
• Step one is to attain perfect contrition. Do this by reading part 1, chapter 8, and then use the ten meditations that follow as a nine-day novena: one meditation per day on the first eight days, and then on the ninth day do the ninth and tenth meditations. While you are doing this, refer to the chapters you have already from part 2 (that is, chapters 1-8 of part 2) if you need to be reminded of St. Francis's method of prayer and meditation.
• Step two is to prepare for, and make, a good confession: a general confession, if possible. (You might want to make an appointment if you think it will be a quite thorough general confession). Prepare for the confession a couple of days ahead with these readings: Part 1, chapter 19; then part 2, chapter 19; then part 1, chapters 20 and 21. (Again, if you are making a thorough general confession, it may be wise to write out the results of your examination of conscience so you can refer to it in the confessional.). Bookmark part 2, chapter 19 for reference in future confessions. Write out a solemn resolution as described in part 1, chapter 20, and bring the resolution with you into the confessional. Make a good confession, accusing yourself directly, simply, and specifically as directed in part 1, chapter 19, and part 2, chapter 19.
• Step three: While still in the confessional, making your Act of Contrition -- in the part where you resolve to amend your life -- refer specifically to that solemn resolution that you wrote out and brought with you. Then, as directed in part 1, chapter 21, receive absolution and then go immediately to an appropriate place of prayer in the church. There, sign and date the resolution, then carry out the penance prescribed for you by the priest in the confessional.
• Finish reading part 1.
• Read the rest of part 2, one bit at a time, and trying to apply his advice in one chapter before moving on to the next: baby steps. These chapters are about everyday prayer and reception of the sacraments. After reading his advice about morning prayer in chapter 10, for example, you might compose a short morning prayer after his method (or choose a traditional formula); write it out; keep it by your bedside; and attempt to pray it for at least a few days before moving on to try the advice about evening prayer in chapter 11. When you get to the chapters about Communion, you might bookmark them and return to them regularly prior to receiving Communion for a while.
• Now you are going to choose just one or two virtues to work on developing in yourself. To discern which virtue you need to work on, first carefully reread part 1, chapters 22-24; then Part 3, chapters 1 and 2.
• Then, quickly and without trying to follow any of the advice in the chapters, read the remaining chapters in part 3 to get an overview of possible virtues that you could choose. I recommend reading the chapters in this order:
• First, a quick reread of chapters 1 and 2, along with 37, 23, and 24. All these deal with how to discern which virtues to focus on, and how to practice the virtues prudently, not to excess.
• Then, the chapters on practicing virtue in everyday life, in this order, taking it in chunks. Again, you are trying to discern which virtue you need to focus on, so don't follow the advice yet, just take it in and consider it. While reading Chapter 3 consider whether you need patience most. While reading chapters 4-7, consider whether you need to strengthen virtue when others are finding fault with you. While reading chapters 8-9, consider whether you need to develop these virtues that help you when faced with faults and frailties in yourself and others. Read chapters 10, 11, and -- note this -- 35, then consider whether you need to develop these virtues concerned with the performance of your duties. Skip to chapters 14-16 and consider whether you need to develop virtues that help you in times of material riches or material poverty. Read chapters 17-22 and consider the role of virtue in your friendships. Return to chapters 12 and 13, then read chapters 38-41, and consider the role of virtues in sexual matters. Finally, read the following chapters that give advice in dealings with society: chapter 25 on dressing attractively, chapters 26-30 on speaking honestly and respectfully, chapters 31-34 on having fun and recreation, and chapter 36 on fairness and reasonableness.
• Choose a virtue, return to the relevant chapter or chapters from part 3, and follow the advice relevant to that virtue alone while continuing to practice the skills taught in part 2 about prayer, meditation, and the sacraments. Do this for as long as it seems to be helping you to develop the virtue and grow in devotion. Give it a little bit of time if you seem to hit a plateau. But when you hit a plateau that seems permanent move on to part 4.
• Part 4 is the "troubleshooting guide" to the devout life. Read it through once quickly, without following any advice, before deciding how to proceed. It might be that you will find one or two chapters somewhere in it that specifically address a problem that you are specifically having, and you can go straight to them and begin following the instructions therein. Or you might decide to go back to the beginning of part 4 and slowly advance through it chapter by chapter, applying the advice in each chapter before moving on to the next, and continuing to try to follow the advice in the chosen chapters of part 3 (not ALL of part 3! Just the ones focused on your specifically chosen virtue!) and the general advice about prayer, meditation, and the sacraments from the chapters of part 2.

