Carrot Top Pesto

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woman holding carrots at farmers market
Zoe from Happy Boy Farms with carrots at Jack London Square Farmer’s Market
Photo by Anna Buss

Too many times I have seen people ask market venders to remove the tops from their carrots. What they don’t realize is the tops are delicious!

Carrots belong to the parsley family. And the green tops have a flavor very similar to parsley, making them an excellent ingredient in pesto. The most flavorful tops are found on young carrots, and blanching them allows for a smooth, beautifully vibrant green pesto. For this root-to-stem recipe, we used Nelson carrots from Happy Boy Farms in the Jack London Square Farmer’s Market of Oakland, California.


Carrot Top Pesto
(Serves 4–6)

bowl of carrots with carrot top pesto

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove greens from carrots.
  2. Blanch greens in salted water until tender and bright green.
  3. Remove greens from water and shock in ice bath. Squeeze out water and set aside.
  4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 with arugula, and then with carrot bottoms.
  5. Blanch almonds until shells become loose. Remove almonds from water and allow to cool. Shell and set aside.
  6. Combine carrot greens, arugula, garlic, almonds, olive oil, and lemon in food processor. Blend until smooth, adding salt and pepper to taste.
  7. Toss pesto with blanched carrots, and serve. Pesto can also be tossed with your favorite spring salads, pasta, and veggies, or spread it on a sandwich.

Recipe created by Mario Hernandez, program coordinator and market chef for Cookin’ the Market

Americans United to Support the Civil War Troops

This is the third installment of our six-part series on the lead up to Gettysburg. To recap: In part one of this series, “The News from Gettysburg: A Hazardous Move,” we described how the Post covered the initial news of the invasion. In part two, “Scrambling for Soldiers,” we looked at the renewed attention to the draft.

Sanitary Commission Headquarters
Headquarters of the Sanitary Commission at Gettysburg Battlefield.
Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

By late June of 1863, three forces were converging on the region around Gettysburg: the Confederate Army, the Union Army, and the United States Sanitary Commission.

The Sanitary Commission was the first large-scale volunteer organization, and it had come a long way in the two years since it was founded in response to widespread disease in Union Army camps. The living conditions in camps were so bad that, over the course of the war, two soldiers died from illness for every one soldier killed in combat.

The commission’s original goal was to keep army bases healthy and clean, and protect their drinking water from contamination. Later, it expanded the scope of its work and broadened its operation to 7,000 local chapters across the Northern states. The commission was based in the North and served the Union Army, but would also help wounded Confederate soldiers that had been captured.

Its army of women volunteers—numbering in the tens of thousands—gathered medical supplies, food, and clothing for the wounded soldiers, and sometimes provided aid to their families. Most important, perhaps, it began providing nursing services after the organization overcame the prejudice of the Army Medical Bureau.

When the commission heard the Confederate Army was marching north, it began gathering information from its agents with the Union Army, who reported the movement of troops and made estimates for the coming battle’s casualties. The Sanitary Commission’s general secretary, Frederick Law Olmsted, told Post readers that its officers used this information to estimate how big the upcoming battle would be and what supplies would be needed. The commission then began distributing supplies to sites in areas close to all the expected targets.

As soon as Olmsted knew the heavy fighting had begun at Gettysburg, he moved operations to a nearby railway junction near the town and obtained railroad cars to run medical supplies up to the front. The commission also sent supplies by wagon, which arrived just as Gen. James Longstreet began his attack on the Union left flank.

The wagons pulled up to the field hospital, just 500 yards from the shooting, where several hundred men were awaiting medical help. According to Olmsted’s account in the August 1 Post, “A surgeon was seen to throw up his arms, exclaiming ‘Thank God! Here comes the Sanitary Commission. Now we shall be able to do something.’ He had exhausted nearly all of his supplies; and the brandy, beef soup, sponges, chloroform, lint, and bandages, that were furnished him were undoubtedly the means of saving many lives.”

Later, wounded soldiers that could still walk made their way to an open field by the railway line and awaited transport to hospitals. They soon discovered the army had no provisions for sheltering them from the rain, or for feeding them as they waited for evacuation. The commission quickly put up tent shelters and set up a kitchen, which fed up to 2,000 wounded men each day.

Throughout 1863, a regular Post column called “Sanitary Commission Department” featured news about the work of the commission. It also included requests for help, like these excerpts from June and July 1863:

We have lately received a letter from Washington, saying that pickles and domestic wines are needed, and that their storehouses have none.

[We have received] the pattern of a ‘Ration Bag,’ with the following remarks as to its usefulness: ‘The idea is to furnish each solider with two bags (one for sugar and one for coffee), to put inside the haversack, so as to keep the two articles from being spoiled, either by being wet from rain or in crossing streams, or by coming in contact with the greasy pork and bacon …’

We have received a requisition for arm-slings, with the following directions for making them: ‘They should be made to fit on the underside of the arm, from the elbow to the hand, and at equal intervals should be furnished with several tapes …’

Occasionally, this department received testimonials, like this letter from a wounded soldier to the “noble ladies” of the Women’s Soldier’s Aid Society of Northern Ohio.

I want to thank you. I was wounded at Stone River on the last day of December 1862, and since then I have run the gauntlet of the hospitals from Murfreesboro to Cleveland. At every stage of my painful progress I was the grateful recipient of your priceless gifts. I owe the preservation of my life to a bottle of blackberry wine, sent to me by Mr. Atwater, Agent of the United States Sanitary Commission at Murfreesboro. It came to me a time when I had scarcely any vitality left. It restored my appetite, which I had lost to the too free use of Morphine. That wine could not have been bought with money; it was the priceless gift of some great-hearted countrywoman—God bless her!

