Twilight Picnic

We had a delightful twilight picnic in Astoria Park last night, overlooking Manhattan. Dinner was good turkey sandwiches, rubbed generously with kalamata olive paste, and thick slabs of Greek pastry from the usually excellent Artopolis bakery. Also, one of the park's indigent inhabitants came and yelled at us about "the blood of science and god" for five minutes, but that didn't spoil the mood.

Torture

Warning - Non-food content!

Professor Sandy Levinson at Balkin has a post today concerning the moral gravity of torture compared to, say, carpet bombing. It resembles, in a way, a colloquy I had with Prof. Levinson when I was his student during his visit to HLS. Briefly, I tried to push him to provide a clear answer to why torture was worse than any of the other barbarities that accompany war. The only answer that has even remotely satisfied me is that torture involves the infliction of pain on someone entirely in your grasp. It is, in that sense, especially barbaric, an indicative manifestation of a basic incivility. But I do not see how dropping an atomic weapon on millions of civilians who do not know it is coming is any worse.

I suspect that Prof. Levinson's answer to the conundrum is rather different than mine, in that he would likely say that both the bombing (as well as a host of lesser civilian oriented attacks) and torture are equally indefensible, constitute war crimes, etc. During my talk with Prof. Levinson, and on my old blog, I've gone on the record saying that I am willing to defend our obliteration of Germany during WWII, as well as Hiroshima/Nagasaki, while I am not willing to permit torture (in which I include waterboarding). But my distinction is not based on morals - the man or woman who orders either, I think, bears an equal and possibly indelible, moral weight - but on practicality. Torture doesn't work, it can be used on our men and women, and it looks horrible in a conflict where we are fighting an ideological war as much as anything else. But is the distinction really one of gravity, as people seem to think? I'm not sure.

The Chart Explained

Pinkberry, the luxury frozen yogurt brand sweeping the nation, has recently been exposed as, well, not especially natural (as it had been advertised). I'm not surprised, because I tried it about a year ago and wasn't impressed,suggesting that I would have been equally happy with a McDonald's soft serve ice cream cone. Now that the Pinkberry ingredients have been revealed, probably courtesy of the law suit contesting their claim to be natural that was recently settled, we can see exactly how Pinkberry yogurt compares with its much cheaper, down market competitor. Below, you'll see a chart comparing all the ingredients of each dessert, drawn from their respective web pages.

My methodology is pretty simple. I found the ingredient lists of both frozen treats, and attempted to categorize each ingredient by way of google. For those ingredients that differ, I have provided a link to what I found. My conclusions are below, and I present them with the obvious caveat that since I'm not any kind of food scientist, I may well have something wrong. If so, tell me, but even if some additive is a emulsifier and not an acidifier, I think the point is basically made. At about four times the cost, Pinkberry has more ingredients, more additives, and more food coloring than Mcdonald's. Advantage Golden Arches.

1. As you can see, 10 of the ingredients (the Red) are basically the same. Yes, Pinkberry has yogurt and Mcdonald's has cream, but effectively, there is no difference or superiority here.

2. Both are full of additive emulsifiers (What I've coded as Green)

3. Pinkberry includes starch. That is to say, a pure filler.

4. Pinkberry includes three different kinds of acidifiers (Purple). I couldn't find any in Mcdonald's, but this may have something to do with the need for Pinkberry to be tart.

5. Pinkberry is colored with Yellow 5 Lake. That is to say, tartrazine, an often controversial coloring required to be reported on a label by the FDA because it causes reactions in some people. Pinkberry's color is as natural as Mountain Dew.

Mcdonald's Soft Serve	Pinkberry
Milk	Skim Milk
Sugar	Sucrose
Cream	Nonfat Dry Yogurt
Nonfat Milk Solids	Nonfat Dry Milk
mono- and diglycerides	mono- and diglycerides
guar gum	guar gum
dextrose	dextrose
sodium citrate	sodium citrate
artificial vanilla	natural and artificial flavors
Corn Syrup Solids	Fructose (a corn syrup extract) maltodextrin (corn syrup based thickener)
sodium phosphate (emsulsifier)	lactoglycerides (emulsifier)
carrageenan (emsulsifier)	propylene glycol esters (stabilizer, emulsifier)
disodium phosphate (emulsifier)	soy lecithin (emulsifier, stabilizer)
cellulose gum (stabilizer)	sodium acid pyrophosphate
Vitamin A Palmitate (fortifier)	Starch (filler
	Tocopherol (Vitamin E, preservative)
	Yellow 5 Lake (tartrazine)
	Citric Acid
	magnesium oxide
	calcium fumarate

Prune

I took the opportunity of a fairly early night to dine at Prune last night. For those who don't know, Prune's Gabrielle Hamilton is, by all accounts, the quintessential chef's chef. She runs the restaurant herself, chefs eat there, and it is beloved of the New York food cognisenti (see, for example, the Amateur Gourmet, who had a few of the things I had when he visited) . It also has about 24 seats. Consequently, it is effectively impossible to get into on the weekend, so we weaseled in at 9 pm last night.

Hamilton's signature is the utter simplicity of her cooking. It is almost off-putting, to tell you the truth. A dainty slab of monkfish liver (which I have never had before, and had no idea that monkfish had a liver of that size) dressed in nothing but balsamic. Enormous, langoustine sized shrimps, grilled whole, and served in nothing but an anchovy butter. Or, my girlfriend's grilled quails with raisins and escarole, which brought to mind a Jewish pasta I once learned involving schmalz, pine nuts, and raisins. As for dessert, at my first bite of the ricotta ice cream with butterscotch croutons, I thought, "Eh". At my fifth, my spoon started scrunching imperceptibly towards my girlfriend's side of the scoop. And at the end, I was scraping the plate to get the last bit of butterscotch. A truly understated, delicious, ending.

Two questions: 1) Why is it called Prune? (Aha! It was Hamilton's childhood nickname!) 2) Why, why is it so small? (Presumably to allow the chef to keep total control (she was there, after all), but wow. How do you make money in such tight confines?).

World's Best Restaurant

I see via a couple of sources that the "world's best restaurants" list released for this year. It's sort of an inane list, of course, because the idea of saying that El Bulli is better than The Fat Duck is sort of a meaningless construct. Everything on the list is very good. There are other very good restaurants. Enough said.

What interests me about this is the extent to which food today really is a transnational enteprise, though. Gordon Ramsay is as famous here as he is in Europe. Everyone knows about El Bulli, etc, etc. We are apparently at a point in the development of a world economy (and, really, a world elite, given what these places charge) that it is entirely plausible for someone to casually note that they prefer Troisgros to Le Bernardin, but Mugartiz is better than both. My actual sense is that this convergence has helped the United States very much, and has hurt France, both in reputation and quality (as French chefs feel compelled to ape America).

Where should we go? I know! The British Library!

