On Quotes

John K. Taber

Posters are fond of pithy quotes. One of my favorites was Homines id quod volunt credunt (Men believe what they want) supposedly from Caesar’s Commentaries. It doesn’t take long in a newsgroup to learn that Caesar was right. Oh, true, posters argue their point with logic or rage, but in the end, they believe what they want. I confess I used the quote to the point of exasperating my readers before I finally dropped it from my signature.

The problem using pithy quotes is that the poster has practically never read the work from which the quote is pulled. Sometimes the quote comes from another post or email. Sometimes from a web site providing quotes for any occasion so that the poster doesn’t have to do much reading to find a poet or statesman or philosopher to voice the poster’s view. Sometimes from an important personnage, living or dead, such as Petronius Arbiter, or Toqueville, or Ronald Reagan. And, I confess, I never read Caesar’s Commentaries, and I am simply unable to tell you if Caesar really wrote Homines id quod volunt credunt or not. I just liked what the quote seemed to say.

A frequent contributor to a mailing list I subscribe to used a quote that flabbergasted me. It was

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.
—Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), French poet.

Baudelaire happens to be one of my favorite poets, but I did not recognize the quote. There is no way, I thought to myself, that Baudelaire could write that. He didn’t write a lot, but the poems he did write sound nothing like that. One of his poems, "The Jewels", is one of the most sensuous poems in any language. When The Flowers of Evil was first published, Baudelaire was prosecuted by the French Government for harming public morals. He was fined, and The Jewels was one of several poems that had to be expunged from the book. He celebrated sensual pleasure, and here we have a banality in praise of work? No way.

I asked the mailing list contributor for the citation. After a few exchanges I learned he got the quote from a quote site, http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/t/time.html from its TIME category. Indeed, the quote truly was Baudelaire. It was taken from his Journaux Intimes (Intimate Journals), which I had not heard of. The web site used a translation by Christopher Isherwood.

So, it was off to the library for me. I got the most authoritative edition I could find, because for reasons beyond this post I felt that the Isherwood translation had textual problems.

It turns out that Intimate Journals is a collection of Baudelaire’s odds and ends. One part, , “My Heart Laid Bare”, in which the quote occurs, actually began as notes for a larger work that Baudelaire never finished. He was fond of Poe, and cribbed the title from one of Poe’s works. Baudelaire intended a shockingly honest work baring his soul and feelings, or at least interesting a publisher enough for an advance, but it never amounted to more than some notes to which Baudelaire added entirely unrelated jottings as the original purpose of the notebook was lost. He also kept notebooks with details of household expenses, angry outbursts against his mother, and so on. After Baudelaire’s death, these disparate notebooks were bought by a private collector, and after the collector’s death were forcibly united and published under the title of Intimate Journals.

Baudelaire had syphilis, was dying, and terrified of going insane. The entry after this quote is his prescription recipe from his doctor, which was laborious, but copied out with desperation, as if he meant to follow it scrupulously. In those days, prescriptions for syphilis were pretty imaginative if of little value.

Sartre wrote a scathing review of Baudelaire, drawing in large part from Intimate Journals damning it for its banality. He is quite right, it is banal, like the quote on work. But Sartre ignores Baudelaire’s mental agitation as his death neared (not to mention failing to judge Baudelaire’s poems as poems). The poet was literally frightened out of his wits, and willing to try “working hard” as his step-father must have often admonished the Parisian dandy, as if somehow that would help. It was as if Baudelaire were saying “Yes, Doctor, yes. I will follow your prescription recipe to the letter. Yes, Father, yes. I will work hard and forgo pleasures.” Plainly, Baudelaire was demoralized.

It would have been better to leave Intimate Journals unpublished out of respect for Baudelaire’s established greatness, but such is the appeal of any scrap written by one of the most important poets of modern times that I don’t suppose the poor man’s privacy could have been protected.

