A more formal review TK, but in the meantime, you should buy In Defense of Food. Michael Pollan's new book has the electrolytes plants crave. It also has quite a bit of good advice, despite an unfortunate tendency to reify the role of women as it relates to cooking. But more on all that soon.
If shitting gold or a roast that weighs more than the last three best actress winners does not appeal, there are some more reasonable ideas.* I stand by what I said last year, but would add a bit of a caveat by way of suggestion. Individually selected knives make better gifts than sets, and one way to make a single knife seem giftier would be to pair it with the new Peter Hertzmann jawn, Knife Skills Illustrated. Hertzmann has one of the more fully realized, yet slept upon food things on the internet. This book is useful, but it does seem like a case where the publisher's eyes are bigger than its stomach. There is an article or two like he does's worth of material, and then a lot of other stuff that pads it out into a book.
The stuff about choosing, holding, and using knives is useful -- imagine a world where Chris Kimball took antidepressants -- but the next 210 pages are how to cut individual vegetables and meats. Seriously. Here on earth, if you are unable to apply what you learned from cutting celery to cutting fennel, you probably should not be trusted with a knife anyway. To make matters worse, each item, mushroom, chicken breast, etc, is repeated for righties and lefties. Let's just say that the Cod has been shopping at the Leftorium for some time, and has, to this point, managed to extraopolate from the illustration to real life. I still have a hard time swiping my card at the gas pump, but the idea that the locations of the tomato and the knife would be exchanged, I've been able to suss pretty consistently.
All that said, the same things that make this a not-great value at $29.95 make it a nice gift -- while it is tough to figure buying it for one's self, but not hard to imagine wanting it for the stuff in the beginning. Paired with a decent kinfe, either utilitarian or fancy, it would make a nice gift for someone who has started cooking, and wants to get serious.
Last week, I issued an appeal for some Taiwanese guidance, foodwise, for the cinetrix' screening of Yi Yi for her students. Time, ingredients, technique all militated against any even remotely authentic night market feast, but it did give me a chance to work through a few things in a variety of Asian idioms. (And yes, I recognize that it's like serving schnitzel for an Antonioni movie, but what are you gonna do?
As a baseline for any kids who might be vegetarian or skittish, cinetrix wanted some cold sesame noodles. Not fancy, but they seemed to do the job.
For sides, I looked at Kylie Kwong's Simple Chinese Cooking. This is a big and handsome book from Viking Studio that I have unduly neglected since its arrival last winter. It is definitely on the coffee-table side of the spectrum, with proportions similar to Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, or other Alford/Duguid jawns. The focus is on tight shots of food, with none of the National Geographical stuff that many cookbooks in English treating non-Western foods feel obliged to include. One feature of the design worth emulating is that each receipt is on a single page, with an illustration facing. I can take or leave the illustrations, but it is a treat not to have to flip back and forth. (The Zuni cookbook, for all of its strengths, pulls the ingredients on one page, technique on another trick a lot.) The layout means that there are not that many receipts overall, and some surprising redundancies -- many more receipts for soft-boiled eggs than one might expect, for instance. It's certainly not the only Chinese cookbook an experienced home cook would want, but it would be a good first Chinese cookbook for someone looking to expand their repertoire.
From the Kwong, I made the spicy dry-fried green beans with hoisin sauce and garlic. Basically, she has you fry green beans in peanut oil, discard the peanut oil, and run them back through the pan with hoisin and garlic. These were tasty, if oil-intensive and one of those dishes that puts the lie to the idea that vegetables are good for you. On the plus size, if you do not have, like a Berkeley philosophy professor who grows perfect haricots verts for you, one at a time, this is a forgiving prep for the ornerier green beans one is likely to see this time of year.
I also too a stab at Kwong's celery, cabbage , and carrot salad. In the absence of decent lettuce where I am, I've gotten more interested in salads that are not lettuce-driven. This is one of those receipts that seems needlessly fussy the first time through, but once you get the basic idea, it would not be hard to improvise. The detail of a quick pickle of the carrots was a nice touch, though there was considerable vagueness in the directions about what to do with the pickling solution after removing the carrots. A bit refined to call a slaw, but that's the basic idea.
For the main, I absorbed the helpful suggestions from Emily Upjohn, did a bit of interwebs research, and then made something up. I diced and trimmed some Boston butt, let it marinate overnight in sherry, five spice, garlic, chilies, and molasses. I drained the meat, reserved the marinade, boiled it, and let the drained meat sit in the freezer for a while before I ground it through the bigger setting in the Kitchen-Aid. I browned the meat in a big skillet, added some of the boiled marinade, and the water from the shitakes I had soaking. I removed the meat from the skillet, warmed up some mushrooms and a head of bok choi, sliced horizontally and relatively thinly. I recombined the meat, and then tossed this with some thin Asian wheat noodles. I made a lot, and there was none left, so the kiddies seemed to like it.
Note: I wrote this last spring, and explored finding a non-Cod home for it. What with the new Waters jawn dropping, I thought I would share my thoughts on the last Panisse communique.
Thomas McNamee, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2007), 380 pp.
One of the challenges in reviewing a biography is to review the book, rather than its subject. As often as not, reviews of biographies become mini-bios of the subject, rather than critiques of a particular biography. When the subject is Alice Waters, the temptation to take this approach is strong, especially as musing on the Organic Revolution seems to be an irresistible topic these days. However, if you are reading this review, you probably know the Alice Waters story, at least in its broad strokes: Young woman founds small restaurant in Berkeley in the early 1970s, starts culinary revolution.