It's not food related, but I love the idea that one of the great crises in British academia is that hordes of noisy undergraduates are crowding academics out of the British Library. I mean, really? There are so many undergraduates clamoring to study in the British library that there aren't any seats? This was not my experience of British undergraduate study, let me tell you. And if it were true, isn't it a good thing that undergraduates are crowding research libraries?

Carbonara

I'm surprised to see that Michael Ruhlman's carbonara has cream in it. To me, as some people mention in the comments, that's an unnecessary diversion towards alfredo. Still, he does add the egg raw at the last minute, which I think makes things twice as tasty.

Le Bernardin VIP

I am trying to figure out how to become a Le Bernardin VIP so that I too can get baby eels.  Unfortunately, I suspect it involves eating at one of New York's most expensive restaurants a couple of times a week for a long time, so I'll just content myself with looking from afar.  They do look like pastas, though! 

Malaysian curry

We're off to a wedding in another state today, which will be a lot of fun.  Yesterday, though, I tried to imitate my favorite dish at our local, everyday Thai restaurant, the inimitable Bangkok Tasty.   I used a simple combination of red curry paste, sauteed briefly in oil, and then combined with fish sauce, lime, green beans, coriander, coconut milk, bean sprouts, sugar, and firm tofu.  It was, indeed, tasty, but next time I would greatly reduce the sugar and up the curry paste, and add cauliflower.  Nonetheless, once you get through chopping the ingredients, a wonderfully quick dinner for a night you really need to spend packing, but did not.

El Bulli taking the piss?

I followed Tyler Cowen's link to a well blogged visit to El Bulli, probably the most famous restaurant in the world today.   I'm sure the food is actually good - too many people say so to be wrong.  But looking at the pictures, I just can't get away from the feeling that they're taking the piss, just a little bit.   On the other hand, the restaurant does look beautiful. 

Pizza hut pasta

I don't really know how to explain Pizza Hut's new pastas, which I learned about via Instapundit via the Speculist. I don't understand the business plan (why would I buy frozen pasta from Pizza Hut rather than, say, Stoffer's?), I don't understand the market, and I don't understand why I would want to eat a beef pasta listing so many foul ingredients as this one.

Un-force fed foie gras

Michael Ruhlman writes about a new foie gras from Spain that isn't force fed, as is traditional foie gras, but relies on the goose's natural inclination to gorge itself. I'm skeptical, not only because Gordon Ramsay appears to have rejected it as inferior (and though Ramsay's television persona is something of a joke, he is a very serious, very great chef), but because I had a version of what I believe to be a humanely raised foie gras at the wonderful L'eau a la bouche outside Montreal last year. While it was delicious, and to me tasted better objectively than real foie gras, it wasn't foie gras. It was very fatty, unctuous, liver, and there's a big difference between the two.

Word of the Day

"Pellucid", meaning transparently clear, from Justice Stevens' otherwise puzzling opinion in today's Baze v. Reese, upholding Kentucky's method of execution.

UPDATE: As in, it is pellucidly clear that most TV chefs have research staffs find them other people's recipes for use in their shows.

"My" special risotto, says she

The interesting part about the Cindy McCain mini-recipe kerfuffle (in which it was discovered that recipes listed as the McCain's personal home cooking were actually drawn verbatim from Food Network) is that every single current Food Network TV chef does much the same thing, and I've long found it highly obnoxious. "Oomph", groans Giada, as she decorously slithers her "favorite" lasagne into her mouth, or such and such dish like "her mother used to make". The number of Rachel Ray's dishes that she claims she "usually" makes in X or Y fashion are legion. And I won't even get into the pastiche clown, Guy Fieri.

In reality, no one has a ready repertoire of favorite dishes which they've served multiple times in the past vast enough to cover 3 dishes a day for even 30 episodes a year. My own grandmother, for example, a highly talented cook who fed a family all three meals every single day for 40 years, can count perhaps 10 dishes that would qualify as "favorites", or specialties, or about which she can claim with any plausibility "I usually serve it this or that way". She knows of, and can probably execute, any number of other dishes, but those are always in the context of having learned them from some woman in the past, or once having been served it at dinner. In the same way, listen carefully to Batali or Pepin on TV. Very rarely does either use the Food TV code. Rather, they learned the dish in Amalfi, or know puff pastry to be made in this way, or once ate it and remember the flavor vividly. There is none of the forced, fake, intimacy of Rachel Ray's apparently bachannalian home feasts, at which we are to suppose she serves 14 dishes a night to an army of hungry omnivores. Of course, professional chefs have a much larger mental library to work from than the rest of us. But that is obviously not what they're invoking on TV.

None of this is to say that there's no value in Food Network, or that I hate the hosts. There is, and I don't. But it is rich of someone to complain on Rachel Ray's behalf that Cindy McCain['s intern] stole her recipes as her own.

A quick weekday dinner salad

For most of 2007, I spent every day and much of every night in the office. The economy was piping hot, and legal practice for a corporate lawyer in New York was an unending stream of deals and transactions. In those circumstances, even the quickest home meals were impossible. The best I could do was order hummous, or taboule, or the like, from some of the middle eastern restaurants here in New York, and lose myself for a moment or two in nostalgia for home.

But the economy has slowed down, and my life is much better. I don't mean to downplay the wretched effects of economic stress on many people, but I have enjoyed very much coming home before midnight, the opportunity to see my girlfriend for more than snatched meals outside my office, the chance to breath some fresh, non-air conditioned air. And, of course, to cook during the week.

Weekday dinners need not be complicated, or time consuming. The last thing many people want to do after coming come from work is to wait for a stew to thicken. With spring finally here, furthermore, the vegetables are improving every day. With that in mind, dinner last night was this grilled goat cheese (from Vermont's Coach farms), atop a salad of tangy, spicy, dandelion leaves and thinly sliced apple, just to soften the sometimes astringent dandelions the tiniest bit. No, it's not fancy, but it'll do.

PS - I often get into arguments with other people who have long running issues with weight over whether one can plausibly eat, say, a 4 oz. chunk of goat's cheese healthily. All I have to say is that a 4 oz. goat's cheese like the above has about 250 calories, has great "mouth feel" (to use one of the worst food industry phrases) and "umami" up the wazoo. I'll take that over a frozen diet dinner any day of the week.

A worthy pro-bono project

I had never before heard of the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, but now that I have, I'm enthused. Among other things, they're engaged in defending small farmers from the ravages of New York and California's state agricultural regulators, who are (as are all American agricultural regulators) evangelical about rubbing out raw milk. Especially interesting is the saga of Meadowsweet Farms, which apparently distributes raw milk and other dairy products through an LLC into which someone wishing to enjoy good food contributes capital. The profits produced by the cows fed by the capital contributions happen to be sweet dairy goodness. Unfortunately, Meadowsweet is under withering attack from the government, which is attempting to prove that it is illegally "selling" raw milk. A fascinating situation, and a worthy pro-bono project for any (ahem) lawyer.

