The Book of Lists

RATING THE EFFECTS OF 51 PERSONAL CRISES

In the 1920s, Dr Walter Cannon began recording connections between stressful periods in a person’s life and the appearance of physical ailments. A decade later, Dr Adolf Meyer compiled a ‘life chart’, which specifically correlated health problems with a person’s particular life circumstances at the time. This process was refined during the 1950s and 1960s and resulted in the creation of the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS), which ranks 43 life crises on a scale of Life Change Units (LCUs). The ratings were arrived at by researchers who used in-depth interviewing techniques on an international sample of 5,000 people from Europe, the US Central America, Oceania and Japan. Because of the consistency with which marriage was rated as one of the most significant life changes, it was given a value of 50 on the scale, and 42 other life crisis were judged in relation to it. Some cultural differences surfaced (for example, the Japanese ranked minor law violations near the middle of the list and jail terms second from the top), but on the whole there was a remarkable uniformity of results, cutting across all national and socio-economic levels. SRRS supporters contend that there is a direct correlation between annual LCUs and stress-related diseases. One of their studies found that with a ‘mild’ stress level (150 to 199 LCUs in a single year), health problems increased 37% above the average; with a moderate level (200 to 299 LCUs), the increase was 51%; and with a major crisis level (300 LCUs and above), 79% more health problems occurred. The researchers noted that what counted was the cumulative total, not whether the life changes in themselves were positive or negative. The original chart, produced in 1964 by T.H. Holmes and T.H. Rahe, has since been updated to reflect changing values as well as cross-cultural differences.

Rank Life event LCU value

1. Death of spouse/mate 87

2 Death of close family member 79

3. Major injury/illness to self 78

4. Detention in jail or other institution 76

5. Major injury/illness to close family member 72

6. Foreclosure on loan/mortgage 71

7. Divorce 71

8. Being a victim of crime 70

9. Being a victim of police brutality 69

10. Infidelity 69

11. Experiencing domestic violence/sexual abuse 69

12. Separation from or reconciliation with spouse/mate 66

13. Being fired/laid-off/unemployed 64

14. Experiencing financial problems/difficulties 62

15. Death of a close friend 61

16. Surviving a disaster 59

17. Becoming a single parent 59

18. Assuming responsibility for sick or elderly loved one 56

19. Loss of or major reduction in health insurance/benefits 56

20. Self/close family member being arrested for violating the law 56

21. Major disagreement over child support/custody/ visitation 53

22. Experiencing/involved in auto accident 53

23. Being disciplined at work/demoted 53

24. Dealing with unwanted pregnancy 51

25. Adult child moving in with parent/parent moving in with adult child 50

26. Child develops behaviour or learning problem 49

27. Experiencing employment discrimination/sexual harassment 48

28. Attempting to modify addictive behaviour of self 47

29. Discovering/attempting to modify addictive behaviour of close family member 46

30. Employer reorganization/downsizing 45

31. Dealing with infertility/miscarriage 44

32. Getting married/remarried 43

33. Changing employers/careers 43

34. Failure to obtain/qualify for mortgage 42

35. Pregnancy of self/spouse/mate 41

36. Experiencing discrimination/harassment outside the workplace 39

37. Release from jail 39

38. Spouse/mate begins/ceases work outside the home 38

39. Major disagreement with boss/coworker 37

40. Change in residence 35

41. Finding appropriate child care/day care 34

42. Experiencing a large unexpected monetary gain 33

43. Changing positions (transfer, promotion) 33

44. Gaining a new family member 33

45. Changing work responsibilities 32

46. Child leaving home 30

47. Obtaining a home mortgage 30

48. Obtaining a major loan other than home mortgage 30

49. Retirement 28

50. Beginning/ceasing formal education 26

51. Receiving a ticket for violating the law 22

10 MAMMOTH CHEESES

The world’s largest block of cheese was 6 ft high, 32 ft long, and 4½ ft wide. It was commissioned in 1995 by Loblaws Supermarket and made by the Agropur dairy cooperative of Quebec, Canada. At 57,508 pounds, the giant cheddar was equivalent to the amount of cheese eaten by 2,500 Canadians in one year.

Known as the Golden Giant, this enormous chunk of cheese was 14½ ft long, 6½ ft wide and 6 ft high. Produced in 1964 by Steve’s Cheese of Denmark, Wisconsin, for the Wisconsin Cheese Foundation, it required 183 tons of milk — the daily production of 16,000 cows. After its manufacture, the cheese was shipped via a special tractor-trailer, called the Cheese-Mobile to the Wisconsin Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. A refrigerated glass enclosure remained its home until 1965. It was then cut up into 2-lb pieces that were put on display until 1968, when they were sold for $3 per package. At the 1978 Wisconsin Cheese Makers’ Association convention, the two remaining pieces of the cheese were auctioned off for $200 each.

Twelve Canadian cheesemakers collaborated to make a cheese for display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The ‘Canadian Mite’ was 6 ft tall and 28 ft in circumference. When the Mite was put on display at the Fair’s Canadian pavilion, it broke through the floor, and had to be placed on reinforced concrete at the agricultural building. In 1943, a concrete replica of the cheese was unveiled alongside the railroad tracks in Perth, Ontario, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the cheese. For the hundredth anniversary in 1983, Perth organised a week-long celebration.

This giant was produced by upstate New York cheesemakers under the direction of W. L. Kilsey for the 1937 New York State Fair at Syracuse. Production began on July 12, 1937. It took seven weeks to cure and had to be turned frequently to ensure even ripening. It used the milk of 6,000 cows.

