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Posts from the ‘foodie pseudery’ Category

Foodie Pseudery (41)

The lament of the woman with two kitchens…

I have two kitchens. For most of the year, I cook in an Upper West Side apartment, in Manhattan. It was designed in the eighteen-nineties and is probably best described as a landlord’s misguided attempt to lure tenants with horizontal evocations of the upstairs-downstairs life. The ‘public’ rooms, meant to be seen and admired, were large and well proportioned. The ‘private’ rooms, out of sight off a long back hall, were for the most part awkward and cramped, and perhaps the lowliest room on this totem pole of domestic status was the kitchen, where your cook, emerging each morning through the door of a tiny bedroom—in my apartment, it opened between the icebox and the sink—was expected to spend her waking hours.

… there was no way to expand my kitchen to accommodate my own moment …

… I am consoled, however, by my other kitchen. It is the ‘please come in’ room of the Umbrian farmhouse where I work, and cook, in the summer—a much more satisfying image of the way I like to live.

Foodie Pseudery (40)

A frankly bizarre interview with Nigella Lawson:

Nigella Lawson bites her bottom lip as she snatches a giant knife off the counter with the stealth of a schoolgirl up to no good. Swiftly, she lops a loop of fabric off her curve-hugging purple dress.

The blade nearly grazes her jugular.

“The microphone got caught in my dress,” she explains, batting her eyelashes coquettishly as if to make amends for doing something naughty.

“I took the impatient and slightly dangerous way out.”

Impatient. Certainly. Dangerous. Perhaps a bit. Add to that larger than life with star wattage that could light the fire under a rocket ship….

A hurricane of hips, boobs and hair, the British food babe tosses her head and unwraps her black wool coat. It slinks off her shoulders like a dressing gown, instantly transforming the culinary space into a boudoir and underscoring why she’s famous for making food sexy.

But before getting down to the whisking and sprinkling of cooking Mini Macaroni and Cheese All’Italiana, a recipe from Nigellissima, Lawson sets her famously ample bottom into a chair so a makeup artist can smooth the winter’s kink from her appearance.

Foodie Pseudery (39)

The chocolate, it speaks:

‘”Alice knows chocolate. It speaks to her. We’re lucky to have her as a translator,” Lydon wrote to me. “Alice’s cocoa brownies changed my life.”‘

With grateful thanks to Sue Quinn. All submissions more than welcome.

Foodie Pseudery (38)

From the New York Times. Again:

It is a sinister dish, this ziggurat of bread, steak and foie gras, cloaked in black like a treacherous peak on the road to Mordor. At the base is a hulking crouton, topped by filet mignon, both slaked in butter; then comes foie gras; and finally all is drenched by a slow-moving sauce of bordelaise, truffles, veal stock and Madeira, which lends a sweetness and tang akin to balsamic vinegar. It is heavy, hobbling, a prelude to gout, an anachronism and a thrill.

The restaurant is called Le Philosophe:

Afterward, there will be enormous profiteroles, shrouded in chocolate sauce, with a rubble of half-burned hazelnuts. … Better is the apple tarte Tatin, made with a wink at Jacques Derrida, with a round of pâte brise (which my table took for a shortbread cookie) in lieu of a proper crust, and caramelized apples and apple butter sloping down the plate, as if poised for a getaway.

One wall is covered with black-and-white photographs of French philosophers: Montaigne in his ruff, Simone de Beauvoir in her chignon. Name them all and Le Philosophe’s owners, Amadeus Broger and Jack Wu, will comp your meal.

Thus far no one, not even a visiting French philosopher, has succeeded.

Foodie Pseudery (37)

This comes courtesy of Signe Rousseau. It’s by Yotam Ottolenghi and although I’m a huge fan of both him and his restaurants, this is really ridiculous:

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Foodie Pseudery (36)

This is by a man with a ‘spinning axis of eros’ who lived, for a while, ‘a feckless carnival’:

Soothed by its musky light, I’d discover a vividly perfumed circus that needled me with pleasure while letting me be invisible. If I loved the olive stalls, the chickpeas and fava beans, and the charcutier’s stand with its carnivore’s curtain of dangling brick red chorizos and its satanically handsome butcher, it was the fishmongers of this port city at the door between the cold Atlantic Ocean and the warm Mediterranean Sea that truly fascinated me. I could study their lavish and mysterious offerings for hours, and every day I’d come across a kind of fish I’d never seen before—science-fiction-strange goose barnacles, or scarlet scorpion fish. Though I didn’t know it at the time, slowly but surely, the market was healing me, a just-turned-30 writer living in Paris in the 1980s.

Foodie Pseudery (35)

This is from a New York Times review of Ganso, a new Japanese restaurant in Brooklyn:

Some ramen broths detonate at first spoonful, then fizzle out halfway through; others start off meek and turn carnal. Ganso aspires to the latter. After my initial disappointment, I kept eating, idly, expecting nothing, and as I dragged up broth from the bottom of the bowl, the flavours began to deepen and assert themselves. What I had thought nebulous took on a distinct point of view. But some of my dining companions never got that far, abandoning hope a few spoonfuls in.

No MSG is used, no artificial flavor boosters. And no condiments are on the table. (A house-made chile sauce is available on request.) There is an austerity to the proceedings, a sense that something is being asked of us, the diners, as well. Patience, perhaps.

Foodie Pseudery (34)

The strange power of Lobster Thermidore:

It was time for us to cook a lobster and join the rest of Maine. I wanted to connect it symbolically; I would knit together past, present, and literary past pluperfect.  And I’d finally learn what Lobster Thermidor tasted like.

Foodie Pseudery (33)

This is from a hive-inducing article on the ‘new gastronauts’ in London from the Telegraph:

He looks at the menu. ‘It really irritates me when people don’t spend time looking at the menu. In France no one speaks until they have studied the menu. I can’t bear it when people talk before ordering.’ I ask him what he is looking for in a menu. ‘A balance of flavours. I want to be experimental but I also want to match the food up so that we have a full culinary experience.’ I tell him I am happy for him to order for me. He chooses the cuttlefish risotto, rabbit salad, mozzarella plate and a courgette salad and then photographs it on his mobile when it arrives. ‘I photograph everything I eat,’ he says.

Foodie Pseudery (32)

Gilt Taste’s series, ‘The Art of Plating’, is a foodie pseud’s joy. This is from an article on Wylie Dufresne’s rib comet:

For the placement, we call that a schmear—taking a quenelle, something very symmetrical, and grabbing the corner and destroying it. We’ve messed around a lot with putting something on a plate, and then moving or changing it, and we like it when it can give the dish a sense of motion.

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