The Sanitary Commission was unique; for the first time, American civilians operated a large-scale, volunteer effort that provided direct help for soldiers. Women living too far from hospitals to nurse the wounded still had a unique opportunity to help the war effort. As one volunteer expressed it, “It is difficult to connect gray flannel and blue yarn with the thought of a great historical movement; yet our work is really in such connection, and each stocking or shirt we make for the soldiers is portion of a story that has never had its counterpart.”

The resources of the Sanitary Commission would be heavily taxed in the coming battle, in which 14,000 Union soldiers were wounded. In the days following the battle, the commission’s agents also provided help to 5,000 rebel casualties who remained behind in 11 Confederate hospitals.

Some of the commission’s hospital workers felt that, even amid the suffering, some of the best traits of humanity—humility, gratitude, compassion—would emerge. As one correspondent wrote, “There is no hospital which could not furnish in volume incidents that would do honor to human nature.”

Coming Next: The Post Reports the Battle of Gettysburg

Henry Winkler on Botox, Mom, and Fishing for Trout

Henry Winkler

Along with a hectic TV schedule for Arrested Development and Royal Pains (and the paperback release of his book about fly-fishing!) legendary “Happy Days” star and devoted family man Henry Winkler has been crisscrossing the country to raise awareness that Botox isn’t just for erasing wrinkles: it’s a hugely valuable, FDA-approved therapy for relaxing muscles after a stroke.

“You’ve seen it a million times: an elbow, hand, or wrist that is gnarled and frozen into place,” says Winkler. “Upper limb spasticity is painful, it is embarrassing, and it diminishes one’s dignity. Mom’s hand was locked in a fist after her stroke. Simple things like washing her hands and getting dressed were difficult. Over time, she just got deeper and deeper into her sadness.”

About 1 million Americans have ULS. Head injuries and neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis can also trigger troubling symptoms.

Now in his third year of “ambassadorship” for using Botox therapy to relieve muscle spasticity caused by stroke, Winkler is more passionate about his role than ever.

“I was asked, I’m sure, because of my celebrity, and I was asked because my mom did have upper limb spasticity. But I really knew nothing about ULS until I started traveling to hospitals and meeting caretakers, family members, and patients. All of a sudden I realized: Holy Mackerel, I am so thrilled that I was smart enough to say yes! I talk about my family, my mom, and what I’ve learned from the health pros. My job is to say: ‘Botox therapy for ULS exists!’”

Winkler shares two stories of how Botox can relax affected muscles and restore movement: One man’s arm returned to his side “where it belonged” after 50 years. In another case, siblings spoke of having to negotiate around their mother’s “chicken wing” while they cared for her. After Botox, the woman was able to put both arms around her daughters for the first time in two and a half years.

“I hear these amazing accounts and can’t help but wonder how Botox might have changed my mother’s view of living,” says Winkler. “Meeting with stroke patients is like going to a big revival meeting! Hundreds come and many openly share how this therapy improves their everyday lives and gives them back their dignity.”

“Absolutely there are other treatments for ULS,” he continues. “But when physical therapy and drugs fall short, consult a doctor who understands the therapeutic use of Botox for limb spasticity, and discuss whether you are a candidate for the approved treatment. That simple gesture can change your life.”

Click here for a doctor discussion guide and Botox patient brochure.

Cartoons: Summertime, and the Living is Easy

Mower vs Hose

March 1957

 

"Isn’t it great to get out of the kitchen and cook in the fresh air?” July/August 2012

“Isn’t it great to get out of the kitchen and cook in the fresh air?”
July/August 2012

 

“Allow me to introduce myself . . .” September 5, 1953

“Allow me to introduce myself …”
September 1953

 

June 19, 1954

June 1954

 

"You get your laughs, don’t you?" July 31, 1954

“You get your laughs, don’t you?”
July 1954

 

kink in hose cartoon September 21, 1957
September 1957

Ultimate Barbecue

Barbecuing isn’t just about cooking. It’s about connection, family, smoke, joy, love, and the sacrament of the shared meal. Tending the fire, wearing the apron, roasting the meat and the vegetables, then divvying it all up with one’s clan—it just feels primal.

Grill
Why grill? Because it takes us from our harried present back through the generations to that moment when our ancestors sat around the fire, safe and sated.

Possibly it is primal. When our distant cave-dwelling ancestors began scavenging the earth for sustenance—still lacking the means to create fire—all their food had to be eaten raw. These early ape-guys spent up to 12 hours a day gnawing on sinewy flesh and coarse plant matter. They were chewing machines!

Fire changed everything.

Roasted meat and roots were tender. Chewing declined to 45 minutes per day. Think of all the free time!

By some accounts, the brain surged in response to all the nonchewing stimuli humans were suddenly exposed to. In an evolutionary blink of an eye, we went from chewing alone to eating together. This led to dinner conversation, then cave drawing, the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the printing press, space flight, and the Internet (so we can swap Lolcat photos with our BFFs).

So, why grill? Because it takes us from our harried present back through the generations to that moment when our ancestors sat around the fire, safe and sated, chewing on freshly cooked meat, while all around them the elements raged, volcanoes spewed, and wild things lurked. Is it any wonder that so many of us are passionate about open-fire cooking?

I’m a longtime barbecue guy, having been instructed in the black art by my father, who showed me how to peel loose bits of bark off hickory trees, soak them in water, then lay them on charcoal to produce a thick, blue smoke. It was a simple process, with quick and flavorful results.

