"Steak Diane" in Wednesday's NY Times" Big Apple Whore Hoax & Wikipedia
Bapopik at AOL.COM
Bapopik at AOL.COM
Wed Feb 8 05:45:51 UTC 2006
STEAK DIANE
...
"Steak Diane" is a NYC dish, but the NY Times will never know. From
Wednesday's newspaper (available online):
...
_http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/dining/08mini.html?_r=1&oref=slogin_
(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/dining/08mini.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)
Since oysters are never as good cooked as raw, there is one great solution:
Turn to one of the most natural, creative and ancient minimalist dishes of
all: steak Diane, named, perhaps, after the goddess Diana, the hunter
...
...
_http://www.barrypopik.com/article/48/steak-diane_
(http://www.barrypopik.com/article/48/steak-diane)
...
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FYI: BIG APPLE WHORE HOAX AND WIKIPEDIA
...
_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Big_Apple_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Big_Apple)
...
What about this theory?
Taken from _http://salwen.com/apple.html_ (http://salwen.com/apple.html)
"When and how did New York City come to be called "The Big Apple'?"
This is by far the most frequently asked question submitted to our New York
History Hotline.
In popular folklore, the name is usually traced to early jazz musicians or
long-ago sports figures. Often, the explanation of the so-called "origin" of
this phrase is accompanied with plausible-sounding historical or biographical
details, giving it an unmistakable (but alas, totally spurious) "ring of
truth."
Because this question continues to excite curiosity, and because the real
facts are quite well known to serious historians, we provide the following
authoritative account, based on our unique archival sources. The story may
disappoint some readers -- truth, after all, is often less colorful than fiction.
But facts are facts.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, refugees from war-torn Europe
began arriving in New York in great numbers. Many were remnants of the
crumbling French aristocracy, forced to seek refuge abroad from the dread "Monsieur
Guillotine." Arriving here without funds or friends, many of these were
forced to survive, as one contemporary put it, "by their wits or worse."
One of these, arriving in late 1803 or early 1804, was Mlle. Evelyn Claudine
de Saint-Évremond. Daughter of a noted courtier, wit, and littérateur, and
herself a favorite of Marie Antoinette, Evelyn was by all accounts remarkably
attractive: beautiful, vivacious, and well-educated, and she was soon a
society favorite. For reasons never disclosed, however, a planned marriage the
following year to John Hamilton, son of the late Alexander Hamilton, was called
off at the last minute. Soon after, with support from several highly placed
admirers, she established a salon -- in fact, it appears to have been an
elegantly furnished bordello -- in a substantial house that still stands at 142
Bond Street, then one of the city's most exclusive residential districts.
Evelyn's establishment quickly won, and for several decades maintained, a
formidable reputation as the most entertaining and discreet of the city's many
"temples of love," a place not only for lovemaking, but also for elegant
dinners, high-stakes gambling, and witty conversation. The girls, many of them
fresh arrivals from Paris or London, were noted for their beauty and bearing.
More than a few of them, apparently, were actually able to secure wealthy
husbands from among the establishment's clientele.
When New Yorkers insisted on anglicizing her name to "Eve," Evelyn apparently
found the biblical reference highly amusing, and for her part would refer to
the temptresses in her employ as "my irresistable apples." The young
men-about-town soon got into the habit of referring to their amorous adventures as
"having a taste of Eve's Apples." This knowing phrase established the speaker
as one of the "in" crowd, and at the same time made it clear he had no need
to visit one of the coarser establishments that crowded nearby Mercer Street,
for instance. The enigmatic reference in Philip Hone's famous diary to "Ida,
sweet as apple cider" (October 4, 1838) has been described as an oblique
reference to a visit to what had by then become a notorious but cherished civic
institution.
The rest, as they say, is etymological history.
The sexual connotation of the word "apple" was well known in New York and
throughout the country until around World War I. The Gentleman's Directory of
New York City, a privately published (1870) guide to the town's "houses of
assignation," confidently asserted that "in freshness, sweetness, beauty, and
firmness to the touch, New York's apples are superior to any in the New World or
indeed the Old." Meanwhile, various "apple" catch-phrases -- "the Apple
Tree," "the Real Apple," etc. -- were used as synonyms for New York City itself,
which boasted (if that is the term) more houses of ill repute per capita than
any other major U.S. municipality.
William Jennings Bryan, though hardly the first to denounce New York as a
sink of iniquity, appears to have been the first to use the "apple" epithet in
public discourse, branding the city, in a widely reprinted 1892 campaign
speech, as "the foulest Rotten Apple on the Tree of decadent Federalism." The
double-entendre -- i.e., as a reference to both political and sexual corruption
-- would have been well understood by voters of the time.
The term "Big Apple" or "The Apple" had already passed into general use as a
sobriquet for New York City by 1907, when one guidebook included the comment,
"Some may think the Apple is losing some of its sap." Interestingly, the
phrase had also become pretty well "sanitized" in the process, thanks to a
vigorous campaign mounted just after the turn of the century by the Apple
Marketing Board, a trade group based in upstate Cortland, New York. Alarmed by
sharply declining sales, the Association launched what some believe to be the
earliest example of what would now be called a "product positioning campaign."
By devising and energetically promoting such slogans as "An apple a day keeps
the Doctor away" and "as American as apple pie!" the A.M.B. was able to
successfully "rehabilitate" the apple as a popular comestible, free of unsavory
associations. It is believed that the group also distributed apples to the
poor for sale on the city's streets during the Great Depression (1930-38). No
convincing documentary evidence has been produced to support this, however.
-- Society for New York City History, Education Committee Copyright © 1995
The Society for New York City History All rights reserved.
* Read what the good Mr. Popik has to say on the matter: _[1]_
(http://www.barrypopik.com/article/57/big-apple-whore-hoax-1800s) .--_Pharos_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pharos) 06:14, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
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