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heelsheadandstandardshigh · 6 years

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Opening Night - A Lawyered Ficlet (Chris Evans/OFC)

Author’s Notes: Thanks to the encouragement of some of my lovely readers, I finally took the plunge and let myself write a ficlet set in the Lawyered verse. Lawyered is hosted over at @chrisevans-sexualfrustrations and you can read the whole story here.

This takes place in present day (specifically, on March 1, 2018). I’m not sure whether it is actually going to be canon in the Lawyered verse and show up in the story down the road. Regardless, I hope you enjoy!

[WARNING: Very mild Spoilers for Lobby Hero ahead. However, if you’ve read any reviews of the play or the NY Times profile about Chris, there is nothing in here you aren’t already aware of.]

With ten minutes until curtain, silence lingered in the dressing room as Chris sat on the tiny sofa with no other company but his thoughts. His parents and siblings had cleared out twenty minutes ago with many words of encouragement and ‘break a leg’s prior to their departure, though there was one person whose absence he experienced acutely while he struggled to calm his nerves.

Boston and its suburbs had always been Chris’s stomping grounds, but it was undeniable that New York City was Danielle’s. He felt it every time they walked down the street while carrying on a conversation, her steps carrying her to their destination as though she were operating on autopilot, deftly bobbing and weaving around the tourists. Everything about her screamed that she belonged.

And living in TriBeCa now? Well, that was a bit of a kick. It was almost serendipitous that he would wind up moving somewhere that had served as the backdrop for their first meeting and the deepening of their relationship, where Chris had irretrievably fallen in love with the blonde law student who looked at him and saw an out-of-towner in need of culinary recommendations, rather than the actor who usually wore the Captain America suit.

The time was rapidly approaching where he would don the cowl for the final time, yet there was so much opportunity ahead of it. He’d undoubtedly find it strange to see Sebastian or Anthony wield the shield, but he would be embarking on a new path of his own, too. The sprawling, albeit temporary TriBeCa loft had cemented recent discussions with his mother about maybe setting down some roots in the area because it had been increasingly difficult to spend large stretches of time with his girlfriend when her work load required late hours and put a damper on any flexibility to travel. While he loved the Boston house and seeing his family at his mom’s house fifteen minutes away, Danielle’s job was in New York City and looked to be for the foreseeable future. At some point, Chris would have to decide just how invested he was in their relationship because he knew she couldn’t be okay with living constantly apart during most of his downtime forever, even if she hadn’t voiced that opinion just yet.

He’d never forget her face when she told him that he was strongly considering the play and he would be required to live in Manhattan from the end of January through mid-May if he took the role. If Chris wasn’t entirely sold on the role of Bill before, the hope and sheer excitement in her eyes would have been the last push he needed.

Apartment hunting with her was an eye-opening experience. It wasn’t because he learned anything about her that he didn’t already know; her 3am Property Brothers marathons when she couldn’t turn her brain off enough to sleep were pretty legendary. Instead, it was the feeling of warmth that pooled in his stomach at the realization that they were partners in the search, looking for a home that would suit both of them, a space that blended their tastes and their needs together.

Their lives were more intertwined in TriBeCa than they’d ever been and with it came a sense of contentment and belonging that rivaled the one he felt as his mother’s house. It was a scary realization, but one that he took to heart.

After years of talking about it in articles and interviews, Chris Evans was finally going to settle down and he was going to do it with Danielle Blake. It didn’t matter if it was in New York City or suburban New Jersey; he just knew that he couldn’t spent any more time waking up in a bed that wasn’t one they called theirs rather than his or hers. It was a huge step that was not to be taken lightly, but he was ready for it nevertheless.

What he didn’t feel ready for, however, was curtain on the first night of Lobby Hero and certainly not without Danielle. She’d promised that she would leave work with enough time to be in the audience to support him, after cursing the legal gods that they had set a massive deadline in the European Union for that day. Everything needed to be filed by 7pm EST or they would automatically default.

She told him that she would see him out there so he didn’t get anxious and made him promise not to look for her. Chris had been hesitant, but ultimately gave in. Of course, he hadn’t expected his sister to hand him a folded piece of paper with a knowing smile on her way out the door.

It had taken ten minutes to build up the courage to open it, but he was glad he did once he finished reading its contents.

Dead center, row 3. Don’t look for me, I know you’ll be tempted. Just know that I’m here and I love you. I am so proud of you, sweetheart. Break a leg. xoxo Danielle

The roling in his stomach stopped and Chris found himself able to stand to adjust his belt by the thick buckle just beneath the polyester police jacket. He was finally ready.

It had been over a decade since Chris had last taken a bow on stage following a long-rehearsed performance. So much had changed since then, but the exhilaration that surged through his veins with the rousing applause from the audience had not.

For the first time on that winter evening, he let his eyes roam the crowd. His brother was the easiest to spot, though that was because his whistle was as clear as day and probably sent all dogs within a ten-mile radius running for the hills. From there, it was easy to find the remainder of his family members.

