Mar 2
This is by Todd Kliman:
I watched tears streak down a friend’s face as he popped expertly cleavered bites of chicken into his mouth … He was red-eyed and breathing fast. “It hurts, it hurts, but it’s so good, but it hurts, and I can’t stop eating!” He slammed a fist down on the table. The beer in his glass sloshed over the sides. “Jesus Christ, I’ve got to stop!”
From the New Yorker:
Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer-prize-winning restaurant critic for the L.A. Weekly…is an extreme eater—organs, hallucinogenic heat, and parts still moving—and a devoted one. He visits three to five hundred restaurants every year. It’s a family affair. His children, Isabel and Leon, suckled on tripas de leche (small intestine filled with undigested cow’s milk) and Sichuan food from the San Gabriel Valley, beg to eat at home.
I’ll bet they do.
Feb 3
This demonstrates nicely how bad writing, poor research, and a slightly odd understanding of food combine to produce some truly ridiculous writing:
Inviting a partner to play a game with food can therefore be an erotic experience. It’s easily done. For example, forget cutlery and table manners and sink your teeth into a rib of beef or a shin of veal while gazing into each other’s eyes: meat invites us to abandon our usual obsession with hygiene.
Take a mental note: the more a person is inclined to dirty himself with food, the more passionate is his nature. At a dinner for two, a piece of meat on a bone held firmly in one hand so that it can be gnawed at detracts nothing from civilized man. On the contrary, it jolts him out of that somewhat affected composure which inhibits a healthy expression of his instincts.
So, let this be a homage to meat, for the role it plays in delivering metropolitan man from his excessive aplomb.
Jan 20
The following comes courtesy of this excellent article on bad food writing, passed to me by Signe Rousseau. It’s Paul Theroux on tomatoes:
Slicing a sun-warmed, home grown, vine-ripened tomato is, first, an aesthetic satisfaction, as formal as dissection. Once the skin is split and the tang of tilled soil released, the fruit offers no resistance to the blade, which slides unchecked, as if through the pulpy meat of a melon.
Jan 6
Every now and again, the FT publishes a letter from a bemused reader asking if the paper’s weekend columnist Tyler Brûlé is actually an elaborate hoax. But I’ve seen him on Bloomberg, so he must be real. This is real gem of food-related pseudery from a few months ago, courtesy of my Dad:
Breakfast is a finely tuned, precision operation in our household. While the menu alters slightly depending on where it’s being prepared, it’s almost always assembled by Mats (though my mother occasionally stands in when she’s visiting) and it tends to be a spare, brisk affair. Last weekend in St Moritz breakfast involved cappuccinos served in cosy yellow Dibbern mugs and Gipfeli (German Switzerland’s less buttery and more fluffy answer to the croissant) with apricot jam served on maple plates from the Tokyo retailer Play Mountain. When we’re in Sweden it’s cappuccinos in white Iittala mugs and egg, chive and Kalles kaviar open-face sandwiches on toasted Finnish rye bread served on small rectangular teak plates. With a bit of luck all of this is consumed on the jetty in the morning sun followed by a dip in the Baltic.
On Wednesday the breakfast routine in London started with coffees served in mugs from One Kiln ceramics in Kagoshima but there was a problem in the kitchen. The Poilâne bread that had been purchased the evening before at our local branch of Waitrose was still mushy in the middle and started smoking in the toaster. This caused a minor fuss but Mats and Mom managed to salvage some end pieces and breakfast was saved. As far as I was concerned the episode was over and I headed off to work.
continues ad infinitum ad nauseum
Kim Severson has Alice Waters over for lunch, and discusses Waters’s latest recipe book:
The book is deceptively simple. As she writes, ‘Good cooking is no mystery.’ Most recipes seem to be built on salt, black pepper, olive oil, fresh herbs and garlic. But they have to be specific kinds, like chunky gray sea salt for boiling water. ‘If you are not buying the right ingredients, this is going to taste like any other food,’ she said.
The attention to detail is maddening and enlightening. She offers lovely notes on cooking eggs, and her passage on serving fruit for dessert is so thoughtful and useful it reads like gospel. She devotes a page and a half to making bread crumbs properly.
