The Side-Effects of Coleslaw

My grandmother, whom I called Geegee (hard G’s), was a terrible cook. She overcooked everything and rarely spotlighted fresh vegetables or light fare. She was also overly fond of her freezer. Much of what she served had that distinct reheated taste and texture.

The origins of her inabilities in the kitchen remain shrouded in mystery, although I believe they stem from a few root causes. For starters, she was part of a generation that came of age during the depression. Having food on the table was something to celebrate regardless of its tastiness. There was no Food Network and celebrity chefs did not roam the airwaves and bookshelves in 1933.

I think she also didn’t enjoy the activity. She cooked for my grandfather, mother, and me because feeding was a sign of love and my grandmother was an epically loving person. Using the kitchen as a creative outlet, however, was not in the cards.

Finally, she was the child of immigrants from Lithuania, where the diet of Jews, even educated ones like my great grandparents, likely consisted of tough cuts of meat and bland vegetables like potatoes and yes, cabbage. Cabbage, that bitter, waxy vegetable with unique abilities to turn off the initiated and uninitiated.

I don’t like cabbage in many of its forms. Stuffed cabbage offends all senses. Shaved raw cabbage ruins a perfectly delightful salad. Sauteed bok choy is something to be picked around in a Chinese dish. By some odd incongruity in the bond between scent and taste, I abhor the smell of sauerkraut but love it on a hotdog along with a good, spicy deli mustard.

Coleslaw is one of those dishes that evolved over millennia. According to Wikipedia, the Romans ate a dish of cabbage, vinegar, eggs, and spices, basically most of the components of coleslaw. The modern version is derived from the Dutch settlers of the New York area who grew cabbage and made a shredded salad out of it called koosla (kool means cabbage and sla is salad).

Geegee was a frequent presence at my house when I was growing up. She always brought something for me to eat. As a picky four-year-old, the few things she could coerce into my mouth were jello (red only), Swedish candied fish (again, red only), and for some quirky wrinkle in the matrix, her coleslaw.

Diners and Jewish delicatessens in the NYC metro area frequently serve a side of coleslaw in little paper cups with their main dishes. Many people don’t touch it…with good reason. It is often terrible, either overly sugared or bereft of any flavoring at all. Geegee’s coleslaw was a standout. It was a perfect balance of mayonnaise, salt, vinegar, lemon juice, and a hint of sugar. It was creamy without being heavy. The acid broke down the cabbage just enough to soften it without robbing it of bite. There was just enough salt and sugar to tickle the tastebuds without either overwhelming anything.

As I got older, I watched Geegee make her one signature dish. She didn’t measure anything. The closest thing to standardization was a small jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, which she emptied into a pile of shredded cabbage and carrots. Otherwise, she largely went by look, taste, and feel. Then she would let it sit overnight. It always tasted better the next day.

After watching her make the dish, I would scamper to the office/library of her apartment where she kept some toys for me, and whose bookshelves groaned under the weight of thick history books. So many looked daunting to a young child. A two-inch-thick, black hardcover non-fiction book about the Third Reich is not as inviting the Berenstein Bears to a six-year-old. I could not fathom the daunting task of ever reading such tomes. However, I used to flip through the pages of those gargantuan books, particularly those about World War II. My grandfather had served and risen to the rank of major in the army. I found that factoid amazingly cool and the more I read about World War II, the more I wanted to learn. Both of my grandparents were happy to talk to me about what they knew and experienced during the war years. I have loved studying history ever since.

I don’t just read about history now. I write about it. Those thick books that used to intimidate me are now my greatest resources for my novels and I have digested piles of them. None of my novels are set during WWII. Not for lack of interest. There just have been so many novels set in the time period, some wonderful and some bland, that it feels hard to stand out. Many follow a standard formula—often an unlikely hero or heroine acts courageously under harrowing circumstances with the Nazis close at hand and changes the course of the war while finding love. I attempt to make my novels less formulaic. I write about less novelized time periods, work off a general outline that builds the character arcs of the protagonist and antagonist, creates tension between the two, leaves a few cliffhangers, and then resolves matters. Nothing is measured and I don’t always know how I’m going to get from point A to point B. I go by feel and add plot points here and character traits there. It is remarkably like my grandmother making coleslaw.

Memory and trial and error have allowed me to replicate Geegee’s coleslaw. I wish she were around to taste it and read my books. I think she would like both.

