The New Yorker, 2005-09-05, a

[fiefoe]

"Public Safety: Car Seat Lady" / Michael Agger
__ If the driver complied, she would flip the sign over: "Thank You." She has only recently stopped being embarrassed about this.

"Speaking Of Soup" / Calvin Trillin

• A bilingual booklet of local events...saying, "Take care! Would not be you the first to be converted in one small fish, for not putting care to this myth" - a small witticism that served to give me some idea of how my Spanish must have sounded to my instructors all these years.
• Fanesca has a base of salt cod cooked in milk and thickened with pumpkin seeds. Traditionally, it contains twelve different beans or grains - one for each of the twelve apostles, some people say.
• I could envision myself pushing back from the table and making a statement to the waiter that was as complex as the dish itself - something like "I can't take leave of this glorious establishment without saying, in utmost sincerity, that the fanesca I've just had the honor of consuming made my heart soar, or at least go pitter-patter, and I want to emphasize that each and every bean had a valiant role to play in what was, when all is said and done, a perfectly blended and modulated work of art." In that daydream, the waiter is so impressed by my eloquence that he offers me seconds. I decline, with a short speech that reminds him of something he once read in a story by Jorge Luis Borges.
• roast pig - displayed whole, with his detached head turned back at an impossible angle, as if he'd been lying on his stomach to take the sun and had looked around suddenly to see who was sneaking up behind him.
  

"Night Kitchens" / Judith Thurman

• For all its austerity, the garden is an image of release: of the moment at which, after an intractable struggle, you get permission from yourself to let the inessential go.
• You will need a depth finder in good working order, because when the tide is at its lowest ebb you are going to moor the boat and gather the seawater - as Mr. Ishii does - that cascades from the (coral) reef, which has an exceptionally rich and complex mineral content. This primordial bouillon is your curdling agent.
  
• a gaillard - a bon vivant bristling with rakish vigor
• the definitive, though unplaceable, sweetness that artisanal tofu seems to share, and which, like the scent of lotus blossoms in a folktale, signals the presence of an unseen divinity.
  

"Taboo: Peacock" / Alexandra Fuller
__ unstitched from the walth of her family by wars and bad luck

"Taboos: Caviar"
__ It was my first encounter with beruga eggs. They smelled metalllic, like a rusty doorknob. "Open wide... a spoonful, for Lenin," the nanny implored.

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