Then, on a lark, I signed up for a three-day grilling workshop with Steven Raichlen, author of the classic The Barbecue! Bible and arguably the P. T. Barnum of open-fire cooking. The experience changed everything.

At the course, which took place at the lush Greenbrier resort in Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, we cooked not only chicken, pork, beef, shrimp, and fish but also cabbage, artichokes, corn—even pineapples and plums—searing up five-course meals from start to finish. We learned sauces and rubs. And we cooked on everything from a basic backyard charcoal grill to restaurant-grade gas grills, box-shaped grills, an egg-shaped grill, an infrared grill that cooks at 1,200°F (really!), and multiple variations on the smoker.

I learned that my former practice had been mere grilling. What Raichlen taught was barbecue, which is another thing entirely [see “Setting Up Your Grill”]. And, while the process can get as complex as you want, you don’t have to barbecue fancy to barbecue well. (When the course was all over, Raichlen admitted to me that his favorite dish of all was fresh swordfish, brushed with a bit of olive and seasoned with nothing more than sea salt and freshly ground pepper.)

The point being that open-fire cooking is always satisfying somehow, even when the result isn’t perfect. “It’s more art than science,” says Raichlen, “Every time you make a mistake, what you’ve actually done is come up with a new recipe.”

Watch as Post staffers share their best tips for grilling.

The Best of Barbecue from Emeril Lagasse, Curtis Stone, and Barton Seaver

Save and share more of our favorite open-fire recipes by visiting our Grilling Recipe (Smorgas)Board on Pinterest!

Top 10 Beach Reads

Amazon.com editorial director Sara Nelson sifted through hundreds of books to bring you the season’s best.

Fiction

The Execution of Noa P. Singleton by Elizabeth L. Silver The Son by Philipp Meyer The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls
The Execution of Noa P. Singleton

(Crown)

The Son

(Ecco)

The Silver Star

(Scribner)

Elizabeth L. Silver Philipp Meyer Jeannette Walls
A smart and sassy novel about a young and very angry woman who refuses to fight to have her murder conviction overturned. A breathtaking, classic cowboys-and-Indians epic about the birth of Texas, is shockingly good. Fans of Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle will love her new novel about two girls whose flaky mom inadvertently leads them to discover more and weirder relatives.
Joyland by Stephen King And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
Joyland

(Hard Case Crime)

And the Mountains Echoed

(Riverhead)

Stephen King Khaled Hosseini
Steven King’s Joyland is for the author’s Stand By Me fans, and anybody else who likes good, old fashioned coming of age stories, horror or no. Khaled Hosseini does it again, with And the Mountains Echoed, an evocative novel that takes us from the Kite Runner author’s native Afghanistan to Europe and back again.

Nonfiction

The Joker by Andrew Hudgins Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick After Visiting Friends by Michael Hainey
The Joker

(Simon & Schuster)

Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution After Visiting Friends

(Scribner)

Andrew Hudgins Nathaniel Philbrick Michael Hainey
Hudgins’s latest is the life story of a guy whose upbringing was so harsh and joyless, he (and we) just had to learn to laugh. Bunker Hill tells a familiar American history tale with fresh eyes and clear voice. This is not your father’s term paper. After Visiting Friends Hainey’s investigation into the death of the father he lost years ago.
The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville by Clare Mully The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville

(St Martin’s)

The Boys in the Boat

(Viking)

Clare Mully Daniel James Brown
A meticulous account of a real-life Polish-Jewish Mata Hari, during WWII. Brown celebrates American can-do-ism through the story of the champion rowing team who took on the Germans at the 1936 Olympics.

Scrambling for Troops

This is the second installment of our six-part series on the lead up to Gettysburg. Click here to read part one, “The News from Gettysburg: A Hazardous Move.”

 

Chambersburg
Confederate troops rode through Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. The state was still trying to raise a militia.

The news reached Philadelphia on a bright June morning in 1863; Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army had invaded Pennsylvania and was heading virtually unopposed to the state capitol. Suddenly, a Post correspondent wrote, the city was filled with a militant spirit.

“One could scarcely turn in any direction without meeting with a fife and drum. Recruiting officers were constantly marching up and down the streets. Large four-horse omnibuses, with bands of music and placards announcing various [assembly points], were driving about the city.

“The apathy, that for a time had seemed to taken possession of the community, was speedily dispelled. The possibility that the rebel horde might reach the Susquehanna, and even cross that stream and destroy our state capitol, was freely entertained yesterday; but there was also a firm resolve, ‘that many a banner should be torn, and many a knight to earth be borne’ before that disgraceful calamity should befall the state.”

In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—100 miles closer to the approaching Confederate Army—the mood was quite different. There, residents had panicked after hearing that the rebel army had looted Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Swarms of frantic passengers gathered at the railroad station, desperate to fit into any railway car they could find. The roads out of town were choked with wagons piled high with household effects, bearing families away from the enemy, and the inevitable battle.

The North’s confidence, which ran so high when the war began, was showing signs of collapse. There seemed to be little enthusiasm for fighting. The governor’s call for an emergency militia of 60,000 men was met with only 16,000 volunteers.

The Federal Army was also running low on its supply of soldiers. The eager recruits who had signed up at the war’s beginning were now approaching the end of their two-year enlistment. By the end of the month, more than 30,000 soldiers were due to leave the army. At the same time, enlistments of new recruits were falling behind goals. Men throughout the North were reluctant to sign up with an army that was so often defeated.

Faced with a drastic shortage, Congress passed the unpopular Enrollment Act, which set up the machinery for drafting 300,000 men. The Post editors disliked the idea of this conscription law, particularly its clause that allowed men to hire substitutes or buy exemptions.

