No Calamari Here
Photo: Hans Hillewaert
While trying to figure out InDesign, I came across a fun fact about squid. (Here’s how it happened—I was trying to figure out how to tint a photo, and one thing led to another, and you know I’d rather be looking up fun facts then going through a web tutorial). Anyway, here it is. The sepia tones in your great-grandparents’ photographs come from cuttlefish ink. This made the photos more resistant to aging, which is why those are the ones that still survive.
Maybe I should have guessed this. Cuttlefish are in the family Sepidae, genus Sepia. A cuttlefish might have guessed it—they’re supposed to be dang smart, like other cephalopod, including the wild and dangerous Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, although members of these species are frequently squished by cars on their water-bound mating journey and eaten by Sasquatch.
You would think this would be a great place to talk about how to cook calamari. It would be, except I don’t know how. I don’t even really like calamari. (Okay, I liked it one time in Italy, where it was super-fresh and I’d also had several glasses of finocchietto.) But I’m willing to be swayed. If you’ve got a killer calamari recipe, I’ll try it out and post it here.