I don't include Part 5 in my bulleted list above, because all of Part 5 is an "annual review." You won't need to read it until approximately one year after the date of your signed resolution, or any time you want a "refresher" in the devout life. Or, if you have already gone through the method of the Introduction to the Devout Life, part 5 would make a good study for a spiritual retreat -- or for your Lenten renewal.

 

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The Goodreads 100-book meme.

I'm borrowing this meme from DarwinCatholic, because I haven't managed to post in a couple of days and I feel bad about it.

In the spirit of the 100 book meme, Goodreads has posted a fairly diverse group of novels for its members to rank, drawn from both the most popular and the most highly rated books from its readers' libraries. And in the true internet spirit of borrowing, I've typed up the list for the rest of us to pass around. Goodreads reports that its average user has read 27 out of the 100; I've read 58 (and Darwin has read 31), and I find that most of the ones I haven't are books I've seen around but haven't felt a great compulsion to take and read.

I copied the list from MrsDarwin and highlighted according to my reading history.  Here's my key:

Here's my key.  Note that if I've read it all the way through, it's bolded; if not, it's unbolded.

 

Read it

Read it, returned, re-read it at least once

 I have read it, but I barely remember it

Never read it (asterisk means I started it but didn't finish)

Interested in reading, based on what I know of it

Don't know enough about it to know whether I want to read it or not

• To Kill a Mockingbird
• The Catcher in the Rye
• Fellowship of the Ring
• Pride and Prejudice*
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
• Romeo and Juliet
• Jane Eyre
• 1984
• Hamlet
• The Hobbit
• Brave New World
• The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
• The Great Gatsby
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Fahrenheit 451*
• Wuthering Heights
•  Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• The Secret Garden
• Green Eggs and Ham
• Little Women* (in process of rediscovering by reading to children!)
• Of Mice and Men
• The Handmaid's Tale
• Lord of the Flies
• The DaVinci Code
• Frankenstein
• Dune
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• Gone With The Wind
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
• A Wrinkle in Time
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• Slaughterhouse Five
• Anne of Green Gables
• Twilight
• Where the Sidewalk Ends
• Le Petit Prince 
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• The Princess Bride
• The Picture of Dorian Grey
• The Hunger Games
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Golden Compass
• Dracula
• The Color Purple
• The Kite Runner
• The Odyssey* 
• Anna Karenina*
• And Then There Were None
• Interview with the Vampire
• The Book Thief
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• The Joy Luck Club
• Little House on the Prairie
• The Giver
• Life of Pi
• Rebecca
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes*
• Ender's Game
• A Tale of Two Cities
• L'Étranger
• East of Eden
• Les Miserables
• The Bell Jar
• Lolita
• The Road
• The Time Traveler's Wife
• A Prayer for Owen Meany
• The Stand
• Catch-22
• The Sun Also Rises
• The Pillars of the Earth
• Crime and Punishment
• The Good Earth
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• The Help
• Watchmen
• Lonesome Dove
• Water for Elephants
• Outlander
• American Gods
• The Poisonwood Bible
• My Sister's Keeper
• The Master and Margarita*
• The Notebook
• Like Water for Chocolate
• Beloved
• Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Invisible Man
• A Game of Thrones
• The Fountainhead
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• Ulysses
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
• The Brothers Karamazov
• The House of the Spirits
• Fight Club
• Middlesex
• Interpreter of Maladies

 Any comments, arguments, or willingness to take a stab?

Beer for beginners, part V: Fruity stuff and saison.