Faces of the American Civil War

Photos courtesy The Library of Congress

A man who received a draft notice could hire another man to take his place in the fighting. If the substitute was found acceptable and duly sworn in, the draftee would be free of any obligation to serve, but only, the Post adds, for “the term for which he was drafted.” After the substitute had served the length of service, the original draftee would be again eligible for conscription.

If the draftee couldn’t find a substitute among poor citizens or struggling immigrants, he could simply buy a personal exemption for $300. (Congress set the amount at a level they felt would be affordable to working-class men. When you adjust that figure for 150 years of inflation, it comes close to $6,000 in 2013 money.)

Before the fighting had ended, the War Department had four separate draft calls, which drew the names of 776,000 American men. Few of these men ever saw military service. More than 20 percent never showed up. Another 60 percent were disqualified for physical or mental disability, or because they were the sole support of a motherless child, a widow, or an indigent parent.

Once sworn into service, recruits and draftees were rushed through basic training before being sent to the front. With only minimal instruction and poor leadership, a Post article claimed, it wasn’t surprising that Union troops had been repeatedly outfought by the Confederates. It quoted a Union army officer who had watched the unskilled Yankees at Chancellorsville:

“They have been taught to load and fire as rapidly as possible, three or four times a minute … they go into the business with all fury, every man vying with his neighbor as to the number of cartridges he can ram into his piece and spit out of it! The smoke arises in a minute or two so you can see nothing or where to aim. The trees in the vicinity suffer sorely, and the clouds a good deal. By-and-by, the guns get heated and won’t go off, and the cartridges begin to give out.

“Meanwhile, the enemy, lying quietly a hundred or two yards in front, crouching on the ground or behind trees … rise and advance upon us with one of their unearthly yells, as they see our fire slackens. Our boys, finding that the enemy has survived such an avalanche of fire we have as we have rolled upon them, conclude that he must be invincible, and, pretty much out of ammunition, retire.

The editors urged the army to abandon the practice of forcing men to load and fire in unison. “Accurate loading, and slow firing, at will, and only when the soldiers has an idea that his ball will tell, will do more execution than hasty loading, and rapid firing at something or nothing.”

It was well-intended advice, but would have been useless during the intense fighting at Gettysburg, where soldiers found themselves loading and firing “as rapidly as possible” simply to hold their ground.

By June 28, Lee learned the Union Army had pursued him across 120 miles in 10 days—a remarkable feat of marching at a time when 5 miles a day was a good speed for an army. He began gathering his forces for a massive blow against the Union army, which he hoped he could deliver at Gettysburg.

He couldn’t have known that a Union general, John F. Reynolds, was also hoping for a fight at Gettysburg because he’d already picked the best ground for his troops.

Next: Americans United to Support the Civil War Troops

Lincoln as Jokester

Lincoln Comic

The most famous of all debates in American history are the seven between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas campaigning in Illinois in 1858 for a Senate seat. On one occasion, Douglas attempted to buffalo Lincoln by making allusions to his lowly start in life. He told a gathering that the first time he met Lincoln, it had been across the counter of a general store in which Lincoln was serving. “And an excellent bartender he was too,” Douglas concluded.

When the laughter died away, Lincoln got up and quietly riposted, “What Mr. Douglas has said, gentlemen, is true enough: I did keep a general store and sold cotton and candles and cigars and sometimes whiskey, but I particularly remember that Mr. Douglas was one of my best customers. Many a time I stood on one side of the counter and sold whiskey to Mr. Douglas on the other side. But now there’s a difference between us: I have left my side of the counter, but he sticks to his as tenaciously as ever!”

Today, not many are aware that Lincoln had a subtle, and sometimes biting, sense of humor. A contemporary wrote, “When Lincoln tells a joke in a fireside group, his face loses its melancholy mask, his eyes sparkle and his whole countenance lights up.” He referred to laughter as “the joyful, beautiful, universal evergreen of life.” Some other prime examples of Lincoln’s humor:

A guest at a reception told Lincoln that in his home state people said that the welfare of the nation depended on God and Abraham Lincoln. “You are half right,” said Lincoln.

While in office, he was asked about what it was like to be president. Lincoln answered, “I’m like the man who was tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. When they asked him how he felt about it, he said that if it weren’t for the honor of the thing, he would rather have walked.”

Lincoln could impale an opponent with a humorously turned phrase or analogy. “He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met,” said Lincoln of a political foe.

During one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Douglas accused Lincoln of being two-faced. Replied Lincoln calmly, “I leave it to my audience: If I had two faces, would I be wearing this one?”

The president was a gangly man who topped out at six feet four inches. To the inevitable question “How tall are you?” Lincoln would reply, “Tall enough to reach the ground.”

Early in the Civil War, the president became angered by General George B. McClellan’s refusal to attack General Robert E. Lee in Richmond. He wrote the general a one-sentence letter: “If you don’t want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while. Yours respectfully, A. Lincoln.”

Later, a temperance committee visited the president and asked him to fire General Grant. Surprised, Lincoln asked why. “He drinks too much,” answered the spokesman for the group. “Well,” said Lincoln. “I wish some of you would tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to every one of my other generals.”

