by Michael Liss
George Washington and his wife Martha were committed eaters and generous hosts. A meal was a serious affair: fine China, glassware and cutlery, a variety of spirits, wines, and champagne, soups and souffles, trifles, crisps, tortes, any number of things pulled or plucked from the soil or vines, harvested from the bays and rivers, or trapped, shot, or simply domesticated and destined for the table.
The couple preferred English-style cooking and apparently were fond of meat pies. For a Christmas meal one year, their kitchen turned out a family favorite—a cover-the-bases delicacy that called for a bushel of flour for crust, stuffed with five different types of boiled fowl—pigeon, partridge, duck, goose, turkey—all baked on high heat for four hours. I’m not sure what that might be called—perhaps “pipparduckoosekey”?
Of course, none of these monumental affairs began with George and Martha doing any of that pulling, plucking, sowing, reaping, boiling, or broiling. Nor setting the table, clearing it afterwards, washing up, polishing the silver, drying the China, or putting it away. The Washingtons had “staff” for that, quite a large staff, in fact.
George and Martha kept slaves—per the Mount Vernon website, at the time of George’s death, there were 317 on the plantation. There is nothing to indicate Washington was a particularly difficult master, and Mount Vernon was in temperate Virginia, not some swampy, snake-and-insect-ridden killing field in South Carolina, but the “Peculiar Institution” was certainly vibrant enough there. As one might expect, the staff didn’t enjoy quite the same creature comforts as the Washingtons did. Again, from the website:
The standard slave quarter on Mount Vernon’s five farms was a rough one-room log structure with a wooden chimney, measuring about 225 square feet. Some dwellings were slightly larger and divided into two rooms, each housing a different family. As many as eight people could be crowded into a single room. They slept on pallets or on the dirt floor.
History is complex and contradictory, isn’t it? Certainly, one that demands you put inconvenient parts aside so as to appreciate the more celebratory. Still, this is George Washington, so let’s talk about the Father of Our Country’s personal qualities. No doubt he was uncommonly brave, an oak for the thin reed of independence to lash onto. He was incorruptible, rigidly self-disciplined, and, as Parson Weems reminds us, even as a boy, honest in trees and axes. Read more »
3QD: The old cliché about a guest needing no introduction never seemed more apt. So instead of me introducing you to our readers, maybe you could begin by telling us a little bit about yourself, perhaps something not so well known, a little more revealing.
Last spring, American documentary film maker Ken Burns gave a commencement address at Brandeis University in Boston. Burns is a talented speaker, adept at spinning uplifting yarns, and 
In daily life we get along okay without what we call thinking. Indeed, most of the time we do our daily round without anything coming to our conscious mind – muscle memory and routines get us through the morning rituals of washing and making coffee. And when we do need to bring something to mind, to think about it, it’s often not felt to cause a lot of friction: where did I put my glasses? When does the train leave? and so on.
In the game of chess, some of the greats will concede their most valuable pieces for a superior position on the board. In a 1994 game against the grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik, Gary Kasparov sacrificed his queen early in the game with a move that made no sense to a middling chess player like me. But a few moves later Kasparov won control of the center board and marched his pieces into an unstoppable array. Despite some desperate work to evade Kasparov’s scheme, Kramnik’s king was isolated and then trapped into checkmate by a rook and a knight.
What do we know about vampires?