(part I, part II, part III, part IV)

Before I get into this, I need to tell you that my drinking has spiralled out of control. Which is to say that I am, in fact, already breaking into the cases of Belgian witbier (aka bière blanche, if you're dealing with the Frenchy sort of Belgium), which is the next thing I want to write about, and I am even starting to attack the oatmeal stout, which is, like, three styles ahead. And I am just now sitting down to write about the Belgian fruited lambic and saison. And I still have one bottle of raspberry lambic in my basement.

Also, I recently discovered gin and tonic. Seriously losing focus here, and I am pretty sure it is not because my eyes are crossing.

So let me just knock this bit out, and then I can get on with the witbier in peace.

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Belgian saison is where my opinions and the opinions of Garrett Oliver, author of The Brewmaster's Table, part company. He is really into them. They are "one of the world's most refreshing and enigmatic beer styles," "light, brisk, refreshing, and sustaining," "some of Belgium's most exciting beers," "truly glorious and endlessly interesting," and "[w]ith food... beyond versatile... virtually invincible."

The style is interesting in that they are traditional farmhouse ales, unfiltered and artisanal, and varying from bottle to bottle. As Belgian beers are wont to do, they carry flavors of spices and citrus peel. They often are sold in Champagne-style bottles complete with cork -- so they might be a fun alternative to expensive French bubbly for your next celebration.

But I don't know -- our bottle of Saison Dupont failed to impress either me or Mark. Maybe I just got a bad bottle, or maybe I didn't match it well, or maybe Mr. Oliver just set up my expectations too high. I just remember finding it kind of boring, and it wasn't cheap either. The people at Beer Advocate like it fine, so maybe I should give it another chance. I almost feel embarrassed saying that I didn't like the stuff, at least not at the $11 price point.

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Fortunately for my perception of Belgium, the next bottle we tried was also from Belgium and not boring in the least. It left me wondering aloud, "This? This counts as a beer? Impossible!"

What left me so incredulous was Brouwerij Lindemans Framboise. This is a sweet fruited lambic beer. Lambics are not always fruited, by the way; they are a traditional style that is fermented with wild yeast and bacteria, sort of like old-fashioned sourdough bread. I don't know what they taste like, I still haven't had any plain lambic yet. I have not seen any in the beer store.

But I did see the Lindemans Framboise, and carried it home along with some kriek. The fruited lambics get a secondary fermentation on cherries or raspberries -- sometimes whole fruit, sometimes purée or juice. Oliver writes, "The result was a stronger, transformed beverage that sat squarely on the border between wine and beer."

We poured the framboise into champagne flutes and admired its beautiful rosy color. It tasted jammy and sweet and tart at the same time. It tasted kind of crazy, to be frank. Soda-pop, with an alcoholic kick.

I think I would rather have it than almost any dessert wine that I can afford to buy regularly (I have had luxurious ports and eisweins and muscats and the like, sure, but I think of them as special-occasion wines, not something to keep always on hand). The book says it goes well with cheesecake, and I had managed to procure some for the occasion -- indeed it did. On another occasion we tried the kriek. It was also fruity, tart and sweet.

I would recommend trying one of these to anyone. They are just so over-the-top -- and they don't taste very much like beer. They taste more like sweet bubbly fruity wine. I don't want to think too much about whether it proves that I don't know much about beer, that I liked this frothy sweet stuff. I bet it isn't for everyone. But you won't know until you try it.

I still have one bottle left to try, of an American kriek -- Wisconsin brewery New Glarus's Wisconsin Belgian Red, which proclaims that each 750 mL bottle contains one pound of Montmorency cherries. I am waiting for an evening in which we can kill a bottle without regretting it in the morning.

 

Mad dogs and humans.

Interesting article about rabies, which until recently was 100% fatal in symptomatic humans -- maybe -- and the story of the last-ditch desperate cure that seems to work -- maybe.

