Summer Garlic
Raffi Melkonian at 10:46 AM
Nigel Slater is one of my favorite food writers - not because he is traditional (the usual way into my stomach), but because he so clearly is gluttonous. Even the names of his books betray him - Thirst, or Appetite. His finest book is the foundational Real Food, and the best passage in that book is about summer garlic:

"Round about late May or early June, the first garlic appears in the market. The very first from Italy or FRance is plump and white, its skin a soft green, brushed with anything from the faintest pink to the deepest mauve. Tied in three, the bulbs are fat and pale and the smell is at first barely detectable.

At home, I peel back the waxy skin and pull out the slippery white cloves. Each one has its own thick skin, still wet and pliable. Tucked inside are the sweetest, juiciest nuggets of garlic. So firm and crisp I want to eat them like slices of new season's apple. This is the garlic I want for cuting in half and rubbing on tihick, crisp toast, or for slicing thinkly and tucking between the sily folds of a toasted pepper, or for rubbing round the salad bowl. This is the garlic for scenting summer mayonnaise, for stuffing into a chicken as it roasts. This is the sweet, mild, garlic of romance".

I personally don't know what I'm going to do with the summer garlic I found in the small Cambridge Farmer's market this morning. Maybe I'll finally indulge my need for a shrimp po' boy, and make a spicy remoulade to go with it. Or perhaps a simple pasta with asparagus is on order. Or, if I'm being particularly homely, I'll simply grind it into a bowl of yogurt like we do at home.

In any case, keep your eyes open. The summer garlic is here.

A faulty stove
Raffi Melkonian at 11:07 PM
Don't you hate things that look great, but don't work worth a damn? Like chiseled boxers with glass jaws, or beautiful looking tasteless food? I do, at least. And I'm feeling that way about my parents' new stove.

It looks astonishing, I have to admit. An array of buttons festoon the front, promising to do things I didn't even imagine stoves did. The griddles can be electronically expanded and contracted, while the stove can be programmed to the single degree. There's a professional looking ventilator above, and an equally complicated microwave (boo) attached to the top. There's even this needle you're supposed stick into meat, which shuts off when the internal temperature reaches the FDA approved standard. Incredible. And expensive.

Oh, and also completely useless. You can't use cast iron on the griddles - it might crack the glass, or whatever it is. The repair man who came to look at the scratch our completely normal pot made said that you have to take a carpentry level when you're out buying cookware, since the heat is apparently inefficient if your pots aren't exactly flat on the bottom - "don't bother with those expensive pans", he said - "they don't work". To keep the complex electronics cool (for which, by the way, you have to buy a warranty, otherwise they're essentially guaranteed to break down to expensive effect), the oven almost constantly emits a giant fan noise. Oh, and that ventilator? It's so weak that the steam from your cooking degrades the microwave handle to the extent that it eventually falls off. Seriously.

So what is this oven possibly for? Well, just like a lot of gadgets that people buy, the point of this stove is apparently to invite friends over, show them that your credit rating is still high enough to afford the gleaming monstrosity, and then send them home again having eaten food bought furtively at the Price Club and passed off as your own by the addition of some aerosol whipped cream. We're taking it back to the store when I return from Wilmington. And buying an honest stove with a few knobs, and some coils that can heat cast iron and normal pots alike.

I've not been keeping up with writing up my 50 book challenge entries - suffice to say that I've been reading diligently, except for a short gap around exam time. Hopefully, I can catch up over the next week or so, mostly posted on my own web site.

But my thoughts on Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires are appropriate here, even though Will has written on it previously. I'd only disagree with Will's assessment in that I find this book's lighter emphasis on personal drama when compared with Reichl's previous memoirs a tremendous strength. Give me formalized, Handel-opera like emotion any day.

Amid a real flood of good writing, however, one passage did strike me particularly. Discussing New York's famous Le Cirque, Reichl writes, "I had meanly ordered risotto, a dish few French chefs can master". (37). First of all, of course, the author is right - my suspicion is that French chefs see risotto as a convenient, superficially elegant sop for the awkward vegetarians that fashion has forced them to accomodate. Consequently, the number of wall-paper paste risottos I've eaten in otherwise competent restaurants is a little startling.

But much more interesting is Reichl's real point, about ordering dishes "meanly". I too have been known to take part in this bizarre game, ordering dishes I know the restaurant can't cook. Of course, to some extent this one sided exercise is silly, rather like the pitched academic rivalry we at St. Andrews maintained against Cambridge, and about which the latter knew nothing. And it's also somewhat masochistic - I know for a fact that the Cheesecake Factory isn't going to produce a creditable pasta carbonara, and it's idiotic to order it just to prove to myself that they couldn't. But I do it anyway, because I feel like part of what you're suposed to be doing at a restaurant is finding out if the menu is serious. Unless someone is paying for me to eat the entire menu, like a proper critic, the best I can do is make sure the most unlikely entry isn't a joke. And yet, this technique obviously results in me eating a lot of junk I don't want to eat. So who is really being mean, and to who? At least in Reichl's case, she was at a good restaurant, and the meal was great regardless. That doesn't often happen for me.

I obviously prefer home made food, but that doesn't mean I don't care about processed and other ready made food. This is the stuff that's feeding America, and somone ought to pay attention. Here, for example, you can see my brief thoughts about C2 cola, and here my review of the sugar free baby ruth.

The target of my eating this week has been 7-Eleven's relatively new "gourmet" sandwiches, called "Big Eats Deli". They claim to be made with artisanal bread, fresh meats, and interesting cheeses. In an area where one local bakery sells a single sandwich for $8.25, 7-Eleven has come into the market at between $2.99 and $3.49. That's the good news.

And the sandwiches aren't appalling either. The basic offerings, such as smoked turkey & Jack cheese on Wheatberry bread, are perfectly serviceable - made relatively close by in Brockton with ingredients as advertised. No, the supposed southwestern mayonnaise wasn't that exciting, and the bread had generally gone a bit gummy, but I've had worse sandwiches at places purporting to serve sandwiches. That 7-Eleven is matching even some sandwich shops is pretty impressive.

And as much as it worries me to say this, the Mediterranean Style Turkey with Pepper Supreme spread is actually decent. Like, I'd have it again. The tomato and basil bread was fresh and tasty, there was some sort of tapenade (yes, I'm serious), and the pepper sauce was an interesting mix of bell peppers and some sort of cheese. No, I wouldn't pay any more than $3.50 for it, but at that price it's a pretty good deal. If you're hungry and desperate, 7-Eleven has moved into the market with at least one relatively impressive offering. Go for it.

So, we'll discuss the propriety of following a post about killing your co-ethnics with a trivial post on italian bread at some time in the future. For now, if you're interested in a few photos of the ciabatta process, click here. Click here for the finished product only. My apologies for the crap-tastic pictures.

Baking bread is one of the real pleasures of cooking. It's hardly an observation original to me, but the idea of combining flour and water and getting something at once so delicious and fundamental is inspirational. On top of that, I've recently had my bread baking itch re-activated by two encounters - first, by a reader who contacted me with news of their successful baguett-ery, and second, by a federalist society member with whom I spent half an hour talking ciabatta on Friday night. Armed with a quarter pound of sopresetta to eat with the end product, I settled down for some serious baking today. The results were delicious.

This ciabatta is my preferred "Italian" bread. Sure, focaccia as made around here is nice, but it also tends to be heavily oiled. Since in all cases I prefer breads that include nothing but flour, water, yeast (or other leaven) and salt, the ciabatta I discuss below is a perfect foil for my other gluttonies.

The conventional wisdom is that baking requires exact measurments. To some extent, this is right - cakes are particularly fickle things. But I'm always frustrated by recipes for bread that rely more heavily on measurments than feel - the experience of kneading bread connects you so closely to the food that "feel" is necessarily central. Who hasn't cracked a smile at that transformational moment when pizza dough, say, turns from a granular amalgamation of some disparate ingredients to a smooth, gluten rich, bread dough?

As noted by the recipe's orginator (Rose Levy Beranbaum of The Bread Bible) the overriding feel of ciabatta is wetness. Unlike that pizza dough I discuss above, it should never coalesce, but should remain wet, hardly coherent, throughout. It should always be sticky - so sticky, in fact, that kneading by hand should be minimized in favor of an oiled spatula or stand mixer. This is important, because if the dough is too dry, you'll get a dense, unappetizing loaf rather than the airy ciabatta you expect. If the proportions the recipe gives don't give you wetness, due perhaps to the humidity in your house, or the age of your flour, add a little more water. Especially with bread, reality trumps the recipe. Having said all that, a recipe is a good starting point, and I offer one here.

1. Three days before baking, prepare the biga (called a poolish when you're making french bread). For this recipe, combine .5 cup of good, unbleached, white flour (i.e, King Arthur) with .25 cups of water, some yeast, and salt. Mix well, and let rise outside for 6 hours before placing in the refrigerator to develop flavor.

2. On the day of baking, combine a scant cup of flour with a little yeast. Mix well, then add some salt (I'm told that this makes sure the salt doesn't kill the yeast). Add the biga, and half a cup of water. Mix well - as I say above, it should be quite wet. Adjust if not wet enough, and knead or mix for ten minutes until strands of gluten develop, and the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Remove from bowl and place in an oiled, covered, pan to triple in size.

3. Remove risen dough from pan, shape into a sort of slipper, and dot the dough with your fingers to make a series of depressions. This will spread the dough out. Then, with the palms of your hands, push the dough back into its distinctive slipper shape - this will create the characteristic lines on the top of the dough when you invert it.

