Food in the Library

The Rosenbach was awesome. I’ve been meaning to get there for a while now, because they have Joyce’s Ulysses manuscript. But I bailed on the Bloomsday shindig last time I was in Philadelphia on June 16. So before going to three of my favorite Center City Philadelphia bars, I hiked out to 20th & Delancey and took a tour. They’ve got a small Maurice Sendak exhibit up, with a much larger one going up in May. (They’re being loaned nearly 10,000 pieces of of Sendak stuff from the man himself, who has a strong relationship with the institution.)

The current exhibit is Really Rosie, and it’s great. It features the largest piece ever done by Sendak, (a wall sized drawing done for a 1980 New York Times Magazine cover), beautiful watercolor and ink pieces (rrrreally wish i had been allowed to photograph the cases), and an original score by Carole King. Really Rosie, the animated musical, is projected in the gallery. I had forgotten about Chicken Soup with Rice, but here in the Rosenbach was this amazing exhibit with paintings and songs and stories about soup!

Anyway, the Rosenbach has an incredible collection, and I love that they still function a library, and make their materials accessible to researchers. I wish I had images to show of Sir John Tenniel’s (he illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) sketch that features oysters…I also wish I had some oysters right now <sigh>.

Bought a book of recipes selected from the Rosenbach Museum and Library 1982 exhibit “Cook’s Choice: Rare and Important Cookbooks from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century”. My favorite recipe? Pesca in Gelatina, from De Honesta Voluptate et Valetudine, printed in 1475. Don’t think I’ll be using the next striped bass I catch to try it. Mostly what I like about aspic is that it makes me think of that line from Psycho, the tough detective to Norman Bates… something like, “if it doesn’t gel, it isn’t aspic. and this ain’t gellin”

Left the Rosenbach, went to three center city bars I really like; Monk’s, the Nodding Head and Ludwigs. Here’s a map of the places I went that day.