Made by Canadian cheesemakers, this 7,000-lb-plus giant excited spectators at the 1883 Toronto Fair. Mortician-poet James McIntyre immortalised it in the following cheesy verses:

We have thee, mammoth cheese,

Bestowed upon US President Andrew Jackson by a New York State cheesemaker in 1837, this three-quarter-ton monster ripened in the vestibule of the White House for nearly two years. It was served to the entire city of Washington, DC, when Jackson threw open the doors of the White House to celebrate Washington’s Birthday. According to eyewitnesses, the whole atmosphere for a half-mile around was infected with cheese. The birthday cheddar was devoured in less than two hours. Only a tiny morsel was saved for the president.

In 1801 President Thomas Jefferson received this cheddar-like tribute from the tiny town of Cheshire in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. Named the Ultra-Democratic, Anti-Federalist Cheese of Cheshire, it was shipped to Washington, DC, by sled, boat and wagon to honour Jefferson’s triumph over the Federalists. The originator of the cheese was a preacher named John Leland, who took advantage of all the fuss and publicity to proselytise for his church. Duly impressed, Jefferson donated $200 to Leland’s congregation.

The Great Pennard Cheese, 9 ft in diameter, was a wedding gift to Queen Victoria in 1840. Puzzled and somewhat embarrassed by not knowing what to do with it, the queen was relieved when its makers asked if they could borrow it to exhibit it around England. But when they tried to return the grubby, show-worn cheese, Victoria refused to accept it. After lengthy quarrels over its disposition, the cheddar was finally surrendered to the British Chancery, where it gradually disappeared. In 1989, John Green of West Pennard recreated the Great Pennard Cheese, but added 100 lb.

One of the lesser-known wonders of the ancient world, the 1,000-lb Luni cheese, named after an ancient town in northern Italy, was reported by Pliny in his Natural History about AD77. Manufactured in what is now Tuscany, near the famous Carrara marble quarries in central Italy, the Luni cheese was probably made from a mixture of cow’s and goat’s milk. It is supposed to have tasted like a cross between cheddar and parmesan.

The largest cheese to travel halfway around the world, this half-ton cheddar was taken to London all the way from New Zealand. It was the star attraction at the Wembley Exposition of 1924.

5 BODY PARTS NAMED AFTER ITALIANS

The organ of hearing in the middle ear. Alfonso Corti (1822–78) was an Italian nobleman who studied medicine and anatomy in Vienna, writing his thesis on the cardiovascular system of reptiles. He published his findings on the inner ear in 1851, the year that he inherited estates and titles from his father and retired from scientific research.

A tube leading from the middle ear to the throat. Its purpose is to equalise pressure in the ear. It is named after Bartolommeo Eustachio (c.1513–74), considered one of the fathers of anatomy, who lived much of his life in Rome, working as a physician to leading churchmen, including two future saints, Charles Borromeo and Philip Neri.

It has been suggested that Eustachio’s discovery of the connection between the middle ear and the pharynx was known to Shakespeare and suggested the means of murder (poison poured in the ear) used by Claudio to kill Hamlet’s father.

The pair of tubes that conduct the egg from the ovary to the uterus in the female. They are named after Gabriel Fallopius (1523–62), who spent much of his adult life as a professor of anatomy at Pisa and Padua (early attempts to practise as a surgeon resulted in the deaths of several patients and Fallopius decided that an academic career was a safer option). He was the first person to coin the word ‘vagina’ and also invented a kind of contraceptive sheath which he tested out on more than a thousand men in what was, perhaps, the first medical trial of condom efficacy.

Sensory nerve-endings that respond to warmth. Named after Angelo Ruffini (1864–1929), who used gold chloride to stain microscope slides of anatomical specimens, thus revealing the tiny and sensitive corpuscles. Ruffini began his career as a country doctor but ended it as a professor at the University of Bologna. His major researches were into the embryology of birds and amphibians.

Cells of the testis that serve to nourish sperm cells. Named after histologist Enrico Sertoli (1842–1910) who discovered them in 1865, when he was still a postgraduate student of physiology in Vienna. The year after his discovery Sertoli returned to his native country to fight for Italian forces against an invading army from Austria. His later life was spent as a professor of anatomy and physiology in Milan.

9 BODY PARTS YOU DIDN’T KNOW HAD NAMES

Another term for the cuticle of the fingernail, a narrow band of epidermal tissue that extends down over the margin of the nail wall.

Found in the male reproductive system, this delicate fold of skin attaches the foreskin to the undersurface of the glans.

A flattened area of the frontal bone (forehead area) between the frontal eminences and the superciliary arches (eyebrows), just above the nose.

The white crescent-shaped mark at the base of a fingernail.

Particles of calcium carbonate in the utricles and saccules of the inner ears. The otoliths respond to gravity by sliding in the direction of the ground and causing sensitive hairs to bend, thus generating nervous impulses important in maintaining equilibrium.

One of the bones of the fingers or toes. There are two phalanges in each thumb and big toe, while there are three phalanges in all other fingers and toes, making a total of 14 in each hand or foot.

The vertical groove in the middle portion of the upper lip.

A collective name for the external genitalia of the female; also known as the vulva. It includes the mons pubis, the labia majora, and the labia minora.

The corners of the eye where the upper and lower eyelids meet.

14 NOTABLE EVENTS THAT HAPPENED UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF ALCOHOL

In 1606 King Christian IV of Denmark and Norway paid a visit to his royal brother-in-law, James I of England and VI of Scotland. The English courtiers were no strangers to alcohol, but even they were astonished by the prodigious boozing of Christian and his entourage. Several official ceremonies descended into chaos and farce as Danes and English, men and women alike, competed to see who could down the most drink. During a court masque, figures representing Faith, Hope and Charity appeared before the two kings. Faith was so drunk she could not utter a word of her speech and Hope fell over. The Danish king attempted to dance with one of the other actors but tumbled to the floor and had to be carried, comatose, to his room. Indeed most of the performers in the masque, according to a witness, ‘went backward or fell down, wine did so occupy their upper chambers’.

