Green Beans Amandine
Adapted from Jubilee by Toni Tipton-Martin
But first, some musings…
There’s this tallish Dutch fella named Carel Struycken. You may have seen his work in spherical panoramas. A spherical panorama is a photograph that allows the viewer to see a vantage point with full 360 degree vertical and horizontal view. Imagine the most magnificent view you’ve ever seen, that space you tried to capture in photographs, but they only flattened that which your eyes pivoting around you and from the ground to the sky could embrace as grand. The sunsets you took on your iPhone that never looked worth sending. All those snaps you grabbed of the Grand Canyon that could be shown only with the disclaimer that you have to see it for yourself.
Well the spherical panorama captures what you see if you spin all around in a circle, recording as you go, as well as from your feet to the sky and back around the other way, the whole image visible and made able to spin in a dizzying array, as if the space you view could be projected onto the inside of a giant snow globe, with the viewer placed at the center of your experience, gyroscopically spinning endlessly, directing and redirecting where their eyes fall, spinning all the while in your experience as they go.
Here's Struycken’s spherical panorama of the Sheets-Goldstein house.
You may know the house as Jackie Treehorn’s from The Big Lebowski.
Here’s one of the Canyon de Chelly. Move your cursor skyward and remember the lazy afternoons of childhood lying on your back, gazing at the sky, and feeling the rotation of the earth in the movement of the clouds.
On his website, Struycken describes his fascination with spherical panoramas:
“Normally, the photographer decides what part of a scene will be viewed. To a large extent, this point of view represents the art and craft of the photographer. In spherical panoramas, it is up to the viewer to decide what to focus on and it becomes the task of the photographer to offer up something interesting, no matter where the viewer decides to look. When successful, it becomes an immersive experience, an act of seduction even” (https://www.sphericalpanoramas.com/about/).
Imagine the host of human experience then, but only ever seeing one small part of it. The 360 degree panorama is there, but you are permitted only one small isolated part, constrained and limited to that view. I imagine it would feel like a prison. Now imagine it’s not external forces, but rather a choice. The spherical panorama is available, but you, the viewer, choose to see only one section. Why would you do that, do you think?
Anyway, the metaphor is starting to get away from me, and I told myself I’d write today. We’re isolated in information silos is the point, because we choose to limit our access to the entire human experience, and a few years ago I would have said that’s a bad thing, and it’s a big reason we’re in the mess we are, but when faced this morning with a YouTube news feed of the news of the world (of injunctions over treasury data, and the pillaging of USAID, and the threatened Rivierafication of Gaza, and an incoming report from PC Gamer about how CAPTCHA has always been a for-profit tracking cookie to make Google money), or videos of a tiny rescued miniature horse having an even tinier miniature baby horse, I chose the horse. Because the spherical panorama of tragedy and chaos is hard to look at right now. And I think it is for most of us. I need to find a spot on the sphere, and hold myself there, for fear of spinning off the globe entirely.
If you don’t know Carel Struycken from his work on spherical panoramas, you may know him from his work on Twin Peaks as The Giant, or The Addams Family movies as Lurch, or as Mr. Homn, the manservant of Deanna Troy’s mother on Star Trek: TNG. Or that dude that hung out with the I Heart NY Pug in Men in Black. Perhaps my describing him as a tall fella was an understatement. Carel Struycken is 7 feet tall. And on January 7 he and his wife Tracey lost their home of 12 years to the Eaton fire.
The fires are concrete, real tragedies, not metaphors at all, of course. But sometimes when the panoramic sphere of an event is overwhelming, it helps to focus on one smaller frame. So imagine you’re a 78 year-old, 7 foot-tall man, and your home burns down with all of your very specific clothes in it. Imagine you’ve lost your film equipment for your very specific art of taking spherical panoramas. Imagine your memorabilia of your very specific film career went up with your home. And then imagine the director that you worked with in maybe your most iconic role dies a week later.
So what’s the point?
We miss a lot of the breadth of human experience when we draw a little box around what we see, and silo our experience inside of that. But when the big picture is overwhelming, we draw the box to connect--not to shut out feeling, but to enable it. That compassion fatigue we heard so much about during the pandemic is always a risk. And allowing compassion fatigue to creep in means turning away from what is hard to watch, and toward, yes, more videos of miniature horses, but it’s also a way of shutting out the range of human emotions when we feel overwhelmed by tragedy. I’m finding that I function better when I don’t allow the miniature horses to take me. Rather I try to find a small frame of the panorama to focus on, and to feel something about. This week, that was Carel Struycken. He and his family are safe. And many more people are not.
Green Beans Amandine
Adapted from Jubilee by Toni Tipton-Martin
This recipe is really loose. Amp up the garlic and paprika if you like, add some chili flakes, or replace lemon zest with a squeeze of lemon. Or leave it out entirely (it’s not in Tipton-Martin’s recipe; I added it). Just a simple green bean side preparation.
Ingredients
1 – 1 ½ lb green beans, ends trimmed
2-3 cups water heavily salted water
1 Tablespoon olive oil
1 Tablespoon butter
3 garlic cloves, crushed
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
½ cup almonds, slivered traditionally, but sliced, or chopped will work
½ teaspoon lemon zest
1 Tablespoon chopped parsley
Directions
Over medium heat, in a dry pan, toast your almonds until fragrant and slightly tanned. Be careful not to burn!
Remove almonds and set aside. Clean out your pan.
Fill a large bowl with ice water, and set aside.
Add salted water to a skillet or pan large enough to hold all of your green beans over high heat. When boiling, add your green beans, and blanche for 3-4 minutes.
Then remove from pan and place in ice bath. When cold, drain and set aside until ready to cook, in the fridge if it’s going to be while.
Recipe can be done ahead until this point. The rest of this goes fast, so preferably complete right before serving.
Dry out your pan. Put back over medium heat, add olive oil and butter. When bubbling, add garlic and stir for 30 seconds.
Add green beans, paprika, lemon zest, and more salt and pepper to taste. Toss for about 2 minutes, or until done to your liking.
paprika, salt, and pepper in pan
Remove to serving bowl, and top with almonds, and parsley. I add a little drizzle of additional olive oil as well.
Super simple side that can be completed while a meat is resting.
Have a week, and try to hold it together.
Finding it too overwhelming to look at the whole spherical panorama of human suffering right now? Maybe find one real person who’s been hit especially hard by it, and tap into your ability to empathize again. Or, if you’re struggling the other way, overwhelmed by too much connecting, take that break for miniature horses. I know we’ve all heard it. But…
It is happening again.
Carl Struycken in Twin Peaks
Citation:
Tipton-Martin, Toni. Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking. Clarkson-Potter, 2019.