Word: curiosa
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LAROUSSE GASTRONOMIQUE, by Prosper Montagné (1,101 pp.; Crown: $20). In this large, well-illustrated American edition of the famous French encyclopedia of food and cooking are recipes for almost everything edible, definitions of culinary terms, and such curiosa as a description of what Louis XIV liked to eat for dinner (the fifth course consisted of various fresh-water fish cooked in pastry, and was intended to remove the taste of the larks, ortolans, thrushes, capons, woodcocks, young turkeys, young hares, sweetbreads, ham, forcemeats, hot pâtés and fritures that had preceded it). Its completeness...
...Conductor Newell Jenkins' Clarion Concerts, which for two years have made a distinguished name by searching out musical curiosa, in a Town Hall concert featured Alessandro Scarlatti's rarely performed oratorio, II Martirio di Sant' Orsola. An unpretentious work, it had little true dramatic tension but was supported by a vocal latticework of wonderful warmth, tenderness and transparency. Elsewhere on the program. Conductor Jenkins exhumed a wonderfully flourishing Trumpet Suite by 17th century English Composer Jeremiah Clarke, and played Mexican Composer Carlos Chavez' Symphony No. 5, a propulsively rhythmic work for strings that ran hard...
...learn from White that each baron owed the King an annual sniff of hot pie in payment of his feudal dues, that a certain bone from the body of a pure black cat that had been boiled alive was believed to make one invisible. Against these curiosa, the characters still manage to hold their own: Sir Galahad, who is so priggish a saint that lesser knights loathe him; Jenny, who cannot make her mind up whether to be a good woman or go on in her usual way; Lancelot, the ugly duckling who is loved by all save himself. Balancing...
...only mentioning it in passing, Professor Jones has lost the opportunity of bringing his work to a firm conclusion. Nevertheless, if it is slight in contemporary analysis, "The Pursuit of Happiness" is first-rate intellectual history. A lively synthesis of many fields, packed with amusing bits of judicial curiosa, it shows with precision the American, his ideas about happiness, and the ways he has tried to attain...
Where Blood Is Green. The underwater world is a silent world, Cousteau testifies. "Hydrophones have recorded clamors that have been sold as phonographic curiosa, but . . . it is not the reality of the sea . . ." As for most of the conventional perils of the deep, the men-fish call them just fish stories. Cousteau says that he has never been attacked by an octopus?in fact, he has actually waltzed with them dozens of times on the sea floor, and he has movies to prove it. Only once was Cousteau in danger from a shark; and that was when the blood-spoor...