In the Words of the Presidents

In 1608, one year after the establishment of Jamestown, Captain John Smith attempted to transcribe the Algonquian word meaning “he scratches with his hands” by writing down rahougcum. This led to the word raccoon, and one of the earliest seeds for American English was sown. More than three centuries later, in 1951, Mitford M. Mathews of the University of Chicago Press published A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, which contained 50,000 American words and phrases along with their definitions and extensive notations on their origins. These included words adopted from native tongues, such as skunk, squash, and pawpaw, as well as words from other languages—cafeteria from Spanish, sleigh and coleslaw from the Dutch. Other words were concocted from what Mathews called “the old lumber” of British English: bullfrog, rocking chair, and catfish, as well as thousands of words and phrases straight out of the American experience, from which we learned to play ball, eat crow, bark up the wrong tree, and paddle one’s own canoe.

Presidents Illustration
Clockwise from top left: Jefferson coined more than 100 new words including pedicure; card-player Harry Truman popularized the phrase fair deal; George Washington added 37 terms to the lexicon, including hatchet man; and Teddy Roosevelt denounced irresponsible journalists as muckrakers.
Illustration by Kyle Hilton.

When one browses through this work and the earlier Dictionary of American English, which Mathews worked on with the British lexicographer Sir William Craigie, one is taken with the number of words and phrases that were coined, first recorded, or made popular by the nation’s presidents, beginning with George Washington.

Indeed, the largest number of White House words have been handed down from the founding fathers—a term created by Warren G. Harding for his “front porch campaign” of 1920. Thomas Jefferson alone gets credit for more than 100 new words—among those that survive are lengthily, belittle, electioneering, indecipherable, monotonously, ottoman (the footstool, not the empire), pedicure, the noun bid, and, appropriately, the verb neologize.

The early presidents felt that creating new words and new uses for old ones was part of their role in creating an American culture. “I am a friend to neology,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in 1820. “It is the only way to give to a language copiousness and euphony.” And the early presidents had Noah Webster and his followers at hand to legitimize their brave new words.

Jefferson and others of his time felt that Americans were more tolerant of innovation in speech and writing than those in England and thought that American innovations would eventually justify calling the language of America by a name other than English.

Many on both sides of the Atlantic were alarmed that Americans were adding words to “their” language. As Mathews pointed out in a later work called American Words, “They thought the English language belonged to those who lived in Great Britain and that Americans should show their appreciation of being allowed to use it by not making any changes to it.”

Webster considered this notion foolish and plunged into the task of creating a dictionary of the American language. He announced on the Fourth of July 1800, “New circumstances, new modes of life, new ideas of various kinds, give rise to new words and have already made many material differences between the language of England and America.” When the first edition of Noah Webster’s dictionary appeared in 1806, one critic was outraged when he came upon two words that had never appeared before in a dictionary: presidential and congressional. These words were denounced as “barbarous,” and he said that they were “unnecessary, and offensive to the ear.”

Some—if not most—of these early presidential terms were not pure coinages but words that a president was the first to leave in a written record. Others were created by aides and associates and passed along to the president. Yet even this is fascinating—how, for example, did it come to be that the first written record of the onomatopoetic word bobolink was by John Adams, or that nobody before James Madison had used the word squatter to mean someone occupying property or territory that was not his or her own?

Many of the words attributed to George Washington appear in his diaries as simple terms that Allan Metcalf in his book Presidential Voices: Speaking Styles from George Washington to George W. Bush describes as “connected with home and farm” and were probably in general use around Mount Vernon and other Potomac plantations. The 37 terms Washington is given credit for in the Oxford English Dictionary include hatchet man, cradlers (farmhands who reap with a cradle scythe, 1766), logged (describing a house made from logs, 1784), and New Town Pippin (a special variety of dessert apple with a yellowish-green skin and aromatic flesh, 1760).

The early years of the Republic were a crucible for American leaders as neologists. John Adams, to cite another example, brought us a number of new words, including caucus. John Quincy Adams brought us gag rule.

American politics took on the cant and slang of the frontier and the poker table, and the people of the rest of the world were at once stunned and amused as they noted that only in America are there bandwagons to jump on, coattails to attach to, and war chests to dip into. There were also pure coinages. It was Abraham Lincoln, for example, who came up with relocate, relocation, and the great metaphor for the Civil War: a house divided.

The tradition blossomed again at the turn of the 20th century with a steady parade of new coinages, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt’s lunatic fringe, mollycoddle, muckraker, and, appropriately, bully pulpit, as well as some wonderful TR phrases and aphorisms such as Speak softly and carry a big stick. Roosevelt, who boasted that “no president ever enjoyed himself in the presidency as much as I did,” seemed to have a recreational fascination with new ways of expressing himself.

The trend continued throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, but no coinages were more dominant than the link between governing and the card table. There were new deals, square deals, and fair deals, and, of course, President Truman had a sign on his desk that said the buck stops here.

By the nature of the microscope under which they are observed, presidents are more likely than the rest of us to have words or phrases attributed to them that they did not coin. Presidents are also more likely to come under fire for “impurity” of speech or for their disregard of the “rules” of English—or, even worse, for using words that are undignified.

During the July following his inauguration, Lincoln sent a message to Congress opposing secession threatened by Southerners. The message said in part, “With rebellion thus sugar-coated they have been drugging the public mind of their section for more than 30 years, until at length they have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the government.” The Hon. John D. Defrees, the government printer, was disturbed by the use of sugar-coated. He finally went to Lincoln, with whom he was on good terms, and told him that a message to Congress was a different affair from a speech at a mass meeting in Illinois—that the message became a part of history and should be written with that in mind. “What’s the matter now?” Lincoln inquired of the printer. “Why,” said Defrees, “you have used an undignified expression in the message.” He read the sentence aloud and suggested Lincoln replace the word.