There is something very compelling about the narrative, in which a physician who is completely inexperienced in rabies treatment, but faced with a young doomed patient, buries his nose in the books and comes up with a Crazy Idea That Just Might Work:

[T]oday, after millennia of futility, hospitals have an actual treatment to try. It was developed in 2004 by a pediatrician in Milwaukee named Rodney Willoughby, who, like the vast majority of American doctors, had never seen a case of rabies before. (In the US, there are usually fewer than five per year.) Yet Willoughby managed to save a young rabies patient, a girl of 15, by using drugs to induce a deep, week-long coma and then carefully bringing her out of it. It was the first documented case of a human surviving rabies without at least some vaccination before the onset of symptoms. Soon Willoughby posted his regimen online, and he worked with hospitals around the world to repeat and refine its use. Now referred to as the Milwaukee protocol, his methodology has continued to show limited success: Of 41 attempts worldwide, five more patients have pulled through...

Even though his specialty was infectious disease, Willoughby knew almost nothing about rabies. “For the board exams,” he says, “you only needed to know one thing: that it was 100 percent fatal.” He telephoned the CDC to ask if there was any treatment somewhere in the research pipeline—some promising new therapy, perhaps, not yet published in any medical journal. The CDC had nothing. Not one person had ever been shown to survive rabies without having gotten at least partial vaccination before the virus reached the brain.

With less than a day to formulate a plan, Willoughby attacked the problem with quick but deliberate reading, using his limited time to review the basic neuroscience of rabies.

...Willoughby laid out a last-ditch idea, the surprising result of his day of reading and thinking. The solution, he says in retrospect, had been “hiding in plain sight.”

A pretty exciting story, but one that still remains largely unconfirmed by fundamental research. The article details some of the objections that have been raised by researchers. Still, when you are dealing with "100% fatal," it becomes much more attractive to try the untested.

On the same topic: I heard on NPR a week or two ago that there is a new nonfiction book out on rabies, called Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus. It sounded good, but I have to get in line for a copy at the library. The authors are a husband-and-wife team (he's a journalist, she's a veterinarian). I am looking forward to it, when I move to the head of the line.

I am really in the mood to read something fluffy and light, which for me means "almost anything nonfiction." I just barely managed to finish Kristin Lavransdatter in time to return it to the library before it went overdue, and while I enjoyed the book, it exhausted me as epic multigenerational literature tends to do. If it were not for the patronymics I would never have been able to keep track of everyone, but at least since I always had a clue as to whose daughter or son everybody was (Kristin is Lavrans's daughter, get it?), I didn't fall very far behind.

Anyway, after having struggled through Kristin (a book which, at least, got better and more gripping the deeper I got into it), I polished off the deeply weird nonfiction book The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson in a matter of hours. This is part nonfiction and part introspection, a book about psychopathology and mental illness -- or maybe it is more about the author's investigation into psychopathology, since Ronson injects all kinds of commentary about his interviewees and his own reactions to them throughout the book. The style is mildly self-deprecating, and Ronson depicts himself as sort of star-struck by the people he is interviewing -- he is forever being amazed that he has managed to score the interviews with this eminent researcher or that institutionalized criminal or this other possibly psychopathic CEO -- and somewhere in the middle of the book I began to be convinced that the style was really just an act meant to guide the reader to conclusions about the interviewees. (Namely, that maybe the psychiatrists who study psychopathology are sometimes themselves psychopaths.)

I think I will stop here before anyone draws any conclusions about the fact that I suggested books about rabies and psychopaths as beach reads. Ahem.

Beer for beginners, part IV: Porter, pilsner and not-quite-pilsner.

(part I, part II, part III)

The next time I went to the beer store, I took with me an index card with a list of porters and pilsners.  This turned out to be a bit of a funny combination, because they are, of course, very different styles of beer.  On the other hand, it was a nice pair to have in the house, because between the two of them they cover a lot of ground.  After all, I was checking these off my list of versatile beers.  Porter is said to be good with roasted or smoked food, sausages, blackened fish, meatloaf, steak, and (intriguingly) brownies or vanilla ice cream.  Pilsner is supposed to go with Indian or Vietnamese or Thai food, tinned sardines or kippers, salmon, shrimp, caviar, proscuitto or other ham, and mixed hors d'oeuvres. 

+ + + 

Porter first.