Captain William Kidd was sentenced to death for murder and piracy and led to the gallows at London’s Execution Dock on May 23, 1701. The execution itself was a fiasco. As a large group of spectators sang a series of ballads in honour of the pirate, a very drunk public executioner attempted to hang Kidd, who was so smashed that he could hardly stand. Then the rope broke and Kidd fell over into the mud. Though a second attempt at hanging the prisoner succeeded, the sheriff in charge was later harshly criticised in a published editorial for the bungled performance.

In Boston, Massachusetts, 50 colonials and members of the Committee of Correspondence met at the home of a printer named Benjamin Edes at about 4 pm on December 16, 1773. Later that evening, they intended to destroy the tea aboard three ships in Boston harbour as a protest against the British government’s taxation of the American colonies. To bolster their resolve, Edes filled a massive punch bowl with a potent rum concoction. Edes’s son Peter had the job of keeping the bowl filled, which proved to be an almost impossible task because of the ardour with which the patriots drank. Shortly after 6 pm the men, most of whom were now in a noisy, festive mood, with a few staggering noticeably, departed and marched to Griffin’s Wharf, where the tea ships were anchored. For the next three hours they sobered up — a number becoming violently ill — as they dumped heavy tea chests into the harbour — and set off the American Revolution.

The Prince Regent, later George IV, was markedly unwilling to make the dynastic marriage expected of the heir to the throne, not least because he was already secretly married to a Roman Catholic commoner, Mrs Fitzherbert. Pressured by his father, George III, the prince agreed to marry Princess Caroline of Brunswick. Meeting his bride three days before the wedding, he was horrified by the prospect of them becoming man and wife and took refuge in drink. At the ceremony he was so drunk he could hardly stand up and had to be supported by his groomsmen. He came to life only to make eyes at his current mistress, Lady Jersey, who was one of the wedding guests. George continued to drink after the vows had been exchanged and spent his wedding night collapsed in a drunken stupor in the fireplace of his new wife’s bedroom. The couple spent only a few nights together — on one of which George’s heir Princess Charlotte was conceived — and separated within the year.

On the night of August 21, 1831, black slave-prophet Nat Turner launched a rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, that left more than 50 whites and more than 120 blacks dead. Although Turner never touched alcohol, his six followers had feasted on roast pig and apple brandy that night. At the first plantation they attacked, the rebels drank hard cider before massacring the whites living there. Through the night and into the next day, the insurgents raided plantations, killed whites and confiscated horses, weapons and brandy. By noon, Turner’s army had expanded to approximately 60 men, but many of them were so intoxicated that they kept falling off their horses. When Turner caught up with one advance party, they were relaxing in the brandy cellar of a plantation. Learning that a group of whites was approaching, Turner rallied his men and put the whites to the fight. But the next day an alarm scattered his new recruits, and he had only 20 men left to fight 3,000 armed white militiamen and volunteers. The rebellion was crushed.

On April 14, 1865, actor John Wilkes Booth began drinking at the Kirkwood House bar in Washington, DC, at three in the afternoon. At 4 pm he arrived at Deery’s saloon and ordered a bottle of brandy. Two hours later he was drinking whisky at Taltavul’s Saloon, next door to Ford’s Theater. Having made the final arrangements for his impending crime, Booth returned at 9.30 to Taltavul’s, where President Abraham Lincoln’s valet, Charles Forbes, his coachman Francis Burns, and his bodyguard John Parker, an alcoholic policeman, were all drinking. At 10.15, while Parker continued to imbibe — thus leaving the president unprotected — Booth left, went next door to Ford’s Theater, and shot Lincoln. Meanwhile, George Atzerodt, Booth’s fellow conspirator, who was supposed to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson, had become so intoxicated and frightened that he abandoned the plan.

A controversy still rages over the extent and level of intoxication of the officers and men of the US 7th Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. It is known that Custer’s second-in-command, Major Marcus Reno, had a half-gallon keg of whisky with him on the expedition. When they reached the Rosebud River four days before the battle, the 7th Cavalry troopers may have replenished their supplies of alcohol off a steamboat carrying cases of whisky. According to Indian veterans of the battle, numerous canteens half full of whisky were found with the bodies of Custer’s men. It is a fact that Reno, who was most likely an alcoholic, was intoxicated when besieged by Indians the night after Custer was defeated.

In May 1918, during WWI, General Erich Ludendorff’s German troops reached the Marne River at Château-Thierry, only 37 miles from Paris, during the Third Battle of the Aisne River. On the verge of capturing Paris, but after living without any luxuries for years, the German soldiers invaded France’s champagne provinces, where well-stocked wine cellars abounded. Drunkenness quickly spread through the ranks; even the German military police joined the revelries. In the village of Fismes on the morning of May 30, the bodies of soldiers who had passed out littered the streets, making it difficult for trucks to drive through the town on their way to the front lines. The intoxication and subsequent hangovers afflicting the Germans slowed their advance and halted it completely in certain sectors. This enabled the French and Americans to establish new defensive lines, counterattack, and end Ludendorff’s offensive, which proved to be the Germans’ last chance for victory in WWI.

Alcoholics Anonymous came into existence when a New York stockbroker named Bill W. (an AA member uses only his last initial), an alcoholic who had stopped drinking as a result of a spiritual experience, helped a physician named Dr Bob to quit drinking. During a business trip to Akron, Ohio, Bill W. met Dr Bob and shared with him his own experiences as an alcoholic and his method of recovering from alcoholism. Suffering from a severe hangover, the still woozy Dr Bob had his last drink on June 10, 1935. The next day, with Bill W., he found what is now called Alcoholics Anonymous. Neither Bill W., who lived until 1971, nor Dr Bob, who lived until 1950, ever drank again. The fellowship they founded, which is based on the concept of alcoholics helping other alcoholics, now has more than two million members.

