The Merry Middle

At a certain point between “Some Of” and “Too Much Of,” there comes a magic amount called “Just Enough.” You may remember the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. If any part of it has stayed in your mind, it’s probably where Goldilocks tastes the Bears’ porridge and finds the Papa Bear’s “too hot” and the Mama Bear’s “too cold,” but the little Baby Bear’s portion is “Just Right.”

This must have been an important matter in the days when porridge was a staple ingredient of many people’s lives. (In the famous Dictionary of Dr. Samuel Johnson, who looked down on Scottish people – although his great biographer, James Boswell, was a Scot – “Oats” was defined as “A grain which in England is fed to horses, but in Scotland supports the bulk of the population.”)

And then there’s that other classic, the nursery rhyme about Porridge, which tells us that:

Some like it hot, some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot, nine days old.

In the days before most people had a home refrigerator, or at least an icebox, food that couldn’t be eaten right away was generally kept in a “pantry.” In my family’s small house, in a suburb of London, the pantry was a sort of large closet adjoining the kitchen. It had a window which was usually kept open, since the outside air was almost always cooler than inside. I can’t remember if the window had a screen, but, at least in our neighborhood, insect pests were never much of a problem.

But just how long various foods could be stored in the pantry before becoming inedible was I suppose mainly a matter of housekeeping knowledge – although there were, and are, many books on cookery and related topics, such as the famous one by Isabella Beeton called Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, which first appeared in 1861 and is still in print.

Incidentally, Some Like It Hot is the name of one of my favorite movies – probably one of the best comedies ever made, although much of the humor is based on that old plot device of men pretending to be women. In this case, it’s two male musicians – Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis – attempting to escape The Mob by disguising themselves as members of an all-girl band. Just to add zest to the mixture, one member of that band is Marylin Monroe.

But getting back to food preservation, this was historically one of the major concerns of our ancestors, and it at least partly explains the importance of spices in trade, colonization, and even in war. Certain spices were known to make food more edible, and to help preserve it during the long winter months, when there was a shortage of fresh food, especially in Western Europe. And certain parts of the world, such as the “Spice Islands” of the East Indies, were particularly desirable as trading destinations. This was after the sailing route around the bottom of Africa had been discovered. Previously, spices had to come overland by caravans from the Far East.

(Incidentally, if you want to stump your friends with a quiz question, try asking “What is the Southernmost point of Africa?” Many will probably say “The Cape of Good Hope.” But actually, Cape Agulhas is about 140 miles farther south.)

While we’re considering the swings of Fortune, mention must be made of that ubiquitous swinger, the Pendulum. As a child I’d believed the pendulum was a phenomenon limited to grandfather clocks – until at school, in Physics class, I learned of its scientific relationship to time and measurement and gravity; not to mention all the different types of pendula and swings.

Then there’s the “bell curve of normal distribution” which on a graph, no matter what you’re measuring, has a bell shape – with a mid-point from which your data will go steeply down and then flatten out.

And we must give credit to Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose essay on Compensation attempts to encompass the balanced duality of Nature in all its forms. It’s not easy to find optimists like Emerson today; those who believe that, even in this world, there’s a right for every wrong, and that we need not wait for an afterlife to find divine justice at work.

Finally, let’s not forget that porridge we left in the pot nine days ago. Some brave person should experiment to see how safe it is to eat. Shall we try? You go first.