I came home with Samuel Smith's Taddy Porter and Fuller's London Porter, which are both brewed in the UK.  Little did I know that, at least according to the folks at Beer Advocate, I was carrying home excellent examples of the style.  I liked it:  sweeter, deeper, not hoppy; and Mark did too.  We compared them, and decided that Samuel Smith's is rounder, and Fuller's dryer; I liked Samuel Smith's, but it's more expensive. 

That was all well and good and I was ready to check "porter" off my list, but we had one more thing to try:  this notion that porter was a perfect match for vanilla ice cream.  "We have some in the freezer," I said.  "Let's try it."

"Weird," said Mark.  "It's like the beer milkshake in Travels with Charley."

I scooped a bowl of our ordinary grocery-store vanilla ice cream for each of us and opened one of the bottles of the Fuller's, pouring it between two jelly glasses.  We took a bite of ice cream and washed it down with a sip of beer and went:

"WOW."

This was, to put it bluntly, a revolution.  The stuff went with vanilla ice cream the way that good strong espresso does, or hot fudge sauce.  Amazing.  It didn't take long for us to polish it off. 

The next time, we experimented with a one-vessel version:  we made a porter-ice cream float, and a porter affogato (affogato is something you usually do with espresso -- you pour it over vanilla ice cream and eat it with a spoon).  The porter-ice cream float was prettier in the glass (WATCH OUT FOR THE HEAD) but it felt like the beer-to-ice-cream ratio was too high.  We liked the affogato better -- maybe even more than the espresso kind, as it doesn't melt the ice cream as fast.

I'm telling you, the porter affogato is your next fancy-but-super-easy summer dessert.   The only thing it lacks is an appropriate garnish to make up for how ugly it is in the bowl.  Maybe a good English shortbread cookie would do the trick.  

+ + +

The pilsners we brought back were basic examples of the style:  Pilsner Urquell (which is sort of the "original" pilsner) and Summit Pilsener, which is local and therefore fairly easy to find around here, sometimes at a discount or as part of a sampler pack.  I was familiar with the pilsner style and have had both beers before, but we wanted to compare them.  Both are good, and in fact they were very similar, but I thought Urquell was a little bit better.  Possibly I would not have been able to tell the difference had it been a blind tasting.

On a second trip we brought home a single bottle of Czechvar, which is what the Czech Budweiser brewery has to call its Budvar when it sells it in the United States (go figure).  We decided it was fine but with so many pilsners out there, we would not seek it out again.  

That same trip, Mark pointed out a variety 12-pack from Spaten, a Munich-based brewery whose beers are widely distributed in the United States.  "This has a hefeweizen in it -- Franziskaner Weissbier -- and it's on sale."   We took it home and decided it was indeed a good find.  It also included the doppelbock Optimator, another nice beer.  (I'm not ready to study doppelbocks yet, so I simply considered it a nice preview of the style.  Trying to focus here.)

More interestingly for my purposes, the box included four bottles of Munich Premium Lager, which at first we took to be a type of pilsner.   The Brewmaster's Table reviews it in the same section as pilsners.  But on additional research, we realized that it is not a pilsner, but a related type called Helles, aka Munich Lager.  I was interested, because it reminded me of one of my favorite beers I'd had in the past few months, the local craft brew Hell from the deservingly trendy Twin Cities outfit, Surly Brewing.  (The name is a pun:  Surly's other beers have names like Furious and Cynic and Abrasive and Schadenfreude, and of course "hell" is German for "light" and the name of the style "helles" is related.)

Surly Hell is supposed to be not a helles but a Zwickel, which is a bit hoppier, but there's a lot of overlap in the classification, and in any case the world of Helles/Zwickel/Keller biers is distinct from the world of pilsners.  After a few evenings spent in the company of Spaten Munich Premium Lager, plus a little Hell, I decided that Helles lager is the pilsner I've been waiting for my whole life.  

And although that is not, on the whole, particularly insightful, I was excited to learn it.  First of all, it counts as something I've really learned, giving me so far two new things I didn't know before:

1. Porter + vanilla ice cream = YUM
2. When it comes to clear yellow beer, forget the pilsner and give me a Munich-style helles lager. 