As in almost all of his films, W.C. Fields was intoxicated throughout the production of My Little Chickadee. After drinking from two to four martinis with his breakfast each morning, Fields arrived at Universal Studios with a cocktail shaker full of martinis. Apparently at his comic best when drunk, Fields consumed two bottles of gin each day during the filming. Fields’s inebriated behaviour often infuriated his co-star, Mae West, especially once, when, in an overly affectionate mood, he prodded and pinched her generous figure and called her ‘my little brood mare’. Although he often required an afternoon nap to diminish the effects of his drinking, Fields was never incapacitated by alcohol during his performance in the movie.

Even though his work sometimes dealt with projected future worlds, English author Anthony Burgess developed his novels from his personal experiences. For example, the brutal rape scene in A Clockwork Orange was derived from an incident when his wife was mugged during WWII, which resulted in the death of their expected child. While writing A Clockwork Orange, Burgess became so emotionally involved that he frequently had to calm himself by means of alcohol. As he admitted, ‘I had to write A Clockwork Orange in a state of near drunkenness, in order to deal with material that upset me so much.’

After striking a reef, the Exxon Valdez spilled 250,000 barrels of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound, forming a slick that covered 2,600 square miles and washed onto 1,000 miles of coastline. At the time of the accident, Captain Joseph Hazelwood was below deck, having left at the helm Third Mate Gregory Cousins, who was not certified, to pilot the tanker in Prince William Sound. After the collision, Hazelwood attempted to pilot the tanker off the reef despite warnings that the ship might break up if he succeeded. Hazelwood also failed to sound a general alarm. In addition, Hazelwood was observed chain-smoking on the bridge until Coast Guard officers arrived and warned him that he could set the whole ship on fire. One of the Coast Guard officers who boarded the ship two and a half hours after the collision reported that Hazelwood’s breath smelled of alcohol. When a blood test was administered — a full nine hours after the accident — Hazelwood’s blood alcohol level was above the legal level required to operate a ship. Although Hazelwood admitted that he had drunk alcohol while ashore earlier that day (and witnesses spotted him drinking in two different bars), he denied being impaired at the time of the accident and insisted that the blood alcohol test was inaccurate. Indeed, although a jury convicted Hazelwood on misdemeanour negligence charges (later overturned), he was acquitted of operating a ship while under the influence of alcohol. On the other hand, an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that Hazelwood had left the bridge because of ‘impairment from alcohol’.

In a last-ditch attempt to undo the reforms of glasnost, on August 19, 1991, Communist party hardliners attempted to overthrow Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. The coup collapsed two days later in the face of resistance led by Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Republic. The plotters’ failure to act decisively against Yeltsin ensured the failure of the coup. Heavy alcohol consumption contributed to the ineptitude of the plotters. Former Soviet Vice President Gennady Yanayev, the front man for the coup, drank heavily throughout the affair, and was found ‘in an alcoholic haze’ in his office when the coup collapsed. Another plotter, former Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, began drinking the first night of the coup, by his own admission. When Pavlov tried unsuccessfully to convince the government to declare a state of emergency, he appeared sick ‘or more likely drunk’ according to Deputy Prime Minister Shcherbakov. The failed coup ultimately led to the complete disintegration of the Soviet Union.

On August 31, 1997, Diana, her boyfriend, Dodi al-Fayed, and their driver Henri Paul, were killed in a car crash in a tunnel in Paris. Paul had been driving at more than 100 mph when he apparently clipped another car and lost control. An investigation found that Paul’s blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit. There were also traces of anti-depressants in his blood. Conspiracy theorists — including Dodi’s father, Mohammed al-Fayed — have disputed the blood test results. They note that two bodyguards who were with Paul shortly before the crash said that he did not appear drunk and that he acted normally.

9 DRINKS NAMED AFTER PEOPLE

Made with crème de cacao, gin, or brandy, and cream, this cocktail was named for Alexander the Great, centuries after his death.

Ferdinand L. Petiot, bartender at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, mixed vodka and tomato juice in 1920; American entertainer Roy Barton gave it the name ‘bucket of blood’ after the club in Chicago. The drink was renamed ‘the red snapper’ when Petiot spiced it up with salt, pepper, lemon and Worcester sauce. Though it has been said that this ‘queen among drinks’ was named after Mary, Queen of Scots, it was Queen Mary I of England who was known as ‘Bloody Mary’.

Dom Pérignon (1638–1715) entered the religious life at the age of 15. A blind man, his acute senses of taste and smell aided him in making and improving the wines of the Benedictine monastery near Épernay, where he was a cellarmaster. It was Dom Pérignon who perfected the process of fermenting champagne in the bottle — he literally put in the all-important bubbles. Moët et Chandon vineyards later honoured Pérignon’s accomplishments by naming its finest vintage after him.

The typical summer drink of the English upper middle classes was created by James Pimm, nineteenth-century owner of an oyster bar in the City of London. Originally Pimm intended his drink, flavoured with herbs and quinine, to be a digestive tonic, but it was soon being drunk as a cocktail by fashionable Victorian society.

California surfer Tom Harvey (c. 1970) had a great passion for the ‘Italian screwdriver’ (orange juice, vodka, Galliano). After a day of surfing, Harvey still couldn’t stay off the waves. He would rush to his favourite bar, overindulge himself — and then walk into a wall when it came time to go home.

Mickey Finn was apparently the name of a bartender who worked in Chicago around 1896–1906. He served knockout drinks (which probably contained chloral hydrate) to his customers so that they could be robbed.

