Leave it to the Federalist to offer a literal recipe for owning the libs.
In a post titled “How To Cook The Columbus Day Feast Of Liberal Nightmares,” the inadvertently comical right-wing site offers detailed recipes for “Mama Turner’s Sauce” and “Bedford’s Missing-Capers Veal Milanese” for your C-day “feast.” (I didn’t even know that was a thing.)
The goal here, of course, to trigger the libs with a dinner centering around tomato sauce — because, don’tcha know, it was Columbus who brought tomatoes back from the New World.
“[D]umb people across the very country [Columbus] Discovered are spreading old lies and choosing to honor Indigenous People’s Day instead” of Columbus day, the Federalists declare.
“Honoring,” because no one actually “celebrates” Indigenous Peoples Day. And why would they — there’s no pasta, no veil [I think he means veal], not a recipe for “the sauce” in early America?
But the Italians did invent the sauce. One Italian in particular also had the vision and the bravery to sail over the ends of the earth, amidst tempests, serpents, and cannibals, to discover the New World (and bring back the tomatoes they needed).
This is that man’s holiday, and these are his peoples’ recipes — brought to you by The Federalist’s Chris Bedford and Power the Future’s Daniel Turner.
Wow, I guess you sure showed us.
There’s a nearly-an-hour long video showing you how to prepare the recipes for your “feast.” Needless to say I didn’t watch the thing and neither should you.
This whole “Kitchen Culture War” — that’s what they call it — is more than a little reminiscent of MGTOW cooking, the only real difference is that these guys actually seem to know their way around a kitchen.
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Figures they’d think sea serpents were real…
Perhaps unsurprisingly, pre-columbian Native Americans had lots of tomato based foods. Tomatoes are one of the ‘magic 8’ foods. See here for more on that.
https://www.unearthwomen.com/2019/07/31/the-chef-revitalizing-native-american-cuisine/
Ironically it was the white colonists who wouldn’t touch the things. They thought they were poisonous. Thomas Jefferson once caused a scandal by serving them at a White House dinner.
This bloke probably did more to popularise tomatoes than anyone though.
https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/from-poison-to-passion-how-the-evil-poisonous-tomato-became-a-staple-of-our-diet/news-story/fad3506781016b0546cc0afe6c8f2a70
Notwithstanding that was in 1820, it wasn’t really until the late 19th/early 20th century that tomatoes took off as a food in Europe. One exception to that was the Italians; who got heavy into tomatoes from the 16th Century. And they do have some nice sauces.
But the fact remains if you wanted to honour/celebrate Indigenous People’s day with tomato based cuisine, you’d have plenty of choices.
I find that I can both enjoy pasta sauce and care about indigenous people in the Americas and elsewhere.
Frankly, if they’d just own up that Columbus Day is really “Italian-American Heritage Day” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day#History) I wouldn’t have a problem with it. Eat pasta! Listen to Louis Prima and/or Dean Martin! Watch Scorsese and Coppola movies!
@Nequam: Indeed. I’m Italian-American, and we can celebrate our heritage without honoring a guy who committed atrocities.
@ personalpest
Ironically the most common national holiday in the world is “Independence from Britain Day”.
(52 separate ones)
@Alan Robertshaw: You beat me to the punch. Colonel Johnson stood on those steps in Salem, Massachusetts to eat his tomato, not far at all from where I grew up.
The Federalist (a gross misnomer) is likely unaware of the fact that a lot of what we consider “Italian” was not really Italian fare. If you ordered pizza in Rome in the 1960s, you got a round piece of bread with maybe some melted cheese, maybe not.
The Federalist, like almost all conservatives, know nothing from history.
Considering Columbus day was invented as a sop to Italian-Americans after eleven Italian immigrants were lynched by a mob led by the KKK.
“Monday we dined at the Camerons; various dago diplomats were present, all much wrought up by the lynching of the Italians in New Orleans. Personally I think it rather a good thing, and said so.”
Teddy Roosevelt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_14,_1891_New_Orleans_lynchings#Press_coverage
tbh having a dumb protest with pasta at their homes is a lot better than having a dumb protest with guns, nooses and zip-ties at the Capitol, so maybe we shouldn’t mock this too much. It’d be great if food became their regular mode of protest, actually. I’ll take it.
Actually, we’re honoring the day that an Italian man was discovered starving on a beach.