The quote that for good reason I doubted came from Baudelaire nevertheless was his. But the context was missing. Did the mail list contributor know anything about the context? I doubt that he ever read a word of Baudelaire’s poems. Perhaps he never heard of Baudelaire. I suspect he felt that quoting a “French poet” magically lent importance to his posts. The reader was supposed to be impressed.

However, great writers have better things to do than provide posters with banalities, even if conveniently arranged and categorized on a web site someplace.

Posters should not quote for decorative reasons without having read the work in question, and hopefully with an understanding of the whole thing. Perhaps Caesar never wrote the quote I used — there are a lot of bogus quotes on the internet. Perhaps Caesar did write it, but was quoting an adversary to refute his cynicism, for all I know, instead of commenting on internet practice.

If you don’t know the stuff don’t quote it.

Real Spätzle

© John K. Taber, 1999

Sonja, my wife, did not learn to cook when she was a girl growing up in Stuttgart because of the disruption of ordinary life by the War. But even in War she learned to make Spätzle in spite of spending most of her days living in, or running to, bomb shelters.

Spätzle, a kind of homemade noodle, is the national dish of Schwabia, where it is widely made to the point of being a standing joke. It is also popular in Alsace, which confuses some people into believing that Spätzle is French. It isn’t originally, it is Southern German, and in particular, Schwabish. Probably the confusion is due to the fact that Alsace has changed nationalities numerous times in the long history of France and Germany so that the food there draws on the genius of both French and German cooking.

In the old fashioned way of making Spätzle, the homemade dough is spread thinly by knife on a wooden board with a handle, like a cheese board, and the knife is used to cut thin lines of the dough. Then the line of dough is flicked into a pot of boiling water. It is an art, the idea being to create thin, light noodles. Your reputation as a Schwabish housewife depended on your Spätzle flicking skill, and some women developed a motion that is just a blur to the eye. Nowadays, use of a Spätzle machine is almost universal, a kind of press that looks like a huge garlic press. The dough is placed in the press body, then pressed through holes into the boiling water.

Personally I prefer Spätzle made the old-fashioned way. I think the machine compresses the dough so that the texture of the noodle is not as light as it is when hand flicked. If Sonja hadn’t emigrated to Texas, she would have switched to the machine much sooner, and I never would have tasted real Spätzle made the old-fashioned way. For a long time after Sonja emigrated, Spätzle machines were not available in Texas, though you might have found them in New York or San Francisco.

Northern Germany uses the potato as its staple starch, and in Northern Germany, Spätzle is almost unheard of. Schwabia is part of Southern Germany, next to Bavaria, but still quite different. Schwabia, except for size, reminds you of Texas. The dialect is unique, and there are lots of stories, jokes, and even local theater based on the Schwabian dialect. Northern Germans are called “Prussians” regardless of whether they are from Prussia or not, just as Northern Americans are called “Yankees” in Texas, regardless of whether they are Yankees or not.

And of course, there are innumerable variations on Spätzle. Thaddäus Troll, the Schwabian humorist, writes: “There is Spätzle in the soup, or buttered, or fried. And there is wheat Spätzle, potato Spätzle, milk Spätzle, cheese Spätzle, roasted Spätzle, cabbage Spätzle, liver Spätzle, ham Spätzle, spinach Spätzle, sausage Spätzle, cucumber Spätzle, apple Spätzle, sour Spätzle, and Spätzle soufflée. And when there is no more Spätzle, there are noodles.”

In Stuttgart, the major Schwabian city, I once overheard a “Prussian” exclaim in exasperation “Will you have Spätzle, sir, will you have Spätzle, sir” mocking the waiters in the local restaurants, “Doesn’t anybody have potatoes here?” The answer is, not very often.

In this country, Sonja learned to cook. She learned dishes to serve Spätzle with. From a formidable old Hungarian, she learned the dish for which Sonja is still famous, chicken paprikash, which is perfect with Spätzle. She had to listen to the old lady’s stories of her marriages and amours, her wheelings and dealings, especially with men, and had to serve for free in the old lady’s restaurant. Eventually, Sonja’s perseverence won out, and she got the dish.