This concoction of Scotch whisky, sweet vermouth and bitters, topped with a maraschino cherry, bears the nickname of the legendary eighteenth-century Scottish cattle rustler Robert Macgregor.

This drink was named after a nineteenth-century bartender at Limmer’s Old House in London who was famous for his gin slings — a tall drink that resembles the Collins mixture of gin, lemon, sugar and soda water.

There are at least eight different stories relating to the creation of the tequila-based margarita. The most commonly accepted one is that the drink was concocted in 1938 or 1939 by Carlos Herrera, a Mexican bartender who named the drink in honour of a showgirl named Marjorie King, who was allergic to all hard liquor except tequila.

RUTH ROGERS’ TOP 10 ITALIAN SOUPS

With Rose Gray, Ruth Rogers is chef and co-owner of London’s lauded River Café Restaurant. The Michelin-starred restaurant was one of the first in Britain to emphasise the flavours of Italian home cooking and employ an all-Italian wine list. She has published several cookery books, including, with Rose Gray, the prize-winning The River Cafe Cook Book (1995), The Italian Kitchen (1998, accompanying a Channel 4 TV series) and River Cafe Cook Book Easy (2003).

This soup is a traditional, simple soup of Florence made with Tuscan bread, fresh tomatoes and basil. This is my number one favourite.

A November soup with cavalo nero, bread, beans and oil — the new season’s oil, newly pressed and cavalo nero just after the first frost.

Summer vegetables — asparagus, green beans, courgettes and pesto served at room temperature or chilled. Different to winter minestrone.

A soup for the beginning of summer with new peas and fresh, bright green broad beans.

This soup is made of bread, stock, broccoli and melted fontina cheese and comes from the mountain regions of Italy.

I first had this in U Gianco; it is an unusual combination of fresh and raw porcini.

Porcini, tomato and bread from the Maremma. Acqua Cotta is translated as ‘cooked water’ and is full of the flavour of tomato and porcini.

A really easy soup from our most recent cookbook that can be cooked in 20 minutes.

Sliced fennel cooked in a chicken stock. The fennel absorbs the flavours of the chicken stock and the stock is flavoured by the fennel. The ricotta crostini is placed in the bowl with the fennel ladelled over, giving a creamy dimension.

An autumn soup which is comforting and warm and so thick that you can eat it with a fork.

ROSE GRAY’S 10 FAVOURITE ITALIAN WINES

With Ruth Rogers, Rose Gray is chef and co-owner of London’s famous River Café. She graduated to cooking after a career as teacher of fine art, designer and manufacturer of paper lights and furniture and importer of French cookers. She became chef at Nell’s Nightclub, New York in the mid-198os, and has published several cookery books, including, with Ruth Rogers, the prize-winning The River Cafe Cook Book (1995), The Italian Kitchen (1998, accompanying a channel 4 TV series) and River Cafe Cook Book Easy (2003). The restaurant has been showered with awards, including a Michelin Star (1998). Rose is also co-founder of the Cooks in Schools charity.

I love to use this sparkling wine to mix half-and-half with fresh fruit of the season as an aperitivo.

An unusual, dry Riesling from a great Barolo producer.

This perfect, perfumed Pino Bianco from Friuli complements the fabulous fish dishes of Venice that I love to cook at the River Cafe.

My favourite summer red. Light, beautifully crafted, young drinking wine. Delicious chilled.

Amazingly clean. A modern-style of Amerone which I love to use to drink and also to make Amarone Risotto in the winter.

This year they used all the grapes from their top vineyards in this blend to make a superb concentrated, spicy Chianti. A fantastic buy.

My favourite super Tuscan from one of the genius Chianti producers.

As I love game so much, I love this wine, which is complex with interesting, spicy fruit and savoury flavours.

For Bruno, the wine maker, this is a perfect representation of the elegance of Barbaresco.

When I get my hands on a white truffle from Alba, the pleasure is always completed by a bottle of this brilliant Barolo.

14 HIGHLY UNUSUAL RECIPES

Calvin W. Schwabe is a professor of epidemiology and veterinary medicine at Cal State Davis, California, USA. Among his goals is that of helping people overcome existing prejudices about food, and introducing international ways of eating to the Western world. Schwabe serves as an advisor on numerous international committees devoted to nutrition. In 1979, he wrote the groundbreaking work, Unmentionable Cuisine, published by The University of Virginia State Press.

Put olive oil in earthenware casserole. Add halved, parboiled lambs’ brains, turn over and coat with oil, add salt and pepper, capers, crushed garlic, pitted ripe olives and bread crumbs. Bake in 400° oven for 10–15 minutes. Brain Casserole — Algeria — (Mokh) is an alternative. In Turkey, Brain Salad is commonly eaten.

This popular dish is not only a temptation for frustrated parents. Rub a skinned, eviscerated kid inside and out with: chopped nuts, parsley or coriander, chopped fresh ginger, salt and pepper. Stuff the kid with cooked rice, mixed nuts (pistachios, almonds, pignolias), sultana raisins or seedless grapes, plus residue of kid rubbing mix. Sew up opening, paint with melted butter, roast on a spit over charcoal (or in a 270–300° oven) until brown and tender. Serve on a mound of the stuffing. Guests sit on the floor and dig in.

Trim beef or pork heart, cut into one-eighth inches. Julienne. Marinate with sections of scallions in a mix of cornstarch, water, soy sauce, sherry, sugar, salt and minced ginger. Drain vegetables and stir fry medium hot. Pork heart must be thoroughly cooked.

‘For the cook,’ writes Professor Schwabe, ‘who has successfully subjugated most of the family’s food prejudices…’

Stuff a pig uterus with cumin, leeks, pepper, garum, pounded pork meat and pine nuts. Cook sausage in water and oil with some garum, dill and leeks.

