John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the 35th
President of the United States, serving from 1961 until 1963. He was
the only Catholic president, and the only president to
have won a Pulitzer Prize. His presidency is most associated with his
assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1964 by Lee Harvey Oswald. All three
major US television networks suspended their regular schedules and switched
to all-news coverage from November 22 through November 25, 1963, being on
the air for 70 hours, making it the longest uninterrupted news event on
American TV until 9/11.He is also remembered the Bay
of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the building of the Berlin Wall,
the Space Race, the African American Civil Rights Movement, and what some
historians believe was his sexual addiction. Kennedy reportedly told
Bobby Baker, the scandal-ridden Senate's Democratic Secretary,"I get a
migraine headache if I don't get a strange piece of ass each day." In
An Undiminished Life, historian Robert Dalleck reports that
many of his political aides including Dave Power and Kenneth P. O'Donnell,
were the prinicpal White House pimps for strange ass. Some of the strangest
ass may have been Ellen Rometech, the wife of a West German Embassy military
attaché who also moonlighted as a prostitute for a high-end DC call girl
service and allegedly a spy for the East Germans. Then there was Judith
Campbell Exter, the girlfriend of Chicago Mafia crime boss Sam Giaconda. But
the strangest, and possibly most dangerous piece of ass was the drug-addled
Marilyn Monroe.
Most of the United States became vaguely aware of
that Kennedy even knew Marilyn Monroe was in May 19, 1962, when
Marilyn Monroe breathlessly sang "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" at a large
party in Madison Square Garden celebrating Kennedy's upcoming forty-fifth
birthday, which was widely reported on television. In The Secret
Life Of Marilyn Monroe by J Randy Taraborrelli, the author claims that
several months after
the Madison Square
Garden birthday celebration,
Jackie
Kennedy a
told her husband that she was deeply unhappy about Marilyn's birthday song
and the affair, and threatened to file for divorce immediately before
the next presidential campaign.
The tryst with JFK and Marilyn was set up
in Palm Springs in 1960 by mutual friends. According to one member of the
Secret Service quoted in
Taraborrelli's
book, " 'We all knew about the weekend. It wasn't until she and the
President were both dead that people started talking about an affair. Trust
me, no one was saying anything about an affair in 1962. "Although it was
just a one-or two-night stand to the president. Marilyn literally fell head
over heals for him. According to Rupert Allan, Marilyn's publicist,
she seemed "fixated on the President. It started to become unclear as to
what was going on between them, even though I thought it wasn't much. She
was acting like she wanted more, though."
Segue to the recipe. In the book Fragments:
Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe
published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the publisher collected her
scribblings jotted in notebooks, typed on paper, or written on hotel
letterhead. The book includes her recipe for turkey stuffing written on a
letterhead from an insurance company, the detailed instructions explain how
she used a bread loaf soaked in water, five herbs, spices and nuts to create
the dish.Marilyn writes that giblets must be ‘liver-heart’ and stipulates
that the beef must be ‘browned (no oil)'.To make the mix right it also needs
‘1 handful’ of grated Parmesan and an undetermined amount of ‘parsarly’ (one
of many words in the book misspelled).
So to celebrate JFK's birthday, we offer the
adapted recipe for Marilyn Monroe's Stuffing with corrected spellings. Enjoy
it with a viewing of Oliver Stone's JFK (1991) which was so popular
that it led to the passage of the President
John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.
Marilyn Monroe's
Stuffing |
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Ingredients
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10-ounce loaf sourdough bread
1/2 pound chicken or turkey livers or hearts
1/2 pound ground round or other beef
1 TB cooking oil
4 stalks celery, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
2 cups chopped fresh parsley
2 eggs, hard boiled, chopped
1&1/2 cups raisins
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1cup
grated Parmesan
1&1/4 cups chopped
walnuts, pine nuts or roasted chestnuts,
2 tsp dried crushed rosemary
2 tsp
dried crushed
oregano
2 tsp dried crushed thyme
3 bay leaves
1 TB salt-free, garlic-free poultry seasoning
1 TB kosher salt, plus more to taste
1 TB pepper.
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Instructions |
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1. Split the
bread loaf in half and soak it in a large bowl of cold water for 15 minutes.
Wring out excess water over a colander
and shred into pieces.
2. Boil the livers or hearts for 8 minutes in salted water, then
chop into small bits.
3. In a skillet over medium-high heat, brown the ground beef in the
oil, stirring occasionally and breaking up the meat,
4. Combine the sourdough, livers, ground beef, celery, onion,
parsley, eggs, raisins, Parmesan and nuts in a large mixing
bowl and mix with your hands.
5 Add the rosemary, oregano, thyme, bay leaves, poultry seasoning, salt and
pepper together to the same bowl and mix
again with your hands. Taste and adjust for salt.
6.Refrigerate, covered, until ready to use as a stuffing or to bake
separately as dressing.
Yield:
20 cups
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