Jeffrey Steingarten is probably best known for his recent sweaty-palmed ode to Gwyneth Paltrow. But as Vogue‘s food writer, he’s a fine figure of a pseud. This is from an article about what he eats in a week:
We had a guest from India. He’s quite old and he’s a very particular eater, so we went to ABC Kitchen for dinner. And he asked me, ‘Obviously the chef didn’t have to do much to the ingredients, so why do you need a good chef?’ I tried to explain how the cooking was not as simple as he thought it was, it just looks simple. We had many dishes: the Jersey tomato on bread, certainly the squash that’s sautéed with Parmesan.
I salute you, elderly, picky Indian guest.
Nov 18
The best food writing knows not to take itself too seriously. Calvin Trillin is amazing precisely because he understands that his various food obsessions are just that: personal enthusiasms for food that others may not enjoy as much as he does. He knows and cares a great deal about food, but wears this expertise and enthusiasm lightly.
It’s with great sadness, then, that I must include Michael Pollan, one of my food heroes, in this series. He has written many sane, sensible things about food. But the following is neither sane nor sensible. It’s from an astonishingly humourless article published in the New York Times titled ‘The 36-Hour Dinner Party‘, in which Pollan describes a series of meals cooked in a wood-fired oven kept blazing over a day and a half. It is a pompous and self-important piece of writing: you’d be forgiven for thinking it was about a religious experience.
8:30 a.m. The core group reassembles in the backyard for breakfast. Mike has coaxed the fire in the oven back to life. I’m starting to think of the fire as a creature with its own moods and appetites; now it needs to be fed. Chad has kindled a second fire in the pit and is toasting slices of yesterday’s bread. Melissa, meanwhile, has prepped an unexpectedly intricate yet goat-free breakfast: in individual clay pots, she arranged sautéed porcini on a bed of blanched amaranth greens picked from Mike’s garden. Over that, she cracked an egg and drizzled some cream. The pots go into the oven for several minutes, and when they come out she gives each a dollop of green-tomato chutney and dusts them with dukkah, an Egyptian spice-and-nut blend. … One of the best bites of the weekend, if not of all time, is of a slice of Chad’s toast spread with Mike’s cheese and Jenny’s apricot jam and then liberally sprinkled with dukkah. It takes a village to make some toast, apparently, but this is one sublime piece of toast.
9:38 a.m. We’re still at the breakfast table when Mike starts pouring glasses of Vouvray to mark the 24 hours that have passed since we lighted the fire. By now, having shared so much eating and drinking and cooking, everyone feels comfortable enough not to have to talk; we’ve all entered the same psychological space.
Nov 11
A key feature of any foodie pseudery is a fatal lack of perspective: a belief that choosing dinner is as significant as the most momentous political act. This article by Francine Prose likens religious belief with a taste for pork.
I understand why others find comfort in faith. Though I sympathize with their longings and sometimes envy them the consolations that sustain them, I myself have fallen away from religion—my own and everyone else’s. That’s partly because of the intolerance with which the world’s religions so often seem to encourage their members to treat members of other faiths. But if, however unlikely it seems, I ever find myself making one of those late-life turns toward God, one thing I can promise you is that this God will be a deity who wants me to feel exactly the way I feel when the marbled slice of pork floats to the top of the bowl of ramen or when the platter of sliced suckling pig arrives, crisp and moist, emitting curls of fragrance and steam that carry a message of bliss along the length of the table.
Charlotte Freeman waxes lyrical on making a croquembouche:
It was still a little lumpy, and there weren’t as many stringy glistening strands as I would have liked, but overall, it was beautiful. It was a beautiful croquembouche. … I’d finished my project. I hadn’t cried all day. I had arrived at a party like a person who can survive disaster with aplomb. I’d called on my inner Julia Child, and she hadn’t let me down.
That’s what Mastering the Art of French Cooking is really all about. It’s about poaching your salt pork for precisely the right amount of time it takes for American salt pork to resemble French lardons.
And that’s what Julie Powell’s project was about. It was about being determined enough to figure out how to split a marrow bone, or kill a lobster, or learn to make a perfect pâte brisée.
It’s not about easy. Triumph never is.
A moral lesson from a croquembouche. Bizarre.
Tangerine and Cinnamon 