Then, during the curtain call, he realized that they were all in the third row, a mere 10 feet from his place on stage in the tiny Helen Hayes Theater.

Dead center, Row 3.

His blue eyes darted over seat by seat, landing on his parents then his siblings and brother-in-law, and then—

And then.

Despite the burning stage lights, he could see the familiar green eyes that made his heart hammer against his ribs, even after nearly four years. She, like everyone else, was on her feet and it was apparent that she was clapping so hard that he thought she might bruise her palms. Yet, the warmth and pride that was evident on her soft features clearly took the cake.

The lights dimmed and hindered his ability to keep eye contact, but Chris could still feel the tight pull of his cheeks due to the grin he hadn’t even realized appeared. He desperately hoped that she would come backstage to see him soon, anxious to hear her thoughts and maybe, be on the receiving end of such a look once more.

The walk back to his dressing room was delayed by shared congratulations from the cast and the crew alike, embraces and cheek kisses all around. He didn’t want to rush because there’d only ever be one opening night, even though they were technically previews, but it was hard not to let his mind drift to who might lay ahead.

He tried not to be disappointed when he found the space empty. Then a knock on the door filled him back up with hope again.

“It’s open,” he called out from the small vanity where he had leaned to toe off his boots.

The door opened with a snick and he watched in the mirror as a head of blonde hair became visible. A grin rocketed across his face.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” Chris echoed.

“Can I come in?” the blonde asked softly, surprisingly cautious.

He nodded his ascent as he turned in the direction of the voice, but added “Of course” for good measure. His face had grown a little more stoic by then, though he couldn’t understand the source of the nerves.

She slipped inside and shut the door behind her, leaving them alone for the first time since she’d left for work that morning. Although, Chris had still been mostly asleep in bed when she kissed him goodbye.

Her green eyes carefully raked down his form, taking in the uniform up close. “I feel like I could bump into you on patrol in Port Authority like this.” They flicked up with a smile. “It’s not only the costume, though.”

He removed the hat to carefully set it down on the tabletop. “Did you like it?”

“The costume?”

“The whole thing,” he clarified. “What did you think?”

The woman took a few steps closer, crossing the tiny room in virtually no time at all. “I cried,” she confessed. “It was funny, it was horrifying. And you—you were like nothing I’d ever seen.”

He breathed in deeply prior to exhaling, the knot in his belly loosening. “Danielle.”

“Chris,” she answered, drawing nearer to him and hearing the light crinkle of the police jacket as her arm brushed against it. “You made my skin crawl. I never thought that was a feeling I’d tie to you, but you somehow managed it. While the second act was running, I didn’t know how I was going to come back here and let myself be in the same room as you without anyone else around.” The corner of her mouth rose. “Then I watched you come out behind the screen of the building doors on the stage and I saw you react to something Michael said. I’d recognize that laugh as yours anywhere. It wasn’t anything like Bill.” She reached for his cheek and could feel the familiar texture of makeup under her palm, but paid it no mind. “You were wonderful, sweetheart. I am so unbelievably proud of you.”

Neither knew who initiated it exactly, but a few moments later, they found themselves tightly wrapped up in each other’s arms, Chris’s mustache tickling her neck where he burrowed his face against her skin.

“I’m not the only one, you know.” She stroked her fingers over the fuzzy hairs at the back of his head, shorn down for the police-appropriate crew cut. “When you delivered Bill’s line about being nice, you made my mom cry.”

He laughed and she felt his chest reverberate against her. “Yeah, he’s a piece of shit.”

“He is,” she emphatically agreed, “which is why I’m even prouder. He’s absolutely nothing like you.”

“The mustache and hair help.”

“Oh, yes. Because we both know that awful facial hair and a bad haircut can save a terrible performance,” she noted dryly.

Chris pulled back just enough to kiss her. “Thank you.”

Satisfied he was taking the compliment, she smiled. “You’re welcome.”

After another few kisses, he begrudgingly backed away so he could get started on shedding Bill’s attire. The jacket came off first, followed by the belt and all its accessories. He was sitting in the chair to take off his boots when he realized his girlfriend was staring, focus unmoving.

His blue eyes lifted curiously and followed her line of sight until it led to his left hand.

Oh.

He tucked his boots neatly beneath the table. “I’m not used to it either,” Chris admitted, straightening again. “I’ve been acting professionally for nearly two decades, but I’ve never actually had to wear one.”

Danielle paused in thought prior to answering. It was difficult to find an appropriate response now that she’d been caught looking. “You twist it a lot. In the play, I mean.”

“I’m glad you picked up on that.” He smiled, pleased. “I only do that when you see Bill leaving the elevator.”

The implication of the habit dawned on her. “So we’ll know it’s because he’s just put it back on?”

“Bingo.”

“Wow. That’s fucking brilliant.” A small, quiet laugh. “You’re brilliant.”

“Says the lawyer who was just complaining to me yesterday about how archaic and corrupt the Argentinian trademark opposition procedure is,” he countered, pointing at her.

