Measured Extravagance

03 January 2002 (fixed 1/9/02) - 8:49 p.m.

The Diaryland form has evidently decided to mangle whatever I paste in from Outlook, so I guess I will be sticking with short (or no) entries for the nonce. Let's see if it lets me at least show you the quote I featured in the tonight's entry:

...there is an element of self-denial in kale cuisine, a certain gritty northern survivalism. The two most familiar types are Siberian and Scotch kale, both of them evocative of bleak and arduous environments. Very curled and crumpled, in both dwarf and tall varieties, Scotch kale (or kail) was once a mainstay of rural Scottish cuisine, at certain tough times the only cultivated green being eaten. The name also came to mean a broth in which kale was the principal vegetable. Thus Walter Scott has one of his stalwarts promise to do lunch: "I will be back here to my kail against ane o'clock." Because kale was by far the most prevalent vegetable in it, the cottage kitchen garden came to be called a kail-yard, as in the old lyric "There grows a bonnie brier bush in our kail-yard." This less-than-immortal line was penned by Ian Maclaren, one of a group of writers who came, in the 1890s, to be known as the Kailyard School from their depiction of humble life in Scotland, their dialogue laced with more extravagant brogue than an open bar at a Robbie Burns party. The kailyarders' rise to prominence a century ago leads me to wonder in passing if perhaps the celebration of simple living isn't specifically a fin de si�cle phenomenon.
    - Des Kennedy, An Ecology of Enchantment

One year ago: "yes, I also cry on cue when I read Harlequin romances"

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