Commodity Prices force school lunch cuts

The Washington Post reports the disturbing news that rising commodity prices are causing bad changes in school lunch programs. The really disturbing part of all this are the choices the schools are making to react. One school district has replaced "healthier options" (presumably milk) with Yoo-hoo. Another school has removed tomato slices (inappropriate given the season anyway) and replaced them with celery. And yet another came up with limiting fruit to twice a week.

I realize that the budgets are stretched. But it seems obvious to me at least that part of this has just got to be incompetence. Not because they're out of money, but because the apparent solutions have such deleterious effects that they're clearly worse than the disease.

Melton Mowbray gets PGI status

A very old interest of mine, the Melton Mowbray pork pie, has finally won European PGI protection. The real story here, as I first discussed about four years ago, is that the proposed geographical indication essentially shut one of two main competitors out of the market. It was a business ploy rather than some sort of artisanal impulse towards tradition. With the competitor now apparently safely situated in the protected area, all is apparently well.

Buyer Uncertainty

Via Larry Ribstein, I see this paper on "Buyer Uncertainty and Two-Part Pricing: Theory with Evidence from Outsourcing and New York Restaurants".

I have not throughly studied the economic theory as yet, but there is definitely something wrong with the empirics here, apparently because the authors didn't think enough about how people order in restaurants.

The idea is this: the researchers noticed that appetizers, desserts, and soups cost more (6-20% more) in comparison to main dishes at restaurants categorized as "romantic" in Zagat's guides than at restaurants categorized as "business dining". From this fact, the researchers extract the theory that restaurants are responding to a sort of uncertainty. Because couples on a "first date" don't know whether they are going to like each other, the authors argue, first date restaurants price "ancillary courses" more aggresively than the obligatory main course, because by the time the couple decides to order an ancillary, they'll have decided they like each other or not, and will thus be willing to pay a premium.

I can't even count the number of things wrong with these empirics when you look at them through the lens of New York restaurants.

1. The ancillary courses used as examples are totally disimiliar - one orders soups and appetizers before or at the same time as the main course, and only dessert afterward. The fact that the empirical results are the same across all three strikes me as fishy. I suppose one might argue that by the time the couples gets to the restaurant they know whether they like each other or not, but in New York you often meet your date at the table.

2. Business meals are often also highly uncertain affairs. You might be making a pitch for a client, or meeting an adversary for some hard words. If it goes badly, shazam! Just a main dish.

3. There are deep structural differences between business dining and dates. One of the most obvious is that business is typically done at lunch, and dating at night. And it is almost certainly much more common to have just a dish at lunch than at dinner, so restaurants might respond to that by attempting to extract more value from the main dish, and then discount the ancillaries to lure lunchers into buying additional courses.

A cool note on Pate au choux

Listening to Colameco's food talk show on the radio this morning, his guest (the pastry chef at Gotham Bar & Grill) mentions that a great way to know whether a choux pastry has been beaten sufficiently (a choux pastry is made by boiling water or milk, adding butter, then flour, then cooking the newly formed ball until it dries over the heat, and then beating yolks into the mixture) is that it falls off, rather than sticks to, the Kitchen-Aid paddle or whisk.

Thoughts for the Day

1. The increase in the number and sophistication of food blogs since I was last writing actively in 2005 is staggering.

1a. I have no value add in the world of (a) describe recipe (b) take picture of recipe. I'll still do that, because I enjoy it, but there are people who are better at both elements than I am.

1b. My value add in this market (to the extent I have one) is in depth of knowledge, and lively but formal, writing. Target is Steingarten rather than, say, Clotilde. Which is to say, in the things I used to write on the old Crescat Sententia. Whether that effort is popular or not, I don't know/care.

2. Aran has made a beautiful Japanese inflected opera. If I had to make a criticism (and I would probably be better off not), I would say the layers of cake are thicker, and the layers of cream thinner, than I would like. But it is beautiful nonetheless.

Colameco has a radio show?

One of the least appreciated food personalities in New York, Mike Colameco, apparently has a radio show! It's wonderful, and it's archived.

Queso Fresco

To jump onto an old soapbox of mine, Belle of John & Belle draws our attention to the success of a small cheese maker in Mexico with microfinance. I don't really have much of an opinion about the main issue of "for-profit" lenders getting into the microfinance business, but I do want to note that our own FDA thinks that Alejandra Abúndez's cheeses (among others) are unsafe to eat (see the bottom of the handout). Forget whether she'll survive paying 90% interest - at least Mexico lets her try.

Weekend Meal

Possibly my favorite way with fish (other, of course, than the fryer, but I'm not supposed to admit that, I think) is to cook it in pappillote - that is to say, in a parchment paper envelope. The fish steams perfectly, seemingly without effort, a ready made sauce is made from the lemon and olive oil one uses to dress the fish and vegetables, and clean-up is almost instantaneous. The actual mix of fish, veg, and accompaniments are entirely up to you and what's available at the fishmonger, of course, but in this case I used some nice grouper, small sweet peppers, bok choi, and dandelion leaves. Some potatoes cut into thick coins and then baked for an hour for a golden, dark, crust were the perfect side dish.

Wedding Cake

In the comments below there is a brief discussion of wedding cake. In fact, I was supposed to think about the issue, and come up with cakes other than the traditional tiered cake, and other than my initial thoughts of Opera and Sachertorte.

I've thought about it, and am sad to report that I have no new ideas.

I guess the initial point is that I think that traditional wedding cakes are just awful, a pointless combination of airy fluff and American style buttercream. I have never eaten such a cake other than because I had to. I realize that you can't stack too many other kinds of cakes to make the spectacular displays brides expect, but I have to confess that every time I've seen some bride to-be gushing about the cake on one of those wedding shows my sister makes me watch when we're together, I really don't understand what they're talking about. Yes, it's a chocolate/yellow butter cake with [Put in your UNIQUE cream here]. Like a Duncan Hines. Yes, even the one from Soutine's. Woot.

So, what to do? You want something festive and different. So out go the brownies, the cookies (except as additions, where they are very nice to have) pies, quickbreads, and tarts. I'm not sure which of the canonical French cakes, traditionally served individually, one can have, except that I could imagine a very large Paris-Brest working. I also played with the thought of a dense, raisin-rich, carrot cake, which I think would be very nice, though I suppose some people might well complain. But in the end, if it was me, and if I was stuck in New York, I think I would call Payard and talk them into making a very large Opera.


UPDATE: Ah. You don't have to talk them into doing anything. They offer Opera for up to 100 people.

The Modern World

In honor of the various articles about annoying iphone users

My girlfriend and I were supposed to meet some friends at Luca Lounge on Friday night, putatively at 13th Street and B Avenue here in Manhattan. Stupidly, I didn't call to make sure they were open. It wouldn't have mattered, because they were. Just, no longer at 13th Street and B Avenue, but elsewhere entirely.