Her heartbeat thrummed at his argument. She knew Chris listened to her complain about cases and clients sometimes, but it still caught her off-guard that he was usually able to paraphrase back to her the details of her lament because he’d listened so intently. It also didn’t hurt that for the first year they’d known each other and before she’d gotten experience in practice as an actual attorney rather than an intern, he knew little more of trademarks outside of famous brand names.

If he wasn’t already going to get laid later as a result of his utter brilliance on stage that evening, he certainly was now.

“Does it bother you?” he asked suddenly, interrupting her thoughts.

“What? That your character is an utter bastard?”

“No.” Chris snorted. He held up his left hand to illustrate the actual meaning of his question, the silver catching the light. “The wedding ring.”

“Oh.” She shook her head, recently-shortened blonde hair tumbling over her shoulders from the action. Though, Chris noted a little extra tint of pink creeping up her neck that he suspected reached her cheeks, but the cosmetic blush on her skin made it difficult to tell. “No, it doesn’t. It’s just… strange to see, I guess?”

Any further discussion was derailed by a buzzing noise, the source of which he realized was her iPhone that had been stowed in her back pocket.

“It’s my mom,” she advised once she was able to look at the screen. “She and dad are with your parents and siblings. They want to know if it’s okay to come back or if you’d rather they meet us at home since it’s kind of a tight squeeze.”

“It’s okay. I wouldn’t mind being squished in here with them,” he chuckled. “We can all go back to our place after.” The words home and our place reverberated in his head like an echo. “We should probably order in some food for everyone, though. I’m not sure what’s open.”

“Come on, honey. Have I known our families for a day?” Danielle scoffed. “I called last week to schedule an order from that Italian place we like on Reade Street.”

God, he loved this woman. “The one that makes the greatest asparagus on the planet?”

“With pancetta, parmesan, and bread crumbs, yeah. There’s a tray of them waiting for us on sternos as we speak. Someone from building management has been checking in every thirty minutes to make sure the apartment isn’t on fire, so all of the hot food will be warm by the time we get home. Plus, I may have ordered an extra half-tray to stash in the fridge for ourselves.” Her phone vibrate three times in quick succession. “Okay, both of our mothers are harassing me now, so I’m gonna go out and get them.”

He caught her hand before she could fully turn around and pulled her in for a long, slow kiss. “Thank you. For everything.”

“Does that include putting up with the fuzzy caterpillar on your face?”

Chris rocked back with the force of his laughter and clutched a hand to his chest. “Especially with that.”

“In that case, you’re welcome,” she said definitively and slipped away to the door. She had just turned the knob to let herself out when she stopped and glanced back at him over her shoulder. “Just so you know. What we talked about before?” Danielle glanced at his left hand again for context before her gaze returned to his face. “I wouldn’t mind seeing it again. Maybe not right now.” She tilted her head a little. “But someday.”

The corners of his mouth lifted just enough to be noticeable. “Good to know,” he replied and watched her disappear into the narrow corridor, closing the door behind her.

Tagging per their usual requests, as well as those who voted in favor of ficlets: @patzammit @duncedgoofball @renntastic @beautifulrare4leafclover @avaalons @danielleharmony @tchitchou26

#chris evans #chris evans rpf #chris evans fanfiction #chris evans fan fiction #chris evans fanfic #chris evans fan fic #chris evans/ofc #chris evans/original character #chris evans/oc #chris evans/original female character #lawyered #my fics

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instantdeerlover · 4 years

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Who Will Save the Food Timeline added to Google Docs

Who Will Save the Food Timeline

The internet’s most comprehensive archive of food history — a passion project of one dedicated librarian — predates Wikipedia. Now, it needs a new custodian.

In the long timeline of human civilization, here’s roughly how things shook out: First, there was fire, water, ice, and salt. Then we started cooking up and chowing down on oysters, scallops, horsemeat, mushrooms, insects, and frogs, in that general chronological order. Fatty almonds and sweet cherries found their way into our diet before walnuts and apples did, but it would be a couple thousand years until we figured out how to make ice cream or a truly good apple pie. Challah (first century), hot dogs (15th century), Fig Newtons (1891), and Meyer lemons (1908) landed in our kitchens long before Red Bull (1984), but they all arrived late to the marshmallow party — we’d been eating one version or another of those fluffy guys since 2000 B.C.

This is, more or less, the history of human eating habits for 20,000 years, and right now, you can find it all cataloged on the Food Timeline, an archival trove of food history hiding in plain sight on a website so lo-fi you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a GeoCities fanpage. When you look past the Times Roman font and taupe background, the Food Timeline happens to be the single most comprehensive inventory of food knowledge on the internet, with thousands upon thousands of pages of primary sources, cross-checked research, and obsessively detailed food history presented in chronological order. Every entry on the Food Timeline, which begins with “water” in pre-17,000 B.C. and ends with “test tube burgers” in 2013, is sourced from “old cook books, newspapers, magazines, National Historic Parks, government agencies, universities, cultural organizations, culinary historians, and company/restaurant web sites.” There is history, context, and commentary on everything from Taylor pork roll to Scottish tablet to “cowboy cooking.”