4. Invert the dough into a prepared (i.e, lightly oiled) baking tray. Cover, and let rise for two hours. Sift a very little flour onto the top. In the last half hour, pre-heat the oven at 500 F. Also, place a cast-iron or other oven safe skillet on the floor of the oven.

5. When the dough has risen to about 1.5 inches in height, pour a cup of ice into the skillet on the floor of the oven (believe it or not, my freezer doesn't work so I had to run to 7-Eleven to buy a superfluous "Gulp" filled with ice) and put the tray with the bread on a baking stone, if you have one. The ice is there to mist the oven - essential for a crisp, crunchy, crust.

6. Bake for five minutes at 500 F, and then lower to 450 F for another 15 minutes. Remove when brown (and when it sounds hollow knocked on the bottom), and let cool on a rack. Slice, and enjoy.

Will's not the only one in a huff about Roper, though a little time has dampened all that to mere dismay. Still, last night I needed comfort food of sorts. Though I've got nothing against the macaroni & cheeses of the world, my taste in these cases does often run to the simpler side of French cooking. So, a picture of my veal cutlet is here, and the mushrooms and onions in cream here. Recipes below the fold, along with a brief note about why the veal cutlet is an escaloppe de veau and not a wiener schnitzel (as served at Figlmuller) or milanese sort of cutlet. I'll discuss the propriety of eating veal in my "What I'm Eating this Week" post, when I get to it.

Escaloppe de Veau - just pound a small veal cutlet to soften (though not too thin, I think), and then dip first in flour, then egg, then bread crumbs made from a good left-over loaf of white bread. Richard Olney says that the first coat of flour risks gumminess, but I haven't found that to be too dangerous. This, incidentally, is a French escaloppe de veau rather than its Austrian or Italian equivalents because wiener schnitzel is fried in lard, and Milan is in Italy's band of butter. Otherwise, they're the same thing.

Mushrooms and onions in cream - this is basically a classic french gratin, but I've added mushrooms. Boil some small onions in water for 15 minutes, remove from skins once cool, and put in a casserole with some sliced onions. Pour over enough cream to cover, roughly, and put in the oven at 350 F for 50 minutes. Flavoring can vary (nutmeg is thought authentic), but I used dried thyme because that was all I had. Yum.

I'm working on a paper about geographical indications, and the history of the struggle between the United States and Europe on protecting local products such as Roquefort, Champagne, etc. Here's an exchange between Jon Dudas, an official in the Commerce Department, and representative Bob Goodlatte of Virgina:

MR. DUDAS: And Roquefort cheese has been registered and protected in the United States since 1953. Registered and certainly could have been protected under a common law before that. And you point out, parmesan cheese is generic in the United States, but parmegiana reggiana is a protected geographical indication.

REP. GOODLATTE: Is that a brand of parmesan cheese?

MR. DUDAS: It's a type of parmesan cheese that comes from a region in Italy.

And Goodlatte is the guy in charge of Congress's negotiations on this issue? Flurgggh!

As you can see here, I've been thinking recently about the taboo against eating dog. It's a more baffling question than it initially seems. There's a voluminous food history literature about the taboo against pork in jewish and islamic cultures, for example - and after rightly discarding the idea that ancient peoples somehow knew about modern pathology (and therefore avoided pork), or that jews developed in countries where pigs won't live, the best anthopological work concludes that the pork taboo was a way to set the adopting peoples apart from their surroundings. Other taboos are equally well explained - Christians in the middle east, for example, don't eat camel because the local muslims do.

But why don't we eat dog? It's not a sacred animal, and our aversion is shared by a lot of people, I think. To get some expertise on the question, I turned to Frederick J. Simoons' excellent Eat not this Flesh, a descriptive survey of what the author calls "food avoidances" throughout history. The book, incidentally, is generally fascinating - Simoons is a careful and interesting historian, and the various structures people have erected to facilitate their religions and castes, sometimes wholly against rationality, are startling.

On the subject at had, Simoons has no truck with the idea that we avoid dog eating because dogs are domesticated animals in faithful service to their master - indeed, Simoons notes that dogs were probably domesticated precisely for their flesh. Moreover, other animals are just as domesticated, but we do eat them. And besides that basic intuition, Simoons has no real answer - historically, most cultures have thought dog to be a poor meat, but they've eaten it. Modern western and American cultures are almost alone in strict rejection.

So here's a far-fetched potential answer. Prof. Warren, of Bankruptcy fight fame, has argued recently that Bankruptcies are on the rise because women are now in the workplace - before, the wife could always go to work when the family fell on hard times. Now, when crisis hits, the woman is already working, so there's no reserve fund. Similarly, maybe dog was the reserve fund of the European populace. As Simoons points out, Europeans did eat dog - but only during sieges, and droughts, and other disasters. I've personally seen special "siege" recipe books written in Hugenot France during the reign of Louis XIII. Dog, in other words, was avoided because people wanted to make sure there was a food beyond reach when things turned bad - a protein food that would be available at the last, terrible, exigency.

Back when I was tangentially involved with the cashew business (during college vacations), I never quite worked out why we had to wear goggles to extract the nut from its hard shell. The story was that you would go blind if you didn't, but I thought that was silly. It's a nut - how is it going to make you go blind? Anyway, the Oxford Companion to Food answers my question:

"The nut is not easy to extract. The tissue between its two layers of hard shell contains strongly irritant substances, cardol and anacardic acid. This tissue has medical uses, including burning off warts, an indication of its great corrosive power. The usual way of treating the nut is to roast it whole, driving off the irritants and making the shell brittle enough to crack without crushing the contents".

Oh.

About two weeks ago, I noted that putting together a dinner party is hard work. Will seems to have put in a ton of effort yesterday. But in the Weekend Financial Times, Lucy Kellaway writes about serving her (extremely prominent) guests deep-frozen chicken kievs, an avocado with olive oil, and processed Vienetta ice-cream cake. The theory, I take it, is that people don't care about the food if they're laughing and talking.

Afterwards, she emailed all the guests and asked what they thought. The reaction wasn't that positive to the food, but most agreed that they hadn't really noticed. My favorite comment? One guest noted that she and her husband had a 'somewhat disturbed night' afterwards, as a result of the kiev. Alas.

My sense, incidentally, is that some parts of dinner can be creditably bought (cakes, bread, salamis and other cured meats), and others really need to be made by hand. Chicken Kiev is in the latter group. Especially if you mean the kind that cost 99 pence frozen.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an article on finding a good roast chicken in the city. It's a good article, and I'll certainly keep it in mind when I eventually move to New York. But the article's implication that one wouldn't, say, roast their own chicken really annoyed me in a way. Yes, roast chicken is time intensive, in that the thing has to roast. And yes, prices of pre-roasted chickens have dropped to almost equal the high end of raw chickens. Nor is roasting your own chicken necessarily traditional - in fact, in Beirut it's been common since my dad was a kid to send a single unfortunate out to get some farooj, the delicious fire roasted chickens of the lebanese capital, and some fresh bread for ravenous devouring at home (drowned in garlicky yogurt and tahini sauce, and served with tart assorted pickles).

But despite all these arguments in favor of buying your chicken pre-cooked, the home roasted chicken has a lot to be said for it. Of course, you have control over how it's stuffed and flavored. You tend to get a better quality of chicken for the same price if you do the work yourself, and you also get the detritus of roast chicken to use at home - the roasting juices for gravys and potatoes. And as for the time and effort, there's really very little active work in roasting a chicken - once you've flavored and seasoned the bird, all you have to do is put it in the oven and wait. And that wait is leavened by the delicious, permeating, smell of a good chicken, and herbs, and onions and garlic, and the pleasant fug of (unwaxed) lemon. As for the result itself, if you're a fan of the chicken's skin and juicy meat, the home product is much superior. Even if the roasted chicken is right outside your apartment, as tends to be the case in Beirut, the skin is never as crispy, nor the breast as juicy, in even the five minutes it takes to ferry the meal home.

Anyway, the article spurred me to roast a chicken, which I hadn't done for a few weeks then. The pictures start here, but my discussion is below the fold.

1. If you can afford it, get a good chicken, defined as an organic or free range bird of some size. I used a Whole Foods organic chicken that weighed about 4 pounds, and that was certainly enough for a week of eating. Some people wash their chickens before roasting. I suppose it might make sense, but if so, make sure to dry it throughly. There's nothing worse then soggy skinned chicken.

2. Dress the chicken. This, for me, involves olive oil, salt and pepper (remember to rub these things inside too), and a half lemon and thyme stuffed up its bum (to steal a phrase from Nigella Lawson). Somewhat bizarrely, because I happen to like chicken breasts flavored heavily with thyme, I stuff absurb amounts of the herb between the skin covering the breast and the meat. This is probably wrong, but I like the result.

3. Put the chicken in a roasting tray. Mine has a little griddle which holds the chicen above the tray, and also incidentally keeps it relatively compact. If you don't have such a thing, you can go ahead and truss the chicken, tying its legs together, to ensure more even cooking. Or not. The world won't end if you don't.

4. Put the chicken in the oven at 350-400 degrees for about an hour and a half for a 4 pound chicken. I'm told the rule is something like 20 minutes per pound, with half an hour thrown on top. As you can see from the pictures, I intervened halfway through to add some boiled potatoes, which get fattily roasted in the chicken dripping.

