Didn’t really work from a cookbook over the weekend, though I used a bit of Baraghani’s The Cook You Want to Be as inspiration for two side dishes. I had a request for ham, so that’s what I set out to make.
Ham at Easter for me was always a sign of being at a boring event, usually dressed uncomfortably, sometimes after one of our few family visits to church. It was often on a steam table, flabby and moist. I didn’t really like ham as a sliced meat until I cooked really good quality whole hams for the weekend lunch service at the restaurant I worked at. I was responsible for taking out the aitch bone, making a preserve-and-mustard glaze, cutting the fat on top in a pattern, and inserting cloves in each square.
I looked a lot on Friday for a ham that was as good as the ones I used to roast at the restaurant but I just don’t think they’re available in commercial supermarkets—you have to order one special to get any kind of quality. I did my best to make an interesting glaze for this one—hoisin + hot Chinese mustard as the main components of a glaze—and that worked pretty well. But the meat was still that sort of flabby, moist, not as tasty as it should be texture. Oh well. I will try to redeem it in a pasta casserole and a black bean soup this week.
I know this is an observation that comes from a bad place—about one-half Le Carre and one-half tinfoil hattism—but I can’t shake the vague thought that the leaks of American intelligence about the war in Ukraine might be at least partially a deliberate misdirect intended to mask whatever counteroffensive the Ukrainians are about to undertake. That kind of move is not unprecedented in warfare, to put it mildly—the Ukrainians used disinformation last year to pull the Russians towards the southern front in advance of their counteroffensive at Kharkiv. From before the beginning of the war, moreover, the US government has been willing to publicly highlight their apparent penetration of high-ranking Russian government and military bodies, seemingly with the intent of increasing the paranoia and vulnerability of the Russian leadership and thus perhaps inhibiting them from acting.
Of course, if I’m right that this is a possibility, then even the thought that it might be true is good enough to achieve some strategic value in this conflict. Whether or not this is the case, anything that helps the Ukrainians out is ok by me—but if I am right (and we’ll likely never know if so) I have to admit that I really am not wild about the press playing a role in anything of this kind. I frequently feel that it’s impossible to trust the breathless reportage of the NYT and other newspapers about what exactly is happening in the war—I do trust the in-the-trenches work but not the overall strategic account. There is at least a cost later on for helping to create disinformation, however righteous the need might be in any given moment.
I enjoyed reading the profile of Hillsdale College in the recent New Yorker. It is, at least, enough to convince me that Christopher Rufo and his ilk have not even the faintest idea how to reproduce the relative erudition and thoughtfulness of some of Hillsdale’s faculty in the ruins of New College and any other institution they set out to tear apart. (I also still treasure the possibility that an actual intellectual who actually reads and thinks deeply in “the Western tradition” would be so disgusted with that bunch that they wouldn’t play along—but I know better, not the least because I’m quite aware of what has happened before in the “Western tradition”.) The president of Hillsdale was a bit grating at times in the article, but the only person who really annoyed me was Michael Roth of Wesleyan, with his patented personal brand of intellectual condescension intended to burnish his credentials as a ‘bridge’ between liberals and conservatives in the academy. It must be pretty hard sometimes to be a Wesleyan faculty member and know your president is out there somewhere taking a big careless dump all over most of what his own faculty teach and study.