On Friday, about half an hour after giving my kick ass speech about not making the junior high cheerleading squad in Dale Carnegie, I nearly fainted. My mother, sister and I have a history of fainting between the ages of 16 and 20 or so. That may or not be related to what happened on Friday. Doctors were called, advice was given. I was told to "take it easy all weekend", which I did. Leo, who is in the running for the best husband ever, cleaned the house top to bottom (he even cleaned the carpet) and wouldn't let me help him at all. I felt fine all weekend. But I have no idea what brought this on (and Friday was the second time it happened) so its a little scary.

This gave me time for a more in depth examination of my AAUW book sale finds. As I was reading the Time-Life "Foods of the World" Vienna's Empire book, I was thinking about the author's possible biases (or lack thereof) in the recording of recipes. The series does not purport to be a historical record of the foods of each of the areas covered for a certain period; but it does aim to reflect the food of those regions over time. This train of thought started when I read a recipe for Pureed Brains in a Shell. That's just not he kind of thing you see in current cookbooks marketed in the US. A lot of books in the series have multiple organ meat recipes. If the books were written today, those recipe would be left out, most likely. So I figured out what they didn't have a bias against in the late '60s, but what did they place too much emphasis on? I read through the rest of the Vienna's Empire and all of the China books before I got it.

The Classic French Cooking book is chock full of one ingredient, which hasn't seen the light of day since '72: unflavored gelatin. They made an aspic out of EVERYTHING. There is not a single photograph that is not jiggly and glistening in gelatinous goodness. Its rather unreal. The dishes are even served on a bed of "jewel-like" diced aspic. Semi-solid meat juice, yum!

My weekend reading also inspired me to start working on the Christmas menu. I'm thinking Classic Foods of the Hapsburg Empire. In case you think that's too easy, I'm going to try to make them all pork-free. That really ups the ante.

What else? I wore a dress on Saturday that apparently makes me look gigantic. At least that's what I think it makes me look like since multiple people felt compelled to come up to me to tell me how gigantic I look.