Pimenton

I don't always agree with Mark Bittman's recommendations (I am a little bothered by his "I don't care if something is done this way or that so long as it tastes good" approach), but I have to say that I did not know about pimenton (aka, smoked paprika) before his various recommendations. What a cool flavor. I think I'll try it on halibut tonight, and report back.

Odd scandal in DC

No, not a political scandal, though there are some of those about. Eric Ripert, the mastermind behind Le Bernardin, has been sponsoring a new restaurant in Washington DC. As Grub Street and the WaPo report, the chefs at the DC restaurant have been booted for behavior problems. Putting aside the question of what could possibly be enough of a behavior problem to cause a firing in the restaurant industry (in which, I hear, behavior problems are kind of par for the course), I noticed this follow up on Tom Sietsema's (the WaPo restaurant reviewer) chat:

Washington, D.C.: Tom,
Before your chat begins, I just wanted to say that Leo, Ricky and I worked incredibly hard this past year to turn the Westend Bistro into a major success. We cared deeply about the restaurant and strove for perfect food under difficult circumstances. In the end, The Ritz had other ideas about food and what it took to run a great restaurant. Eric Ripert's name was on the sign but the Ritz always called the shots _ for better or worse. So we parted ways. All three of us. I think it was best for everyone.
Robert Berry Former executive sous chef, Westend Bistro by Eric Ripert.
Tom Sietsema: Thanks for taking the time to write, Robert. I'll be interested to know where everyone ends up.
Interesting, interesting.
_______________________

Delicatessen

What kind of people go to restaurants like Delicatessen, which Frank Bruni gave zero stars today? I'd wonder why he was reviewing it, except that restaurant reviewers have an obligation to review popular places, but deep fried "rueben" fritters? Cheeseburger spring rolls? Fried chicken in a metal pail? It sounds like deli food interpreted by a drunken Scotsman recently laid off from a failing chippy.

Geniuses

Amazingly, every single one of our esteemed Senators, according to their comments at the committee meetings on the bailout plans, foresaw all these problems, and each was individually ignored by all the others. We're so lucky to have such geniuses in power.

Weekend Meal

I finally had a chance to cook on Sunday, after a week of late night meals in the office (disgusting, all of them).

For lunch, I mixed lots of ras al hanout with greek yogurt and slathered it all over chicken thighs, and then let loose my broiler on them. Voila. Pseudo-tandoori - a bright yellow, spicy, delicious kebab.

Dinner was a little more ambitious. I braised beef short ribs in a covered dish for six hours with wine (an oddly fruity American merlot, more on which later), mushrooms, celeriac*, and pearl onions. The meat, as it should, eventually melted into the sauce. Delicious.

My fiancee bought me Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques DVD's this weekend (which I'd been collecting by tivo'ing the shows on PBS). To celebrate, I made a creme caramel, finally getting the caramel right (I usually burn it) by following Jacques's advice. A note to self - creme caramel really needs vanilla, otherwise it ends up tasty like sugary egg. Aside from that mild setback, all was delicious.

Anathem

I finished Neal Stephenson's Anathem over the weekend. I liked it, though the best review of it I've read is a negative one, from Michael Dirda of the Washington Post. The story captures the imagination. The philosophy that litters hundreds of its pages is a comforting layer of intellectualism if you just want a story that sounds smart, and yet lets you dig in and think if you'd rather.

One thing that occurs to me, though - the avout are so smart (and, I guess, Stephenson wants everyone to realize that he is so smart) that their brains verge on acting on the story as a deus ex machina. Maybe not quite, but it is rather like the complaint that some have about the Eagles in Tolkien.

The confusing reality

I've been thinking recently about what one can possibly eat in a typical restaurant that doesn't fall afoul of the newest conventional wisdom on food.

Beef: It's produced by feeding grass eaters corn. So, no.

Chicken: Most chickens are raised in horrific batteries and doused constantly in antibiotics.

Pork: Pigs raised in small pens, rife with disease, and tasteless anyway.

Milk: From those corn cows, and also rife with chemicals.

Shrimp: Raised in cesspools of chemicals in China.

Tuna, both fresh and canned: Mercury, mercury, mercury.

Cod: Your next fish stick might be the last cod there is.