By the time we found out, I was already at Union Square, a shortish walk to Luca Lounge, and our guests were on their way. So as I walked along 14th Street towards Avenue B in the desperate knowledge that we might end up at the local taco place, I pulled out my iphone and logged onto chowhound. A search for "Avenue B" turned up Back Forty, one of the leading "back to the farm" restaurants in New York. Google maps told me it was less than half a mile away from where Luca Lounge used to be, so I called my girlfriend, who was still on the train in Astoria, to redirect her, had her check in with her friends, called the restaurant from the imbedded link in the post discussing Back Forty at chowhound to discover that they don't accept reservations, and then opened the menu to figure out what to get. I did all of this before I got to Avenue A. I got to the restaurant, realized I had to wait because everyone else was late, watched a couple of politics related youtubes, and then had dinner. I took a picture of the place with the phone's camera, and then spent the trip home drafting a blog post about the dinner I just had.

Is all this a good thing? I have no idea. But there's no doubt that even five years ago, we would have been left with our guests standing like idiots in front of the closed restaurant, with no idea where to eat, our night would have been ruined, and everyone would have felt awful. Instead, we had fun. At least this time, technology was a net positive.

Parts of me that I don't like much

I got into the elevator here at work yesterday, and pressed the button to head down to the lobby for lunch. Two girls jumped in just as the door was closing and pushed the button for our top floor. Whoops! They were headed the wrong way. I was just about to tell them about their mistake when I heard:

"I just can't eat pigs, you know? I don't mind eating cows, but pigs, you know, are smart and stuff".

And I shut my mouth.

Bread and Chocolate

In addition to the pizza lunch below, over the weekend I tried my hand at Michael Laiskonis's "Chocolate Olive Oil". This was my first foray into even the fringes of so-called "molecular cuisine". I am firmly ensconsed in the homey side of the world, and what Wylie Dufresne is doing at WD-50 has little superficial appeal to me.

At the threshold, I've decided that I need to not do food photography with my iphone. It's a wonderful tool, but it really sells my food a little short, compared to all the other pictures floating around on the internet. But moving on to the chocolate olive oil, the finished product was delicious, but I think I made two mistakes.

1. There were small pockets of gummy something in the middle of the individual chocolate packages. I believe they must have been undisolved agar agar, but I'd like to know for sure.

2. I omitted the glucose syrup, which I think is responsible for the relatively matte finish.

Also note, of course, that I hadn't made bread, so I used a crostini instead, and I think that fleur de sel would be better on the chocolate than the sea salt I used. Nonetheless, it was a delightful experiment.

Saturday Lunch, wishing for July

Lunch yesterday was a sort of desperate yearning for July - tomatoes, cold italian style dishes, pizza. Really none of which was at its prime right now. But my pizza is good, the bean dip tasty, and the company, as always, magnificent. Now, when exactly am I going to be able to build a wood fired stove outside, so my pizza hits the next, splinteringly hot, level? Alas for Astoria.

Valomilk! Valomilk! Valomilk!

I've been looking for Sifer's Valomilks (a famous but regional candy) ever since I read Candy Freak two years ago. Today, finally, victory! While I was looking for Agar Agar at Wholefoods Columbus Circle, I ran into a whole display of Valomilks, piled six foot high. I set aside my plans to buy sea salt, grabbed four packages, and ran at a half waddle, half sprint back to my office to crunch into the dribbly, marshmallowy deliciousness. In the first picture, you can see the characteristic leakage of marshmallow filling from the hand filled valomilks, which never achieve the perfect, antiseptic seal of a Reese's peanut butter cup. And in the second, well, you can see why they say, When it runs down your chin, you know it’s a VALOMILK.” .

Ah, Pectin

So, I realize I'm being a smart-ass, but something tickled me about the quote below from an article today in the Wall Street Journal about famed baseball manager Joe Torre:


"There's something in jelly that makes it jelly", says Mr. James, senior baseball operations adviser with the Boston Red Sox. "Without that, it's runny grape juice with a lot of sugar in it".

Umm, well, there is something in jelly, he's right. Joe Torre as the pectin in the Dodgers jelly?

Petits Fours

It turns out that petits fours are extremely difficult to make, at least when you're a) incompetent and b) tired. Or, so I discovered when I made them as part of my fancy-pants valentine's day meal. Also, it is extremely difficult to pipe straight lines of chocolate icing onto a napoleon when your piping bag has ripped, and you're forced to use paper cones instead. Just for reference, since it's not obvious what I made, these are two kinds of truffles (Valrhona chocolate, covered in cocoa and in roasted almonds), and mini-napoleons, the making of which counts as one of the grand debacles of my cooking career to date.




To make up for these, I present some sweets I had on my last visit to Paris, a few weeks ago.

Olive Oil Madeleines

Cannelle & Vanille has made beautiful olive oil madeleines, which she proposes to give away. I don't have much more to say, other than to encourage any readers to compete for them.

Croissants made by Robots

The New York Times reports a croissant made by robots in New York, which supposedly helps make the croissants more tender. Color me unimpressed, but I'll go try them.

Amuses Bouches - Branzino Fumet, chanterelle, and Shrimp

I recently made this amuses bouches for my girlfriend on Valentine's Day. I'm working on a much longer post about the meal, but the idea was to attempt super fancy restaurant food as an experiment. This dish was based on a fumet made of branzino bones, flavored with chanterelle mushrooms (from Oregon) and garnished with a steamed jumbo shrimp.

Should you give your kids alcohol?

Eric Asimov, the New York Times wine columnist, asks whether parents should give their children alcohol at an early age to stave off potential abuse later on.

I don't have much to add to this, other than to say that wine, beer, etc, should obviously be introduced as early as possible just as a matter of common sense, because they're not big deals, and are part (for many people) of civilized life. Why we insist on fetishizing the whole issue is quite beyond me.

UPDATE: Read Michael Ruhlman's post on this, as he struggles with what to do with his 12 year old daughter.

How far would you go

My comment on going out of one's way for a special meal or food at Bitten had been posted as one of the "Comments of the Moment", so I'll just link here.


Being a city person, the question for me is “how far am I willing to walk?” for a particular food. I think there’s a certain charm in allowing oneself to eat anything, no matter how off diet, so long as one walks to get it. So far, my record is 3 miles for a particularly wonderful eclair made in the old way in Paris, but I’m always looking for excuses to beat that effort.

Bread with Chocolate

Michael Laiskonis, pastry chef at the wonderful Le Bernardin (where my girlfriend and I recently had a terrific meal, asks why we Americans don't have a native born combination of bread (and bread defined narrowly, as yeast, and flour and water, rather than a muffin or quickbread) and chocolate. France, he says, has the pain au chocolat, but what is our equivalent?

