What I'm Eating This Week


I'm pleased to announce a new feature this week, which I've un-inventively titled "What I'm Reading [about food] this week". My goal, you see, is to eventually have the largest private food library in the world, which I've decided to accomplish by adding a book or so to my collection each week through Ebay. Sure, it'll take me a millenia or so to get there, but what's a thousand years between friends?

In any case, the book for this week is Eating in America, by Waverly Root & Richard de Rochemont. I bought it mostly on the basis of the former's reputation for French cookery - for those interested, I'll be discussing Root's contribution to that subject next week. But I also needed a general history of American cooking - I have the odd European tome, but nothing covering home, and I hoped this would fit the bill. Unfortunately, I haven't got much good to say about this piece. Compared to Calvin Trillin's bright, dancing prose in The Tummy Trilogy, a contemporary of Eating in America, Root's work is turgid and uninteresting, progressing in series through an inevitable paean to Native American cooking and the usual denounciations of The Jungle era meatpacking before settling into a repetitive screed against American cooking in the mid-seventies. The entire work, to my mind, is a terrible warning to those contemplating co-authored books, and I was sorely disappointed.

Still, I do like a good gluttony scene, and Eating serves up several memorable ones. My favorite demonstrates what happens when religious leaders stick to the letter rather than spirit of their spiritual admonitions. As most people know, Catholics are meant to eat no meat on Fridays during Lent. The fast is supposed to be particularly strict on Ash Wednesday. But when Cardinal Mercier of Belgium visited New York at the start of Lent in 1919, the Waldorf Astoria served the following meal - I'm not quite sure this is what the Church fathers had in mind:
. . . fish and vegetable hors d'oeuvre, canteloupe filled with fruit salad, potato soup, lobster Thermidor, salmon steaks with mousseline sauce, potato balls, hearts-of-lettuce salad, Port Salut cheese, peach Melba, and petits fours".

As to the my menu for the week, I have to admit to being little inspired this week. Thankfully, there was a large loaf of good bread slowly going stale on my counter, so following my own advice a while back I decided to base my meal around that.

Breakfast:

Steel Cut Irish Oatmeal (the texture differs considerably from the usual Quaker Oats) with Canadian maple syrup.

Lunch:

Cheese & Spinach Triangles x2 - I had some cheese mixture and filo dough left over from last week's cooking, so the obvious answer was to stuff the dough with the cheese and spinach, brush the pastries with olive oil, and let them loose in the oven.

Taboulleh x 3 - I've noticed that people in America make this middle eastern salad with far more bourgul wheat than parsley. That's entirely wrong - taboulleh is a parsley salad, and even if you're making it as a main dish, as here, the bright green herb should still dominate the wheat, tomatoes, cucumbers, and lemon.

4 pm snack:

I've been on a blueberry kick recently, perhaps out of nostalgia for the summer, so I made 6 blueberry muffins. Unfortunately, as happens sometimes, I, umm, ate them. As self-punishment I went to the gym for a 3 mile job, skipped my traditional Sunday night pizza slice, and bought a box of Kellogg's Nutri-Grain bars for snacks the rest of the week. The last is by far the worst indignity.

Dinner:

Grey sole with breadcrumbs x 2 - delightful, light, fish topped with a crust of breadcrumbs, pecorini romano, and butter to bind. Served with leftover lentil and spinach soup from last week.

French Toast x 2 - what better use for stale bread than this eggy, syrupy treat?

Pasta with breadcrumbs x 1 - ground breadcrumbs fried in olive oil, enriched by pancetta, and tossed with linguine and more olive oil. Odd as it sounds, breadcrumbs have always been the traditional poor man's substitute for parmesan in Italy, and I think they work rather well.