Vegetables: Not local, so massive environmental damage, and also doused in chemicals, and also totally tasteless (see "not local").

Tofu: GMO.

So what are we supposed to eat? Short of using places like Blue Hill as a cafeteria, that is?

The silver lining

The upside of sleeping on a pillow made of your suit coat under your office desk: I've still got enough money on my subway card for tomorrow.

Take that, MTA!

Citizen

My mother (finally) became a US citizen yesterday.  In November, she'll vote in an election for the first time in her life (Syria is not especially big on contested elections).  As with most things in my family, her celebrations here revolved around food.  A little after the ceremony, her and my father found themselves nibbling through some ribs at Red, Hot and Blue.

Thinking back to when I became a citizen about ten years ago, I remember finding the entire process extremely moving, both the image of all people of all nationalities coming together in the conference room we'd been herded into united in their desire for citizenship, and the exercise of putting into words by way of the citizenship oath what it means to become an American.  I am so so lucky to have become a citizen that day, and I'm delighted my mom has joined our ranks.

Burrata

I had lunch at La Masseria today (a consistently decent italian restaurant near my office). Apart from my excellent sea bass (with an astonishing wild prawn on top), I had burrata, which I'd never had before. If you want to make eating a large round of mozzarella any less healthy, you'd add cream to the middle of it when it's still cooling - and that, of course, is what burrata is.

EDIT: Also, it was $32, which I only realized when I looked at the bill a second ago. Ah, expense accounts.

Shrimps

I love shrimp. Which makes what I'm reading about shrimp in Bottom Feeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood more than a little depressing.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not much of an ethical eater, though I'll try if it doesn't inconvenience me too much. But, more and more, ethical eating, and vaguely natural eating (which I am interested in) intersect. To wit:

"According to Tamil Nadu's fisheries department, a dry pond should be prepared by spreading urea and superphosphate to encourage plankton growth. Once the poind has been filed with brackish water . . . it is typically covered with diesel oil . . . The water is then treated with a piscicide = a ubstance that poisons any competing aquatic life - such as chlorine or rotenone; the latter has been strongly linked to Parkinson's disease in humans. As the shrimp grow, the water is treated with pesticides and more piscicides, but by far the gravest area of concern is the use of antibiotics to ward of disease. (p. 158).

And, p. 170.

If the shrimp in your supermarket display case glisten unnaturally, or if they taste soapy even after being cooked, they have probably been treated with STPP . . ., the suspected neurotoxicant used to prevent drying. . . A grainy substance coating the shell could mean the shrimp has been treated with caustic borax.

Strawberries

When I talked about how much better fruits were in France, I meant everything. Peaches, strawberries, raspberries, and all the way down the line (though, depressingly, french fruitiers and markets have started to sell non-French fruits in greater numbers). But these strawberries are a pretty darned good example of what I mean - impossible red inside and out, and a flavor like the best jam, except better.

Take 'em out

The Washington Post is reporting Obama as saying a rather curious thing today. First, he excorciates Palin for mocking Democrats who supposedly want the constitution to apply to suspected terrorists:

Calling it (the writ of habeas corpus) "the foundation of Anglo-American law," he said the principle "says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, 'Why was I grabbed?' And say, 'Maybe you've got the wrong person.'

"The safeguard is essential, Obama continued, "because we don't always have the right person."
"We don't always catch the right person," he said. "We may think it's Mohammed the terrorist, but it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You might think it's Barack the bomb-thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president."

We'll leave aside the wisdom of using the "Barack the bomb-thrower" line. But the article continues:

[I]f the plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks are in the government's sights, Obama went on, they should be targeted and killed.

"My position has always been clear: If you've got a terrorist, take him out," Obama said. "Anybody who was involved in 9/11, take 'em out."

So, what happens if you "take out" Mohammad the cab driver, accidentally? Or are constitutional rights somehow less crucial when you're killing people? Of course, I have a lot of sympathy for habeas rights and so on - but you've got yourself some serious contradictions if you're ok striking people you think are terrorists with missiles launched by drones, but think that imprisoning people without applying controversial rights to them is a serious betrayal of American liberties. I've no idea where I come out on this, but one would expect the hyper thoughtful Obama to have grappled with the problem.