Isn’t tomato sauce a little too spicy for right wingers? They should be offering up some mayonnaise based dishes instead.
I think it was only the upper class British who refused to eat tomatoes.
@weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee:
Well, since Mayonnaise is French… I honestly don’t know where they’d go with that.
@Galanx: “Monday we dined at the Camerons; various dago diplomats were present, all much wrought up by the lynching of the Italians in New Orleans. Personally I think it rather a good thing, and said so.”
Just so we are clear here, was he talking about the lynching as a good thing?
His loan accuser? What was that about dumb people again?
@Robert Haynie just don’t let the Spanish hear you say that, especially not the people of Mahón (or anywhere in Menorca or the Balearics in general … 🙂
I’ve understood that only some Italian-Americans bothered to celebrate Columbus day until it became a target of anticolonialist critique, and subsequently a cultural war cause celebre for the racist right. And despite the pretense of appreciating Italian culture, the focus seems to be shifting toward celebrating the US-Anglo-American heritage of racism.
Blatant attempt to bait leftist nerds into arguing that Native American cultures did in fact have sauce-like foods (I can only this is true to some extent), which can then be ridiculed as obsessive indignation over something completely irrelevant. More likely than not this ridicule would be expressed with a trollish smirk and the confident assertion, “no, only Italians have invented the True Sauce”.
Perhaps deliberate upside-downing of the basic reality Columbus and his financial backers didn’t get what they wanted and didn’t know to anticipate what they eventually got*. Of course, from modern historical perspective one can always joke that Italians spent their pre-1500 history spontaneously dreaming of tomatoes and vainly searching for them, just to be complete in their Italian-ness.
*Now that I think about it, Columbus getting a load of funding to find pepper and eventually coming back with allspice is a pretty funny and accurate metaphor for my own PhD thesis project.
cat of many faces:
No obviously the point is that Columbus braved the sea even though in his day everyone believed you could fall off the pizza if you sailed too far.
Alan:
Indeed; though this hardly had anything to do with the fact that Columbus was from Italy. One can imagine that without longstanding Italian influence, other Europeans would’ve been even slower to adopt the tomato. Today, tomato would be (in North America and Europe) known as an exotic fruit popular in Mexican cuisine.
@Alan : Tomato are like potatos in that they are close cousin to highly poisonous plants, and also have anything who isn’t the usually eaten part actively poisonous. So while they were stupid to not learn from the natives, they could easily have done tests and concluded the thing is no bueno.
Potatoes similarly did not get immediate european adoption either, for very similar reasons.
Yeah, both tomatoes and potatos are related to European plants called “nightshades”, most of which are notoriously poisonous. Even to this day there are some orthorexists who declare that eating “nightshades” is the real cause of all manner of health problems.
“Honoring,” because no one actually “celebrates” Indigenous Peoples Day.”
Delurking long enough to ask “And how does this dimrod know this?”
I work for the Chickasaw Nation, and it does *not* celebrate Columbus Day. It celebrates Piominko Day (one of their most important leaders).
Same day, same time and a half paycheck wise, but a much better–and more appropiate–choice, in my not so humble opinion.
@ kat
I wonder if this is meant to be a reference to the meeting Columbus had with various other sea captains and potential financiers? It is certainly true that they expressed a degree of scepticism at the project; and they were right to do so.
Columbus was using an estimate of the circumference of the earth that was wildly optimistic. This was because he had conflated Arab miles with European ones; so he was underestimating the distances by around 25%. He also believed Asia was a lot wider than it actually is. There’s speculation that he was aware of the Viking ‘Vinland’ and had identified that with Vladivostok.
There is debate as to whether Columbus was actually that naive; or whether he just used those figures, despite knowing they were wrong, in order to drum up funding.
The irony is, the other sea captains said he’d run out of food by the time he’d got 3,000 miles; and they were right. Lucky for Columbus the Caribbean was in the way.
Re: Toxic flora
Quite a few people deliberately grow poisonous plants; just as an exercise in horticulture. And a lot of people are doing it without realising.
But this is a nice video on a really good example of a poison garden.
And yes, they have tomatoes!
https://cdn.website-editor.net/dcb2270579134da18d99448109d32e03/files/uploaded/alnwickpoisongarden.pdf
@Seth S
As long as we all act like it’s the most atrocious thing we ever heard of, they’ll snap it right up.