December 12, 2024 : A Tipsy-Woozy Holiday Respite
A TIPSY-WOOZY HOLIDAY RESPITE
“Okay, so, I have a 13th century Syrian saddle bag fruit beer fermenting in my closet,” our friend Claudia was telling us the other day. “I don’t think it’s going to taste very good; but I’m excited to confirm my suspicion.” (By Claudia, I mean the polymathic DC-based marvel Claudia Shrivastava; and by “us,” I mean my daughter Sara and me, since Claudia started out as a friend of Sara’s but has since become fond pals with our entire family—both her and her cringingly adorable naked mole cat, Espurr, see above). Sara and I were mildly concerned though hardly surprised, since alongside her other myriad and storied professional pursuits, Claudia has long harbored a side-passion for farflung ancient remedies and recipes, the weirder and more dubious the better, with a library bulging with such esoterica (again, see above) and a calendar festooned with specialty banquets, each one more recondite than the one before, to which she invites friends and acquaintances to sample her latest resurrected discoveries.
This year, for example, she pulled together a meticulously annotated menu of holiday drinking fare, and given the dizzyingly discombobulating gyre of the recent months’ worth of news, I asked Claudia whether she might let us here at the Cabinet share in the much-needed bounty. She was willing, as was Espurr, and so here you go!
Cheers, we guess….
As we go to press, Claudia, ever punctilious, wrote to ask whether we might include a bibliography of sources for the foregoing, and of course we said yes, so here it is:
Scents and Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook, unknown authorship but translated by Charles Perry
The Elixers of Nostradamus by Nostradamus
A Soup for the Qan by Hu Sihui
The Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary by John Knott
Also mentioned, Hannah Wooley's A Queenlike Closet
But that in turn gives us the chance to let you know that in another of her side-lifes, Claudia is a fictionara of the first order, a dazzlingly inventive spawnstress of worlds and a downright gobsmacker, who goes by the name Cooper Shrivastava (that first name being her middle name, which just happens to be her mother’s last name). See for yourself:
A short teaser, about bees
and then a longer novella, dealing with just about everything else in the known universe(s?), although come to think of it, there may be some bees in that one, too.
Speaking of inordinately elegant creatures, Espurr, for her part, is a year-round fashionista.
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See you next week!