Les Fables de la Fontaine

We tried to get into Cafe Constant one night in Paris, and found ourselves at the end of a long line. "For two?", the waiter said? "No way".

So we wandered up and down along Rue St. Dominique and ended up at Les Fables de la Fontaine, a one michelin star restaurant known for fish.

The one thing I will say without equivocation for Les Fables - the welcome was without fault. We walked in late, at about 10:00 pm. We made no indication we would order a bottle of wine, or a big meal, and in fact proceeded to order only a main course. Although restaurants are in the hospitality business, we all know that a one michelin star establishment, especially in France, would feel entirely within its rights to get a little sniffy. There's wasn't even the slightest whiff of it.

As for the food, we have an excellent amuse bouche of a bell pepper mousse, and each of us had a piece of fish - my fiancee dorade, and me lotte. Both fish were cooked impeccably. But there was so much on each plate. Mushrooms and foam, and onion and mashes and vegetables and herbs. Each component was delicious, but by the end we were confused and baffled. The whole was entirely less than than its parts.

I'd like to back for a full meal. Maybe a real meal would have all built up to a crescendo to that final main dish. But I'd still have left off the foam.

Bourmoudienne

I've been re-reading Bourmoudienne v. Bush, the case in which the Supreme Court held last term that the writ of habeas corpus ran, in some sense, to Guantanomo. It's an important case, of course, but setting all that aside, it's a deeply compelling mix of history and law.

It's becoming clearer to me on my re-reading, though, that the history on which the Court relies is all rather muddled. It feels wrong, to someone familiar with the early modern era. Of course, to some extent that's because it was probably drafted by someone not terribly interested and based on obviously outdated textbooks, which couldn't possibly be the state of the art understanding of the relevant history. On page 11 of the slip opinion, for example, the Court cites a well known but ludicrously general "History of England and the British Empire", originally published in 1937 for the history of Charles I and the 1627 Petition of Right. I'm pretty sure that the current state of thought on that episode is something a little more sophisticated than "the King soon began to abuse his authority again, and Parliament was dissolved".

The stilted history particularly struck me in the Court's various answers to the Government's claim that because the writ didn't run to either Hanover or Scotland, it shouldn't run to Cuba. As the Court described the argument,

"The Government argues in turn that Guantanamo is more closely analagous to Scotland and Hanover, territories that were not part of England but nonetheless controlled by the English monarch (in his separate capacities as King of Scotland and Elector of Hanover). "

The court goes on repeatedly to discuss both entities as if they had something in common at the time of the founding, interspersing such oddities as Berwick upon Tweed and Guernsey in the mix. But these places really had nothing in common at all at that time. First, of course, no person was ever King of Scotland and Elector of Hanover at the same time. The Kingdom of Scotland ceased to exist in 1707 with the Act of Union, and the first joint King of Great Britain and Elector of the Holy Roman Empire, George I, took the British crown in 1714. Having conflated the timing, the Court proceeds to explain the English Court's reluctance to issue writs of habeas corpus against imprisonments in both Scotland (and Hanover) as driven by prudential concerns - "Given the English Crown's (an entity which, technically, didn't exist) delicate and complicated relationships with Scotland and Hanover in the 1700's, we cannot disregard the possibility that the common law courts' refusal to issue the writ to these places was motivated not by formal legal constructs but by what we would think of as prudential concerns."

While we probably can't "disregard" that theory, as to Hanover this seems plainly wrong. However one understands the status of Scotland in the late 18th century (and there is debate here - Justice Scalia explains on p. 22 of his dissent), there can be no misunderstanding the position of Hanover, which had literally nothing to do with the English crown, the Scottish Crown, the British crown, or anything else having to do with the British isles. Issuing a writ of habeas corpus in favor of a prisoner in Hanover would be something like having a US court issue a writ of habeas corpus in favor of a prisoner held by German authorities, on the basis that President Bush also happened to be German Chancellor. It's not a matter of prudential self restraint, but of formality - Hanover was deeply, utterly foreign, ruled by a German Duke who also was an Elector of the Holy Roman Empire, bound to the Emperor in some vague and difficul to understand ways, governed by a completely continental legal system. The English Courts would have had about as much luck issuing writs of habeas corpus to Frederick the Great as to the Elector of Hanover.