A couple of years ago, I landed on the humble authority of the Food Timeline while doing research on bread soup, a kind of austerity cuisine found in countless cultures. The entry for soup alone spans more than 70,000 words (The Great Gatsby doesn’t break 50,000), with excerpts from sources like Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s A History of Food, John Ayto’s An A-Z of Food and Drink, and D. Eleanor Scully and Terence Scully’s Early French Cookery. Before long, I fell into the emotional condition known as an internet K-hole, following link after link after link for hours on end. From olla podrida to hodge podge to cassava to taro to Chex Mix to Johnnycakes, the Food Timeline covered everything. Did you know that mozzarella sticks go as far back as the Middle Ages, but back then they called them “pipefarces”? I bookmarked the site and returned to it time and time again, when I was researching, writing, or just bored and hungry.

Despite the Food Timeline’s incredible utility, few people I spoke to had ever heard of it. Those who had always marveled at its breadth. “Oh my god, it’s nirvana,” Taste of the Past podcast host Linda Pelaccio said to herself when she first stumbled onto the Food Timeline. Sandy Oliver, a food historian and fellow fan, was stunned by its completeness and simplicity. “It was one of the most accessible ways of getting into food history — especially if you were a beginner — because it was just so easy to use,” she told me. “It didn’t have a hyperacademic approach, which would be off-putting.”

When Oliver learned that the thousands of pages and countless resources on the Food Timeline were compiled and updated entirely by one woman, she couldn’t believe it. “Oh my lord,” she thought. “This is an obsessed person.”

The Food Timeline, in all its comprehensive splendor, was indeed the work of an obsessed person: a New Jersey reference librarian named Lynne Olver. Olver launched the site in 1999, two years before Wikipedia debuted, and maintained it, with little additional help, for more than 15 years. By 2014, it had reached 35 million readers and Olver had personally answered 25,000 questions from fans who were writing history papers or wondering about the origins of family recipes. Olver populated the pages with well-researched answers to these questions, making a resource so thorough that a full scroll to the bottom of the Food Timeline takes several labored seconds.

For nearly two decades, Olver’s work was everyone else’s gain. In April of 2015, she passed away after a seven-month struggle with leukemia, a tragedy acknowledged briefly at the bottom of the site. “The Food Timeline was created and maintained solely by Lynne Olver (1958-2015, her obituary), reference librarian with a passion for food history.”

In the wake of Olver’s death, no one has come forward to take over her complex project, leaving a void in the internet that has yet to be filled — and worse, her noble contribution to a world lacking in accurate information and teeming with fake news is now in danger of being lost forever.

It isn’t often that we are tasked with thinking about the history of the food that we eat, unless it shows up in a Jeopardy! question or we ask our informal family historians to detail whose mother passed down this or that version of pound cake. But there are plenty of reasons to pay close attention: for curiosity’s sake; for deepening an appreciation of and respect for cooks, food, and technique; and for gathering perspective on what came before us. “Very few (if any) foods are invented. Most are contemporary twists on traditional themes,” Olver wrote on the Food Timeline. “Today’s grilled cheese sandwich is connected to ancient cooks who melted cheese on bread. 1950s meatloaf is connected to ground cooked meat products promoted at the turn of the 20th century, which are, in turn related to ancient Roman minces.”

The problem is that these days we’re overloaded with bad information that can be accessed instantaneously, with few intermediaries running quality control. “I think it’s a little too easy to turn to the web,” Oliver, who was also a longtime friend of Olver’s, told me as we talked about the legacy of Food Timeline. “What I worry about is that people aren’t learning critical thinking skills. Once in a while I run into someone who has never used a primary source — wouldn’t know it if it hit them on the head. Libraries are where you’d find that stuff. It’s not the same as using a Wikipedia page at all.” Or, if not a library, a mammoth resource compiled by a certified reference librarian herself. Whenever a reader would write in asking a question, or when Olver herself would become interested in the provenance of a certain food, she’d turn to her personal library of thousands of food books, and her litany of professional resources and skills, and write out detailed answers with sources cited on her website.

As Olver emphasized proudly in a 2013 interview on Pelaccio’s Taste of the Past podcast, when you Google “food history,” the Food Timeline appears first in the search results, even though she never “paid search engines for premium placement, solicited reciprocal links, partnered with book vendors, or sold advertising.” Over the years, thousands of emails poured in asking Olver for help finding the specific information they were looking for, like the history of a weird cheese or a grandmother’s pie recipe.