I would have thought that the obvious answer was the chocolate glazed donut. It is, of course, a bread. A somewhat sweet bread, though made properly no more sweet than a croissant. And, of course, it includes chocolate, and, as far as I know, is basically indigenous in this form to the United States. I realize it is fried, and the focus is on fat, in some sense, rather than bread, but on the other hand, I can think of nothing more primal than fried dough and chocolate.

UPDATE: Incidentally, Michael's recipe for chocolate ganache thickened with agar agar and served with bread looks astonishing. I will try it (and probably fail!).

The ivory tower

Ezra Klein says that meat ought to be more expensive. By which he means, presumably, that the country should move toward more humane husbandry. When pushed on the obvious problem (well, what are people who don't have a ton of money supposed to eat?), his answer is that they ought to eat more vegetables.

Obviously, everyone should eat more vegetables. But for one thing, the post entirely ignores the fact that the wide availability of (admittedly) inferior meat is one of the great advances of the last century. Meat used to all be organic, and free range, and humane, and so on. And it was available to a sliver of mankind, who were physically bigger, stronger, and better developed than the rest. Providing meat to the masses was actually a terrific equalizing accomplishment, and it is surprising that a self-described "progressive" would miss this point in an effort to be au courant with currently trendy food localism.

But let's say Klein and people who agree succeed, and somehow, humane husbandry is imposed across the board, and meat prices soar. Klein says that "other things would be cheaper". How does he know this? And how does he know that the newly deprived will make the choices he'd like them to make about food? While Klein may know that tofu is cheaper than chicken (depends on the tofu, and on the chicken, actually, as with most things, and in any case, is it really obvious that cheap genetically modified, pesticidey, tofu is better than cheap chicken?), chips are cheaper than both. As George Orwell observed in his wonderful "Road to Wigan Pier",

"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."

And in any case, while humane beef is all well and good, that movement is all part and parcel with establishing proper agriculture. For someone posturing from Klein's position, all food is too cheap. So under a proper food regime, stripped of subsidies, not only would the grains the poor people are supposed to eat be more expensive (assuming they even knew how to cook them in a tasty way, which I understand from friends who work with food charities in poorer areas is actually a ludicrous supposition) but everything else would too. Milk, cheese, butter, all manner of leaves (Would Klein be cooking "asian asparagus" in February in DC if people ate properly? Umm, no) vegetables, cooking oil.

Now, it might be that the simpler world of less, expensive, food is a better one. We might well be healthier from a fat perspective. Our animals would be happier, and we'd all ingest less pesticides. But it is a much different world than the one we inhabit today, and I suspect it is one people like Klein would not like very much at all.

Morning Flight Scones

I am flying to Washington D.C. in about two hours, and decided to make some scones for the morning's fun. For someone who is so good at bread, I have a surprising amount of trouble with pie crust and its brothers, scones and biscuits. Where is the lift of other scones here? On the other hand, these taste and feel like scones as I've had them in England, so maybe it's everyone else who is screwing them up. I can't shake the feeling, though, that they should have risen higher and more evenly.

Still delicious. The recipe is from the King Arthur book.

Real Fast Food

Here is my comment over at Bittman's place recommending Nigel Slater's "Real Fast Food" (one of the great, underappreciated cookbooks of the last twenty years, in my view):

I think of Nigel Slater’s “Real Fast Food” as a sort of a minimalist for the British taste. Mustardy sardines and kippers on toast, rarebit, potatoes baked and scooped out, and then stuffed again with cream and cheese, pages of sauces for simple, poached, salmon. It’s the food that helped me learn to cook, that fed me in college, and that I turned to as a graduate student. “Real Fast Food” is what I would take with me into a nuclear shelter, faced with cooking tuna forever, but my copy is also dog eared and circled and wrinkled with stray splashes of soy here in the real world too. Slater’s other books are good, but other people take nice pictures too. “Real Fast Food” is a lifesaver.

Starbucks Sandwiches

I said more than a year ago now that "Starbucks' effort to corner some of the breakfast market [through warmed breakfast sandwiches] will fail utterly".

I realize I'm bragging, but it has proceeded to fail utterly.

Schultz already has said he's killing the ballyhooed breakfast sandwiches and says he hasn't ruled out dropping more foods.

UPDATE: I now realize there is a "Save the Starbucks Breakfast Sandwich" website. I should say, amid all this gloating, that they were actually very good sandwiches. Just completely inconsistent with the chain, with no connection to the market, etc, etc.

UPDATE 2: And here is the discussion I had with PG on the comments at Crescat Sententia. Pretty good stuff, I think. We should be hired.

-------
I had the impression that the pastries at Starbucks were reasonably popular, actually -- at least I've had them several times, whereas I think I've ventured upon a sandwich once and never again. Pastries go with a Starbucks drink, or can be an alternative when you're meeting a coffee addict there and feeding your own sugar jones. I'm not sure whether meatier breakfast food goes with Starbucks coffee; eggs and bacon seem vaguely downmarket. I wouldn't bother making coffee at home, and pastries really are a lot of trouble, but I can fry eggs and bacon with little effort.

Posted by PG at January 11, 2007 04:31 AM
PG - I think the pastries are indeed reasonably popular, but not at breakfast, perhaps. Or not popular enough. As a matter of taste, I think they vary wildly from decent to bad.

As to the second point, I agree with you, but clearly there is a market out there for egg frying with coffee. i.e, Mcdonald's. Where I think Starbucks is going wrong is that they're fiddling with the "do one clean, simple , high margin thing well" model. (let's leave for another day the debate over whether they do that thing well or not). Now they have 5,000 super speed cooking machines eating into their margins. I think that way live starbucks frozen pizzas, and trouble.

Posted by Raffi at January 11, 2007 08:32 AM
Yes, I think the egg/bacon/cheese frying with coffee market is essentially a low margin one, and it doesn't sound like McD's is raising the price of coffee even as it raises the level of quality. So people who are shopping based on price will continue to go to McD's for breakfast. Starbucks essentially is just trying to get the customers it already has for coffee to buy more. The main problem I see is trying to train staff to do more than one thing well. My friends who like coffee claim that at Dunkin Donuts is actually very good, but that it's more trouble than Starbucks because DD doesn't train its staff to focus on coffee, but on serving up donuts.

Posted by PG at January 12, 2007 01:48 AM

Sticky Toffee Pudding

Just a (honest) question about Mark Bittman's "Sticky Toffee Pudding". Aren't most puddings, in the British sense, a) steamed and b) made with suet? I realize that the answer may be that people don't eat suet anymore, and steaming is a waste of time, but I'm just wondering whether we aren't losing something. Or, perhaps, sticky toffee pudding is just named that, and was always baked like a cake.