Second of all, since it's more obscure, it now gives me something to say whenever I want to sound like a genuine beer snob.  "Oh, I drink a pilsner now and then, but I much prefer the Munich breweries' take on that basic style."  

I am planning to print out a list of top Helles lagers and carry it around for future reference.  You never know what you might meet in a restaurant.

Next up:  Belgian fruited lambic and saison.

It's all Greek to an optical character recognition program. Well, Greek is, anyway.

A couple of days ago Melanie commented that she'd gotten a weird image in the anti-spam verification box here:

Seriously, my first captcha had Greek letters! I don't know how to do that on my keyboard. Was I supposed to transliterate to English?

I've never seen Greek letters, but the question led me to idly click around to find out exactly what the captcha program, which is called reCAPTCHA, is doing.  I had a vague memory that it was supposed to be using the human entries to digitize scanned content, but I didn't know how it worked and had wondered:  if the content hasn't been digitized yet, how does it know if your entry is correct?

The explanation is on the reCAPTCHA website and also in a 2008 article that appeared in Science (pdf), and it explains why you get two words.  

• One of the two words is already known to the software, and it serves as the shibboleth that proves you are human (which lets you post your comment) and verifies that you can probably decipher a distorted word in print. 
• The other word is unknown to the software and represents a part of a scanned document that optical character recognition (OCR) has failed to decode satisfactorily. 

Or, as the reCAPTCHA people put it,  

Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

There, isn't that interesting?  And this explains how Greek letters made it in, probably via one of the unknown words:  the reason OCR couldn't recognize it wasn't because it was distorted, but because it was in the Greek alphabet.

Beer for beginners, part II.

part I is here.

So one of the first things I did as I read through The Brewmaster's Table, taking notes, was to try to get a handle on the "family tree" of beers, so to speak -- all the classifications and sub classifications.

It started out fairly simple, with the world of Lambic:

Then things got a little more interesting, when I turned to the chapter on Wheat Beer:

But then I turned to the chapter on the British Ale Tradition, and my family tree sprouted suckers all over the place:

 

Let's just say that things didn't get any simpler when I got to Belgium. I have a few more pages like this.

This was all very overwhelming. I got myself a lab notebook:

I made myself a little Beerwatching List, so I could check off each variety as we tried at least one bottle of each:

But it was still kind of overwhelming, with 59 different kinds of beer, and that doesn't even count the fact that you can generally buy more than one brewery's version of each sort of beer.

Clearly I needed to prioritize.

After fussing around a bit considering what made the most sense (start with easy-to-find and move towards rarer? Tote the notebook to restaurants and order the most obscure draft beer on the menu every time? Geographical organization?) I decided to start with the most useful beers, by which I mean the beers that were listed in the book as being quite versatile and going with a lot of different kinds of food. Theoretically, from among that set we would find something that we wanted to keep in the fridge all the time.

The Brewmaster's Table has a handy lookup table to answer the question, "What should I drink with my food?" Conversely, one can use this really cool pairing chart to answers the inverse question, "What should I eat with my beer?" Turning back and forth between the two and taking notes, I came up with the following list of "Beers that supposedly go with lots of stuff:"

1. Hefeweizen
2. English-style porter
3. Belgian saison
4. Pilsner
5. Helles
6. Vienna lager
7. American pale ale
8. American amber lager
9. Altbier

Ah, nine. What a nice short list to start with. Much better than 59.

 

Mind you, these aren't "beers that go with everything," they are just "beers that showed up a lot in the list of food pairings." Whatever. I went with it.

 

Tune in next time and I will regale you with Adventures in Hefeweizen. Hint for fellow northern plains staters: Not at all like Leinie's Honey Weiss.

 

Beer for beginners.

This post also functions as a test of the Blogsy app to post from the iPad.

I grew up (part-time anyway) in a wine-drinking house. From the time I was sixteen I was allowed a glass by my plate at dinner, and always some of the dinner conversation was devoted to the bottle on the table, where it came from, who recommended it, and always how well it matched with the food. I like to think I picked up at least a working understanding of wine-and-food matching there in my dad's kitchen, and I usually still don't make any gross errors when choosing a glass of wine in a restaurant. Although I am a bit rusty, as I will explain.