John Hancock’s Big Signature

On this date in 1775, John Hancock was elected president of the Second Continental Congress. He replaced Virginian Peyton Randolph, who suffered from gout. A vain and ambitious man in all pursuits, Hancock coveted the presidency of the congress even though it offered no particularly special powers beyond responsibility for keeping order in often raucous meetings. Hancock and Sam Adams were the two most wanted men in the colonies by the time of the Congress. The two men, eventually joined on their journey to Philadelphia by John Adams, had to hurry out of Massachusetts in disguise to attend the Congress. Had they been captured by the British, they would have been hanged.

Hancock’s vanity and ambition likely trace from his background. Along with the Fairfaxes of Virginia and the Schuylers of New York, he was one of the wealthiest men in the colonies and probably the most liquid. His fortune stemmed from his uncle, Thomas Hancock, the leading Boston merchant of his day. After John’s father, a minister, died, Thomas raised John as his own son and trained him to run the family business. John took over the firm at age 27 upon his uncle’s death. The resulting profits allowed him to dream big and dress extremely well. Hancock was something of a dandy. His dreams, however, have far outlived his fashion reputation.

The Boston merchant found trouble with the British by the 1760’s, when his boat The Liberty was impounded for smuggling. Hancock wasn’t too fond of taxes or trade limitations the British imposed on goods coming into the colonies. Hancock was raised to the boss of the business. It irked him for anyone to tell him what to do, even the king. It was not long before he found a kindred spirit in Sam Adams, a local loudmouth. The two men from opposite ends of the economic spectrum must have made an odd sight at the time. John Hancock, the wealthiest merchant in a city of merchants who lived in the finest home in Boston situated at the highest point on Beacon Hill and Sam Adams, a man of the Boston street and underbelly, who could barely keep a roof over his family’s head despite his Harvard pedigree. Yet, the two men made for a potent team in championing the cause for liberty, Hancock provided the means for insurrection in money and material and Adams provided the brawn.

One would think that a man with so much to lose would keep his involvement in treason on the down low. Hancock wasn’t built like that. He wanted credit. He made little attempt to conceal his involvement in local shenanigans against the British. In fact, by the time of Lexington and Concord, the British force sent to confiscate a cache of weapons also had orders to arrest Hancock and Adams. The two men had been tipped off and made themselves scarce. The start of the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia two weeks later gave them an excellent reason to leave the area.

Hancock was elect president of the Congress two weeks into it. Peyton Randolph, a portly man, had to return home to Virginia complaining of gout. Hancock suffered from the same affliction (as did Ben Franklin), but he was not about to let some discomfort remove him from organizing a colony-wide revolt along the lines of the one he and Sam Adams had started in Boston. It seems Hancock only expected to preside over the Congress for a short time. He wanted to be named commanding general of the Continental Army. He had no formal military training but neither did the only delegate who wore a uniform to the congress every day, George Washington.

In the end, Hancock’s ambition to lead the army lost to John Adams’ politicking to name Washington General. The astute John Adams knew that Virginia had to join the rebellion that was localized to Boston up that point. They would not do so with a Bostonian in command. After the loss, Hancock continued as president, dressing fancily to every meeting, banging the gavel and then, most famously, signing his name in the largest font possible on the Declaration of Independence over a year after he lost the election to become general. A big signature for a giant of American history.

The Importance of Hair

Appearances are important to kings and queens. They expend considerable effort and spend vast sums on their surroundings and themselves to exude the aura of majesty. The word “majestic” is not applied to the pedestrian.

Few kings spent more time or money on their appearances than Louis XIV, a subject of my new book Raising the Sun. He can be accused of acting out of vanity. Who among us exempts themselves from any pressure to look a certain way in public? Louis’ public displays of wealth, fashion and extravagance, however, comprised part of larger vision he held of monarchy, one instilled in him by his mother, Anne of Austria, and Cardinal Mazarin, Louis’ godfather, mentor and first advisor. After Louis XIII died when Louis XIV was four, Anne and Mazarin faced an insurrection led by opportunistic members of Le Parlement de Paris and power-hungry aristocrats, including Louis XIV’s Uncle Gaston le Duc d’Orléans and close cousin, the Prince de Condé. The civil war was called the Fronde and it nearly cost Louis and his mother their lives and positions.

Part of Anne and Mazarin’s strategy to battle the coup was elevating Louis and the status of the king. The more grandeur they infused in the throne, the more powerful they made the man holding it (Salic Law in France meant only men could wear the crown). As a result, Louis’ birthdays as a boy were national holidays, a trend that continued throughout his life. His thirteenth birthday stood out in particular. That date attained his “majority” and was officially recognized as old enough to wield power instead of his mother acting as regent, A major ceremony was conducted in the Palais de Justice in front of le Parlement, whereby Louis’ mother officially ended her regency and Louis stepped into a position of authority. At the time, Louis had reddish brown hair, like his mother, which flowed to his shoulders. It added to handsome figure he cut for the powers that be, whom he needed to impress at that critical moment in the life of his reign.

