in a spicy, tantalizing fashion
[a guacamole meander]
Today, September 16, I’m reminded, is National Guacamole Day.
It’s also apparently, here at my desk, National Free Association Day, so let’s hop to it.
I can’t recall when first I happened upon this newspaper clipping (undated, but the accompanying photograph of Boris Karloff suggests the early 1960s),1 but it’s quite the time-traveling treat, no?
First, let’s everyone please get out of their systems “Sauce? A sauce?” and “Sherry? Sherry?,” both of which are, I’ve noted every time I’ve posted this recipe2 on either National Guacamole Day or Boris’s birthday (November 23rd, if you want to mark your calendar and buy him something really special) or just for the heck of it, the immediate and increasingly (if you’re me) wearying responses to it.3
Second, I would certainly like to touch on the headline, which less wearingly (if you’re me) may inspire, as it did elsewhere earlier this morning, a not unreasonable response along the lines of “Whew. For a hot minute I thought that Boris was angry about Mexican food, and I’ve always thought better of him.” Perhaps having internalized Noël Coward’s song “Mad About the Boy” I don’t think twice about saying “mad about” when I mean “utterly gaga over,” but I do suppose that “mad for” is less misreadable.4
I also note that Merriam-Webster, among other dictionaries, persists in giving the “angry” definition of “mad” as “informal,” which perhaps, given its ubiquity, I nonetheless find a little surprising.5
Meanwhile, back at the fine foods, I can’t say that I can quite picture Boris in the Karloff family kitchen6 pulling out the old moljacete and tejolote and whipping up a quick batch of guacamole7 to serve with “fried tortilla wedges,”8 but I have little difficulty envisioning him, with a lovely California tan,9 enjoying a long lunch at an L.A.10 Mexican restaurant.11
By the way (and if you’ve already read footnote 11 you might indeed already be revved up for this): Did you know that Boris’s great-aunt was Anna “Mrs. Anna” Leonowens?
Possibly, right about now, you’re expecting a photograph of Deborah Kerr in the 1956 film of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I, but just to mix things up a little, here’s my goddess Irene Dunne in 1946’s Anna and the King of Siam.
(As interested as I am, and perhaps you are too, in the history of white actors playing nonwhite roles in the theater and the movies, I’m increasingly loath to post photographs of such actors in action, so I’m avoiding showing you faux-permatanned Rex Harrison with his eyes pulled back. You can google your way there if you’re so inclined.)
Before I wrap this up, let’s please share a moment of celebration for that sidebarred Scalloped Potatoes Emergency Dish and the very idea of “packaged scalloped or au gratin potatoes,” which sounds very early-1960s Peg Bracken–y12 to me but which of course you can still purchase thanks to the persistence of, among others, Betty Crocker.
And that, as they say, is that.
For today.
Taking Care of Taking Care of Business
Thank you for being here, thank you for following, thank you especially for subscribing. All of this substackery of mine is free and will remain that way, which means that if you have chosen to contribute to its and my upkeep,13 in larger or smaller ways, you are doing something you don’t have to do, which makes your generosity that much more resonant, and I am profoundly grateful. If you’re not yet part of that contributing crew and there’s a part of you that’s thinking “Who would have thought that apostrophes, commas, and ancient show business anecdotes could be so much fun?” and you choose to join the crew, I will be eternally (or at least monthly or annually) in your debt.
Benjamin
Post-publication addendum: My sleuthy friend Bill Childs managed to track this particular clipping to the March 23, 1967, edition of the Los Angeles Times, though he also found an earlier iteration (look out below!) in the June 17, 1966, edition of the Alton Evening Telegraph. And it seems that we have one Betty Lou Margulis to thank for all this. Presuming so, thank you, Betty Lou Margulis!
Or receipt, to use the old-school term that The Gilded Age (the TV series, not the novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner) can’t ever stop saying over and over and over, like a kindergartner having just learned its first curse word.
Have I made Guacamole Boris Karloff precisely as Boris (or, more likely, we can now infer, Betty Lou Margulis, a presumably underpaid but quite jaunty puff-piece journalist) would have us make it, including the sherry? Yes indeed I have, and it’s quite tasty. And as my friend Farran Smith Nehme commented a few hours ago, “What’s the big deal about the sherry every time you post this recipe? It’s just an acid to bring out the flavors. Do folks think Boris meant Harveys Bristol Cream?”
