THE GURGLING COD

It is so on...

What with all the other irons in the fire, I failed to say anything about last week's  DI/DO piece on the newest option for grocery shopping in lower Manhattan. Greenmarket apostate Nina Planck is coming back with her own string of competing "Real Food Markets."  Fortunately a keen-eyed correspondent we'll call Addison pointed out a followup in New York mag. I am hoping this will be like the XFL to the Greenmarket's NFL, only more successful. Seriously, the Greenmarket model has much to recommend it, but especially with the reality of short Northeastern growing seasons, there is substantial room between the Greenmarket, and say, Pathmark or even Dean & DeLuca. One or two things worth noting: 1) The jacket in the NY mag foto must have come from Camille Paglia's yard sale.  2) Back in 2004, after her ouster from the Greenmarket, Planck wrote an op-ed in the Times, titled "How_the_Greenmarket_Went_Stale" If you have been fired, especially in a public and messy way, it must be nice to have this particular forum to tell your side of the story.  She concludes thus:

Right now, local farms are bursting with asparagus, watercress and rhubarb. The best cream and butter come from cows grazed on spring's emerald grass. Farmers want to sell these foods, and New Yorkers want to buy them. ANew York institution, once great, is failing them. Perhaps it is time Greenmarket itself had some competition.

Along the way, she mentions that she is not involved with any potential Greenmarket competitors-- a lot can change in two years, but it is convenient to have the chance to use the Op-Ed page to call for just the sort of business you wind up opening two years later. Not quite the same as digging up a 2004 Op-Ed from Mario insisting that New York needs a really expensive Italian restaurant, but still. Developing, as they say.

The grasp of a writer

As a public service,  The Gurgling Cod offers the following reader's guide to John T. Edge's review of Ruhlman's Reach of a Chef. John T. Edge, whose cardiac quintet was discussed in this space quite recently, is a standard-bearer of Southern culture.  Southerners have distinct ways of communicating, tropes which may be beyond the ken of the editors of the NYTBR. Clip the following sentences, which I am confident were cut from the original version of the review and insert them throughout, and I suspect you may come to a more candid appraisal of this tome:

Bless his heart.
Bless his heart.
Bless his heart.
Bless his heart.

In the parts of the world where sweet tea is served, this phrase can serve, a) as a mitigation for a straightforward condemnation, viz: "Of course, he does have trouble holding down a job, bless his heart." Or b) as a suffix to an innocuous statement indicating simultaneously the good will of the speaker, and the limitations/ wickedness/ general disagreeableness of the person in question. To demonstrate, compare the following passages:

Of Keller, his apparent muse, Ruhlman writes, "His cookbooks were so lavish that they were sometimes criticized for being too fine (and too big) to actually use. Like everything Keller put his hand to, they seemed sprinkled with magic dust and sold in big numbers." At first blush the sentiment registers as merely overwrought. And then you check the promotional material and realize that Ruhlman helped to write those books.

With:

Of Keller, his apparent muse, Ruhlman writes, "His cookbooks were so lavish that they were sometimes criticized for being too fine (and too big) to actually use. Like everything Keller put his hand to, they seemed sprinkled with magic dust and sold in big numbers." At first blush the sentiment registers as merely overwrought. And then you check the promotional material and realize that Ruhlman helped to write those books, bless his heart.

Like kirsch in fondue, a subtle, yet profound difference.

Red Eye Reading

For the return from SF, (trip details to follow) I managed to boost the food-themed NYT book review from a friend. I had ambitions of sleeping, but I figured the NYTBR would be good for an hour or so of taxiing, etc. Not so much. I don't read the NYTBR regularly, but with a few exceptions, it seems to be on a collision course with the book reviews in Entertainment Freaking Weekly. I'm not expecting 10,000-word essays from Gordon Wood, but too many of the reviews read like warmed-over press releases. In particular, Alan Riding's review of My Life in France I would be disappointed to receive from a sophomore. Here are the two key grafs:

In a foreword, Prud'homme explains that the book had been gestating since 1969, when Julia and Paul organized the records of their life in France between 1948 and 1954: hundreds of letters home, piles of black-and-white photographs (79 are in this book, many taken by Paul) and Julia's notes as she prepared her influential cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," published in 1961. But while she often talked about writing "the France book," Prud'homme recalls, it was only in December 2003, nine years after Paul's death, that she turned to him and said: "All right, dearie, maybe we should work on it together."

The result is a delight. On one level, it's the story of how a "6-foot-2-inch, 36-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian" — her words — discovered the fullness of life in France. On another, it recounts the making of "Julia Child," America's grande dame of French cooking. Inevitably, the stories overlap.

What follows is a summary of JC's career that could have been cribbed from Wikipedia. And that's the review. I checked the pagination to make sure I was not missing a jump. No discussion of JC's writing MLIF from beyond the grave, no hint of a more complicated life for Julia beneath these breezy interjections and reminiscences. I don't expect a book like this to be regarded like it is Lewalski's bio of Milton, but this is in Monheit territory. In an earlier Books of the Times piece, Grimes at least acknowledges the challenges of posthumous authorship, and tells a better story, but basically hews to the same formula. I hope it is nostalgia for a remarkable force in 20th century American culture that produces this tone, because both of these reviews have more to do with cheerleading than criticism, of a book that most folks off the record will agree is just not that good.*

*For those joining us late, my thoughts on MLIF are here.