I was only of legal age to buy alcohol for three years before I got married, and of course I didn't buy many bottles while I was living on my own. When Mark and I married, we spent part of our honeymoon skiing and part touring the Sonoma wine country. When I came home and found myself browsing Surdyk's to put together a little bottle collection, I became aware of a rather steep mismatch between my appreciation training and my grocery budget. Also, the layout of Surdyk's emphasized a major tradeoff that had never really been apparent at home: the more expensive wine I bought, the less cheese I would be able to eat.

I always keep a couple of "good" bottles around just in case, and a bottle or two of bubbly in the fridge. But the short version of the long story: I learned to drink cheap (well, good-value) wine and like it.

Anyway, I sort of missed the whole serious wine-food-matching snobbery thing, because it's fun. We have a bit more disposable income now, and I suppose I could have started buying more expensive wine, but old habits die hard. I am not a penny pincher by any means, but when I heft a $30 bottle, I can hear a little voice whispering in my ear: "you can feed your whole family of six for this money at the family restaurant around the corner, the one with the $1.00 pie special."

Enter beer. Beer has a lot going for it. Let's review:

• You can buy really great beer for a fraction of the cost-per-serving of upper-middle-class wine.
• It usually comes in smaller containers, meaning that there aren't leftovers oxidizing in your fridge all the time, and it is always worth opening a container even for one person.
• It often (not always) has lower alcohol content, so you can enjoy a flight without necessarily landing under the table, and that is particularly good if you are a lightweight like me.
• There's plenty of variety to explore, both locally and globally.
• Some kinds of food match better with beer than with wine.

And finally -- I didn't actually know much about beer, let alone about beer-food matches, so I would get to learn about it. To tell you the truth, I didn't really know the meaning of words like "lager" and "porter" and "ale" and "stout." I could recognize a pilsener and that was about it. I could identify a few specific local beers I liked, and I knew I did not like the bitter IPAs with which Mark filled our fridge, but other than that I didn't have a working knowledge even of my own taste. I decided I needed to rectify this situation. And for this.... I needed a BOOK.

 

The trip to the beer store would have to wait. I must first acquire the theoretical underpinnings, and then move on to the practical applications.

 

The book I chose was The Brewmaster's Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food by Garrett Oliver. It proved to be a good basic introduction to the world of beer.

 

It begins with a basic overview of how breweries produce the different kinds, what the various ingredients do to the product, and a history of the developments in beer-brewing. There is also a basic explanation of the principles involved in matching beers to food -- the basic equivalent of knowing whether to choose red or white, demi-sec or dry, when you select a wine to go with your dinner. In that chapter, by the way, he argues that it's much easier to match beer than wine to your food, because there aren't really any foods that clash with every beer the way that some foods fight with any wine you want to pair it with -- eggs, vinaigrette salad dressings, certain desserts.

 

Then it goes on to describe different "brewing traditions" around the world, each tradition divided up into specific styles, explaining what sort of food each goes with, and recommending individual beers that are good representatives of the styles. As a beer novice hoping to learn about the world of beer, this was exactly what I needed. Mark and I began working through the book immediately. (I'll write another post telling you about our process, which has only just begun.)

 

The "brewing traditions" chapters in the book, by the way, are lambic, wheat beer, British-style ales, Belgian-style ales, and Czech-German lagers, plus a chapter on American craft beers and one that pulls together three "unique specialties" (altbier, Kölsch, and smoked beers, in case you are curious) that don't fit into the other categories. Each chapter covers several styles: for example, the lager chapter has sections on pilsner, helles, Dortmunder export, dark (dunkel) lager, Vienna/märzen/Oktoberfest lagers, bock/doppelbock, and schwarzbier.

 

The book finishes up with a few short notes on glassware and serving temperature, neither of which we have bothered with much yet, except to note that if we decided to buy special beer-tasting glassware, a lot of the different shapes can be found at IKEA.

 

I will post later on what we have learned so far (some) and what we still have left to learn (a lot). For the time being, I will just note that as self-improvement projects go, you could certainly find many that are less fun than resolving to drink better beer.