“One of my favorite groupings of people are those who are looking to recover family recipes,” Olver explained to Pelaccio. “I love that! As long as you can give me a little bit of context, then I have some direction.” She would often cook the recipes people sent her so she could gain a better understanding of the legacy of certain foods. Occasionally, she would struggle to come up with an answer to readers’ questions. “If anybody out there knows the answer to this, please let me know,” she began on Pelaccio’s podcast. “I’ve been asked repeatedly over the years for a recipe for ‘guildmaster sauce.’ It is mentioned on some of the old railroad menus and on fancy dining car menus, but we are not coming up with a recipe or other references.” She never got the answer.

“One of the reasons she wanted people to learn about food was for the simple basic fundamental fact that it kept people alive,” Sara Weissman, a fellow reference librarian at the Morris County Public Library and occasional Food Timeline collaborator, told me. “It was that simple. There was no pretension about it.” Olver found food to be a universal subject of interest — everyone had something to share and everyone had something to learn.

“Yesterday I took the entire day off from work because I wanted to research seitan wheat meat,” Olver told Pelaccio. “My whole site is really driven by my readers. What is it that they want to know?”

The Olvers’ former family home is a modest colonial that sits on a shady suburban street in Randolph, New Jersey, about 10 minutes from the Morris County Public Library, where Lynne worked for more than 25 years. It is fastidiously clean and welcoming, and Olver’s library was still the focal point of the house when I visited a little more than a year ago. As she amassed primary sources to build out the Food Timeline, the sitting room filled up with bookshelves to house her more than 2,300 books — some dating to the 17th century — as well as thousands of brochures and vintage magazines, and a disarrayed collection of other food ephemera, like plastic cups from Pat’s and Geno’s and a tin of Spam. “One of 10 top iconic American manufactured foods, SPAM holds a special place on our national table & culinary folklore,” Olver wrote on the Timeline.

Despite Olver’s intense fondness for it as an object of inquiry, Spam did not hold a special place on her palate; she never tried it. A picky eater, she detested lima beans, pistachio ice cream, calamari, slimy textures, and anything that even edged on raw. When she was in high school in the early ’70s, her favorite dish to make was something she called “peas with cheese,” which is as simple as it sounds. “She would take frozen peas and she’d melt cheese on it, mostly Swiss,” then cover the messy pile in Worcestershire sauce, Olver’s sister, Janice Martin, recalled. “We called Worcestershire sauce ‘life’s blood.’ It was coursing through our veins.” (Sadly, the Timeline does not include an entry for peas with cheese.)

Making peas with cheese as a teenager was the beginning of what would become a lifelong interest in food for Olver. Libraries also captured her attention early on: At 16, she took her first job as a clerk in the Bryant Library in Roslyn, New York, shelving books in the children’s department. There, she was mentored by two older librarians, whom she loved. “She was an introvert,” Olver’s sister told me. “When it came to research, she was fascinated by ferreting out information that nobody else could find.” In 1980, she graduated with a degree in library science from Albany State University, where she also worked as a short-order cook, making sandwiches for students and faculty at a university canteen.

“Libraries are where you’d find that stuff. It’s not the same as using a Wikipedia page at all.”

Olver and her future husband, Gordon, met at Albany State and married the year after Olver graduated, in 1981, after which they worked in Manhattan (Lynne at a law library, Gordon in reinsurance), then Connecticut. They eventually had two children — Sarah and Jason — and settled in New Jersey in 1991, where Olver found a job as a reference librarian at the Morris County Public Library, eventually becoming the head of reference, and finally director of the library.

It was during Olver’s time as a reference librarian that the seed was planted for the Food Timeline. It began as an assignment to explain the origins of Thanksgiving dinner to children, to be published on an early incarnation of the library’s website. Around the same time, Olver was asked to write a monthly print newsletter to share library news, which she named Eureka!. One section of the newsletter was devoted to “Hot Topics,” as Olver and her colleague Sharon Javer wrote in the first dispatch. “Each month, this lead feature will focus on a particular theme: holidays, New Jersey events sources, census data, and so on. Included in this sizzling section will be answers to arduous questions, practical pointers and many marvelous morsels of information.”

Eureka!, in a sign of things to come, began to take over her life. “I remember one time saying to her, ‘How come we’re buying all this colored paper?’” Gordon, her husband, told me. “The library wouldn’t pay for the paper, so she was buying it on her own. When the library realized it was taking so much of her time, they asked her to stop. Meanwhile, she had put so much time and effort into it that she said to them, ‘Just pass it over to me, I’ll take it.’”

When the family got a Gateway computer in the late ’90s, Olver began teaching herself HTML, and by 1999, she was combining her interest in the Thanksgiving dinner project and the Eureka! answers column into a hybrid website she called the Food Timeline, where she could focus on providing well-researched food history on her own time. An archived version of the 1999 Food Timeline http://gti.net/mocolib1/kid/food.html" rel="nofollow">still exists and looks — unsurprisingly — more or less the same as the one now. “We still hand code html & today’s readers comment the site is ‘ugly,’” Olver wrote under the site’s “Market Strategy.” “We acknowledge: what was cutting edge in 1999 is now stale. Conversley? [sic] FT looks so old it’s become vintage.”