Yogurt Cake

Meg of Too Many Chefs makes a chocolatey yogurt cake, based on a yogurt cake which both she and I got from Clotilde of Chocolate & Zucchini. It is a delicate, simple cake, and to the overstimulated American palate is really almost a quickbread. But it is delicious nonetheless.

And the best part is that it is especially easy, and fast - just the thing to whip up for colleagues on Friday afternoon. Contrary to Clotilde, I like it especially after a day in foil, when it gets less crusty (which I normally crave), and the moisture from the yogurt distributes, leaving what I would almost describe as the texture of the syrup soaked semolina desserts that so characterize lebanese (and Greek, and Turkish, and Syrian) cooking. Delightful.

Pet Peeves

Frank Bruni asks about our restaurant pet peeves. I agree with many of those already mentioned, and especially with waiters who take away one person's food without waiting for everyone at the table to finish. When I'm paying so much money, I don't expect to be treated as if I'm in a cafeteria.

Having said that, why do waiters ever ask if everything is ok? What exactly, is this supposed to accomplish? If the food is good, then I'd like to be left alone to enjoy it. If the food is bad, but not bad enough to send back, I'll tell everyone I can about the bad food. but there's nothing you can do. And, of course, if the food is so bad I need to send it back, you'll know. So what does asking me accomplish? In reality, the waiter's question is more of an ultimatum than anything else - speak now, or forever hold your peace. I disagree.

Naples 45

Naples 45

An excellent pizzeria for slices on Park Avenue and 45th. But forget all the flavored pizzas - the only thing worth eating is the margherita. Dough made with flour, water and salt, and good fresh cheese and tomatoes. $2.50, but $1.50 after 2 p.m.

A great lunch.

Some notes on Hawaii I posted on Chowhound

Tokkuri-tei - For us, this was a highlight of the trip. A cozy, eclectic Japanese restaurant with startling sushi, a wide and challenging menu of sochu and sake, and great service. On our two visits, I tried most of the sushi on the menu, and found it all of extremely high quality, with wonderful rice and fresh fish tasting of not much more than the ocean. I was especially pleased with the uni (sea urchin), which I normally find a little difficult to eat, and was blown away by the Mu, a great sweetish sake suggested by the attentive staff. The place is cool too - tiles signed by various semi-prominent visitors are posted up all over the walls, and the crowd is clearly local, regular, and enthusiastic.

Leonard's Bakery - Warm, crispy, malasadas (doughnuts) filled with banana, coconut, and chocolate. One of the best fried doughs I've ever had, and the fact that the staff runs around in a panic at the idea that you might get your malasadas cold makes the whole experience even more fun. Also, I got a cool t-shirt, with smiling malasadas trying to get out of a box.

Side Street Inn - Well, the back alley location isn't all that promising. Nor is the bleak sports bar you find when you go inside. But then you notice that a lot of tables are reserved, and the menu includes some surprising stuff, and people are eating hungrily. After gobbling two kinds of ahi and smoked organic salmon, I'm a convert. I would have liked to explore more of the menu, but we ran out of time.

The Surf Room at the Royal Hawaiian - So, this is were we were staying, and it's just a hotel restaurant, but the view is spectacular, and the taro pancakes with lilikoi syrup were actually very very good. I wouldn't bother with the buffet, though - it looked fine (probably better, objectively, than the House with a Key), but I wouldn't (and didn't) pass up the pancakes on my two visits.

Mai Tai Bar - Also at our hotel, and not known for food, and expensive, but I got some pleasant coconut crusted shrimp here while listening to some very nice music and sitting outside. I wouldn't completely discount this place if what you want to do is hang out and talk.

Pineapple on Pupukea beach - ok, so not a restaurant, but an actual pineapple I bought from Foodlands supermarket (I also bought a cool-looking fruit knife) that we ate on the North Shore beach of Pupukea. Pineapples in Hawaii are complex fruits, completely unlike what we get in New York, and this was one of the best lunches we had on our trip.

House without a Key - we had a terrific breakfast here, based on chowhound recommendations. The food was good (a full buffet with great fruit, and surprisingly good macadamia pancakes, of which I consumed a large number), but the view and the setting (overlooking the beach and an obviously ancient tree) were the real treats. We loved it.

Keo's - Perfectly adequate thai food in a beautiful room festooned with flowers. Not as good as its reputation (but we're from New York, and a lot of the Thai here is excellent), but we certainly didn't regret the meal.

Burke!

I'm working my way through a short collection of Burke - he would not sound out of place today, and I would be on his side. His economic instincts particularly are wonderful, as we see here in his "Thoughts on Scarcity", though the same sentiments apply to everything else, I think:

"To provide for us in our necessities is not in the power of government. It would be a vain presumption in statesmen to think they can do it. The people maintain them, and not they the people. It is in the power of government to prevent mch evil; it can do very little positive good in this, or perhaps in anything else".

2007 Restaurants

I have done a quick back of the envelope calculation of how many restaurants I ate at in 2007, based on credit card records and records on Seamless Web, the delivery manager for my firm (and for most financial and law firms in New York city). Total? 70 personal restaurants, with my girlfriend, family, or friends. And a staggering 204 restaurants at the firm, not including those nights where I went out to grab a burger at McDonald's out of sheer desperation at staying in my office.

This all connects, because I have recently read Michael Pollan's "In Defence of Food", which lists various rules for healthy eating in the back. I was startled to see him basically ignore restaurants, which really are at the root of much of the problem with their extreme portions, salt, fat, and unknown chemicals. Eating actual food mostly at home is a huge lifestyle improvement, and during my vacation thus far have felt it to be one of the biggest differences in my health.

Ciabatta

I made this Ciabatta for the minestroni I will post about later. It is a standard bread, with a little olive oil: flour, yeast, and salt. The secret to its extraordinary tenderness, however, is to knead the dough on the paddle setting of a mixer for a full twenty minutes. You get an astonishing, plastic, shiny, dough, which is hard to work with because it is so moist, but yields a great result if you can just push through the difficulty.





The recipe is from "The Bread Bible", just for reference.

Frivol

I'm not sure there could possibly be a better explanation of what I find wrong with Ezra Klein's writing, public personality, politics, etc, etc, than this post about bookshelves. No, it's not about politics, but, well, read it and see.

I especially love how someone who writes what Ezra wrote could possibly claim to be a "wonk". Hey, ignorance is bliss.

Shrimp and Cheesy Polenta

This simple dish was inspired by a romanian restaurant here in queens. A few shrimp marinated in garlic, ginger and lemon (which had nothing to do with the Romanian restaurant), and polenta served with grated Romanian feta (which did). A delicious combination, although I recognize that polenta is better (though less authentic) when made with milk rather than water.

Risotto Cake

I made risotto the other day, and inevitably had some leftover. I'll post pictures of the risotto tomorrow, I think, if I can them. The usual answer with leftover risotto is to push it together, dip in flour, and to sautee in olive oil to make a delicious snack. It is accompanied by kale, first fried in olive oil, and then drained, squeezed, and sauteed again.