5. When it finishes baking, let the chicken rest, then carve. Eat warm that night, and then cold in sandwiches, salads, and other delicious manifestations all week

I fancy myself a pretty decent cook, overall. The food I make is tasty, and even if not, I know enough about it to sound like a snot, if nothing else. But clearly, one of the things I'm missing is the real, basic grounding a young chef gets at culinary school - the knife skills, the tedious work in perfecting the great mother sauces and doughs. In a lame attempt to fix some of my deficiencies, I bought a copy of Jacques Pepin's La Technique a few weeks ago - a definitive textbook of basic, classical, cooking. My goal is to learn the book to the extent I can - and I'll post my first efforts at any one technique, and hopefully spare everyone the follow-ups.

So, I decided to start this process with pommes cocottes - normal potatoes cut by paring knife into little ovals. The pictures of the raw product - in all their lopsided glory - are here. The potatoes blanched and fried in butter are here. The musings of a spatially challenged clutz trying to carve potatoes into ovals are below the fold.

1. the idea, as Pepin explains it, is to cut a large potato into quarters, and then "turn" them into little ovals. My fundamental take home message from this is that you literally do need to turn them - carving a little bit from each face before rotating the potato ever so slightly counter-clockwise in your palm to repeat. A lot of the bad results you can see in the picture are from efforts where I tried to carve an oval out of the quarter potato - tried to see an oval, to identify the two tips and carve towards them. It doesn't work. Just trust the technique - turning produces ovals. I don't know how.

2. The other thing I'll have to think about as I continue to practice this technique is wastage. I've heard that wasting food, and bits of food, is the bete noire of a restaurant. And yet, the pile of potato scraps my efforts produces was enormous, given that I only cut into two potatoes at my first go. Could any technique endorsed by Pepin possibly waste so much potato? I'm aware that potato scraps are great for vegetable stock, but even so - clearly, as I get better with this, the wastage should decline as well.

What I'm Eating this Week
Waddling Thunder at 08:52 PM
Mark Madsen at Extended Phenotype responded to my criticism of Richard Olney's Lulu's Provencal Table by noting that I "missed something crucial" in neglecting to laud the book's "tribute to a great winemaking family and their 'extended family' of associations from Olney to Kermit Lynch to Alice Waters and her compatriots". That may well be true, but the thing is that I normally like this kind of book. But there are good tributes, and less good ones, and I just didn't sense Olney's usual sense of superior conviviality here. Tastes will differ, but I offer my penance in the form of this week's main recipe, drawn largely from the disputed book.

Highlights below the fold include a discussion of Meat me in Manhattan, and this week's recipe, pot au feu, langue de boeuf (beef tongue fire pot)

What I'm Reading About Food this Week

Meat me in Manhattan: A carnivore's Guide to New York: Mr. Cutlets

The author of this slim but amusing and useful volume describes himself as a "broad meat-like man" on the back cover. I don't know whether Mr. Cutlets really fits that description, but he has produced a good quick reference for meat, and especially in New York. For those who already have a Zagat's, Mr. Cutlets guides you to those destinations that deserve their rating, and some others that Zagat's misses - fried chicken restaurants, butchers, traditional steakhouses, the whole lot. There's some here too for those just interested in the world of meat, without access to Manhattan - a easy to follow discussion of various viands at the beginning, and little interesting bits of wisdom interspersed throughout. You won't, of course, always agree with the formidable author, but at least he tells you what he thinks. And that's better than most.

What I'm Eating this Week

Pot au Feu, Langue de Boeuf

"Tongue", says the Oxford Companion to Food, is a "fleshy muscular movable organ of the floor of the mouth which bears sensory taste buds, and has special functions in tasting and swallowing food". No kidding, I say. But it's also cheap, and packs a lot of taste.

That taste is why I'm always surprised to find that it's not favored here in America. I only found the tongue I'm planning to cook, in fact, while wandering lost in far flung Allston (across the dreaded Charles), where the supermarket had changed its offerings to accomodate a more heavily hispanic population. In fact, in my house, tongue has a festival connotation - we only eat it, cold, as an appetizer at Christmas.

Pot au feu, a stew like braise of (any) meat, plays perfectly to tongue's strengths and weaknesses. On one hand, the tongue flavours the otherwise bland ingredients, making the meal satisfying and of interest. On the other, braising, and especially three hours of it, renders the powerfully muscular organ tender, allows the inedible skin to be removed, and lets you slice the meat thinly to be eaten lukewarm. Olney recommends potatoes, carrots, and turnips as the vegetables to be added to the tongue, cold water, and white wine after the meat has cooked for two hours, but I doubt they're obligatory - one imagines that other additions would do as well. But what I think is more important is to remember to serve the broth with crusts of stale bread laid in the serving bowl. That's the authentic way most french people eat soups and light braises at home, and I think that starchy base at the bottom adds rather a lot to simple, healthy experience of eating tongue and its delicious stock.

I always hate posting just after Will, because I get the feeling I'm pushing him down his own page. I feel like a house guest who sets up shop in his host's bed. Nonetheless, his post just below on frozen vegetables reminds me of a favorite, and fast meal.

Frozen Pea Soup

Roast a full head of garlic in foil for an hour. By the end, the garlic will be luxurious, soft, and extraordinarily mild - the only problem is that you'll have been forced to wait for an hour in the gentle fug of roasting garlic before you can tear a few cloves out of their cover, dip them in salt, and eat them with ilicit speed before you finish the recipe.

Then, in keeping with the frozen pea convenience motif, just put some cold water in a pan, add some cubed chicken stock, and a bag of frozen peas. Drop the roasted garlic in the pan as well, heat briefly (just till hot) and then puree the whole thing. The best way to do it, obviously, is one of those hand held blenders you can just stick in the pot, but if you don't have one any kind of food processor will do. Stir in some grated parmesan, and you're done - the soup will be bright green, smooth, and delicious. Eat with bread, and thick ham sandwiches.

N.B. - if you've got a parmesan rind, throw that into the soup while cooking. It gives a wonderful flavor

Continuing today's mad spate of posting, I realized yesterday that I had all these potatoes left-over from the beef tongue pot au feu the other day. What to do? Well, this. I've finally decided that the best alternative to double fried french fries is a good roast. And dijon mayonnaise helps a lot.

Book #16: Camembert: A National Myth, by Pierre Boisard

Between the fact that this book was originally written in French, and that the author acknowledges the French ministry of Culture, one can imagine that American cheese makers come in for a bit of a slating in this friendly history of the great cheese. And they do - Boisard's depiction of the sophisticated American capitalists hoodwinking artisanal French cheese producers into teaching them their secrets - on the pretense of protecting their traditions- is really pretty funny. And I couldn't help chuckling at the (understandable) French reaction when American cheese makers offered to replace the the bombed statue of Camembert's patron saint Marie Harel with a figure inscribed "This statue was the gift of the Borden Ohio Camembert Factory". As if there could be a Camembert factory in Ohio - I mean, really!

But the overwhelming sense from this book isn't the failure of American cheese making, but the apparently troublesome state of the French industry. As Boisard points out, both France and Europe as a whole have started to fall prey to the pasteurization trend - the book reports that 90% of the cheese made in France is now treated. And even if you think you're buying the real article, Boisard points out , worryingly, that not all raw milk Camembert is made equal. Traditional camembert is made by spooning the curds of local milk into molds by hand. The hand ladling ensures that the curd is never cut, distinguishing Camembert from other cheeses (such as Pont L'Eveque) where this doesn't matter. As for the provenance of the milk, ideally you should be able to tell if you're eating a Camembert of Isigny or one of Auge. As the former head of a dairy mill told the author,

"Save for its origin, what is traditional about a Camembert whose milk comes from Dutch Holstein cows fed on imported cattle cakes and corn silage . . . and whose broken curd is ladle-molded by robots?".

Set in the context of our problems here in the US when it comes to cheese, a robot ladle doesn't seem so bad. But if France falters, where can we turn? I'm really not sure.

The New York Times today has this profile of Gordon Ramsay, probably the most famous (and best) chef currently active in the United Kingdom. You can see my just-after-the-fact post about my visit to his 3 Michelin starred restaurant last summer here.

On a slightly different note, the fact that my law firm paid for that meal came as close to a breach of fiduciary duty as I saw all summer. Whether it convinces me to work there or not in the end is a more interesting question. We'll see.

I obviously prefer home made food, but that doesn't mean I don't care about processed and other ready made food. This is the stuff that's feeding America, and somone ought to pay attention. Here, for example, you can see my brief thoughts about C2 cola, and here my review of the sugar free baby ruth.

The target of my eating this week has been 7-Eleven's relatively new "gourmet" sandwiches, called "Big Eats Deli". They claim to be made with artisanal bread, fresh meats, and interesting cheeses. In an area where one local bakery sells a single sandwich for $8.25, 7-Eleven has come into the market at between $2.99 and $3.49. That's the good news.

And the sandwiches aren't appalling either. The basic offerings, such as smoked turkey & Jack cheese on Wheatberry bread, are perfectly serviceable - made relatively close by in Brockton with ingredients as advertised. No, the supposed southwestern mayonnaise wasn't that exciting, and the bread had generally gone a bit gummy, but I've had worse sandwiches at places purporting to serve sandwiches. That 7-Eleven is matching even some sandwich shops is pretty impressive.

