Rhymed Recipes - by Charles Green Shaw

I recently came across an unpublished cocktail book called Rhymed Recipes by Charles Green Shaw tentatively dated to the 1930s.  The Archives of American Art Journal by the Smithsonian Institution has published a short article about the book and its author in its most recent issue of Print (which can be downloaded here). 

Even more amazing, they've posted the entire unpublished book in their archive research collections.  I've shamelessly pulled a few pages of the book to share with you here, but I hope that you will visit their website and view the book in its entirety.

Charles Dickens Over Rice

Happy New Year! With a food, art and film-filled NYC staycation under my belt, this hostess is back in action, dedicated to bringing you more food, more culture, more art, more design, more everything into your life this year.

During one of my loll-around-and-look-at-pretty-things-on-the-Internet days, I came across "Library," a project by NYC-based artist and curator Trong G. Nguyen. Started in 2007 and currently ongoing, Nguyen paints entire texts of authors like Roland Barthes and Charles Dickens onto individual kernels of rice.

Roland Barthes: La chambre clair (Camera Lucida)

Once I got past imagining how labor-intensive this process might be, I realized the stark and minimal presentation is super pleasing to look at. It's a compact, distilled way of combining both order and chaos: inside the bags, words are jumbled around in a nonsensical mess, but outside the bags are things we recognize, understand and can categorize. Charles Dickens. The Wizard of Oz. Library date stamps.

This book is overdue.

We can take it a step further when we start to think about rice being a food, and how we consume books, or even more generally, stories. We take them in by reading, or hearing, so then something that existed independently on its own outside of you, now exists inside in a different form. Which is really just eating with your eyes, don't you think?

Brain Food

Maybe not the best way to re-read The Wizard of Oz, but thought provoking, when you start to think about the many different forms that stories, can take in today's ever-changing culture and technology.

Books on rice are neither books, nor rice. Discuss.

Let's Play Guess the Fruit

Usually, the need for an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) is cause for concern. But if one were to get a hold of such a high tech machine and use it for, say, gastronomical rather than anatomical purposes...well. Who are we to naysay?

can be found in cheetos, cereal and capri sun!

ancestors of these were found in the tomb of king tut.

man is to manshroom like mush is to...

these delicacies are also known as "the queen of the night."

two words: peeee-yew!

rhymes with orange

For the answers, plus animated gifs (!!!), check out our friends at Inside Insides.