Variants My Eye!

by FRANKLIN P. ADAMS

THERE are, I have it on rumor, so-called poker players who play Dealer’s Choice, which includes such effeminate variations as Baseball, Saliva-in-the-Sea (slang for Spit-in-the-Ocean), seven-card stud, including High and Low, and possibly some I never have heard of.

Of course, those with long memories recall that the rapid-fire vaudeville teams used to say “Every little helps, as the old lady said as she spit in the ocean.” How I remember the teams — might have been Fields and Lewis — who said, “Where did you get that hat?” “Hatteras.” “The coat?” “Dakota.” “The vest?” “Vest Virginia.” “The pants?" “Pantsylvania.” “The necktie?” “A feller give it to me.” Russel Crouse and I used to hear that team, but we have the tie in Ticondcroga, and the shoes at Simon and Shoestore. So Fields whacks Lewis with a newspaper, “What you hittin’ me with the Herald for?” “The Times is too hard.” I saw them dozens of times, and the routine never varied.

But what I started to say concerned the “variations” in poker. They are no good. You can’t improve on the five-card game, be it stud or draw.

And this brings me to my thesis: That you can’t improve on food and drink. The fruit or berry pies that some companies supply the restaurants that don’t have their own pastry cooks with, use some “preservative” in their pies. It looks like gelatin, it probably is gelatin, but it. tastes like a poor quality of library paste. By the way, at Ann Arbor in the nineties, we in the $3-a-week boardinghouse had three varieties of pie: covered, uncovered, and crossbar.

Although I no longer order pies in the second-to-ninth places that I frequent, I have even more trouble at home, including being called Disagreeable and Always Complaining. (Not always; only about 80 per cent of the time.) She always (100 per cent) exaggerates.

In the first place, as I call my home, I complain about Hot Fruit Pies, especially Apple and Blueberry. And I complain when They (meaning a new cook, and If You Don’t Like It, Suppose You Go and Get a Better One) put cinnamon in apple pie, sprinkle parsley on meat and potatoes; I scrape the parsley off, in a nice, polite, and ostentatious way. Sometimes They put nutmeg in pies, and though I dislike it, I don’t complain in Connecticut. Our state was named in honor of wooden nutmegs, which it was thought “shrewd” Connecticut peddlers sold for the real thing.

And speaking of nutmeg, why, unless you tell him not to, does the bartender put grated nutmeg on top of a milk punch?

My idea is that you can’t improve on the taste of anything by trying to make it taste like something else. If you have to put sugar on melons or grapefruit, they are no good in the first place.

In the same category is ginger ale and rye, Cola and rye or rum. And while I am drinking, let me register a complaint about that Contradiction in Terms, the Scotch Old-Fashioned. If you want an Old-Fashioned divested of pineapple, a slice of orange or lemon, or other Fruits and Flowers, do you know what you ask for? A Drag.

To my many murders —and I would take a chance with the jury — is that of the cook who puts sugar in tomato soup, and baking soda in peas and beans, to “bring out the color.”

But I have discovered something that actually adds something to clam chowder, and I don’t mean that other Term-Contradiction, Manhattan Clam Chowder, which is vegetable soup with caraway seeds. I mean clam chowder, made with milk and a lot of clams. Put about a medicine dropper of sherry in it. And as the radio announcers say about beer and cereals, m-m-m!