Hugh Hewitt?

Hugh Hewitt wasn't on my radar screen until I reengaged with politics earlier this year. I certainly didn't know of his abominable record on pushing conservatives around with his own view of what makes up conservatism, most spectacularly on the blundered Harriet Miers nomination, which he defended with considerable vitriol. (Professor Bainbridge particularly turned me on to Hugh's seemingly wilful blindness) Now, as everyone but me knew, he's in the tank for Mitt Romney, of which this post is indicative. His theory, apparently, is that Romney is the only plausible choice for a good conservative, and that Mccain is some sort of liberal trojan horse.

I'll go into this a little more deeply over the next couple of weeks, I guess, but it really needs to be said - a moderate governor from Massachusetts who created government health care is a more authentic conservative than John McCain, who has fought the good fight for decades? How is this meme passing the smell test? And no, a willingness to defend waterboarding isn't the litmus test of conservatism.

It seems clear to me that Republicans, and especially the Republican money men, needs to start coalescing around Mccain. Bizarre stories about a conservative icon being liberal aren't going to get us there.

Melanzana Sirenuse

This is a meal that Mario Batali says he used to eat at Le Sirenuse, a luxury hotel in Italy, near Lake Garda. I love eggplant*, and sandwiching mozzarella di buffalo and fried, it's one of my favorite foods. What's more, the technique is straightforward. Just bake sliced eggplants for about 10 minutes in a little olive oil, make sandwiches out with the cheese, and then dip in egg and flour before frying in the best extra virgin olive oil (eggplants suck up oil, and you'll pay for scrimping on the oil with poor taste).

* Why do we call it eggplant? Melanzana (italian) or aubergine (French) are much better. I wonder if the Germans manage anything less palatable.

How we find ourselves here

Probably the chief reason for this vacation from my law firm (which I've been calling a sabbatical, as it is very long) is that I have gained weight. Those who used to read me on Crescat might remember that one of things I'm proudest of is of having lost eighty pounds, mostly by learning to cook, and eating clean, honest food made by my own hands. My job has robbed me of what I thought was a luxury, and the results were far worse than I anticipated. It turns out that restaurant food combined with tremendous stress makes me fat, and though the situation isn't irretrievable, it has turned grave, at least to me. So I decided to spend this time digging back towards the roots of the original weight loss, back to my hands and kitchen, to the food that brought me here, so to speak.

There is a profound peace in being in one's own kitchen, music in the background, hands deep in flour, or listening to the rhythmic chop of one's own knife slicing through garlic, its aroma slowly reaching one's nose. It is a peace which makes me think of pasta. Here, below is my own pasta, rolled out. You don't need a pasta machine to get thin pasta, as you can see

Those who have not made pasta before are daunted, I realize, but the concern is unjustified. All you need is about a pound of flour, and four full eggs. Pile the flour in a bowl, empty out a well in the middle of the flour, and add the eggs. Mix slowly, and then knead for ten minutes (or a little less with a good mixer, which is what I used). That's it. Afterwards, just cook in plenty of salted boiling water, and drain. It'll look like this.

























Of course, you can dress pasta however you want. Perhaps the nicest thing to do is to sautee some bacon, and then add raw egg off the heat, which, of course, is carbonara. But instead I made a beef sauce with plenty of excellent french wine, and drank more with dinner. The road back to a healthy life may turn out to be long, though I am doing by best. But it will be delicious, no matter what.

Hi! I'm back!!!

Hi. This is actually Raffi, back after a long, long, hiatus. For anyone who doesn't know me, I used to write on the fairly popular blog Crescat Sententia, as the resident food blogger, but also delved into things other than food on occasion. I graduated from law school and then clerked on the Delaware Court of Chancery, after which I took a job as a corporate lawyer in New York. I had a tough year, which people will learn about as a I write. And now, finally, I'm on vacation, for the next several weeks. And I intend to write again. I don't really expect anyone to read this. I've been out of the blogging loop for so long. But more than anything else, I want a record of this vacation, of how I felt, of what I was thinking. And, of course, we are in the middle of the most exciting political season in perhaps a generation. I have lots to say about it. So I don't care if anyone reads this or not. I'm going to write regardless.

A number of friends around DC had told me that I ought to visit a specific restaurant in Vienna, Virginia - it had a good, inexpensive, French country lunch menu, they said. So I went, and was completely taken aback when the first course salad arrived - a few leaves of iceberg lettuce, topped with a couple of grated carrots and what seemed an awful lot like a sauce that had once seen the inside of a bottle.

There's plainly no sense in which my reaction to this salad was simply a matter of taste. Iceberg lettuce in a restaurant pretending to French country cuisine is objectively wrong, whatever someone like the often confused James Beard might have had to say. Nonetheless, my instinct in the restaurant was to say nothing. If they can't be bothered to notice that they just served an actual customer iceberg lettuce with insipid dressing, to me it makes no sense to help them realize their mistake

My dining companion, on the other hand, was pretty irate - they're taking their customers for idiots, she said. You can't let them just hand out iceberg lettuce salads with no consequences. You and I know this is wrong - we should take them to task. And, she added, we should specifically take them to task the more expensive the restaurant gets. Sure, maybe you can let them escape at $14.95 for three courses as here, but cowards like you say nothing even when a $40 plate is objectively wrong. Why?

In the end, I did nothing, and the meal somewhat redeemed itself with a passable duck confit, though the accompanying potatoes had obviously been hanging around since the night before, and the dried plantain adorning the creme caramele (after I had ordered creme brulee anyway) ill placed. But I'm left wondering whether my approach is wrong. My sense is that if they want my advice, they're welcome to pay me, or suffer when an actual critic shows up and is served the same desultory nonsense. But maybe, and especially since this restaurant has survived unscathed for a while, people should speak out during dinner. I wonder - please email me with your opinions.

Hell's Kitchen
Raffi Melkonian at 10:48 PM
I'm just watching Gordon Ramsay's restaurant reality show, Hell's Kitchen. The show began with each contestant being asked to prepare a "signature dish" in just 45 minutes for the chef. I was left wondering what I would do in that situation.

Obviously, my stews are out of the question. Roasts wouldn't work either, and my favorite spaghetti carbonara would collapse completely if left for even a minute or two. There's nothing so nasty as slowly congealing eggy pasta.

Frankly, my first idea would be to simply make Ramsay a fried egg, or scrambled eggs, or an omelet, the best way I know how. For the first, by cooking the egg slowly in butter, and then dripping warm butter over the still raw yolk, and then salting only the white to avoid disturbing the yolk's color. The second over a double boiler, with cream at the end. And the last by rolling the omelet around the pan in that way I've never been able to manage.