Prepare a stuffing of dormouse meat or pork, pepper and pine nuts, a tasty broth, asafoetida, and some garum. Stuff the dormice and sew them up. Bake in oven on a tile. (In 1972, an enterprising chef in Britain revived this recipe, hoping to acquaint modern diners with cuisine of ancient Rome. The results of his mission remain unknown.)

Spread unsweetened crêpes with a mixture of chopped fish sperm and mushrooms bound with fish-based bechamel sauce. Roll crepes and set in a buttered dish, sprinkle with Parmesan cheese and melted butter; heat dish in a 350° oven until top browns.

Soak a calf’s mesentary with the udder of a young beef in cold water, blanch for 30 minutes in boiling water. Dry and cut into small pieces. Sauté a generous amount of chopped mushrooms and some chopped parsley and shallots. Add salt, pepper, nutmeg and a glass of white wine. Remove from heat, and thicken with five egg yolks. Stir in the meat and stuff the mixture into the pig rectum. Tie off both ends, poach sausage for 45 minutes in stock mixed with white wine. Allow to cool in pot.

Mix small cubes of poached beef brains, chopped buttered spinach (spinach goes well with brain), a crêpe batter and pepper and salt. Fry spoonfuls in hot oil until browned on both sides.

Collect ants in leaf cups, put directly into the hot ashes of a fire for just a few minutes. Remove ants and make into a paste. Add salt and ground chilli, then bake. This chutney is said to have ‘a sharp, clean taste’ and is eaten with cocktails and other curries.

Schwabe allows that this recipe ‘sounds weird’, and suggests as an introduction for the family ‘shark fillets a la meunière’.

The recipe for fermented shark: Eviscerated sharks are buried in the sand or kept in an open bowl for three years to ferment. The much-prized result resembles in taste a ripe cheese.

Marinate larvae, sliced onions and lime leaves in coconut cream with some pepper. Wrap in pieces of linen and steam; serve over rice.

De-bone kangaroo rats, pass meat through fine blade of grinder. Sauté with bacon fat and garlic. Add chopped cooked spinach or watercress, salt and pepper, and stuff raviolis. (In New Orleans, Louisiana, a variant, alligator and cream cheese ravioli, is served.)

Caterpillars of skipper butterflies, which live on the maguey cactus, are toasted or fried and eaten with mescal. Since the maguey is the source of pulque and tequila, ‘caterpillar pretzels’ are a favourite in Mexico, even available canned.

Boil dragonfly nymphs. Eat them.

7 GREAT SAUSAGE EVENTS

Epicharmus, a Greek dramatist who lived during the golden age of Sophocles and Aeschylus, wrote a comedy titled Orya (‘The Sausage’) around 500BC. Because the play exists today only as a fragment, we will never know exactly what the Greeks thought was funny about sausage.

The ancient Romans were so fond of pork sausage spiced with pine nuts and pepper that the dish became a staple of the annual Lupercalian and Floralian festivals. Since these pagan celebrations usually degenerated into orgiastic rites, the early Christians looked upon them with disapproval. When Constantine the Great, a Christian, became emperor in AD324, he outlawed the production and consumption of the sinful sausage. But the Romans refused to cooperate and developed a flourishing black market in sausage. They continued to eat the bootlegged delicacies throughout the reigns of several Christian emperors until the ban was finally lifted.

At a simple peasant meal in Wildbad, Germany, in 1793, 13 people shared a single sausage. Within hours they became seriously ill, and six of them died. Their disease became known as botulism — a word coined from the Latin for sausage, botulus. The powerfully toxic bacteria Clostridium botulinum inside the sausage could have been easily killed by boiling it for two minutes. Once in the body, botulism toxins attack the nervous system, causing paralysis of all muscles, which brings on death by suffocation.

Adolph Luetgert, a Chicago sausage maker, was so fond of entertaining his mistresses that he had a bed installed in his factory. Louisa Luetgert was aware of her husband’s infidelities and, in 1897, their marriage took a dramatic turn for the worse. Louisa subsequently disappeared, and when the police arrived to search Luetgert’s factory, they found human teeth and bones — as well as two gold rings engraved ‘L.L’. — at the bottom of a sausage vat. During his well-publicised trial, Luetgert maintained his innocence, but he was convicted of murder and spent the rest of his life in prison.

Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, an exposé of conditions in the Chicago stockyards and meat industry, contained shocking descriptions: ‘There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage… there would be meat stored in great piles… thousands of rats would race about on it… these rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together.’ Americans were deeply alarmed by the filth described, and in the same year the book was published, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

In October 1981, Joseph Guillou, an engineer on the Moroccan tanker Al Ghassani, was arrested, fined £50, and sentenced to two years in jail for insulting Morocco’s King Hassan. Guillou’s offence was hanging a sausage on the hook normally reserved for a portrait of the monarch. A sausage, said Guillou, was ‘more useful than a picture of the king’.

During home games at Miller Park, the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team holds ‘sausage races’ in which people costumed as different types of sausages run around the park between innings. During a game on July 9, 2003, as the runners passed the visiting team’s dugout, Randall Simon, the first baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates, struck the Italian sausage, Mandy Block, with his bat, knocking her to the ground. After the game, Simon was handcuffed by Milwaukee County sheriff’s deputies, taken to a police station, and fined $432 for disorderly conduct. The sausage whacking was broadcast repeatedly, but Block ignored the controversy, accepting Simon’s apology. When he returned to Miller Park later in the season, Simon bought Italian sausages for a section of fans. Block was recognised by the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council with a certificate of bravery. ‘I’m proud of it,’ Block said. ‘I didn’t even know there was a hot dog council.’