And as much as it worries me to say this, the Mediterranean Style Turkey with Pepper Supreme spread is actually decent. Like, I'd have it again. The tomato and basil bread was fresh and tasty, there was some sort of tapenade (yes, I'm serious), and the pepper sauce was an interesting mix of bell peppers and some sort of cheese. No, I wouldn't pay any more than $3.50 for it, but at that price it's a pretty good deal. If you're hungry and desperate, 7-Eleven has moved into the market with at least one relatively impressive offering. Go for it.

Large food corporations are responsible for a lot of our eating. As much as I like to rhapsodize about "fresh" eggs, and lashings of cream, this isn't what's happening across the country. Therefore, I like trying out the new products these companies put out occasionally. Even among processed foods, people deserve a decent product.

With that in mind, I picked up Nestle's new "Sugar Free" Baby Ruth candy bar over the weekend. Obviously, the bar is a creature of the Atkins craze - a serious point against it. But how does it taste, and does it make sense to buy?

Well, first, even though FDA has required the label to say so, I just want to reiterate that there's nothing low calorie or low fat about the bar. A normal Baby Ruth, weighing in at roughly 60 grams, provides 280 calories and 12 grams of fat. The sheer numbers on the sugar free bar are indeed smaller (140 calories, 8 grams of fat), but that's because the bar itself is smaller - a mere 36.8 grams. One wonders if Nestle (and its consumers) wouldn't be better off just making their normal bar a little smaller, and leaving it at that. I should also note that you pay a lot more for the privilege of eating Nestle's sugar free offering - I noticed a premium of about 40 cents over the larger sugar-filled Baby Ruth, but it might differ elsewhere. I suspect the price difference isn't purely marketing - the artificial sweetener Nestle uses, sucralose (brand name Splenda) is much more expensive than even good sugar.

As for taste, it tastes exactly how you would imagine sugar free chocolate might taste, but with an unexpected (label warned) threat of laxative effect - flat, insipid, slightly sickly - with a few nuts strewn within. It certainly doesn't taste of chocolate. As people who read my writing realize, I can't imagine the mentality that drives people to eat this horrible thing regularly. Eat one square of real chocolate and give the rest away - buy an apple - drop a spare few blueberries into a pot of full fat yogurt - anything but this.

I sometimes wonder whether I'm being unfair to this kind of product. The bar tastes kind of sweet, after all, and there are some nuts in there, and the brown stuff covering the filling does kind of look like chocolate, even if it doesn't taste anything like it. And anyway, the chocolate of the normal Baby Ruth doesn't taste like chocolate either. Am I just sneering at something people want to eat? Well, yes, but I think my sneer is deserved. If even one person reads this and decides to put aside the sugar free Baby Ruth and do something else instead, I'll be glad. We don't all need to suddenly become yoeman farmers - but if we can put the person who invented this candy out of a job, then we'll have done something good anyway.

Today is Championship sunday in the NFL, and two great games bookend the afternoon. As much as it pains me to say something nice about the despised AFC, however, the class of the games today is clearly New England's visit to Pittsburgh - the two best teams in the league, both tough, and nasty, and happy to play outside on a freezing, snow filled Pennsylvania evening. This kind of game is why I'm a football fan.

And, coincidentally, the games give me a great excuse to make one of my favorite stews (chili), and accompaniments (cornbread). Read below the fold for recipes

Football Chili

I don't put beans in my chili, and I don't use ground beef. I know some people do both those things, and the chili tastes great, but I think of chili as a normal beef stew with some different spices - and for that you need good, fatty, cubes of beef. I had some wonderful chuck, but a number of other cuts would do as well. I also always try to add some bony meat for its fat content and for its gelatinous properties, which help thicken the stew. The chili I'm eating today is flavored with a great looking lamb neck bone.

I brown the beef in olive oil until crusty and caramelized, and then take them out of the pan to sautee my thinly sliced onions and crushed garlic in the mix of beef fat and the vegetable oil until soft. Then the beef gets put back into the pan, is salted and peppered, and gets spiced by 5 chopped habanero peppers. I know the conventional wisdom is to seed the peppers before cooking, but I like my food spicy. Others will disagree.

I then add a tin of good diced tomatoes to the pan, and then a bottle of decent beer - I like to use German or Eastern European lagers. If you need more liquid, some water or chicken stock will do fine. I add cumin that I've ground from the seeds, and also add some herbs tied up in a cheese cloth - I used thyme, coriander, and parsley today. From then on, the chili is easy. Let it bubble at a very low simmer for three or four hours, until quite thick. Let cool, and refrigerate for a night. Chili (and all stews) are always better slowly reheated the next day.

"Easy" Corn Bread

I found this cornbread on a bag of cornmeal, but it's remarkably good. normally, I eat much rougher cornbreads (that is to say, with higher ratios of corn to flour) with very little sugar, but I was in the mood for this one today. If you want a slightly more authentic experience, instead of pouring the batter into a prepared pan you can put the pan with oil and butter into the oven, and pour the batter into this sizzling fat before putting back into the oven.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Combine 1.25 cups of self raising flour with .75 cups of cornmeal (and this can be adjusted as you like). Add up to .25 cups of sugar, though I like a lot less. Finally, stir in a cup of whole milk, a beaten egg, and .25 cups of olive oil (though less will work too). Mix throughly and pour into a prepared (i.e, oiled) loaf pan. Bake for about 25 minutes until golden and done.

Phoebe disagrees with my post on French Women Don't Get Fat below. She makes two points - first, that I overstate the French health advantage, and second, that "incidental walking", as I describe it, is ineffective in producing weight loss. I suspect we agree on more than not, but I do want to address these two points.

As to the magnitude of the French obesity advantage, it is broadly true that the French are slowly getting fatter. As Phoebe concedes, however, the extent to which this is true can be pretty closely tied to their increasing abandoment of the lifestyle I was lauding. No, it's not true that literally all French people are lean and trim - I overstated the case. But obesity in France in at least half of what it is in the US according to the statistics I've seen, which is astonishing for a country so singularly unobsessed with weight. I've lived with French people at universities, both men and women - I've spent a lot of time there as well. Weight loss is simply not on the agenda in the way it is here. And that's because the people are leaner - not because wine is some sort of mysterious de-fatter, but because they eat less and exercise (in a broad sense) more.

Second, incidental walking is indeed effective in burning calories and fat. The article to which Phoebe links makes no claim otherwise - it merely says there are better ways of burning calories, and that walking doesn't create muscle. Those are both true, but a constant burn of even 300 or 400 calories per day (an hour or so of brisk walking) will have powerful effects on weight. I hate pulling out personal anecdotes, but it certainly worked for me. Do I now do other sports as well? Of course - that's how you develop cardiovascular fitness and muscle tone. But walking will help, and it will help because if you design your life right, you can't avoid doing it.

This week's installment involves Japanese food, the Oxford Companion to Food, any my desperate efforts to find bonito flakes in a Japanese supermarket. Great fun, from my perspective

What I'm Reading [About Food] this Week: The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson

The English do a great job with quirky, long gestating, writing. My great favorite, the Lord of the Rings, of course, took decades to complete - and the Silmarillion was never finished. The Oxford Companion to Food, similarly, has been in the works for twenty years, groaning slowly towards completion. The finished product, however, was worth the wait. This is a terrific reference.

It's not that Davidson has produced the most comprehensive food reference possible. The entries are often incomplete in an objective sense, and as the author notes in introduction, "there were to be no recipes, and there are none". But the breadth and of Davidson's work, and the unexpected directions in which he takes entries more than make up for any shortcomings. Take, for example, his inclusion of "Noah's Ark", and his short musing on what the inhabitants might have done for food - or his description of the combat between two hotels for title to the veritable Sachertorte in the early 19th century. These aren't meant to be part an encyclopedic collection of everything about food, but things one particular man found interesting, and I think the final product is better for it.

This isn't to say that The Oxford Companion to Food isn't good for reference. The number of topics covered is impressive, and Davidson even squeezes in an entry on our favorite ortolan, noting that Alexander Dumas favored drowning them in vinegar to killing them otherwise. To tell you the truth, however, I still think the best part of the whole book is the extremely full bibliography. Ever needed to find out who wrote The Confectioner's Oracle? - I don't, but the answer is William Gunter. For information of that kind on hand at all times, ready for dipping into at random, I'm willing to pay the cover price of $49.95. And you should too.

What I'm eating this week

So, it turns out that shopping in a Japanese supermarket is harder than it looks. I thought I was doing well by looking for a fish logo when I needed bonito flakes for the basic Japanese stock (dashi), but that's less helpful when there are 8 tubs of fish logo-ed flakes of one sort or another in a row, all shouting indescipherable Japanese slogans in the same lurid purples and pinks After a quick check of the notes I had brought along, I found the ones without sesame seeds, or peppers, or strange other things i didn't know anything about. From there, it was a pretty straightforward thing to find the Aka (Red) miso, and not the Red miso with all sorts of things simmered as well, or the white miso that looks more beige than white. I'm still not sure all the ingredients I got were the right ones, but they'll have to do.

All the above makes pretty clear that my theme for the week is Japanese food, and specifically miso. I'm going to brush it on salmon, and broil it till crisp - and eat that with miso soup made of dashi and miso. I've got some firm tofu to brush with more miso and grill with mushrooms, to be eaten with short grain japanese brown rice seasoned with miso. If I need it, there will also be miso soup with udon and mushrooms and kale. Sure, that's probably too much miso for one week, but that kind of immersion is probably a good way to start. I'll report back on my experiment next week.

