Bird Noses and Back to Frisco

Can you touch a baby bird that has fallen out of its nest? A complicated question that we will spend some time on closer to "falling out of the nest season," but for generations the received wisdom was that a human touch would leave a scent on the baby that would cause the parents to abandon it. 'Tain't so, songbirds sense of smell is not very good so they won't notice, as a chipmunk would, that you stink, dear reader. Scientists believed that birds spent a lot of evolutionary energy developing the senses of sight and balance which are essential for flying, leaving smell in the dust, but now an article from Discovery says otherwise. Scientists in Canada studied 157 bird and dino skulls for the size of the space where the olfactory bulb of the brain nestled in the skull and found that "the sense of smell actually improved during dinosaur-bird evolution." Birds apparently began to lose their sense of smell later, but some birds like turkey vultures still have great noses comparable to a little velociraptor called, wait for it, Bambiraptor. In the article there is a nice picture of a Bambiraptor standing over an opossum-take a look, it helps explain why possums aren't that afraid of cars! By the way, T. Rex had a great nose so the Jurassic Park scene where everyone stood really still so the T. Rex wouldn't eat them just wouldn't work in real life. The scientific record is silent on the other Jurassic Park T. Rex story-we still don't know if they actually preferred eating lawyers.

Fanny Holt Ames stayed in San Francisco until the 23rd. I failed to mention in my last posting that the hotel she stayed in, the Fairmont, was the place where Tony Bennett first sang "I Left My Heart in San Francisco." The song was actually written in 1954, the year of Fanny's tour,  for a singer called Claramae Turner, who never recorded it. Bennett debuted the song in December, 1961 in the Fairmont's Venetian Room.

As we have seen Fanny wasn't cooking on a hot plate in her room, so she visited a number of San Francisco landmarks to eat like the Top of the Mark at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. She also dined, on April 22, at the Palace Hotel. The original Palace Hotel, built in 1875, was said to have been the largest, most luxurious, and costly hotel in the world. Famed tenor Enrico Caruso was staying there when the great earthquake struck in 1906-he vowed never to return and kept his promise. The hotel building survived the shaking, but was lost in the subsequent fire. It was rebuilt and reopened in 1909 and remains open to this day with its famed Maxfield Parrish mural in the Pied Piper Bar. Like the Fairmont, several Presidents stayed there. President Harding checked in and then checked out permanently, dying in an 8th floor room. Crackpot conspiracy theories persist that the philandering President was poisoned by his wife; these rumors did not prevent President Clinton from staying at the Palace during his term. We don't know what Fanny ate at the Palace (she noted it was "delicious") or whether she had a highball in front of the Maxfield Parrish, but she could have ordered her salad with Green Goddess Salad Dressing. This was invented at the Palace in 1923 to honor a visit by actor George Arliss who was on a nationwide tour of the play "The Green Goddess." Arliss was a friend of Winthrop Ames and a frequent visitor to Queset House. One imagines that he performed on the little stage at Queset Garden during a family party. The salad dressing is a descendant of a fish sauce originally developed in France during the time of Louis XIII and was the #1 salad dressing on the West Coast until the invention of Ranch Dressing. Here's a recipe, allegedly from the Palace-it's an all-purpose dressing, but true to its heritage it is excellent in a seafood salad or as a sauce on poached fish.

Palace Hotel Green Goddess Dressing

10 anchovy fillets (minced or mashed presumably)
2 tsp. garlic oil

1/4 cup white onion

3 cups mayonnaise

2 Tbsp. fresh parsley, finely chopped

2 Tbsb. fresh tarragon, finely chopped

Coat a bowl with the garlic oil.
Mix the anchovies, onion, herbs, and mayonnaise in the bowl. Today the herbs are pulsed in a food processor with some of the mayo, making a greener final product.
If desired, thin slightly with tarragon vinegar

Like chowder there are a million variations including often the addition of a little fresh lemon juice.