10 REALLY UNUSUAL MEDICAL CONDITIONS

Fine art can really make you sick. Or so says Dr Graziella Magherini, author of The Stendhal Syndrome. She has studied more than 100 tourists in Florence, Italy, who became ill in the presence of great works. Their symptoms include heart palpitations, dizziness and stomach pains. The typical sufferer is a single person between the ages of 26 and 40 who rarely leaves home. Dr Magherini believes the syndrome is a result of jet lag, travel stress, and the shock of an overwhelming sense of the past. ‘Very often,’ she says, ‘there’s the anguish of death.’ The disorder was named after the nineteenth-century French novelist who became overwhelmed by the frescoes in Florence’s Santa Croce Church. Particularly upsetting works of art include Michelangelo’s statue of David, Caravaggio’s painting of Bacchus, and the concentric circles of the Duomo cupola.

On February 26, 1992, Beijing worker Xu Denghai was hospitalised with a ‘twisted intestine’ after playing excessively with a Hula-hoop. His was the third such case in the several weeks since a Hula-hoop craze had swept China. The Beijing Evening News advised people to warm up properly and avoid Hula-hooping immediately after eating.

In its August 1992 issue, the highly respected British Journal of Addiction described three unusual cases of carrot dependence. One 40-year-old man had replaced cigarettes with carrots. He ate as many as five bunches a day and thought about them obsessively. According to two Czech psychiatrists, when carrots were withdrawn, he and the other patients ‘lapsed into heightened irritability’.

The desire to eat metal objects is comparatively common. Occasionally there is an extreme case, such as that of 47-year-old Englishman Allison Johnson. An alcoholic burglar with a compulsion to eat silverware, Johnson has had 30 operations to remove strange things from his stomach. In 1992, he had eight forks and the metal sections of a mop head lodged in his body. He has repeatedly been jailed and then released, each time going immediately to a restaurant and ordering lavishly. Unable to pay, he would then tell the owners to call the police, and eat cutlery until they arrived. Johnson’s lawyer said of his client, ‘He finds it hard to eat and obviously had difficulty going to the lavatory.’

Officially known as Alien Hand Syndrome, this bizarre neurological disorder afflicts thousands of people. It is caused by damage to certain parts of the brain, and causes one of a person’s hands to act independently of the other and of its owner’s wishes. For example, the misbehaving hand may do the opposite of what the normal one is doing: if a person is trying to button a shirt with one hand, the other will follow along and undo the buttons. If one hand pulls up trousers, the other will pull them down. Sometimes the hand may become aggressive — pinching, slapping or punching the patient; in at least one case, it tried to strangle its owner. Says neurologist Rachelle Doody, ‘Often a patient will sit on the hand, but eventually it gets loose and starts doing everything again.’

Twenty-four men and women wrestled in calf-deep mud at the University of Washington. Within 36 hours, 7 wrestlers were covered with patches of ‘pus-filled red bumps similar to pimples’, and the rest succumbed later. Bumps were on areas not covered by bathing suits — one unlucky victim had wrestled in the nude. The dermatitis palastraie limosae, or ‘muddy wrestling rash’, may have been caused by manure-tainted mud.

According to British paranormalist Hilary Evans, some people are ‘upright human [electric] eels, capable of generating charges strong enough to knock out streetlights and electronic equipment’. Cases of ‘electric people’ date back to 1786; the most famous is that of 14-year-old Angelique Cottin, whose presence caused compass needles to gyrate wildly. To further investigate this phenomenon, Evans founded SLIDE, the Street Lamp Interference Data Exchange.

The case of Dianne Neale, 49, appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. In a much-publicised 1991 incident, Neale apparently suffered epileptic seizures at hearing the voice of Entertainment Tonight co-host Mary Hart. Neale experienced an upset stomach, a sense of pressure in her head, and confusion. Laboratory tests confirmed the abnormal electrical discharges in her brain, and Neale held a press conference to insist that she was not crazy and resented being the object of jokes. She said she bore no hard feelings toward Hart, who apologised on the air for the situation.

In another bizarre case, the theme from the show Growing Pains brought 27-year-old Janet Richardson out of a coma. She had been unresponsive for five days after falling out of bed and hitting her head, until, according to her sister, the TV theme ‘woke her up’.

There are about 50 recorded cases of foreign accent syndrome, in which people who have suffered strokes or other injuries adopt a new accent. For example, Tiffany Roberts of Florida suffered a stroke and then began speaking with an English accent. She even adopted such Anglicisms as ‘bloody’ and ‘loo’. Ms Roberts had never been to Great Britain, and was not a fan of British television shows.

Perhaps the oddest case concerned a Norwegian woman who fell into a coma after being hit on the head by shrapnel during an air raid in 1941. When she woke up, she spoke with a thick German accent. She was then ostracised by her neighbours.

Also known as ‘hair felting’, this condition causes hair to form a tangled mass. In a case reported in 1993 in the Archives of Dermatology, a 39-year-old woman’s hair fell out and was replaced by dry, coarse, curly hair which was so tangled that it was impossible to comb. It lacked knots, kinks or twists that would explain the tangling. The hairs themselves were strangely shaped: the cross-sections were triangular, grooved, or shaped like kidneys instead of circular. The usual solution to the condition is to cut off the solidified mass of hair. In one case, a woman from Indiana wanted to keep her hair, having spent 24 years growing it. After two and a half months of lubricating her hair with olive oil and separating the strands with knitting needles, her hair returned to normal.

10 FAMOUS INSOMNIACS

Dietrich said that the only thing that lulled her to sleep was a sardine-and-onion sandwich on rye.

Whenever she stayed in a hotel, Lowell would hire five rooms — one to sleep in, and empty rooms above, below, and on either side, in order to guarantee quiet.