“Defrees,” replied Lincoln, “that word expresses precisely my idea, and I am not going to change it. The time will never come in this country when the people won’t know exactly what ‘sugar-coated’ means.”

As if to raise the hackles of the purists, in 1904 Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Thomas R. Lounsbury, a professor of English at Yale University, to say that he approved of splitting infinitives. Harding came under constant attack in many quarters for his use of normalcy and bloviate and was singled out by H. L. Mencken for his use of the “one-he combination” (as in “one does as he wishes”), but Harding was vindicated when a group of 29 philologians took a vote on one-he and 22 found it acceptable English.

Woodrow Wilson may have been the first president taken to task for his use of slang. He was cited for using such phrases as “we must get a move on” and “that is going some.” Wilson also was criticized for pronouncing ordinary as “ornery” and for omitting the definitive—and honorific—article before the word Congress. The Congress had been the norm for several generations until Wilson came along. The next three presidents restored the article, but it eventually drifted away save for formal papers and documents. Wilson also raised eyebrows with neologistic aphorisms such as “A man’s rootage is more important than his leafage.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s lexical critics looked down their noses on his willingness to use street slang (chiseler for swindler) and for creations such as iffy. President Eisenhower was castigated for his reliance on words that were common in the military. When he used finalize in his second State of the Union message, it set off a clamor among the grammatical purists, aka the language police. As the lexicographer Bergen Evans observed a few weeks later, “Columnists, editorial writers, and teachers pounced on the unlucky word, labeling it ‘nonexistent,’ ‘hideous,’ ‘atrocious,’ and ‘meaningless.’”

But “the best course is to let the purists howl,” Evans wisely concluded. “They have been grousing throughout our history while about them the language has prospered—often with an assist from the president.”

Excerpted from Words from the White House: Words and Phrases Coined or Popularized by America’s Presidents by Paul Dickson, published by Walker & Company/Bloomsbury Publishing. © 2013 Paul Dickson. Reprinted with permission.

The Looming Water Crisis

Lake Mead
Thanks to antiquated water policies, the enormous Lake Mead could run dry by 2021—if we do nothing about it.

Kylan Frye steers her Subaru station wagon along the slushy roadways of the Farmington Bay Waterfowl Management Area at the edge of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. It’s a February afternoon, gray and cold, and a layer of snow covers the wetlands that spread for miles around us. The Wasatch Range rises ruggedly in the background, but otherwise it feels like we’re driving through a barren white sea, indistinguishable from the pale sky if not for the occasional dots of sagebrush, sedge, and cottonwood. The air is thick with gull calls and the periodic flash of a great blue heron gliding by.

Frye, a conservation biologist at HawkWatch International, parks the car. Millions of birds use the Great Salt Lake to breed, feed, and rest, but there’s one in particular that I’m eager to see. The lake supports one of the top 10 winter populations of bald eagles in the continental United States—more than 500 birds whose habitat could be jeopardized by Utah’s ever-growing thirst for water.

We get out. With us is Zach Frankel, a biologist who runs the nonprofit Utah Rivers Council. Together, we look over the bay toward the mountains. At a break in the ice, dozens of gulls and northern pintail ducks have gathered. Behind them, standing still and alone, is something larger but hard to distinguish at this distance.

“Is there an eagle out there?” Frankel asks, pointing to the solitary bird.

“Might be,” Frye says. “They’re kind of all over.” She pulls out a spotting scope, a slipper-shaped magnifier that mounts on a tripod. Through the powerful lens, the eagle comes into focus: Posed elegantly against the alpine backdrop, it looks back over its shoulder like a Renaissance model waiting to be painted. This is the first eagle I’ve ever seen in the wild, and catching a glimpse of our national symbol socks me with a sudden surge of patriotism.

“The bald eagles are a success story of the Endangered Species Act,” Frye tells us. Reduced to 400 breeding pairs in the lower 48 states in 1963, the raptors became the target of an aggressive conservation effort that included habitat protection, captive breeding, and a ban on the shell-thinning insecticide DDT. By 2007 the population had rebounded to 10,000 pairs and the eagles were removed from the government’s list of threatened and endangered species.

But Frankel, who arranged this trip, is worried nonetheless. The Great Salt Lake borders a fast-growing metropolitan area that sprawls for more than 40 miles on either side of Salt Lake City, from Ogden in the north to Provo in the south. The Wasatch Front, as it’s called, houses two million people, the majority of Utah’s population. Its arid climate, cheap water rates, and green lawns mean its residents use extraordinary amounts of residential water—more, Frankel says, than the environment and its creatures can really spare. Now Utah officials say they need more sources of water to keep pace with growth. They’re eyeing the nearby Bear River, which (along with its tributaries) supplies 60 percent of the fresh water flowing into the Great Salt Lake. If the Bear is tapped, Frankel says, the shallow lake could see its levels drop by as much as 4 feet during dry years, shrinking the wetland habitat available to eagles and other birds.

“These birds fly thousands of miles and drop down exhausted on the Great Salt Lake to feed,” he says. Without sufficient water, “you will see a reduction in their food supply. You’ll see more crowding. You’ll see higher mortality rates from disease. The raptors that come here will lose their prey base. We’re concerned that we’re going to see millions of birds die off across hundreds of species.”

And Utah is hardly alone. Across the country, population growth and climate change are putting stresses on water supplies that we once took for granted (and often still do). Americans accustomed to blithely running bathtubs or garden hoses are discovering that existing sources are limited. Tapping new sources could have troubling consequences, which is why we need to stop thinking of water as cheap and infinite.

