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Weekend Butler: The legendary Holiday Ham. How long should a hug last? The end of the Leonard Bernstein movie. Oprah chats with Thich Nhat Hanh. A scathing review. And more.
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Published: Dec 13, 2023
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Weekend
December! I seem to have spaced noticing the shortened daylight and the holiday-sales-that-started-in-September. On the theory I’m not the only one…
HOLIDAY HAM
This recipe has been the favorite of two wives, which is more than I can always say about myself. It comes from a long-departed friend, Gene Hovis, a dazzling cook and exceptional human who made it all the way from a small town in North Carolina to the Best Dressed List.
Don’t worry if you don’t have a dozen people coming to dinner — you’ll want these leftovers.
One caution: If you buy a pre-sliced ham, no one will be happy.
Prep time: 5 minutes. 6 basic ingredients. Insanely good.
Cooking tip: set the ham in a tin foil pan. Or, better, two. It’s so much easier to dispose of a sticky foil pan than spend fifteen minutes scouring one you value.
serves 10-12
16-18 pound ready-to-eat ham, pre-cooked, with bone in (A smoked ham is okay; an unsmoked ham is better. But do NOT get a spiral-cut ham — the edges will overcook.)
l box dark brown sugar
l/2 cup Gulden’s mustard
l/2 cup bourbon
l/2 cup fresh bread crumbs
l cup honey
2 tablespoons ground cloves
Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
Mix ingredients. Pour over ham.
Cook in oven for 2-3 hours.
Baste constantly after first half hour.
To buy “Gene Hovis’s Uptown Downtown Cookbook” from Amazon, click here.
GARY SHTEYNGART ON WALTER ISAACSON’S “ELON MUSK”
From Lit Hub’s “Most scathing book reviews of 2023”
“Who or what is to blame for Elon Musk? Famed biographer of intellectually muscular men Walter Isaacson’s dull, insight-free doorstop of a book casts a wide but porous net in search of an answer … There’s a lot to work with here, but it doesn’t make reading this book any easier. Isaacson comes from the ‘his eyes lit up’ school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI. I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter … To his credit, Isaacson is a master at chapter breaks, pausing the narrative when one of Musk’s rockets explodes or he gets someone pregnant, and then rewarding the reader with a series of photographs that assuages the boredom until the next descent into his protagonist’s wild but oddly predictable life. Again, it’s not all the author’s fault. To go from Einstein to Musk in only five volumes is surely an indication that humanity isn’t sending Isaacson its best … There is a far more interesting book shadowing this one about the way our society has ceded its prerogatives to the Musks of the world. There’s a lot to be said for Musk’s tenacity, for example his ability to break through Nasa’s cost-plus bureaucracy. But is it worth it when your savior turns out to be the world’s loudest crank? So who or what is responsible for Elon Musk? ‘Growing up in South Africa, fighting was normal,’ Musk says, and there’s a whiff of desperate masculinity floating through the book, as rank as a Pretoria boys’ locker room. It is not a coincidence that the back jacket features a fully erect penis (some may argue it is actually one of Musk’s rockets, but I remain unconvinced) … Isaacson’s book constantly tries to build dramatic tension between the species-saving visionary and the beaten bullied boy. But we know the ending to Musk’s story before we even open it. In the end, the bullies win.”
CALVIN TRILLIN WISDOM
“The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”
WHO NEEDS A HUG? AND FOR HOW LONG?
From the Harvard Gazette: The average length of a hug between two people is 3 seconds. But the researchers have discovered something fantastic. When a hug lasts 20 seconds, there is a therapeutic effect on the body and mind. The reason is that a sincere embrace produces a hormone called “oxytocin”, also known as the love hormone. This substance has many benefits in our physical and mental health, helps us, among other things, to relax, to feel safe and calm our fears and anxiety. This wonderful tranquilizer is offered free of charge every time we have a person in our arms, who cradled a child, who cherish a dog or a cat, that we are dancing with our partner, the closer we get to someone or simply hold the shoulders of a friend.
A famous quote by psychotherapist Virginia Satir goes, “We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth.”
THICH NHAT HANH AND OPRAH
When she was good, she was very good. Click to watch.
MAESTRO
Bradley Cooper’s movie is in some theatres now. It streams on December 20.
The Times raved. Watch the preview. The Smithsonian Magazine is enlightening. Click to read.
Maestro’s final scene finds an older Bernstein sitting at his piano during an interview. Felicia is not far from his mind. He repeats a line his wife said to him earlier in the film: “If summer doesn’t sing in you, then nothing sings in you. And if nothing sings in you, then you can’t make music.”
Bernstein returned to these lines in 1979, the year after Felicia’s death. “Summer still sings in me,” he told journalist Mike Wallace. “Not so often as it used to, but it sure does.”
WEEKEND POEM: EDNA ST.VINCENT MILLAY
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
THE WEEKEND RECIPE
BRAISED LAMB WITH PRUNES
Serves 8
2 pounds lamb shoulder
1 cup pitted prunes
1 tablespoon minced garlic
salt and pepper,
1 chopped onion
2 teaspoons minced ginger
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
1 ½ cup red wine
½ cup stock or water
Cut lamb into 2-inch cubes. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and brown in a large skillet over medium-high heat; remove.
Add onion, garlic, prunes, ginger, cinnamon, salt and pepper; cook until fragrant. Add wine, stock or water and browned lamb. When the liquid boils, lower heat to a simmer, cover and cook until tender, 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours. Garnish with parsley.