I'm also participating in the 50 Book Challenge. I think I'm going to do most of the blogging for it over on my own site, but I'll put up appropriate books here - and also, of course, many of my "What I'm Reading about Food this Week" entries will be involved. Anyway, you can see the first 4 books I've read this year over on my site . Here's a taste

Book #4 - French Women Don't Get Fat, Mireille Guiliano

I'm not the type of person who normally reads women's self help books. But this particular book sounded promising - I was hoping that Guiliano was able to distill my basic philosophy when it comes to food (which itself is largely French) in a way that people would like to read it. All of us want vindication sometimes.

I'll dispense with the book's weak points first. The recipes are lousy - you'd be much better off picking up a copy of any book by Richard Olney, and I'm surprised there's no such recommendation. Second, Guiliano's constant, unexplained, divergences into French are really very annoying. Yes, I know I do it sometimes too, and I know it's supposed to be cute and whimsical, but I would argue that any use of French in food writing ought to actually be necessary. Writing "moderation is the key" in French doesn't count. Third, Guiliani is personally really well off, as a big cheese in Veuve Cliquot America (incidentally, bits of the book come across as an ad for the champagne, but one ought to cut her some slack). That's obviously not a problem, but it does come through in her recommendations to eat a lot of oysters, or to adorn your potatoes with caviar. I agree that the vast majority of people can indeed afford oysters (say), in the way the French do (once a year, at Christmas). But shorn of that context, which she doesn't really provide, one is left somewhat with the impression that the lifestyle Guiliano recommends is beyond the reach of most people. That isn't true.


Having said all that, the book really does provide what it purports to provide - the secrets of why all French people, not just women, remain lean and trim. What Guiliano says largely corresponds to my experience. First, the French incorporate much more walking into their daily routines. And I don't mean the forced march of health walks that most people think of - decked out in sweats and those goofy ankle weights - but what Guiliano rightly calls incidental walking. That is, walking to work, because you live a mile or so from the office, or walking to the grocer, who happens to be down the way, because you've forgotten the cream. That's the kind of exercise that slaughters calories, and when Guiliano recommends moving to somewhere where incidental walking is unavoidable, I'm in complete agreement. Personally, I'll never live further than a mile and a half from work, or closer than half a mile or so. The health benefits of that daily treck are simply too important.

Second, Guilano's message of moderation is precisely right. The American intuition has always been to categorically eliminate one type of food or add another - fat, carbs, bran, oats, olive oil, wine. These are sometimes effective short term solutions, but they have nothing to do with long term weight loss and maintenance for the general population. I agree with Guiliano that the real solution is a matter of attitude - the belief that food is a special pleasure, and that preparing your own, delicious, meals well balanced between taste and health is necessary to a sustainable diet regime. I'm not sure she'll be successful in pushing the re-institution of multi-course meals in America (though that would be great), but the basic point is right - meals should be exciting opportunities to try something you're looking forward to eating. You owe it to yourself to make the effort.

I'm not sure if Guiliano's effort will make much difference in the obesity wars. But it's at least a symbol of how we should be approaching the problem, and perhaps a warning as to how far off track many of our efforts are. I wouldn't buy the book - it's far too short a read for long term use, but if you're interested in the modern problems of health and food at all, this is an excellent addition to the literature.

I'm taking a course in food and drug law this semester, which has turned out to be a lot of fun. Reading the casebook, I came across this excerpt from a deposition. I think it speaks for itself;

Q. Mr. Konicov, does your firm still market a tape called "Astro Sounds"?

A. Yes, we do.

Q. How does it differ from the other tapes?

A. It's just a bunch of loud, squeaky noises.

Q. And what is it supposed to do?

A. I don't know.

Q. Why do you sell the tape if you don't know what it does or purports to do?

A. Why?

Q. Yes.

A. To give people a choice to buy it or not to buy it.

What I'm Eating this Week

So, putting aside the Booker excitement, which I think I finally understand after a lot of mucking about, it's time for this week's installment of "What I'm Eating this Week".

What I'm Reading about Food this Week: The Book of Miso:Food for Mankind, William Shurtleff & Akiko Aoyagi

I have no real problem with the kind of glossy cookbooks so much in vogue at the moment. Nigel Slater's Appetite and Real Food are two of my favorite references. But there's a special pleasure in finding something quirky and unexpected in the bottom shelves of a bookstore, or in the forgotten backwaters of ebay. The Book of Miso is a perfect example.

Sure, there's forty pages of crackpot environmentalism at the beginning. Yes, the authors have a zealot's belief in the power of miso to cure every problem from world hunger to obesity. And no, most of the recipes aren't much good. Here's a hint to those planning books on little known ingredients - if we wanted to know how to make enchiladas with miso, we would have asked.

But none of that means that the book is without charm. It's only after the environmental screed, for example, that we learn that the American author spent six months doing a miso apprenticeship with a master in Japan, and only at the end of the book, tucked behind a brilliant history of miso, do we find instructions to do the same yourself. Lost amid the dozens of ludicrous Americanized uses of miso, furthermore, are some amazing, obviously authentic recipes - dengaku, or barbecued tofu brushed with miso; a variety of traditional porridges and gruels apparently typical of Japan; a neat mini-chapter on the art of broiling the miso itself.

I don't suppose that the The Book of Miso has had much staying power since coming out in the mid-70s. But it shouldn't be ignored. Sometimes, out of the unlikeliest of places, you can find some really interesting things to delight and educate. This book is one of those rare exceptions.

What I'm Eating this Week

Rabbit (chicken) stew with green olives - With apologies for the shortened format, the centerpiece of my eating this week was a delicious stew of chicken and green olives. Actually, as the title above indicates, it's supposed to be rabbit, which itself was a replacement for the fattier duck. But my laziness predominates, and much rabbit these days isn't any more flavorful than the better types of chicken anyway.

Put in a stew moistened only by wine, and flavored by large, unpitted green olives, a diced tomato, and some finely diced onions (along with bunches of fresh thyme), chicken really does wonders. The key thing to remember, of course, is to sear the chicken skin side down before doing anything else, making sure to get the skin brown, caramelized, and crisp. I'm sure there are worse things to do to chicken than to stew it while grey and rubbery, but I can't think of them right now, and they're probably inappropriate for this blog anyway. Actually, it's in this searing that the lack of duck is most felt - chicken hardly ever renders enough fat to lend a strong flavor to the onions you saute directly afterwards. But it's a small enough loss compared to the dish as a whole. And the duck can always be saved for roast potatoes later.

According to Karl, Baron Von Rumohr (A german gastronome of the 19th century),

[A certain over-refinement of the art of cookery] usually accompanies an affected taste in literature and art.

Uh Oh.

The True History of the Restaurant

The other day I mentioned that I had a few writing projects keeping me busy, thus explaining my slightly shortened "What I'm Eating this Week" posts. I thought I would post a little something on one of them here for perusal, though this one is way on the back burner at the moment.

The traditional story of the restaurant's birth is tempting in its romance. Some time in the late 18th century, we're told, a maverick cook named Boulanger set up an eatery where he served not only restaurant, a refreshing soup of the period, but also a dish of sheeps' feet in white sauce. Enraged, the guild of traiteurs brought suit in the Parlement de Paris, (a sort of hybrid court/legislature) alleging that Boulanger had trespassed into their territory. Sauces, they said, were the province of the traiteurs. After a series of appeals, the guild won, and Boulanger's naescent effort was condemned by the bewigged manifestations of the royal law. The story always concludes, however, by noting that the damage was done. Boulanger, and the restaurant as universal eating destination, were here to stay.

From the first time I heard the story, I knew it stunk. It just didn't sound like something that was likely to have happened in ancien regime France. Sure enough, a quick look into the subject demonstrated that the best historian of the restaurant, Rebecca Spang, had recently concluded that "this account is, to all appearances, largely unfounded . . . [N]o evidence in the judicial, police, or corporate archives substantiates the story of Boulanger's defeat at the hands of litigious caterers". Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant (2000) at 9. Surprisingly, the reason such a silly fable has lasted so long has little to do with French chauvinistic pride at having invented the restaurant. Rather, it seems that the image of overweening guilds crushing the small entrepreneur was a keystone of French Marxist historiography - an example of how the French Revolution brought capitalism (inevitably to be toppled) to the fore. In the face of that kind of motivation, actual evidence apparently had little weight, and dozens of books have repeated the story in one form or another.

The problem this leaves us with, though, is that we haven't actually done very much to show that the episode didn't happen. In the absence of that kind of proof, I suspect that both politically motivated historians and food romantics will continue repeating this nonsense for a long time to come. Since I don't want that to happen, my idea is to use a lawyer's perspective to get a little better handle on the subject. Specifically, I'm interested to discover if the "decision" as it comes down to us was even in the jurisdictional or legal purview of the Parlement de Paris at all. If, as I suspect, this just isn't the kind of thing the Parlement was likely to have decided, then I think we've got ourselves a pretty persuasive case that the whole thing never happened. Of course, my biggest obstacle is that though I know something about the Parlement de Paris, and I know something about law, I don't know anything about the former's use of the latter. It may well be, in the end, that the Boulanger story is plausible but still almost certainly false. But it's certainly worth a look, especially since, as people note in another context, the trying is a lot of fun.

What I ate this week
Waddling Thunder at 01:31 PM
Hey, it's a new year - and, luckily for everyone out there, a new opportunity to hear me bang on mercilessly about food. For now, the format will be much the same as last year, if a little less detailed - I'm busy with some other writing projects.


