New York Menagerie
The games are gone, but with elephants roaming the site of Barnum and Bailey’s annual pilgrimage to New York, it looks like the circus has come to the Big Apple. A children’s joke has stuck like an old record scratch: why did the elephant paint his toenails red? To hide in the apple tree!
The ploy doesn’t seem to be working since 10,000 extra police officers have been called in to keep the peace-the same number of cops as athletes in Athens-and I began thinking, what a price to pay for being host! According to a New York Times survey, more than half the city’s citizens wish the invitation had never been proffered and more than that have left town for the week. Nevertheless, restaurants that often close until Labor Day re-opened to feed hordes of hungry elephants who have shown a blatant disregard for party ideology and rhetoric, and booked all the fine French bistros from twilight to midnight, missing the keynote speeches meant to rivet us all.
I wondered what this vestigial rite was all about and why the “elephant” had come to town. It turns out that the elephant as Republican symbol began in New York in 1874, in a cartoon penned by Thomas Nast. That summer, the New York Herald had published a hoax that terrorized New Yorkers for a day or two-the beasts of the Central Park Zoo had broken loose and were galloping down the avenues in search of fresh prey. It was a riveting ruse that so captured the city’s imagination that Nast put the image to use jabbing fun at journalism run amok. The left-leaning Herald had warned that Ulysses S. Grant had imperial ambitions and would run for an unprecedented third term. Borrowing from an Aesop’s fable where the donkey, just for fun, had donned a lion skin to frighten all the foolish animals of the forest, Nast depicted the Herald as the jackass, but choosing the biggest fool posed a challenge. In the end, he picked the most monstrous mammal in the Central Park Zoo as the quaking mass of Republican voters. It was the elephant-and the rest, as they say, is history.
Today, it’s the donkey running scared. Watch Thursday night and see what cloak the president chooses in which to hide the elephant in reassuring garb. Four years ago, the phrase he used was “compassionate conservative” and it resounded from the Republican Convention right through to wartime. What will be the soundbyte of 2004?
Abigail’s Apple Pan Dowdy
Serves 8-10
“American as apple pie” is a pretty good metaphor for the way the country used to be. You see, apple pie is an old world immigrant-it really isn’t American at all. Let’s start with apples-genetically, they began in the Russian steppes and migrated down to Anatolia, modern Turkey. There, they became the golden food of the love goddess, Aphrodite. Sweetened and slapped between two crusts, they became a Greek pie. A Roman admirer, Cato, wrote the first recipe for one with goat cheese and honey. The original Queen Elizabeth was credited with baking the first apple pastie, or fruit pie as we know it, but I cannot picture her toiling with a rolling pin.
In 1624, Ole Pieter Stuyvesant planted the first apple tree in America on 13th Street, a few blocks southeast of Madison Square Garden-it was accidentally knocked down in 1866 by a dray wagon dragged by a bee-stung horse.
In between, a nation was born with its capital not far from that tree. Abigail Adams was first lady when she invited guests to the inaugural celebration of the Fourth of July. This all-American variation on the venerable pie was what she served. It’s her published recipe, one that was, by the way, the favorite dessert of another great American, Amelia Earhart.
Pastry:
1 1/2 c. flour
1/2 c. shortening
1/4 c. sugar
Melted butter
Filling:
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 tsp. each cinnamon, nutmeg, salt
10 large apples, peeled and sliced (4 cups)
3 Tbs. melted butter
1/2 c. molasses
Preheat oven to 350-degrees.
Cream shortening and sugar. Add flour, sprinkling ice water on top until it holds together. Roll to 1/4-inch thick. Brush with melted butter and cut in half. Place halves on top of one another and cut again. Repeat four times and refrigerate. Roll out again and cut in half, placing half in a baking dish.
Mix the filling ingredients together except molasses and butter-adjust flavorings to suit. Dump in pan. Drizzle with molasses and butter. Seal with the top crust.
Bake one hour. Cut the crust into the fruit before serving as Abigail did-piping hot with whipped cream or, her husband’s favorite, vanilla ice cream.