The aging Fields resorted to unusual methods to go to sleep. He would stretch out in a barber’s chair (he had always enjoyed getting haircuts) with towels wrapped around him, until he felt drowsy. Sometimes he could only get to sleep by stretching out on his pool table. On his worst nights, he could only fall asleep under a beach umbrella being sprinkled by a garden hose. He told a friend that ‘somehow a moratorium is declared on all my troubles when it is raining’.

Dumas suffered from terrible insomnia, and after trying many remedies, he was advised by a famous doctor to get out of bed when he couldn’t sleep. He began to take late-night strolls, and eventually started to sleep through the night.

As a teenager, Garland was prescribed amphetamines to control her weight. As the years went by she took so many that she sometimes stayed up three or four days running. She added sleeping pills to her regime, and her insomnia and addiction increased. She eventually died of a drug overdose.

Bankhead suffered from severe insomnia. She hired young homosexual ‘caddies’ to keep her company, and one of their most important duties was to hold her hand until she drifted off to sleep.

Kafka, miserable with insomnia, kept a diary detailing his suffering. For October 2, 1911, he wrote, ‘Sleepless night. The third in a row. I fall asleep soundly, but after an hour I wake up, as though I had laid my head in the wrong hole.’

His insomnia cure was a shot of cognac in a glass of milk.

Marx first began to have insomnia when the stock market crashed in 1929 and he lost $240,000 in 48 hours. When he couldn’t sleep, he would phone people up in the middle of the night and insult them.

An irritable insomniac, Twain once threw a pillow at the window of his bedroom while he was a guest in a friend’s house. When the satisfying crash let in what he thought was fresh air, he fell asleep at last. In the morning he discovered that he had broken a glass-enclosed bookcase.

14 HEALTHY INSOMNIA CURES

Do not use these cures without consulting your health practitioner, as every body is different.

• DRINK A CUP OF CAMOMILE TEA, unless you have an allergy to plants in the ragwort family.

• TAKE THE DIETARY SUPPLEMENT MELATONIN. In the UK Melatonin is a prescription drug; in America it is available at wholefood stores and pharmacies. It is widely considered an effective and safe sleep aid.

• TAKE THE AMINO ACID GABA. This safe sleep aid can cause some people to itch the way the B-vitamin Niacin does. Most people, however, find Gaba very soothing.

• A MUG OF HOT MILK WITH HONEY AND/OR A FEW DROPS OF BRANDY. Though health experts argue, this is a time-honoured remedy which may be effective because it is so comforting.

• TO NAP OR NOT TO NAP? In certain countries, like Mexico and Italy, napping is a part of life, and seems to be healthy. In America, napping is often regarded as weak or lazy. Naps are usually recommended to be not over two hours maximum, and if you do nap, the important thing is that it be regular.

• DOZE, REST AND MEDITATE. If you can’t fall asleep, these practices are highly restorative for our brains and bodies.

• MORNING AND EVENING RITUALS. Do you like to read when you wake up, or before bed? Sew buttons? Play solitaire? Whatever you do, it has to be regular.

• TAKE CALCIUM, MAGNESIUM AND POTASSIUM. These sleep aids, found at pharmacies and wholefood stores, are both soothing and can stop ‘restless leg syndrome’, which keeps millions of people awake. You can also rub organic balms into your legs.

• AVOID STIMULANTS SUCH AS TEA AND COFFEE IN THE EVENING — unless: you’re used to an after-dinner coffee and it doesn’t bother you. Never disrupt a schedule that works.

• FIND OUT IF YOU HAVE SLEEP APNOEA. Overweight people, or those with sinus problems, may have ‘sleep apnoea’, a term describing cessation of breath during the night, usually accompanied by heavy snoring. Consult your health practitioner, because there are cures and sleep apnoea prevents you from getting the levels of REM sleep we all need to function healthily.

• EAT POTATOES, WARM OR ROOM TEMPERATURE, BEFORE BED. Many studies show this to be a wonderful insomnia cure, as are a single candy or pasta. Other studies argue that one should not eat anything three hours before sleep.

• USE WHITE NOISE. Boxes are available that produce what is called ‘white noise’, said to be highly effective for some. Alternatively, tapes of tides or soft sounds of nature can send you to sleep.

• AVOID ANY STRENUOUS EXERCISE THREE HOURS BEFORE BED. Studies have shown that this is the wrong time for aerobic exercise, and will keep you awake.

• DON’T GO TO SLEEP WITH AN ARGUMENT UNSETTLED. American comedienne Phyllis Diller is often credited with this bit of wisdom, but in truth it is as old as the hills. Do all you can to make up your fight before sleeping, or at least one of you is likely to have insomnia or even nightmares.

29 ACTIVITIES AND THE CALORIES THEY CONSUME

Activity Calories per hour

1. Making mountains out of molehills 500

2. Running around in circles 350

3. Wading through paperwork 300

4. Pushing your luck 250

5. Eating crow 250

6. Flying off the handle 200

7. Jumping on the bandwagon 175

8. Spinning your wheels 150

9. Adding fuel to the fire 150

10. Beating your head against the wall 150

11. Climbing the walls 125

12. Jogging your memory 100

13. Beating your own drum 100

14. Dragging your heels 100

15. Jumping to conclusions 75

16. Beating around the bush 75

17. Bending over backwards 75

18. Grasping at straws 75

19. Pulling out the stoppers 75

20. Turning the other cheek 50

21. Fishing for compliments 50

22. Hitting the nail on the head 50

23. Pouring salt on a wound 50

24. Swallowing your pride 50

25. Throwing your weight around (depending on your weight) 50–300

26. Passing the buck 25

27. Tooting your own horn 25

28. Balancing the books 23

29. Wrapping it up at day’s end 12

Source: Bulletin, Columbus Industrial Association, July 11, 1977