Olver wrote everything on the Food Timeline with a royal “we,” including her responses to readers’ emails, despite the fact the project was largely hers, with an occasional assist from others. “‘I don’t want anyone to know that it’s just me,’’’ Sarah recalled her mom saying. “She wanted people to believe that it was a network of volunteers,” because she felt that it lent the site more credibility.

“We acknowledge: what was cutting edge in 1999 is now stale.”

While Olver worked at the county library by day, by night she was creating an online resource for anyone who wanted to know more about Johnny Appleseed or chuck wagon stew or the origins of Sauce Robert. By the website’s first anniversary, Olver was already spending upwards of 30 hours a week on the Food Timeline, compiling and posting all the information she was digging up and answering readers’ questions about the origins of their grandmothers’ crumble recipes. “If you came in the house and you wanted to know where she was, and she wasn’t cooking, she was in the office on the computer,” Gordon recalled.

Eventually, even the cooking fell behind. Olver’s children came to expect burnt grilled cheese sandwiches at meals Sarah said. “She would be like, ‘I’ll leave these [on the stove] and go do my work,’ and then she would forget because she was so into what she was doing.”

Over time, the audience for the site expanded, and Olver’s subtle form of fame grew with it. She was named a winner of the New York Times Librarian Award in 2002, and, in 2004, Saveur put the Food Timeline on its Saveur 100 list of the best food finds that year. In the mid-2010s, she was asked to contribute to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America and consult for America’s Test Kitchen.

Sarah and Jason recalled taking their mother to a cooking class at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan during that time period. “She was so excited about the teacher of this class because she had heard of her through her research,” Sarah told me. “When we got there, the teacher was like, ‘I’m looking at my roster of students and I see that Lynne Olver is here. Where is Lynne Olver?’ Mom kind of timidly raised her hand, and this chef was like, ‘I’ve been dying to meet you!’” The chef who left Olver starstruck was just as starstruck to meet Olver.

For years, Olver lived something of a double life. As the director of a mid-size suburban library, she was known to hand out PayDay candy bars to her staff on pay day and shovel snow from the building walkway during snowstorms, while as the founder of Food Timeline, she brought her computer on vacation, dutifully responding to readers’ food history questions within the promised 48-hour window. “I think she started on the internet as a way to reach a lot of people,” her sister said. “A lot of people who wouldn’t go into the library.”

The night before her wedding, in September 2014, Olver’s daughter, Sarah, noticed that her mom wasn’t acting like herself. While the family was sitting all together in the living room, Olver got up to go to the bathroom; minutes later, she was in the throes of a seizure. Sarah called 911, and Olver was taken to the hospital. The family stayed with her until doctors sent them home in the early hours of Sarah’s wedding day. The wedding had to go on, though Olver was too sick to attend. Doctors diagnosed her with leukemia the next day.

Olver had known for a while that she was sick, but didn’t want to ruin the wedding, so she had put off telling anyone. “She’d be like, ‘I’m dying, but let me put everyone else first,’” Sarah said. Olver was kept in the hospital for two months, but fought hard to be home for Thanksgiving. “It was my first time cooking Thanksgiving dinner because she wasn’t feeling up to cooking — and I ruined it,” Sarah said. “The turkey shrunk off the bone. That was one of the only things that made her laugh in a really long time.”

“Knowledge is power, but sharing knowledge is the best.”

When she was diagnosed with leukemia, Olver used the Food Timeline’s Twitter account to grumble about the food in the ICU at Morristown Medical Center, where she stayed until she was transferred to specialists in Hackensack two months later. “It was a chicken cutlet with some kind of sauce on it,” Gordon recalled; the post has since been taken down by the family. “She said, ‘This sauce, I don’t know what it is, I’m not eating it. It doesn’t look very good. It’s not a natural color.’”

Following her stay at the hospital in Hackensack, Olver returned home to wait for a bone marrow transplant. “She had to use a walker because balance was a problem, but very shortly after getting back from the hospital, she was walking around and doing all of her Food Timeline stuff again,” Gordon explained. She was responding to emails, diving back into her research. “On her birthday, March 10, she said, ‘I had a glorious day.’”

The reason? “Someone had written in with a question that she liked.”

A little over a month later, Lynne died of leukemia, only one year short of her retirement from the library. She had been planning to spend her retirement working on it full time: Earlier that year, she had renewed the Food Timeline domain for 10 more years.

A year after Olver’s death, her family began to discuss what would happen to the Food Timeline and who could take it over. “What we know is that we couldn’t do it justice ourselves,” Sarah said.

To anyone willing and able to maintain Olver’s vision of an ad-free, simply designed, easy-to-access resource on food history, the family members say that the website and her library are theirs, for free. A couple of people have put forward their names, but the family felt that their hearts weren’t in the right place. “One woman had shown us what she had done with her website and it was just full of banner advertisements,” Gordon said.

“It has to uphold her vision,” Sarah added.