What I'm Reading about food this week:On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen

With the new edition of Harold McGee's seminal work on kitchen science just on the shelves, I went out and bought the now dated first edition. For one thing, the well preserved used copy I found is a lot cheaper than the hardback in the stores. But even more important, I like having older versions of food books around. As I've said before, my Larousse Gastronomique is from 1964, and it covers a lot of things missing from the newest version. Similarly, McGee's older work is tinged heavily with its native mid-80's. MSG, for example, the formerly ubiquitous chinese food additive, is discussed at surprising length. The American beer scene, now burgeoning in thousands of micro-breweries across the country, is lamented as "blander and more uniform than ever". I can't think of a better reminder of how far we've come.

But apart from historic interest, the book is an amazing compilation of basic kitchen science, none of which is likely to have changed in the past decades. McGee explains why people sear foods, how roasting works, the cellular make up of plants, and the reason avocados go brown when you leave them out. No, there aren't any recipes in here, but even in such detail McGee manages a lively energetic read. I've heard from Will that the new version is just as good. Whether you try to read it straight through, or keep it around as a reference when the mayonnaise insists on splitting, On Food and Cooking is a must.

What I'm Eating this Week

Like most other people, Christmas and the New Year have left me feeling bloated, over-fed, and frankly, fat. I know that a common reaction is to cut down on meats and saturated oils. But in this limited instance, I think the Atkins-zealots are right. The problem with the holidays, for me at least, is sugar rather than fat. Cakes, desserts, chocolates, hot sweet drinks, liquors, glazes ,icings - they're all part of our festive diet, and they're all stuffed with sugar. So this week I thought I would return to the roots of proper eating - butter, cream, eggs, and meat - and use them to dispel some of my post Christmas malaise.

Scrambled Eggs: I've written before about the jobs of scrambled eggs, in an early post on power breakfasts. Seeing that my local supermarket produced some good looking Mitake mushrooms, I fried them in high fat European butter, and then slowly leg my fresh eggs cook on a low, gentle heat.

Pan fried pork loin with salad - there's nothing special about pork loins. What I did want to point out, however, is how easy it is to whip up a quick pan sauce, that can often help the dryer supermarket style pork most of us commonly eat. Once you sear the pork, transfer it to the oven, let it finish cooking, and plate the meat. In the three or four minutes you should give it time to rest anyway, just deglaze the used pan with some sort of wine (I use vermouth, but anything is fine), making sure to pick up the delicious bits of caramelized pork stuck to the bottom, and then whip in butter to taste. The real upside of this method is that the pan is easier to clear. Sauce plus convenience!

Charlie Trotter, Ultimate Leader
cross-posted at Crescat


I've taken to watching Charlie Trotter's food program on my local public access station - my 13 inch TV isn't hooked up to cable. Before I saw the show, I had put Trotter mentally into my list of over-hyped celebrity chefs, for no real reason. Having watched a few episodes, I have to admit that I was wrong. Charlie Trotter is obviously a master. Whether his skill extends to his restaurants is a question I can't answer without a visit.

Good as he is, however, I get the impression that Trotter is a distinctly odd man. Today, in a little spot between two recipes, Trotter was shown taking aside one of his cooks after a bad day. I expected him to administer the blistering reprimand we expect from our famously hot-headed chefs. Instead, Trotter stared soulfully into his subordinate's eyes, and said - "I want you to become your own ultimate leader. Can you do that for me?". Hey, if it works, it works.

Masa
Waddling Thunder at 09:57 PM
crossposted at Crescat

Obscured by Christmas, I missed the fact that Frank Bruni over at the New York Times has dispensed an exceptionally rare four star rating, for the Japanese restaurant Masa. What's remarkable about the review is that Bruni readily admits that one might easily spend as much as $1000 per person at the restuarant, if one lets the chef flex his muscles. So, once again, we're confronted with a perennial food-ist question. Where precisely is the line between obscenity and luxury? Would you spend even half that sum on a meal?

I think I would, but that answer deserves an explanation. There's no sense in which the pleasure I would derive from the meal itself, at that moment, would be worth anything like $500 to me. But as someone who occasionally skipped meals to save up for semesterly blow outs in college, I'd say that it's not that meal you're paying for necessarily. It's the memory of the food for months afterwards; the taste that even a year later haunts your own efforts in the kitchen. If Masa is anything like people describe it, it might well be a bargain. And yet - the number is so very high.

I've enabled comments, I think.

As I've said before, exams are no reason to eat poorly. In the middle of my own exam period, therefore, here's this week's effort.

What I'm reading [about food] this week: In a Shaker Kitchen: by Norma MacMillan

Shakerism is one of these creeds that I can't quite believe anyone ever invented. The worst part of it all, of course, was the celibacy - I have no objection to religious abstinence, and there are some good reasons why it exists, but it seems more sensible from a keeping the sect extant perspective to cabin the celibacy norm to a priestly class. Still, there's something honorable about staking the life of a whole religion on its continued ability to attact converts. And that sense of simple honor permeates the Shakers wholesome, country fare. No, I wouldn't have wanted to be a Shaker - but eating with them would have been a treat and an honor.

And Norma MacMillian's gentle treatment of these anachronistic wanderers of history only adds to the pleasure of leafing through their recipes. I hadn't previously thought of a double crusted lemon pie, for example, but there's a recipe here. There are rough quick breads, and honey soaked cakes, reminding us of the Shakers reliance on natural ingredients. The sect's flirtation with mandatory vegetarianism is celebrated with a delicious chapter awash in country cheese and cream and vegetables, while meats are treated with care - I can't wait to try chicken breasts in cider sauce with butter roasted apples, for example. As a child, I remember romantically wishing I could have sat at table with the honest country Englishmen James Harriot wrote about in his stories of veterinary practice in the farmland of middle England - to keep pace fork for fork with the kind of doughty men who Harriot describes spending an hour sitting silent as their evening entertainment. I'll never have the chance to do that, even if those people ever existed as Harriot described - but Macmillan's book at least gives us an idea of what they might have eaten. I'm a fan.

Easy Peasy Apple Tart - I was invited to a small shin-dig on Friday night. It was supposed to be more civilized than the usual HLS affair, which tend to run towards alcoholic binges most fraternities only dream of. Anyway, I made an apple tart to take with me by using a narrow sheet of puff pastry, adding 2/3 inch borders of pastry after brushing with egg, and finishing with thinly sliced apples brushed initially with olive oil and sugar. They get honeyed after baking.

Lunch:

Smoked Salmon and Avocado - The supermarkets have recently started selling fillets of smoked salmon at about 3 bucks a pop. They're good, and more substantial than the usual thinly sliced smoked salmon. I top them with a a few slices of ripe avocado for a filling sandwich. The on ly thing missing is a little crisp bacon, but I usually manage to control myself.

Dinner:

Goat Cheese parcels - I've read that a lot of recipes developed because of the cooking utensils people had on hand. If you've never heard of an oven, you're likely to have good stews. Well, my cooking is driven somewhat by the fact that my fridge (and especially) my freezer are exceptionally unreliable; to the extent that the former freezes and the latter defrosts. What that all means is that I wanted to use leftover puff pastry from the apple tart above as soon as possible. The obvious solution is crottins of goat cheese wrapped in the dough, with the cheese left open at top. Just put the cheese in the middle of a pastry square, and pull the sides up around, brush with egg, and you're ready to go.

Shaker Asparagus and Cheese pudding - Just a bread pudding of asparagus and sharp English cheddar cheese, moistened with a mix of full fat milk, cream, eggs, and mustard powder. The pudding puffs up brown and crisp, and is especially good eaten with a thick piece of ham.

As I've said before, exams are no reason to eat poorly. In the middle of my own exam period, therefore, here's this week's effort.

What I'm reading [about food] this week: In a Shaker Kitchen: by Norma MacMillan

Shakerism is one of these creeds that I can't quite believe anyone ever invented. The worst part of it all, of course, was the celibacy - I have no objection to religious abstinence, and there are some good reasons why it exists, but it seems more sensible from a keeping the sect extant perspective to cabin the celibacy norm to a priestly class. Still, there's something honorable about staking the life of a whole religion on its continued ability to attact converts. And that sense of simple honor permeates the Shakers wholesome, country fare. No, I wouldn't have wanted to be a Shaker - but eating with them would have been a treat and an honor.

And Norma MacMillian's gentle treatment of these anachronistic wanderers of history only adds to the pleasure of leafing through their recipes. I hadn't previously thought of a double crusted lemon pie, for example, but there's a recipe here. There are rough quick breads, and honey soaked cakes, reminding us of the Shakers reliance on natural ingredients. The sect's flirtation with mandatory vegetarianism is celebrated with a delicious chapter awash in country cheese and cream and vegetables, while meats are treated with care - I can't wait to try chicken breasts in cider sauce with butter roasted apples, for example. As a child, I remember romantically wishing I could have sat at table with the honest country Englishmen James Harriot wrote about in his stories of veterinary practice in the farmland of middle England - to keep pace fork for fork with the kind of doughty men who Harriot describes spending an hour sitting silent as their evening entertainment. I'll never have the chance to do that, even if those people ever existed as Harriot described - but Macmillan's book at least gives us an idea of what they might have eaten. I'm a fan.

Easy Peasy Apple Tart - I was invited to a small shin-dig on Friday night. It was supposed to be more civilized than the usual HLS affair, which tend to run towards alcoholic binges most fraternities only dream of. Anyway, I made an apple tart to take with me by using a narrow sheet of puff pastry, adding 2/3 inch borders of pastry after brushing with egg, and finishing with thinly sliced apples brushed initially with olive oil and sugar. They get honeyed after baking.