But he'd probably have thrown those back in my face for being too unambitious. So after thinking about it a bit more, I hit on risotto with morels - and was gratified to see the chef serve a similar dish in the first night of the restaurant's "opening" later in the show.

Of course, by then I would have run out of time to make the risotto properly. Sweating the vegetables at the beginning takes time, as does the rice itself.

Well, better them than me. The difficulty of satisfying a real chef, even one putting on a bit of an act like Ramsay is, is too much for me. I'll stick to what I'm actually good at.

French toast for dinner
Raffi Melkonian at 04:33 PM
In The Whole Duty of a Woman from 1737, I find the following recipe for French toast. The entire thing is good (though necessarily simple) - but the last sentence is best. Breakfast for dinner is great fun.

"Having two French Rolls, cut them in Slices as thick as your finger, Crumb and Crust together, lay them on a dish, put to them a Pint of Cream, and half a pint of milk, strew them over with beaten Cinnamon and Sugar, turn them frequently until they are tender; but take care not to break them, then take them from the cream, with a Slice, break four or five Eggs, turns your slices of bread in the Eggs, and fry them in clarified butter, make them of a good brown colour, not black; scrape a little Sugar on them.

They may be served as a second Course Dish; but fittest for Supper"

A sticky problem
Raffi Melkonian at 08:39 PM
One of my friends in Paris has just finished his training as a boulanger - that is, a bread (rather than pastry) baker. For some really good reasons, he needs to get out of France, and we've been chatting about opportunities for him in the United States and in China.

But he's got a problem. As far as we can tell, no one has been able to duplicate the best Parisian bread baking abroad, despite herculean efforts. The most enthusiastic, like the excellent Bread Line of Washington D.C, have even tried importing their ingredients and ovens from France to close the gap - and yet, they still fall short.

Neither of us have any real idea why this is so. The best guess we've come up with is something about the water, which obviously can't be shipped from the motherland. But just yesterday, in the midst of some other research in the extraordinary culinary history collection at Harvard's Schlesinger Library, I ran into this excerpt from a late 19th century report on the bread of Vienna.

“The uniformity of the product demonstrates that the problem of making good bread has been solved. One wonders why such bread cannot be elsewhere obtained. It is know that efforts have been made to introduce the production of the Vienna bread to the public of other countries, but with indifferent success. The trained journey-man bakers of Vienna are sought for and obtained to serve in other capitals; but the bread they produce is inferior. Why have these efforts failed? Why cannot so apparently simple a process be communicated to others in such terms as to be followed?”

Same problem, different country. I wonder if I ought to be encouraged, since the French were apparently able to fix their deficiencies.

Criminal Pie
Raffi Melkonian at 10:58 PM
Two weeks ago, I asked whether people would feel cheated if a bakery sold customers Sam's Club or Price Club pies as homemade.

Eileen, of the blog Ambassador Boo, runs a bakery in New Hampshire. She wrote back noting an aspect of the problem I hadn't considered when I asked the question. People apparently have grown so used to industrially made pies that they disdain the real thing. As she puts it,

"At our bakery, we often end up with the opposite -- people come in, and they want a pie. And we say, Oh, we just made this lovely blueberry peach this morning, it is $20. And then they get all huffy, and say, "You know, I can get a pie just like that at Shaw's/Albertson's/Sam's for $3.95". It is hard to explain to those people that this is real pie crust, and made by hand, and etc.

"As we are the only real bakery in the area, most people usually buy it. But not all. One person one time came and bought a slice of pie (blueberry), ate two bites, and came to the counter and said, "This is the worst pie I have ever tasted. It is absolutely disgusting." And we were shocked, and offered her money back and a free other-dessert (she said no, which is weird), and asked what it was that was so gross. Tasted like dirt? Gross crust? And she wouldn't tell us! Just that it was horrible. Then she left. We tasted what she had left on her plate (not proper, but whatever), and it tasted great! Blueberries! Buttery crust! Yum!"

That, I think, is one of the sadder things about food that I've recently read. And yet, I know it's happening. People like the stuff that comes from a box, or a tin. They think it tastes right, somehow, and that the authentic product is the mockery.

Before anyone gets worked up about my elitism, I should say that to the extent these feelings are essentially nostalgic accidents, I don't think anyone should mind. I know that Heinz ketchup is sugary glop, but drowning some cheap fries in the stuff reminds me of the Friday evening hamburgers my family had when I was a kid, our only foray away from home food for the week. Those are evocative memories, and I don't mind the occasional culinary mistake to reach into them. But I think we've got ourselves a generation of younger people particularly who don't even know about the original article. That is to say, people who think the real pie tastes disgusting, rather than recognizing that what they're after is margarine and preservative taste. That, I think, is the worrying distinction - and is something that can't be addressed by well meaning state programs, but at home.

What I ate this week
Raffi Melkonian at 11:25 PM
It's June! That not only means that many of the summer vegetables are heading to the market, but also that heavy dinners sit too stolidly on the stomach to be comfortably eaten in the air-condition-less torpor of my flat. The solution is light, happy fare - like the two recipes I note below. As for my birthday on Friday (June 3), I had a pleasant lunch with some law school friends, and then stole away home for my real treat - a small linzer tart of home-made raspberry jam and short crust pastry.

Ratatouille - My mom's ratatouille is just a medley of vegetables turned quickly in some olive oil with lots of garlic, and then put into the oven until cooked. It's perfectly tasty, but I discovered this week that the traditional French recipe for the stew is actually rather more involved.

Specifically, a real French ratatouille is made by slowly sauteeing the vegetables in a pan over a low flame, starting with the hardiest of the ingredients and only adding the most delicate at the very end. This technique not only keeps the last entrants into the stew fresh tasting and crisp, but also yields a light, "syrupy reduction", in the words of Richard Olney - that is to say, a tasty sauce.

For my own version, I started onions and garlic, and then with a couple of artichokes, cleaned and turned with a paring knife, and rubbed with lemon to preserve color. Fifteen minutes later, the eggplants went in, with some extra olive oil, followed by some nice bell peppers and asparagus. Finally, I added four summer squash for a quick ten minute sweat. The result, cooled in the fridge overnight, and mandatorily lightened with some lemon, was extraordinary. The oven based home ratatouille is great - but this thing is something else.

Salad Nicoise - I read somewhere that Salad Nicoise never tastes quite as good at home as it tastes on a southern French beach, your toes digging into the warm sand. While that's true, I find it makes a perfectly nice dinner. The only really doctrinal ingredients are green beans (cooked for ten minutes in salted water, and then shocked in ice), those small nicoise olives, tinned tuna preserved in olive oil, and a hard boiled egg. Otherwise, let your imagination roam free.

By the way, the one thing that makes Nicoise better at home is that you can toss each element in dressing before plating. Bistros in a hurry pull composed salads out of the fridge, and drench them with dressing from on top. Not good.

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.