 

SF Liveblogging (sort of)

The rumors are true--there are plenty of good things to eat and drink in SF. At the suggestion of Mr. Badthings, I decamped the hotel containing my putative reason for being in SF for the Ferry Terminal Market. It is like the fucking Oscars of artisanal food. Imagine a regular food court, but with every third booth selling estate-bottled olive oil, and you get the idea. To take the edge off, I prepared to deliver my paper with a half dozen oysters from the Hog Island Oyster Co., opting for the mixed selection. The Mad Rivers from Humboldt Bay, and the Olympias from Washington State were fabulous. Eating the first Mad River felt like jumping off of a pier into the ocean. The last selection, however, is what moved me to do a quick post from an extortionate hotel internet kiosk. The final oyster was a St. Simon, from New Brunswick. The New Brunswick they keep over somewhere north of Maine. What is the fucking point of putting an oyster bar next to the ocean and flying oysters from another ocean to serve fresh on cracked ice and seaweed? They tasted OK, and have not killed me yet, but this logic would suggest that somewhere in Missouri would be the ideal spot for your oyster bar, in that all oysters would be equally fresh in this equidistant location. I know these folks are far from the only ones perpetrating this lunacy, but seriously. One should not have to gesture out the window and say: "I want seafood--from that ocean."

His name is Frank, and he is funky

You can get the details here and here, but yesterday's DI/DO was a very special blessing. It seemed to be for the fans, and had the feel of an invite-only aftershow, in an alternate universe where Bruni is Prince. Not only the revolutionary review-in-the-form-of-fictitious-email-exchange, but also a just straight-up bananas super size Frank road trip. At a time when there seems to be some momentum building against the whole fast food establishment, does Frank jump on that bandwagon? Not on your chilidog. Instead,  he rents a Taurus, and vows not to return to Manhattan until he has pillaged every Rax, Sonic, and Popeye's from sea to shining sea. This indifference to the whims of the public is the mark of a true genius. It is easy to imagine this imagine this Frank 2.0  swanning around the office in a floor-length white mink, absently tossing his empty cans of Tab into the bin clearly marked "mixed office paper."

A San Francisco Treat

The Gurgling Cod, a native of Atlantic waters, makes first foray evs to the Bay Area this weekend. Details to follow, if they have the internets in California. I'll be showing Alice Waters my Frank Purdue tattoo on Friday, but otherwise the dining slate is wide open. Feel free to chime in.

Kimchi for the soul

Kimchi = laughs. It makes you smell like the Creature from the Black Lagoon--picante flavor, and Koreans take it very seriously, as seriously as short track speed-skating. There is a lot to like in this LA Times roundup, but beyond the obvious potential of space kimchi, spend some time thinking about those 300 kimchi-related theses getting written every year, and the refusal of the Korean scientific establishment to recognize the health risks associated with kimchi. Good stuff.

Hoffa Cupcakes

The most popular item on the menu at the Milford Baking Co. these days is the 95-cent "Hoffa cupcake," featuring a green plastic hand reaching up through chocolate icing and candy sprinkles designed to resemble earth.

It would suck to get killed by the Mob for being a union organizer, but it would also suck to become a Scooby-Doo villain posthumously.

Chicken, Burger, Pie, Donut

    These four items are not, in fact the Four Ninja Food Groups, but are, rather, the theme of four, count 'em,  four separate books on these topics published by Southern Foodways Alliance frontman John T. Edge. I've read the first three, and the donut book came out last week. It is a project both conceived and executed idiosyncratically. I came across Hamburgers and Fries in the library, and checked it out, but it languished in the queue on the nightstand, a victim of its small size as much as anything. Fortuitiously, Fried Chicken and Apple Pie arrived in the mail. I recognized the format, but was surprised to see that all three books had the same author. The books are designed to look like one another like Hardy Boys books, and each has "An American Story" as its subtitle.* Logically, it seemed to me that someone had had the idea to comisssion a series of books on classic American dishes, and have each one written by a relevant or at least plausible person, like the 33 1/3 series, or the recent NYPL series of small books on each of the seven deadly sins. I expected a parade of slightly implausible literary types taking a stab at their favorites: that guy from the Mekons on fried clams, some American Studies prof on the Reuben, Sarah Vowell on chocolate chip cookies, that kind of thing.

    But John T. Edge is made of sterner stuff. He does it all, himself. One would think that the punishing itinerary of heart-stopping delights would render him too fat to walk, see, or reach the keyboard,  but he appears uncannily slim in his author photo. Not only does he take the whole burden of explicating America's vernacular treats on his own shoulders, but he is distinctive in his approach. In the hands of most writers, especially the dude kind, these sorts of books would turn into quests, with records of how many miles were covered, how many cups of coffee were consumed in search of some elusive mythical roadside diner that served the ultimate deep fried ivory-billed woodpecker wing. Mercifully, Edge leaves the pith helmet and johdpurs hanging in the closet, and gives the impression of ambling, rather than questing.

    Along the way, he finds a considerable array of variation and adaptation. There are any number of places I've added to the list of things to eat the next time I'm within a reasonable detour (chicken and waffles) and a few I'll avoid (bean burgers of San Antonio). These books are reassuring evidence of regional specialties flourishing in the face of the chain restaurant onslaught. They are slight, octavos of about 175 pp. with narrative, anecdotes and receipts filling out each chapter. One could read straight through, or read a chapter at a time without losing much momentum. As a series, they are intended as much to please as to inform. It's hard for me to imagine anyone ploughing systematically through all four, but they are the kind of book it would be delightful to find in the guestroom of the home you are visiting for the weekend. I look forward to reading what Edge has to say on the donut kulturkampf.

*Though I see that Donuts are an "American Passion" instead. Developing.

A treat

And, possibly brought to you by BGH!*

*Memo to self: check dates to see if Olsen twins are young enough to have parents who drank BGH milk. But watch video again first. Thanks to cinetrix for finding this over at MollyGood.