I realize that this is all very strange to the modern ear, but that's how people of the time thought. They understood the composite state, the personal union, and it would never have occurred to them that some court in a different country might somehow be able to compel the sovereign of some other country, who happened to be the same person for the time being, to do anything much at all.

Does all this undermine the Court's decision? No, not as such, I guess. But I wonder how much of the Court's history would still be standing if some enterprising person were to look deeply into the Court's various uses of European history in the last few years especially.

Pineapple

A friend of mine brought me a pineapple from Reunion, the French owned island, east of Madagascar. And then he showed me this novel way of cutting out the pineapple's eyes. A little time consuming, but great theatre. As for the pineapple itself, it was every bit the equal of the extraordinary pineapples we had in Hawaii last year.

100 things to eat before you die

The first clue that this list of 100 things you should eat before you die is too conservative is that I've eaten 94 of them, and one of them is a cigar, which I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.

Palin interlude

I wrote and erased a post yesterday mocking Palin as McCain's choice. Elite conservatives can be just as arrogant as elite liberals, after all. Frankly, I thought she wouldn't be able to string two words together.

Right, so - mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

PS: Oh, and Palin was too mean to Obama? I mean, really. The attacks gently mocked a hugely gifted man who's been convinced that he's the second coming and happily tells everyone so. Boo hoo.

Read Paul for the opposing opinion.

French poverty

One of the most powerful arguments that the American left has in favor of its agenda of increasing the Federal government's economic intervention is, in a word, Europe.  "Look", they say. "Europe spends much more of its people's money on public goods and social justice, and just look at the effects on poverty and on the country's infrastructure." 

I don't have too much of an argument on infrastructure.  European infrastructure is, in some ways, much better, though much of it in ways that aren't especially useful to Americans.  The French train system is so comfortable and fast that the only discomfort I felt while traveling the 800 kilometers from Paris to Marseilles in 3 hours was the embarrassment of comparing the trip to my commutes last month on the Acela, which takes the same time to travel half the distance for twice the price.  But where outside the Bos-NY-Wash corridor could we build such a train? Our country is to big too have spokes of trains coming out of New York or Washington, like the TGV emanates from Paris. 

But poverty and social justice?  As a starting point, I think it's clear that France has reached a point very close to the Laffer Curve - that is, broadly, the point where lowering taxes would raise more revenue.  I know for sure that if I was French, and told that I could make almost as much money by lazing at a prestigious government job rather than busting myself working for private industry, I would pack it in overnight and start planning my month-long Provence holiday. 

But are things really better for the poor in France?  I really can't tell.  On one hand, the government benefits are obviously more generous.  But on the other, I have never seen in New York, the jungle of poverty, scenes like I saw in the richest arrondissement in Paris during this vacation - poor men coming almost to blows over the grocery store's trash can, and two others trying to breath air into their friend's wheezing lungs after his emergence from what I took to be some sort of giant dumpster.   I would say that we're better at pushing poverty off to the unseen sides, except that Europeans have long claimed with pride that their superiority had something to do with the fact that you didn't see poor people on their streets.  Well, you do.  And they're more desperate than the ones on ours, in my experience on this trip and others.  So where does that leave us? 

Le Comptoir

As I mentioned in my post below, probably the most important trend in restaurant cooking recently had been the "gastropub" and its descendants.  Good food, in other words, in relaxed surroundings. 

Le Comptoir is one of the first French manifestations of that trend, a casual bistro attached to a hotel that serves updated but rustic food of the highest sophistication.   No, no veloute, but a braised, de-boned, pig's foot rolled in a web of pork fat, breaded and fried, a truly shocking package of deep fatty flavor.  As part of a tasting menu, it would have been overwhelming, but as a main course, cut through with a tartly lemon salad, it was magnificent.  One of the greatest single dishes I've ever had the pleasure of eating.  But, of course, my fiancee's osso bucco, braised then roasted, tinged with tandoori spices, set in a yogurty sauce and served with fresh garden vegetables, wasn't far behind.  Unlike most fusions of this sort, the tandoori spices almost made the meal taste more french, somehow more authentic.  Cheap (3 euro) glasses of wine complete an exceptional package - the fact that the restaurant is relaxed, and comfortable, and open for continuous service all day and even throughout August is just the cherry on top.