30 April 2008
Hippo Bar
Civic, Canberra, ACT
FYI, regarding the dateline, I’m currently writing from the Hippo Bar on jazz night just after Carmina Burana rehearsal. I’m listening to the crooning Katherine Hunter and her 3-man trio (double bass, keyboard, drums) in a very crowded and lively atmosphere on the second floor overlooking Garema Place. Reminds me a bit of The Enormous Room in Central Square, Cambridge, MA.
Part of the reason for starting this blog was to keep all our friends and family up to date on the doings down here in our Big Australian Adventure. But my other secret reason was to just write. I like writing and it occurred to me that the way to be a better writer is to read more and to write more. So this was a regimen to keep me writing (uneven quality notwithstanding). Up til now I’ve mostly been writing about things I’ve done or seen. The other day I suggested to .b that I could also stretch myself a bit by writing short bits on randomly selected (or suggested) topics like napping or bagpipes or medieval French Romantic Poetry… whatever.
So if you’ve got some topic you’d like to know more about, or would like to test my creative abilities with, feel free to suggest something. I’d been telling .b about the morning tea ritual here at NCEPH (pronounced EN-seff) and how the most popular day is Wednesday because it’s bun day. After a brief pause in our instant messaging exchange, .b came back with a bunch of exclamation points. Bun day?!!? And you are looking for things to write about!??!!
So that’s a very long introduction to what is, in fact, a bit about bun day at NCEPH. For all you citizens of the Commonwealth (of former British colonies, not “independent states”), you might think you can skip the next bit about definitions, but you may regret it. For me, a reasonably educated American, bun, in the singular, was a hairdo – a knob of twisted hair at the nape of the neck, favoured by librarians and not ever considered remotely stylish in my lifetime – with a brief semi-exception in 1977. But Princess Leia’s take on it was such a radical departure from tradition that there’s certainly room for debate on the validity of that as a true bun trend. First, she sported two instead of one. They covered her ears instead of the nape of her neck. And they were significantly larger than usual. However, they resembled, and were frequently referred to as, coffee rolls, which are certainly cousins to the “bun” in the Commonwealth sense. So you can see the challenge.
This would bring us neatly into a discussion of bun day here, except that I feel its necessary to first address the other significant American bun referent – the plural. Well, maybe I shouldn’t go there except to say that I’ve never been particularly fond of that use. There have been few people I’ve known whose submissions deserved quite so cozy a term.
I suppose this essay has gone a bit backwards in some respects. It would be more common in the academic sense to start with the original, Platonically pure and idealistic definition of the bun (the theoretical framework, if you will) and proceed from there through to the degenerate forms at the end. But I came to the whole business of bun day backward myself anyway.
So. The bun. In reality, “bun” is more like a family or genus rather than a species. From what I’ve been able to gather thus far from bun day at NCEPH and my meandering through the baked good sections of local supermarkets, a bun is pretty much any kind of reasonably sweet, baked, cereal product of a cake-like or doughy texture that is not a donut or a muffin. That’s a pretty big range I realize. But that’s what I’ve found. While American exposure to “buns” of the baked variety is probably pretty limited to hot cross buns (which they also have here at Easter), the “buns” I see at bun day are quite large – about the size of a flattened rugby ball, or, I suppose more appropriately, a good sized loaf of Challah bread (though flatter, or, ironically, with the bun-looking bits sheared off the top), with or without nuts and/or fruit (e.g., sultanas – oh, that’s a post for another day), and usually covered with some sort of thick frosting. Thus my academic determination that this range of manifestations makes bun a family or genus and these various incarnations are, in fact, different species.
So now we come to the problem of classification of non-native species. I mean, there is nothing quite like some of the buns I’ve seen here, but others could slip easily into an American continental breakfast (they’d say “brekky” here) buffet without remark – only they would undoubtedly be called “coffee cake.” So are they different species? Or the same species with different common names?
It all boils down to the species concept. The ‘recipe species concept’ (similar to the phylogenetic species concept for you twitchers out there) would suggest that if the ingredients and the procedures for baking are all identical, then the item is in fact the same species and ought to have the same name (in this case, clearly a working group needs to be formed to investigate whether one or the other name should be selected or whether a new name should be proposed). If, however, any of the ingredients or procedures are altered slightly (sultanas instead of raisins, for example) then they are definitely a different species, or genus (e.g., bun vs. coffee cake).
The ‘buffet species concept’, however, (twitchers can think of the biologic species concept) suggests that if two slightly different items can be interchanged at buffet tables around the world without confusion on the part of celebrants, and are accepted simply as variations on a baked goods theme, then they can be considered the same species or genus regardless of the local name, which then makes this a problem for the languages department, not the taxonomists. Which reminds me, some of the buns I’ve seen here are stuffed – sometimes with jam, sometimes custard, sometimes cream (Australian cream – see the previous post on strawberry ricotta pie).
So that’s the bun. What of the “day” part? The first time I saw the NCEPH all-staff email (Subject: Bun day today – 40¢ a slice) I didn’t know what to think. What would you think? Even now, when I see the email each Wednesday, my first thought is some Salvador Dali-esque image of buns with wings flying around over some surreal landscape. But really it’s just a tasty way to break up the morning and get chummy with colleagues in the tea room. Have a cuppa and a chat about the weather or the latest new scheme of the V.C. (that’s the Vice Chancellor – basically the equivalent of the president of an American university – though I’m quite unable to take Ian Chubb seriously because he looks and sounds to me just like Barry Fife, chairman of the Australian Dancing Federation in the movie Strictly Ballroom: check it out). But where was I? Oh, having a cuppa and a chat with colleagues who are otherwise squirreled away in their offices in this rabbit warren of a building.
Morning tea is always an event, but bun day is definitely the day to see and be seen. So start a bun day wherever you are. Grab a couple of tasty doughy sweets and send an email round with the subject: “Bun day today – 40¢ a slice”