Olver’s book collection — if a price were to be put on it — would be worth tens of thousands of dollars, Gordon estimates. So far, there have been no takers for either the books or the task of keeping the site going.

“The Culinary Institute of America initially expressed interest,” Gordon said. “But three months later, they came back and said, ‘We don’t really have the ability to take that volume of texts and dedicate [the task of updating the site] to a specific person. I said they were missing the point; I wasn’t looking to give them the books unless they wanted the website, too.”

The Food Timeline was — and still is — a great democratizing force. “I think Lynne liked that the internet was for everybody and by everybody. Knowledge is power, but sharing knowledge is the best,” Lynne’s sister, Janice, told me. “If you hold the knowledge and you can help everybody get it, that’s where it’s at.” Lynne Olver, an award-winning reference librarian, wanted everybody to know exactly what she knew.

“I would second anybody who says that they want Food Timeline to be brought up to date, who know how to keep that valuable digitized information where people can get their hands or their minds on it,” Sandy Oliver told me. “I’d hate to think Lynne had spent all those hours doing all that work and have it just slide into oblivion. I’d love to see it continue in whatever useful form it can.”

Dayna Evans is a freelance writer currently based in Paris. She last wrote for Eater about the rise of community fridges across the country. D’Ara Nazaryan is an art director & illustrator living in Los Angeles.

Fact checked by Samantha Schuyler

via Eater - All https://www.eater.com/2020/7/8/21271246/food-timeline-lynne-olver

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touristguidebuzz · 7 years

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The Cow Head Taco Philosopher King of Oaxaca

It’s Wednesday and I realize with a start that I’m late again. I have a conference call in a few minutes, and I’m wandering deep in thought on the other side of town. More importantly, I completely forgot to eat. For a woman who writes about food for a living, this oversight is a counterintuitive but consistent affliction. Everything is blotted out when I am deep in a writing project or speech. Yes, even food. I walk around in a daze thinking wordy thoughts.

Pressed for time, I veer to the right hoping that my favorite cow head taco vendor has not packed up for the day. I arrive breathless, smiling, sweaty in the desert heat. Israel, my cabeza expert, smiles widely. “Hola Yeni,” he drawls with all the time in the world. He swings the heavy lid off a huge metal pot, shifting onto his right foot to absorb its weight as steam billows into the air. “¿Qué puedo servirle?” (What can I serve you?)

Israel’s taco restaurant consists of a tiny mobile stand with two stools facing a makeshift bar, propped up against the wheels. In addition to his metal pot, divided into quarters to separate the types of meat and the tortillas, he has a cooler filled with drinks and sauces. When he’s not parked, you wouldn’t know he was coming. The don’t call it tacos ambulantes (wandering tacos) for nothing.

As I half lean on a stool, blood sugar crashing, I catch an older man smiling at me from the corner of my eye. “Where are you from? And are you married?” he asks. “And where is your family? Are they here?” I open my mouth to try to answer his stream of questions but Israel cuts me off with a smile.

“Tranquilo,” he interjects. “Let her eat first.”

I wolf down the first of my tacos as both men eye me warily, perhaps wondering if I can breathe while eating that quickly. Once I wipe off the salsa with a paper napkin, I turn to the other diner and answer his questions.

Israel presides over our talk like a proud papa, looking from one of us to the other.

“Isn’t life grand?” he asks no one and everyone. We smile, then dip our heads to take another bite of our tacos.

Tacos de cabeza, surtidos style.

A Little About Those Cow Head Tacos

Much like dumplings in Asia, many different meats and cuts go into tacos in Mexico. In his book Planet Taco, Jeffrey Pilcher notes:

“People have been eating corn tortillas with bits of meat or beans rolled up inside of them for more than a millenium, but the taco achieved national hegemony only in the twentieth century. Traditionally, every region in Mexico had its own distinctive snack foods, collectively known as antojitos (little whimsies), formed in countless ingenious shapes and given a wide variety of local names.”

The now ubiquitous taco is a more modern usage for one of those antojitos. In the 1831 book El Cocinero Mexicano, a list of corn snacks like quesadillas and chilaquiles, also did not mention tacos. Per Pilcher, tacos-as-descriptor only became popular following the publication of Los banditos de Rio Frio (The Bandits of the Cold River) in 1891, which makes reference to children “skipping, with tacos of tortillas and avocado in their hand.” Though the expression was obviously used prior to publication, it was with this new book that it “quickly received official recognition,” says Pilcher, with attribution officially given to Mexico City.

In the case of cow head tacos a new world fusion: both beef and pork were Spanish imports. Jose Iturriaga notes in Las Cocinas de Mexico that cow head tacos originate from Bajio, in central Mexico. These days, they are quite popular there, in Sonora, and in the capital of Mexico City. But they’re also found elsewhere in Mexico, cooked with whatever local ingredients fit the bill.