Chicken paprikash with Spätzle became our family’s special occasion dish. A family visit isn’t complete unless it is served. Our children invite their friends for chicken paprikash and Spätzle. But of course that’s not the only dish. From an unpromising start in the War in Germany, my wife went on to become a fine cook in America.

One day, Sonja tried Spätzle in a Dallas restaurant that claims to be Austrian. For some reason in Texas if a restaurant is German, they serve wurst and not very good potato salad. But if the dishes are at all continental, it is advertised as Austrian. The menu is limited, but good. Normally, we do not try Spätzle even if it can be found, but perhaps it was the recommendation of German speaking friends. Or, perhaps it was a fateful day.

Sonja thought, these Spätzle are better than mine! She never let on while we were there. She remained poker-faced. I was not aware of it, but a suspicion had crossed her mind. As soon as we were home, and without a word to me, she pulled Kochen wie die Schwaben (Cooking like the Schwabs, ISBN 3-570-01031-7) to check the recipe. It had never occurred to her to check the recipe. Why should she? This is a dish she knows as well as her name. Do you consult dictionaries to spell your name?

But there it was. 3 Eier (3 eggs) to 500 grams of flour! When she was a girl watching Spätzle being made, it was the War. All her life she had been making wartime Spätzle with one egg to 500 grams of flour, not real Spätzle with three! And she had taught so many friends over the years how to make “real” Spätzle, and at the age of 65 she learns it was wartime Spätzle instead of the real thing.

Of course, she had to try the real recipe with three eggs. Personally, I like the real Spätzle much better. But the kids didn’t. For them, wartime Spätzle is the real thing, not peacetime Spätzle. And if you think about it, it is a hard philosophical question to tell which is more “real”, the Spätzle made in peacetime or the Spätzle made in war. Of course, you may think that the real is only what we are used to. But that is a daring statement. What about the things we are not used to, but are quite real nevertheless? Real Spätzle is perhaps a Zen riddle.

So, here is the recipe for a version of real Spätzle, translated into American measurements and directions. I expanded the directions for readers who may not be familiar with handling dough.

Spätzle

Ingredients translated from German measurements

1 level cup all purpose flour unsifted. You will need extra flour on the side to adjust dough consistency.
1 egg (yes, one egg to one cup of flour is peacetime Spätzle. One egg to three cups of flour is wartime.)
½ tsp salt
¼ cup – 1 cup of water. You will use about ¼ cup of water but need extra water on the side to adjust dough consistency
1 TBS cooking oil

The proportion for peacetime Spätzle is about one egg per cup of flour.

Instructions

When working with dough it is smart to have extra water and flour on hand, so that dough consistency can be adjusted as needed. Especially for this recipe which was in metric measurements from a German cookbook, where I have reduced quantities, so that the American quantities don’t quite match.

Mix the flour, egg and salt into a dough, adding the water as needed. Don’t dump all the water in! Don’t overwork the dough or it gets tough. Add water a little at a time while mixing dough to achieve the right consistency. Use about ¼ cup to start. If the dough gets too thin, add some extra flour. Consistency should be smooth but not rubbery. It may be a little sticky.

Bring a large pot of salt water to a boil. Add the oil. Wet a wooden board with cold water. The board should have a handle, a cheese board will do. Put a piece of dough on the wetted board, and with a table knife, spread some of the dough, as if you were spreading peanut butter. Then with the edge of the knife, cut a thin line of dough and flick into the boiling water. Repeat rapidly. When the Spätzle swims on top of the water, it is done. Use a sieve to scoop out to a warmed platter. If you’re not fast enough, don’t worry, just make small batches.

Or, do what the Schwabs do today, use a Spätzle machine.

Use a slotted spoon or a sieve to scoop the cooked Spätzle out.

Serve buttered, or with an entrée with sauce or gravy. It’s really good with chicken paprikash or goulash.

Wartime Spätzle is the same, except with two to three times the flour per egg.