Lunch:

Smoked Salmon and Avocado - The supermarkets have recently started selling fillets of smoked salmon at about 3 bucks a pop. They're good, and more substantial than the usual thinly sliced smoked salmon. I top them with a a few slices of ripe avocado for a filling sandwich. The on ly thing missing is a little crisp bacon, but I usually manage to control myself.

Dinner:

Goat Cheese parcels - I've read that a lot of recipes developed because of the cooking utensils people had on hand. If you've never heard of an oven, you're likely to have good stews. Well, my cooking is driven somewhat by the fact that my fridge (and especially) my freezer are exceptionally unreliable; to the extent that the former freezes and the latter defrosts. What that all means is that I wanted to use leftover puff pastry from the apple tart above as soon as possible. The obvious solution is crottins of goat cheese wrapped in the dough, with the cheese left open at top. Just put the cheese in the middle of a pastry square, and pull the sides up around, brush with egg, and you're ready to go.

Shaker Asparagus and Cheese pudding - Just a bread pudding of asparagus and sharp English cheddar cheese, moistened with a mix of full fat milk, cream, eggs, and mustard powder. The pudding puffs up brown and crisp, and is especially good eaten with a thick piece of ham.

In my recent post on the Academy of the Sierras, I promised an exposé on the fattiness of restaurant food. Here's what I meant:

The problem with restaurants for the person watching their weight is twofold. First, the portions are far too large. Yes, all portions - I'm not just talking about inhuman feed baggeries like The Cheesecake Factory here. Second, a lot of the food is a lot fattier and more caloric than one would expect, given what it looks like. For the average chubby eater who wants to eat something tasty and relatively restrained (that is, they refuse to be corraled by the designated 'low fat' options), restaurants are therefore terrifying obstacle courses. You don't believe me? Well, how about the Chicken Tarragon and Field Greens Sandwich at Au Bon Pain, a nationally growing chain of supposedly artisanal "bakeries". Sounds relatively healthy right - chicken breast, herbs, and greenery? And it should be. But in reality, as you'll see if you click here, the sandwich has an astounding 800 calories and 42 grams of fat. That, you should know, is 240 calories and 12 grams of fat more than a Big Mac, almost twice as many calories and more than twice the fat of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and even beats a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese. This is serious stuff.

The real question, however, is how they managed to make a relatively innocuous sandwich that outrageously fatty. So I set out to make my own the other day, using FoodTV's calorie and fat counter as a guide.

I started by grilling a chicken breast on my cast iron grill, setting off the smoke alarm, and using 141 calories and 3 Grams of fat - I shouldn't even count that much, because Au Bon Pain clearly uses less chicken, but let's go with it. The quarter tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil I brushed on the chicken was more than enough to make it crisp and juicy, and brought me up another 50 calories and 4 grams of fat, rounding up. A quarter of ABP's large foccacia gets me another 2.25 grams of fat and 185 calories. That brings me to a running total of 376 calories and 9.25 grams of fat. The tarragon and the field greens are essentially calorie-less, but let's throw another 50 on for good measure, and we're still at a mere 426. There isn't any cheese in the sandwich (I asked) so all that leaves is mayonnaise. For my sandwich to equal ABP's in fat and calories, I would have to add an astonishing 3 tablespoons of Hellman's (100 calories/11g of fat per tb), way more than I've ever put on a sandwich, and way more than ABP adds. If you added a little mustard and one full tablespoon of mayo instead, you'd still be at about 20 grams of fat, and under 600 calories for a clearly larger sandwich. So how does ABP do it? I haven't the slightest idea.

But what I do know is that that one sandwich contains more than half the fat and a substantial portion of the calories someone should eat in a day. Now, I'm not a calorie counter, usually. Cheeses, cream, great swathes of pork with back fat - I eat them all. But that's because when I cook at home I know exactly how much and what I'm eating, and I have no reason to eat the entire plate if I know I've had enough. But at a restaurant, uninhibited by the need to keep some for tomorrow, encouraged by the sign of roasted chicken and field greens, I'll eat that entire pitifully unsatisfying sandwich, over and over again. And then wonder why the pounds keep coming on and on. In any case, the above is why I don't often go to restaurants, and haven't since I discovered how I personally ought to eat 7 years ago. I don't claim that I've got all the answers - but when people wonder where our obesity problem is coming from, this is at least one source.

The Route des Cassoulets lies in Southwest France, on the wild Basque borders with Spain. It sounds helplessly romantic, like so much in Europe – one imagines that it must be a sort of savage jaunt through hamlets and hills, maybe ending at a ruined castle, or the tattered remains of a saint’s reliquary. But in truth, it’s nothing so elevated. A cassoulet is a stew of white beans and pork, cooked for hours at low heat. And the route des cassoulets isn’t ancient at all, but the recent fruit of a typically French group who calls itself the Universal Academy of Cassoulet, a hikeable road of restaurants who serve the authentic article. Still, I’d like to head down there some time, and take the walk along its 130 miles – I can’t think of a better thematic holiday to obscure the monotony of a chilly fall, or a more sustaining meal for a daily trundle across the rugged foothills of the Pyrenees.

But why all the melodrama about a stew? Well, first, the cassoulet takes a long time to make. Not all of us are required to be as fanatical about it as Anatole France’s favorite cook, a certain Madame Clemence, who kept hers simmering for twenty years consecutively - but even so, the stew takes at least a whole day of effort, and another day of waiting for the beans to soak. The French, like many Europeans, intuitively understand the relationship between effort and respect– I’ve always chuckled derisively about the German habit of deferring to the oldest members of their upper legislative house, but when you see how those ideas ripple through society in dishes like this, I wonder if I’m too quickly dismissive. But cassoulet not only takes effort to make, it’s ancient and venerable as well. We’re not sure for how long people in France have married beans and pork and other ingredients to make a long simmering, unctuous stew (cassoulet is known as “haricot cream” in some parts, and for good reason), but I know that the efforts man has made to make beans taste better are of mythical vintage. Even with all this, had cassoulet been just the work of Languedoc, it might yet have wandered away into the sands of history unlamented. But cassoulet is a deeply local dish, bound to memory by villages and towns, and micro-regions, and the brutal rivalries of trivial men. There’s not one cassoulet, but dozens, and three greats ones that stand above all the rest like so many heads of a declining French culinary Rushmore – the cassoulet de Castelnaudary, with fresh pork, ham, knuckle, and bacon, the cassoulet de Carcassone, with all the above and mutton and partridge, and the cassoulet de Toulouse, with sausage, and preserved goose or duck; and you can taste them all along the route the local cooks have laid out for you.

To me, all that sounds very fine, and delicious. But really, when you think of it, when you put aside my rhapsodies above, the cassoulet is a stew. It might well be, as Richard Olney puts it, a “voluptuous monument to rustic tradition”, but in the end, it’s also just pork and beans. And that’s the real point of all my meanderings above, for we Americans also do pork and beans, and when we let ourselves make the effort, we do it well. No, even our most elaborate version isn’t the masterpiece that they make in fairytale Carcassone, seat of the medieval cathars. But they’re honest, good meals, and before we introduced sugar and molasses into the mix in the mid-19th century, they were every bit a match for the Europeans’ best. This fact has two messages for us – first, we ought not shy away from making cassoulet for ourselves. The meal requires neither wizardry nor decades of mastery, but just some effort. And second, we needn’t be ashamed of our dishes just because they don’t wind their way through enchanted foothills and around ancient villages steeped in local history. Beans and pork are our heritage too. Let’s make the most of them.


Cassoulet

Put a litre of dried white haricot beans in cold water overnight. The next day, put the beans, some salt pork if you have it, some bacon, a carrot, an onion, some cloves, and a bouqet garni (bunch of herbs in a sack) in a pot with enough water to cover. Simmer on very low heat for about an hour (the beans should be squooshable between your fingers).

In another pan, brown 1.5 pounds of pork loin and a pound of lamb (actually, the recipe is for mutton, but lamb will do in these dreary days of agricultural monotony). Add two chopped onions, another bouquet garni, and garlic. Cook with beef broth for an hour, adding occasionally when necessary – you’re trying to make a sort of sauce for use later.

Take the meat from its sauce and add to the beans along with a garlicky sausage and perhaps some confit de canard (preserved duck). Simmer for another hour, together.

Remove the pieces of meat from the beans, and cut into even portions. Line a casserole with a layer of beans, add a layer of meats, some of the sauce made of the broth, good pepper. Repeat until the ingredients are all used, and top the entire cassoulet with white bread crumbs. If you have it, pour a little goose fat over the whole thing.

Cook at very low heat for another two hours or so. The traditional recipes say that you should allow a crust to form and break it with a spoon seven times before you eat. In any case, by the end you should have creamy, incredibly flavorful beans, and tender meat, all topped with pungent sausage. Eat with crusty bread, and if possible, serve in the casserole in which it was cooked.

Pork’n’Beans

Soak beans of your choosing overnight in cold water, which you can reserve if you want. The next day, cook the beans for one hour in different water, which you can also reserve. Place beans in an earthenware casserole with a large amount of salt pork, some of the reserved liquid, a whole onion, and a little dried mustard – the liquid should be enough to just cover. This also is when you add maple syrup or molasses if you want it. Cover, and bake at low heat for 3 hours, adding more liquid as necessary to keep the beans from drying out. Bake for additional half hour, uncovered. Remove the onion before serving with bread (preferably steamed Boston Brown Bread).