For cow or pork head tacos, this means all of the parts of the head. When ordering, meats are usually split into maciza, which translates into “solid” meat, and can be anything from cheek, to lips, mouth, or neck of the cow. The second grouping is the offal, including eye, tongue, brains, sweetbreads, or machitos (beef intestines). I’m partial to both the maciza and the lengua, tongue tacos. A catch-all for a first foray into tacos de cabeza is surtido, a medley of meats mixed together.

Head meat tacos may sound extreme but they are gourmet-tasting cuts of meat. The tacos are richly textured, tender, and extraordinarily flavourful without being oily. Regardless of style, head tacos usually involve steaming the head overnight, then shredding the meat and adding it back to the pot in its own juice (called consommé).

Of course this is Mexico, so the beef isn’t simply steamed in a flavorless vat. Israel’s steamer includes achiote (annatto), avocado leaves, peppercorns, a variety of different chiles, bay leaves, and some other secret ingredients that he steadfastly keeps to himself. Once ordered, Israel dips into his giant metal steamer and doles out the beef tortillas, which he serves with cilantro, raw onions, a dollop of avocado paste, spicy salsa, and a lime wedge.

The finished product.

My Favourite Taco Philosopher in Oaxaca

When I first got to Oaxaca, I wandered the streets in wonder. After so many years in Asia, curiosity dictated that I eat at every single taco and quesadilla stand I could find that met my rules of eating street food safely. It is during this wander that I stumbled onto Israel’s stall. Originally from Puebla, he has lived in Oaxaca for 15 years, including part of his schooling. He studied both accounting and law — another Thrillable Hours contender? — and worked in accounting for several years following his graduation.

Why did this accountant start making tacos? In 2006, Oaxaca was engulfed in protests, and his entire office was temporarily suspended from work. Needing to feed his family, Israel learned how to make tacos and sell them in a wandering cart. He didn’t sell head tacos in those days. Instead, he focused on what he called “tacos de canasta ambulantes,” greasy chorizo and chicharrones tacos sold out of a basket. These are fried, rolled tacos that he made ahead of time and roamed the streets, selling to protesters who were camped out in the main square and elsewhere.

To his surprise, he made more as a taco vendor than as an accountant. So when the protests cleared and the situation in the city stabilized, he decided to keep selling tacos instead. “No way was I going back to an office,” he says, head thrown back with laughter. He pauses, thoughtful. “But I had to change my tacos.”

It is this thoughtful pondering that makes Israel such a delight. When people come to his cart, he engages in small talk but often they come to him for advice and questions about their choices in life. In the case of his tacos, he switched to steamed head tacos, Sonora-style, because while slightly more expensive they are quite a bit healthier. “It just seemed wrong to make greasy tacos when I could make healthy tacos,” he adds with a shrug.

That’s just the kind of guy he is.

Tacos incoming! <3

I’m still eating tacos and chatting with my fellow diner on that rushed Wednesday when a woman comes running out of a building next to Israel’s cart. Impatient, she calls his name several times before he realizes that during tacos he missed his them calling his number at the government building next door. He scurries off quickly.

Israel turns to me with a sheepish grin and shrugs as if to say, “what can you do? There are tacos to be eaten.” I realize that I, too, ate my tacos and completely forgot about my own obligations.

I wolf down my head tacos, give Israel a quick hug, and rush home for my conference call.

A few days later, my stomach is in the mood for more tacos surtidos and I wander down to Israel’s stall. “Yeni!” he calls out from afar “I see you!”.

Giggling, I push myself onto one of his high stools and order some tacos. A man looking to be in his mid-40s stops in, eyeing me with curiosity. He gives Israel a shrug and slides onto one of the plastic stools in front of the cart.

“Isn’t life grand?” Israel says.

“I am pretty angry today,” the new arrival admits. He glances over at me quickly, unsure if I understand Spanish.

“Oh that’s Yeni,” Israel quickly interjects. “She lives here too.”

The man nods slowly.

“Well,” Isreal continues. “Life is great when your heart is calm. Otherwise life is not great.”

We eat our tacos in silence, thinking about Israel’s words. Almost every time I’ve found him on the streets of Oaxaca, his clients have come by with their life’s troubles, waiting for a word from this head taco philosopher that will put it all in perspective.

We finish our tacos together and Israel takes the other customer’s money first, looking him in the eye. “Remember. You will be in trouble because anger will corrupt your view of the world. The good things in life will become reasons to be angry too. You need to be calm and happy in your heart. The rest will follow.”

The man leaves and Israel turns my way, face cracking into a huge smile.

“You too, Yeni! Don’t worry, though, with tacos in your stomach, it is much easier to be calm and happy in your heart.”

Israel, holding chia water and wearing a ch-ch-ch-Chia shirt — having no idea that it was an ad in North America. Oaxaca grows a lot of chia seeds, and they’re used in lemon water, chocolate, and more.

Part of my joy in getting to know my new home of Oaxaca has been to learn the stories of the people behind the foods I love. I hope you enjoyed this bit about Israel!

More to come soon.

-Jodi

The post The Cow Head Taco Philosopher King of Oaxaca appeared first on Legal Nomads.

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