That said, this recipe/receipt doesn’t make “10 to 12 appetizer servings.” It makes, like, 2.
One may also take note of the vastly more recent sitcom Mad About You, but you know of my penchant for the recherché. Also, I rather like my coined-on-the-fly “misreadable,” but isn’t Less Misreadable the title of some interminable, depressing musical? 🤔
M-W also notes, of the “arising from, indicative of, or marked by mental disorder” reading of the word “mad,” that it’s “not used technically.” To which I say: Whew. To be sure, over on the other side of the Big Water, folks like to use the word “mental” as slang along the lines of “bonkers,” “nuts,” and, as we say around my house, “one Little Eyolf short of a full Ibsen set,” which I suspect gives many if not most Americans the shivers. That said, should anyone at all, anywhere at all, be jocularly using slang terms for mental disorder? Let’s call that a worthy topic for another day.
Unlike his genre colleague Vincent Price, renowned for his culinary skill and the author of a handful of well-regarded (I’m told) cookbooks.
Quite possibly you’ve already seen this endearing publicity photograph of Boris and Vincent posing with Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre (for 1963’s The Comedy of Terrors), but here as well is one I just found from 1942, when Vincent was on Broadway menacing Judith Evelyn in Angel Street, Boris was menacing Josephine Hull and Jean Adair in Arsenic and Old Lace, and Joseph Schildkraut (in the middle, natch) was poisoning Eva Le Gallienne in Uncle Harry.
I’d originally typed “guac” here, then I decided to respect myself.
For which I must confess I’m reading a bag of Fritos purchased by Evelyn, the fifth Mrs. Karloff, at the local Gelson’s.
Here’s Boris, tan and dapper and still suave, in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 directorial debut film, Targets, which, if you haven’t seen it (or even if you have), you should try to catch the next time it pops up on TCM, which it does with some frequency. It’s a fascinating film on numerous levels, including about our national obsession with guns, and Boris gives a charming, thoughtful, moving, and ultimately heroic performance as a barely revised version of himself named Byron Orlok.
Copyeditorial note (and it’s about time, too!): It’s “an L.A.” because I mean for it to be read and heard as “an Ell Ay.” If I’d wanted you to read/hear “a Los Angeles,” then I would have had to have written that.
I don’t know enough about the history of Mexican cuisine in the United States (which is to say that I don’t know anything about it at all) to speak definitively, but I’m imagining that in the 1960s, to many Anglo readers, it was all still fairly, to use the term that unsurprisingly pops up in our little article, exotic—speaking of words that are increasingly dicey to use, given this particular one’s evolution from a more or less neutral “nonnative” (including as applied to plants) to “foreign and thus alluringly weird and thrilling,” which, alas, conjures up for me Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Gale Sondergaard, and, ye gods, Lee J. Cobb in yellowface in Anna and the King of Siam—and more on that in a second, believe it or not—to its latter-day evocation of what we might quaintly call striptease dancers). Sheltered little Long Island, N.Y., boy that I was, I didn’t encounter Mexican food till I went to college in the Midwest and had my first guacamole at El Jardin on Clark Street in Chicago—which is still there! (I mean the restaurant, not Chicago, which, yes, is still there too.) Also my first burrito, my first chimichangas, and certainly my first but scarcely my last margarita.
En dash alert!
And Sallie’s!
I will always remember the time my sister Robin, in maybe 6th grade, wanted to cook something but was put off by various complex recipes in my mother's cookbooks. But she selected one that required no cooking, arranged to get the ingredients and surprised us one day, announcing proudly, "I made Gukka-mole!"
We had no "fried tortilla wedges" or anything else, really, to put it on, and weren't sure how to eat it in the first place, so we dutifully sampled spoonfuls of it, and the general reaction was "yuck," which didn't do Robin's spirits much good, that afternoon. But then, she didn't like it either.
I think that was my first encounter with Mexican food. Luckily, later encounters went much better.
Thank you for embedding links to the footnotes in the text!