Boston Brown Bread

Get a one pound coffee can, wash it well, and butter heavily. Mix 1/3 cup of molasses with about 1 cup of milk or buttermilk. Stir until fully combined. In a different bowl, mix ½ cup of rye flour, ½ cup of whole wheat flour, ½ cup of yellow cornmeal, a little salt, and some baking soda. Add the buttermilk/molasses mix, and half a cup of raisins. You should have a thick batter. Pour the mix into the coffee can.

This can either be baked for an hour and a half, at about 300 degrees, or can be properly steamed in a pot filled somewhat with water for two hours. If you’re steaming, make sure to cover the top with foil

Again, I’m late. No matter – Let’s put it down to end of semester nerves rather than anything else.

What I’m Reading [about food] this week: The Road to Wigan Pier; George Orwell

Not all food reading consists of cookbooks and memoirs. Some of it is a little more socially significant – though with my belief in the foundational import of food to human experience, it pains me to say that. In any case, as World War II drew inevitably closer, George Orwell was commissioned by the so-called “Left Book Club” to write a polemical defense of socialism as the great hope of humanity in the face of German fascism. The result was The Road to Wigan Pier, a striking description of the life, and food, of the British working class in the late 1930’s. The book has several astonishing moments - a description of the least expensive diet that could possibly keep someone alive particularly stuck in my mind – I never knew that beef dripping and wholemeal bread went quite so far.


continue reading "What I'm Eating This Week" »




But perhaps the most important thing Orwell says for us today, however distasteful its “class” based snobbery, is his explanation of why people insisted on eating the kind of processed rubbish they ate to their own detriment. As he put it,

“Would it not be better if they [the poor] spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and whole-meal bread . . . ? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. . . .When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. You want something a little bit “tasty”. . . . White bread and margarine and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread and dripping and cold water”.

What’s striking about Orwell’s observation, of course, is that the same fundamental problem afflicts us today. Yes, the misery of the 1930s is long past, and our world is infinitely richer than the one Orwell describes. But our people still put aside natural and wholesome foods in favor of things that are that “little bit tasty”. It’s still our trendy, richer, populace that poured oat bran into their breakfasts in the 80’s, and embraces the Atkins lunacy today. And we still haven’t been able to persuade people to do otherwise, all the efforts of various zealots aside. One wonders if we’ll ever prevail on this point, or whether a century from now the eating of natural, homemade foods will have retreated ever further into the confines of elite hobby.

Ultimately, Orwell was thankfully wrong when he wrote that “nothing but Socialism can save us from the misery of the present or the nightmare of the present”. Both Nazism and then Communism were thrown back from the gates of civilization’s Vienna despite the dubious aid of the Socialism dream. But devoid of its ideological nonsense, what remains is still a valuable book; and read today, a glorious repudiation to the myth of a zero sum world. I recommend a quick leaf through.


4 pm snack – a lemon-poppy quick bread, with lemon zest. Unfortunately, I ate all of it by yesterday (Wednesday) and was forced to satisfy myself with the new candy bar size Lindt brand dark chocolates I’ve been seeing around.

Lunch:

Pseudo-Japanese soba noodles: This is a really great, quick recipe. Just get some Japanese soba style noodles, boil them in plenty of water, and toss quickly with a little honey, rice wine vingar, and soy sauce. I’d use more of the last, and less of the first, if you see what I mean – otherwise, the noodles sugar overnight. Also, toss in some sliced scallions or green onions while you’re at it.

Rices: I have a great love affair with rice. In part, it’s because of how I was raised; rice is a big deal in a household that eats a lot of middle eastern food. But rice has intrinsic values as well – it’s soft and filling, and serves as a neutral canvas for your best efforts to gussy it up. This week, I used beans and chickpeas (garbonzos) combined with a mix of white and brown rice. Delicious.

Dinner:

½ poussin and potatoes x 2 – okay, so I didn’t actually have a poussin, but a Cornish game hen. Nonetheless, I prefer the British word in this case, even though whether you call it a poussin or a game hen, you basically end up with the same thing - a small, entirely linear, chicken. They make great dinners, though my one complaint is that they don’t produce enough fat to properly roast potatoes. A tin of goose fat would have been a nice addition. But alas – my wallet forbids.

Butternut Squash soup x 2 – what is fall without some kind of squash? Just roast a butternut squash, drop into some chicken broth season with onions fried in butter, and puree the whole affair with a little light cream. You can leave out the cream if you want and add noodles, but in either case the resultant soup should be eaten with crusty bread and gales of freshly ground pepper.

Smoked Salmon - is there a better ready-made meal than a packet of lightly pink smoked salmon? Well, yes - a fresh brie balanced on your lap in a Parisian garden, jabbed with a hastily torn baguette. But failing that, smoked salmon is magnificent. If you insist on strewing a few capers and sliced cornichons on top, you’re welcome to do so – but naturally smoked Scottish salmon needs neither.

What I'm Eating This Week


So, this week's edition is late, largely because I'm lazy. I make no apologies.
What I'm Reading [About Food] this Week - As I intimated earlier, this week's reading selection is Waverly Root's The Food of France, a compact tour around France by province. Compared to the same author's history of American food, this is a much superior book - written with passion, and verve, and the occasional moment of real sentiment. One gets the impression that Root really loves France, even with its idiosyncracies and illogics, in a way he doesn't his native home - that's not a bad thing, but if the last month has taught us anything, it's that connecting with a country that you don't appreciate elementally is hard. That's not at all a problem with Root's work on France.

But the book still has its faults. Most striking, Root doesn't do a great job of telling us what these foods are, what they look like, and why people eat them - rather, he presents an annotated list of things that can be found in each province. That's helpful enough, I suppose, and certainly interesting - but it's not a great way of introducing French food to someone who doesn't already have a pretty good idea of what's going on. The example that jumps out at me is his explanation of the clafoutis, which he tells us is rather like the milliard, which he tells us is a sort of cherry tart. But to call the clafoutis a sort of cherry tart is deeply unhelpful - it's a cherry tart in the way ravioli is a type of pasta. One presented a cherry dessert in Alsace or Auvergne, the places where Root tells us we can find the doughy treat, has no way of knowing from The Food of France whether they're faced by a normal cherry tart, or a mendiant (a cherry tart made of stale bread rather than batter), or a milliard, or a clafoutis, or a cherry flan with dessert rice, and I wish Root had done a better job of it. But enough niggling. Short of dragging my Larousse Gastronomique around France with me, Root's book would be my first choice for a itinerant wander around the ancient country. And that, I think, was the author's goal.


4 p.m snack - I had 4 leftover tangerines from the week before. They weren't very tasty, so I didn't eat them. Boiled for several hours, whizzed into a cream, combined with sugar and walnut meal (The recipe is really for ground almonds, but walnuts do as well), and baked slowly for an hour or so, though, and they make a great syrup doused cake. And anyway, what better than citrus to remind you that winter arriveth?

Dinner:

Yogurt Soup with bourghul meatballs - 2x - I suppose I should explain this; it's odd enough that most people won't have eaten it. Soak bourghul wheat in water for ten minutes, drain, and then mix with ground lamb. Knead together with salt for ten minutes, and then roll into marble sized balls. Drop individually into simmering chicken broth, cook for five minutes, remove, and reserve the broth. In a different pan, combine 32 ounces of yogurt with a beaten egg, heat on a low flame while stirring constantly (otherwise you get scrambled eggs and yogurt. Not ideal.) When the yogurt is smooth, and the egg well incorporated, slowly introduce the chicken broth until you have a soup. Add the meatballs again, add chopped mint, salt, and pepper. Serve. Rice or noodles can be added for a substantial lunch the next day.

Basil grind pasta - 2x? - I didn't plan the second part of the week very carefully because of thanksgiving. If I feel like eating anything but a little hummous on Friday, I'll be surprised. In any case, if I want anything else I'll just grind some basil, salt, and garlic in a mortar and pestle, and then drop it all on some linguine with a bunch of olive oil. Dinner doesn't have to be complicated.

Will and I recently had a pair of posts on the Ortolan, a small apparently delicious French bird eaten whole off the grill. Reading through Waverly Root's The Food of France, which I'll talk about in more length this weekend, I find this additional information on the delicacy:

"South of Bordeaux, the Landes provide a number of typical dishes of their own . . . The region is known for its ortolans, a small bird of the yellowhammer family which is considered the most delicately flavoured of all birds in France, and has provided a household word for the utmost refinement in eating, ortolans sauce blanche, generally used jocularly. Thus a Frenchman reaching the table and finding it set with a particularly economical repast may observe sarcastically: "Eh Bien! Ortolans sauce blanche encore une fois?" (Roughly, "Ortolan again?")
One of the reasons why the ortolan is so prized is that it is not simply shot and served, as are most most wild birds. It is caught during the autumn migrations in traps called matoles, which possess some screening ability that enables them to catch ortolans rather than other birds of the same caliber, and is then caged and fattened on millet . . . Ortolans a la landaise are cooked by an open fire, either spitted or, preferably, each in a little heavy paper box set close to the flame, in which the birds sizzle in their own fat. No other liquid is tolerated, but the guest may be invited to apply salt and pepper to his own taste as the cooking progresses before his eyes. When the bird is done, pick it up in your fingers and eat it without ceremony, as hot as you dare. They are so small you can put away half a dozen of them with ease".

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.