The history of the American frontier might appropriately be subtitled The Great Human Conquest of Water. The Mormon pioneers who migrated to Utah in the mid-19th century hunkered down in what was not exactly an obvious place to build a civilization. “Nonetheless, within hours of ending their ordeal, the Mormons were digging shovels into the earth beside the streams draining the Wasatch Range, leading canals into the surrounding desert which they would convert to fields that would nourish them,” Marc Reisner wrote in his 1986 book Cadillac Desert. “The Mormons attacked the desert full-bore, flooded it, subverted its dreadful indifference—moralized it—until they had made a Mesopotamia in America.” The dams and aqueducts that later sprung up throughout the West allowed us to build cities in places that previously seemed hostile to human settlement—Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, Los Angeles—along with sprawling farm operations in California’s San Joaquin Valley and elsewhere.

The West’s system of water governance was designed to ensure that everyone had enough. It assigned senior rights to the first arrivals, some of whose descendants today grow low-value, water-intensive crops like cotton, rice, and alfalfa. Those rules reflected a smaller, more rural America—before the growth of metropolises, before the modern industrial economy, before the coining of the term global warming. “In effect, we’re managing 21st-century challenges with 19th-century policies,” says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a California-based research group that specializes in water and sustainability. In some places, “we’ve given away too much water—more water than nature seems like it’s going to reliably provide us.”

Those decisions are catching up with us. Ten years ago, the U.S. General Accounting Office asked state water managers about their future concerns. Of the 47 states that responded, 36 predicted shortages by 2013 under normal conditions, 46 under drought conditions. Their forecasts proved prescient. In the Colorado River Basin, which encompasses seven states and is home to 40 million people, a government report released last December says demand could dramatically outstrip supply by 2060. The river’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, stand a 50-50 chance of running dry by 2021—if we do nothing to address dwindling resources, says another study by scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. (The basin includes parts of Utah but not the Salt Lake area.)

And the West doesn’t hold the monopoly on problems. “Increasingly, we are running into absolute limits on water supply—in lots of places, not just in places we’ve traditionally thought of as arid or dry,” says Gleick. Georgia, Alabama, and Florida, for example, have been battling among themselves over two river basins. Landlocked Atlanta wants the water for its drinking supply, while Florida and Alabama insist they need it both for human consumption and to support fish and shellfish populations.

Some researchers call the word shortage a misnomer. Even in the most overstretched areas, we turn on the tap and water comes out. The real problem comes from assuming we can proceed as we always have, that we don’t need to make adjustments to accommodate growing populations and diminishing resources. “It’s not that we don’t have enough water,” says Scripps Institution climate scientist David Pierce, who coauthored the Lake Mead study. “We don’t have enough to continue as we’ve been doing, with a lot of irrigated crops in the dry regions and rapidly growing cities.”

There’s another complicating factor: the acceleration of climate change. Scientists say higher temperatures will cause more evaporation and alter the slow, steady snowpack melts that provide much of the West’s water. Droughts will become more common too. Meanwhile, demand will increase as farmers and gardeners try to grow the same plants in hotter, drier conditions. A study by the consulting firm Tetra Tech, commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council, predicts that 1,020 U.S. counties, mostly in the Great Plains and Southwest, face high or extreme water-shortage risks by 2050 in large part because of climate change.

These forces seem epic and beyond our control. But the stresses on our water are also the product of what we all do in our cities and suburbs: how we price water, how we use it, and how we waste it.

Setting Up Your Grill

Grill Setup

Some foods taste better when grilled over direct heat; others benefit from hours of slow roasting—here’s a primer.

Six Rules of Open-Fire Cooking

Grill

1. Clean up. Use a stiff wire brush to clean the grill before and after grilling.

2. Oil up. Before starting the fire, take a paper towel soaked in vegetable oil and swab it across the grill’s surface.

3. Heat up. Cooking on a cool grill will result in dull, gray, rubbery meat. Give it about 10-15 minutes to heat up before cooking, or use Raichlen’s finger test: It’s hot when you can hold your bare hand 6 inches over the grill for no more than three seconds.

4. Don’t poke. Always use tongs or a spatula to turn the meat. Puncturing with a fork drains precious juices.

5. Give it a rest. When the meat comes off the grill, let it stand for a few minutes before carving. “This allows juices to return to the surface,” says Raichlen.

6. Never desert your post. Do not answer the phone, run to grab a beer, change the oil in your car, or do anything else to distract yourself from the job at hand. In this, modern man can take a lesson from ape-guy: Walk away from the fire and dinner’s going to get tough. A person’s jaw can get sore just thinking about it!

Emeril Lagasse’s Greek-Style Lamb Kebabs


Greek-Style Lamb Kebabs
(Makes 8 servings)

Greek-Style Lamb Kabobs
Photo by Steven Freeman

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In large bowl, combine onion, lemon zest, lemon juice, parsley, cilantro, mint, salt, cumin, paprika, pepper, and olive oil. Stir well.
  2. Add lamb and toss to coat with marinade.
  3. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 2 to 4 hours.
  4. Soak skewers in warm water for about 1 hour before assembling kebabs.
  5. Preheat grill to high, and lightly oil grate.
  6. Thread lamb onto soaked skewers, and place them on grill. Cook, turning frequently to promote even browning, for 12 to 14 minutes.
  7. Wrap pita bread around meat on skewer, and while holding bread firmly around meat, twist skewer out of meat.
  8. Drizzle meat with feta spread to your liking. Repeat with remaining pitas and skewers, and enjoy!

