Spanish Balls

(Sung to the tune of The Clash's "Spanish Bombs")

If you’re looking for books, music, or books about music, start scrolling to the bottom because today I’m going to talk about something completely different: baking.

When I was home in Virginia last month going through my mothers’ things I found a long wooden box stuffed with index cards. I recognized it right away. This was where my mother kept her recipes.

Yo te quiero, oh mi corazón

When she was younger she copied her favorite recipes in her distinctive quasi-cursive handwriting on to 3x5 index cards. As the years wore on, she would simply clip the recipe from a newspaper or magazine and affix it to the card, but it was the handwritten cards I was interested in. These were the recipes that I remembered from my childhood. Chicken Cacciatore, Turkey Tetrazzini, Spam Salad Surprise.¹ Each card was placed in its own section marked by a carefully labeled divider. She had an entire section for ham dishes.

Some of the recipes I’d never seen before, such as a card titled Spanish Balls in the hors d’oeuvres section. Having just returned from Spain, I decided to make this dish. There was just one problem: upon closer inspection the card read Spinach Balls not Spanish Balls. Spanish… spinach… no matter I would make it.

One thing that struck me about my mother’s recipes was how infrequently they called for fresh ingredients: canned corn, frozen peas, processed cheese. Spanish, er, Spinach Balls called for “herbed stuffing mix.” I didn’t have any herbed stuffing mix, but those words brought back a slew of memories of Shake ‘N Bake, Rice-a-Roni, and Hamburger Helper, food kits that transformed basic ingredients into meals. In the late ‘70s, before the invention of the microwave, we had boxes and boxes of that shit in our pantry.

Not anymore. So to get the 1.5 cups of stuffing mix I crushed a sleeve of Saltines and added some extra seasoning. I was also struck by how much butter the recipe called for: six table spoons, which seemed excessive. I chopped the spinach and onions, stirred in the butter and some eggs, and added the spices and homemade stuffing mix. When it was all mixed together I scooped out one inch balls and stuck it in the oven. About ten minutes or so later, my they were ready. Delicious, especially with a dash of Old Bay hot sauce.

My mom was a busy woman. She worked full-time as a nurse, had four kids to look after when my dad was away at sea, and she pursued her passion for sewing, needlepoint, and embroidery in her spare time. She wasn’t the type to spend half the day in an apron baking biscuits in the morning and pies in the afternoon before turning her attention to dinner. That’s not how she rolled.

Nevertheless, she was a good cook and while I’m at peace with her passing and glad her suffering is over, knowing I’m not ever going to get to enjoy one of her dishes again produces a kind of sadness that’s hard to shake off. It’s not her absence that gets me, it’s the fact of no longer having a mother that does me in.

So I baked some Spanish Balls. Then I made a Shepherd’s Pie. I baked some banana bread after that and then I made a couple loaves of Irish Soda Bread, which was a household favorite and I have carried on the tradition over the years. I don’t need a card for that one.

Last night I broke out another one of my mother’s hors d'oeuvres recipes: Cheese Snacks, which she used to make when my parents were having parties. They’re basically processed cheese and a shitload of butter blended together and mixed with flour. It all gets wrapped around a pimento-stuffed olive and baked in the oven. Amazing?

Not really. There’s a tendency to imbue these recipe cards with a talismanic power they don’t possess, but the potential to activate memory through touch, taste, and smell is undeniably powerful. The Cheese Snacks evoke memories of holiday parties, football on the television, Irish music on the stereo. It’s cold outside but the house is warm with laughter and the hors d'oeuvres appearing with regularity from the oven in the kitchen. They are tiny cheesy biscuits with an olive inside. Nothing else in the world tastes like it.

While I was spending time with my mother last year we watched several cooking shows on PBS hosted by Pati Jinich, and I was so impressed with her seafood recipes I did something I’ve never done before: I pre-ordered her cookbook, Treasures from the Mexican Table. The book arrived not long after my mom passed away and I immediately shelved it. At the time it seemed like one of many things I simply didn’t have the emotional bandwidth for after her death.

Emboldened by my recent success with my mother’s recipes, last night I tried cooking Achiote Adobo Tilapia. Friends, it was the best tilapia I’ve ever tasted. I can’t wait to prepare it again when my daughter returns home from college.

Don’t worry, I’m not turning Message from the Underworld into a newsletter about cooking and food, but if anyone needs some Irish Soda Bread this holiday season I can hook you up.

The Mystery of the Mysterious Record

There’s some clarity on the Stains situation I discussed last week. It looks like the SST reissue of the Stains debut album is indeed a reissue and not a bootleg or dead stock as some have speculated. Not one, but two staff members at Sorry State Records made the Stains reissue their pick of the week to discuss the clusterfuck. The post is long (all of Sorry State’s newsletters are long) so scroll down, but they painstakingly break down how the release couldn’t be anything but a reissue from SST.

A good bit of the confusion was fueled by various members of various Stains camps on Facebook. I have since been informed that the person who runs the Stains Facebook page, who purports to be Robert Becerra’s niece, is not actually related to the guitarist, making her motivation for posting somewhat suspect.

So the mystery of the Stains reissue appears to be a case of Occam’s Razor: SST reissued the record but did so in its usual murkily slapdash way. Had SST made an announcement, like, anywhere, all this angst could have been avoided, but of course they didn’t. It took someone from the supply side (either a distributor or a retailer) to shed some light on the situation and I’m grateful that Sorry State Records did just that.

You know who I’m not feeling particularly grateful for? The people who had notice that a Stains reissue was coming and used that information to drive up the price of the original release, adding to the confusion. It seems like everyone is hyper-focused on how to profit from the reissue—everyone that is except the band who made a great fucking record.

Corporate Rock Sucks Podcast Update

As if the Stains debacle wasn’t enough of a case study, I spoke with Sam Backer at Money 4 Nothing about what made SST Records so beguiling and befuddling. Here’s Sam’s intro to our convo:

The modern music industry is defined, in large part, by major labels and centralized digital services. To try and imagine a world without (or at least around them), we’ve been looking backwards to the 1980s, when a thriving underground economy enabled a remarkable flood of American rock. If one label could be said to define that moment, it would be LA’s SST Records. Founded in Hermosa Beach by Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn, SST would spend the decade releasing an unbeatable string of albums from acts like Hüsker Dü, the Minutemen, Soundgarden, Sonic Youth, St. Vitus, and Meat Puppets. To try and understand how SST did it—and why it more or less vanished by the turn of the 90s, we talk to Jim Ruland author of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records. Come for discussion of Spot, the best punk producer of all time. Stay for takes on semi-thriving undefground economies , megalomania, and “weeding out.”

1. I’m kidding. There’s no such thing as Spam Salad Surprise. At least I hope there isn’t.