The Fronde ended around the time of Louis’ fourteenth birthday. Louis never forgot the treachery, however. That early trauma combined with his mother and Mazarin’s effort to elevate him to near godlike status had a deep impact on the outward impressions he wanted to convey. Therefore, losing his hair in his late teens must have struck him as something that exposed weakness. It is no surprise then that Louis would resort to wigs to cover up his follicle challenges. And not just any wigs, Louis being Louis, he had massive, ornate wigs. The more luxuriant the better.

As with so many of Louis’ habits, wearing ornate wigs caught on. People wanted to emulate him and not just around the French court or just in France. A noteworthy copycat was Louis’ first cousin, Charles II of England. Charles spent most of his teens and early twenties in exile in France waiting out the Glorious Revolution that killed his father. Charles, influenced by Louis, brought the elaborate wigs back to England with him in the Restoration.

Elaborate wigs remained a fashion for the better part of the next two centuries. They got more elaborate over the years. First powder was added and then decorations. Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XIV’s great-great-great-grandson Louis XVI, wore wigs that were famous for their height (three feet tall) and the jewelry bedecking them.

Name another person whose sense of vanity influenced fashion for two centuries.

https://thebookofeveryone.com/blog/bizarre-history-giant-powdered-wig/

Haym Solomon

America has always been a nation of immigrants. Back when there were no “Americans” only English colonists, one man became one of the original great immigration stories in American history. Haym Solomon was a brilliant financier, who had worked with Meyer Rothschild and then moved to New York some time in the early 1770’s. Wars require capital and the Americans had little of it. Indeed, not only did the Continental Congress have little gold or silver, there was little to be had on this side of the Atlantic period. Solomon created some of the early American debt securities and was so widely respected for his honesty and ability that the French named him paymaster for their soldiers here. Without his efforts, the revolution might have stopped simply for lack of funds. Solomon is a true unsung hero of the revolution. https://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/jewish-financier-haym-solomon-is-born.html?fbclid=IwAR2nwTwOLnDWIm0tbZJ5Kk2FUzQM-4f8v4OMPL9Gqv5aSM_1zxtJY4K-SzM

Querying

I queried a fair number of agents for Raising Alexander. Apologies. I queried a fair number of agents for my 97,000-word historical novel Raising Alexander. Funny how after slaving over a 400-page story, you can turn people off to reading it by failing to italicize the title. I learned this lesson after contacting about 80% of the people on my query list. I received 98% rejections/no responses and 2% requests for the manuscript from that cohort. I’m told that is a successful ratio. It does not feel like one, particularly since none of those requests attracted representation. Italicizing the title for the remaining 20% of agents resulted in no requests. So much for form.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” That quote is attributed to Albert Einstein. Apparently, it’s misattributed, although it’s fun to think he would say something like that. Still, whoever said it likely was not a writer. We don’t know if it’s our querying method or our stories or both that prevent an agent from responding. So “doing the same thing” either means querying or writing stories in the same style. The former is a lot easier to address than the latter.

Writing classes never appealed to me. I’m one of those just do it types. I read a lot. I write a lot. I think I have a knack for concocting a good story and telling it well. The idea of listening to a modestly successful writer (why would they be teaching a writing seminar if they were really successful writers?) struck me as something only people who have no chance of ever completing a novel would do. You either have the ability and discipline to finish a manuscript or you don’t. I thought a class would not help me.

My just do it sentiment has not completely died. I do think writing ability is largely innate and developed over the years through reading good material and then just writing your own. Good, cogent writing is a skill like any other. Talent only goes so far. You have to hone the craft by seeing the great work of others, and then trying to create some yourself.

Part and parcel with development, I finally concluded a little guidance wouldn’t hurt. I applied for a four-day writing seminar in September after I had edited the hell out of Raising Alexander, which I considered (and still consider) quite good. An author friend told me the seminar was worth it. She did not lie.

Good storytelling has basic necessary structural elements. As an instinctive writer, you might have them in your manuscript…accidentally. Those elements have to be purposeful or they will not be developed fully. That’s what separates the pros from the amateur wannabes. The writing seminar taught me that.

So with my new book, Raising the Sun, I set out to address those structural elements from the outline stage. I believe I succeeded. At the very least, I will pinpoint them in my query letters. I’m also narrowing my agent search and specifying exactly why I’m querying an agent in question. The book will have to stand on its own from there. But at least I’m not “doing the same thing” and expecting a different result.

The jury is out on whether I’m insane though.