Nutrition Facts

Per Serving (pita bread not included)


Calories: 357
Total fat: 28 g
Saturated fat: 10 g
Sodium: 655 mg
Carbohydrate: 5 g
Fiber: 1.3 g
Protein: 20.2 g
Diabetic Exchanges: 3 medium-fat meat, 1 nonstarchy vegetable

Greek-Style Lamb Kabobs and Feta Spread by Emeril Lagasse, from Emeril at the Grill: A Cookbook for All Seasons, Harper Studio Publishers, New York, 2009, courtesy Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc.; Photo by Steven Freeman

Emeril’s Feta Spread

This feta spread is perfect when paired with Greek-style lamb kebabs.


Feta Spread
(Makes 2 cups)
Feta Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine all ingredients in bowl, and stir to blend well.
  2. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour or up to overnight to allow flavors to blend.

Nutrition Facts

Per Serving (¼ cup)


Calories: 104
Total fat: 8.8 g
Saturated fat: 5.5 g
Sodium: 353 mg
Carbohydrate: 1.8 g
Fiber: 0.1 g
Protein: 4.5 g
Diabetic Exchanges: 1 medium-fat meat, 1 fat

Greek-Style Lamb Kabobs and Feta Spread by Emeril Lagasse, from Emeril at the Grill: A Cookbook for All Seasons, Harper Studio Publishers, New York, 2009, courtesy Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc.; Photo by Steven Freeman

Barton Seaver’s Grilled Corn with Sweet Pepper Butter


Grilled Corn with Sweet Pepper Butter
(Makes 4 servings)
Grilled Corn

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Using Microplane grater, grate bell pepper over medium bowl.
  2. Add butter and lime juice and whisk to combine. Season with pinch of salt and set aside.
  3. Shuck corn and steam or boil in salted water for 8 minutes.
  4. Transfer corn to the grill, setting ears directly over coals of medium fire. Grill until kernels begin to caramelize. Rotate ears constantly to cook evenly.
  5. Remove corn from grill and serve piping hot with pepper butter on the side.

Nutrition Facts

Per Serving:


Calories: 155
Total fat: 9.7 g
Saturated fat: 5.6 g
Carbohydrate: 17.4 g
Fiber: 2.8 g
Protein: 3 g
Diabetic Exchanges: ~1 starch, 2 fat

Grilled Corn Reprinted with permission from Where There’s Smoke: Simple, Sustainable, Delicious Grilling © 2013 by Barton Seaver, Sterling Epicure, an imprint of Sterling Publishing Co. Inc.

Great Dame: Helen Mirren

Helen Mirren
On Receiving the Legend Award: “I was like, ‘Why do I have to be a legend? Couldn’t they wait a few years? OK, I’ll take it.'” Illustration by Kagan McLeod.

Leave it to Bruce Willis to define Helen Mirren. “She’s a dame,” he says admiringly, “a real dame.” Willis, with whom she co-stars in this summer’s action comedy Red 2 (premiering July 19), isn’t talking about the “knighthood” bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II, an honor that literally made Mirren a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He’s zoning in on what makes the acclaimed actress—an Oscar winner for her performance in the 2006 classic The Queen—impossible to forget on and off the screen.

In person, she’s a beguiling blend of no-nonsense opinions and a quick wit that she’s always ready to turn on herself. Time hasn’t dimmed her cool beauty. The 67-year-old is at the top of her game.

Mirren has played an amazing range of roles, including several royals (more on that later), but none has surprised her fans more than her deliciously comic turn as a skilled assassin in the Red movies alongside Willis and co-stars including John Malkovich, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and for the sequel, Anthony Hopkins. Before Red, you probably wouldn’t have described Helen Mirren as “gun toting.” Whether elegantly dressed or done up in camo, she plays the former British intelligence agent with a dry humor, reflected in an on-screen confession: “I kill people, dear!”

And she does seem to have a way with firearms. “With that automatic gun, in a cocktail dress, she is the true definition of rock ‘n’ roll,” Willis laughs.

Malkovich deadpans, “After seeing Helen Mirren handling weapons, I was ready to depart this earth a happy man.”

Q: You’re always surprising us with your choice of roles, especially in Red and, now, Red 2. How did that happen? An action heroine? Was the chance to play with all those guns part of the attraction?

HM: Really, I’m not a fan of guns. In fact, I don’t even own a gun. I’m not too sure that guns nowadays are that useful. I’m certainly very ambivalent about them in civilian life. The guns I found the most horrifying are those small machine guns. They’re terrible because you can cause such havoc.

Q: Are you a good shot?

HM: I’m not bad. I like target practice, especially clay pigeon shooting, which is very difficult. That’s a great sport. So I’m up for shooting at a target, just not a human being.

Q: So what was the appeal of this part?

HM: I was getting a bit sick of people saying, “Oh, you’re so evil. You play all these queens.” Actually, I didn’t just play queens. For a long time I was a police detective, and then I transmogrified into the queen. You just want to always try and push the last thing out of people’s minds so they can look at you with an open mind. Also, it’s the cast. John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker, and, of course, our fearless leader Bruce Willis.

Q: You’re quite taken with Bruce Willis aren’t you?

HM: He’s so masterful. I think he’s one of the top 10 American actors. I would love to see him back in the theater. He has become this fantastic action hero but he’s just much cleverer. I think he’s brilliant. I kind of sit at his feet a bit on the set and watch him and learn from him.

Q: That sounds like a crush.

HM: Don’t let my husband [Oscar-winning director Taylor Hackford] know. I’m joking. My husband knows that I do have a crush on Bruce. Actually, I have two kinds: The classic fan crush and a more aesthetic one as an actress looking at an actor who I think is really wonderful, it’s the venal and the respectful.