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Saturday, July 7, 2018

How Ice Cream Made America, by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, Boston Globe

The earliest recipe book devoted entirely to making ice cream was “L’Art de bien faire les glaces d’office,” published in 1768 by a mysterious Monsieur Emy. The illustration on the frontispiece depicts roughly how ice cream was made at the time: By industrious flocks of chubby, naked cherubs with tiny wings, while the Holy Trinity — God and Jesus, languidly reposing in the clouds and flanking a rather startled dove — look down from the heavens.

That wasn’t exactly how it really went, but ice cream in 1768 might as well have been made by angels, so exciting and novel was the experience of eating it and so closely-guarded the process of making it.

“If you knew how to make ices, you had a meal ticket for life, and you would lock the door of your confectionery so nobody knew how you did it,” explained Robin Weir, co-author of “Ice Creams, Sorbets and Gelati: The Definitive Guide.” “If you knew how to make ice cream, you were absolutely laughing — you were set up for life.” Emy’s book underscored just how rarefied the dessert was in his day. Ice cream was something that only the very wealthiest people could afford. It required specialized knowledge and equipment, ice and sugar. Unsurprisingly, a pint of ice cream in the 1760s easily cost about as much as the average worker made in a week, if not more. But within the space of 100 years, that all changed.

Why Are There Palm Trees In Los Angeles?, by Dan Nosowitz, Atlas Obscura

One first weird thing in a very long list of weird things about palms is that they are not really trees. The word “tree” is not a horticultural term—it’s sort of like “vegetable,” in that you can kind of call anything a vegetable—but palms are not at all like the other plants commonly referred to as trees. They don’t have wood, for one thing; the interior of a palm is made up of basically thousands of fibrous straws, which gives them the tensile strength to bend with hard tropical windstorms without snapping. They are monocots, which is a category of plant in which the seed contains only one embryonic leaf; as monocots, they have more in common with grasses like corn and bamboo than they do with an oak or pine tree.

Southern California might not have been rich with trees, but it was rich with money and rich with sunshine. Once the railroads came to Los Angeles, in the 1880s, speculators realized this huge empty sunny place would be a great opportunity to sell land. But how to get people to move way out to the desert? One way was incredibly cheap train tickets; the railroads sold tickets from the Midwest for as little as one dollar. But, as with California ever since, the place had to be marketed.

The Changing Face Of Romance Novels, by Alexandra Alter, New York Times

Romance publishers say that they want to publish books with more diverse characters and settings, but argue that it’s a challenge in part because the majority of submissions still come from white authors. The genre’s largest organization, the Romance Writers of America, which has around 10,000 members, recently conducted a survey and found that nearly 86 percent of its members are white. The group has also faced growing scrutiny over its Rita Award, which has never gone to an African-American writer in the 36-year history of the prize. Black authors have accounted for less than 1 percent of finalists.

“It was eye-opening,” Dee Davis, R.W.A.’s president, said of the survey results. “We have a lot of work to do.”

Evil Children And Overachieving Skeletons: Welcome To The World Of Paperback Horror, by Grady Hendrix, NPR

You remember them if you grew up in the '80s or '90s, leering at you from drugstore racks: A morbid parade of covers featuring skeletons graduating from college, or playing piano, or dressed as surgeons and cradling babies; covers of teenagers brooding in attics and creepy kids, all with peek-a-boo die-cut covers opening up to reveal gorgeous art of menacing grandmothers and chortling, flame-shrouded demons, their titles embossed in gold foil: The Seeing, The Searing, The Sharing, The Spawning, The Suiting.

Welcome to the lost world of paperback horror.

In The Distance By Hernan Diaz Review – A Western Unlike Any Other, by Carys Davies, The Guardian

What Diaz pulls off here is that rare feat of drawing on literary and filmic traditions, only to conjure something completely fresh and strange. In the Distance is a brutal, sad, tender coming-of-age story, set in a historical past that feels both familiar and at the same time like nothing we’ve ever encountered before.