It might be easier to review Waters herself than this biography. Waters's impact on eating in America has been significant and positive. As a biography, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse is much less successful than its subject. Indeed, the relation between the book and its subject may tell us more about Waters than McNamee's text itself.
Readers who come to this book hoping for Bourdainian grit, or an organic and sustainable West Coast iteration of Just Desserts, the dishy Martha Stewart bio, will be disappointed. McNamee makes no bones about his friendly approach:
"Cristina Salas-Porras, at the time Alice Waters's assistant, first approached me about writing this book, presumably on her boss's authority, and in that sense, it is "authorized," but I have had complete freedom throughout. Alice herself has been extremely generous with her time and resources. I have had unimpeded access to the Chez Panisse archives at the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, and to archives stored at the restaurant. Alice has granted me many hours of interviews…." (xv)
Waters, indeed, is and remains an influential figure in the history of eating in America over the last thirty-plus years. As an interesting and complicated woman living through several interesting and complicated decades, one imagines a biographer might find more to do than buff her halo. Unfortunately, McNamee rarely reaches past this level. It would be hard to think of another contemporary biography that is as complicit in the mythology it seeks to describe.
So, it turns out that movie about the rat who cooks is blowing up like a dropped box of Ohio Blue Tips. Bourdain likes it a lot -- Ruhlman looooves it:
I've yet to see the movie, but I've read enough criticism and experienced enough art that I must respectfully disagree with Ruhlman. If I had one day to live, I'd rather re-read Samuel Johnson's life of Milton than any novel I can think of. In a more prosaic vein, most of the time, I'd rather read an Anthony Lane review of most current Hollywood films than see the film myself. These are examples where the deck is stacked in the critics favor, and there are cases where Ruhlman's strata apply -- speaking in very broad terms, it is not hard to think of a painter who contributed more to our civilization than Clement Greenberg has -- but the distinction Ruhlman makes points to a larger question in contemporary food culture.
In this context, the implicit assumption behind Ruhlman's distinction between the work of the artist and the work of the critic is that the chef is an artist. I don't think that is the case. Let me explain as carefully as I can -- I do not mean this in any sense as a slight against the work that chefs do, which enriches my life more than the work of painters, poets, or novelists. Our culture's tendency to use "artist" and "poet" as a term of approbation for hairdressers, bakers, and point guards makes it seem that asserting that someone is not an artist is to insult them, but it is a question of kind, rather than degree. Even for the most exalted chef, "artisan" seems more apt. For an artist, creativity, originality and self-expression is the 
fundamental issue -- for an artisan, these same aims apply, but they have to be balanced with consistency. When it is time to make the doughnuts, the people who pay your rent are expecting them to be like last time, and that applies to Fred the Baker at your local Dunkin as well as to Tom Keller's "coffee and donuts." Obviously, the degree of creativity varies over a range -- there is more art in a meal at Alinea than a meal prepared by a sandwich artist around the corner, but even at Alinea, Achatz, et al, are obliged to produce multiple iterations of the same idea, in a way, that say, Picasso was not obliged to keep banging out Demoiselles d'Avignons for another 75 covers.
It is precisely because the chef-as-artist formulation is dubious that people insist on it with such vigor. In a similar vein, you do not have to watch much NASCAR before you will hear someone assert that "there is no quesiton these drivers are athletes." You never hear commentators say that during NBA games, because no one wonders if basketball players are, in fact, athletes. I suspect that the idea of the chef-as-artist, inevitable, given their current veneration in our culture, may be at the root of the difficulty folks had in understanding why M. Vigneron is not a plagiarist.
A perusal of the latest in the David Kamp snob franchise has me thinking about snobs, and not just The Upper Crust. The Food Snob's Dictionary, which drops on 9 October, does the same things as the preceding Rock Snob's Dictionary and the Film Snob's Dictionary, but the similarities of the books points out some of the differences of these various snob constituencies. To put it in egghead terms, the media ecologies of these fields are configured differently. To put it in more immediate terms, why is there no pitchfork.com for food? And speak to me not of the eGully or the Hound. Not the same thing.
..aaand we're back to the normal foolishness. I'd been contemplating a Mad-lib style Bourdain-o-Matic,* so you can generate your own Bourdain posts on Ruhlman.com, for when Tony is eating animal faces and drinking obscure moonshines in some far-off archipelago with no wireless. And then Bourdain surprises by turning down the bluster, and dropping a solid handicapping of the contestants on the new FN show. There is something of the throwing the hand that feeds under the bus inherent when Bourdain does this kind of thing, but the Squeaky Fromme reset makes it entertaining:
This is not quite Joseph Mitchell territory, but it seems a bit more like Bourdain writing to entertain and inform, as in KC, rather than writing to burnish the Bourdain brand, which has seemed the case quite frequently since then.
*I had the idea independently, but YPR's Raymond Carver Mad Lib is a much more fully realized iteration of the concept.
Just when Alex Kapranos was sitting in the clubhouse, feeling secure in his hammerlock on the Most Disappointing Food Book of 06-07 title, a dark horse emerges and soars beyond this benchmark in an almost Beamonish way. I was looking forward to Twinkie, Deconstructed, in spite of its title. I am not much of a theory person, but my day job makes me leery of "deconstructed" as used in food writing. It almost always means "disassembled," and disassembled in a way that is complicit with the original system of constructing the dish. There are other folks more willing than I to take a crack at what deconstruction is, but even a naif like me knows there's more to it than reverse engineering. One does not deconstruct a carburetor, slap in new jets, and motor away.
That objection aside, I hoped that the conceit of tracing Twinkie ingredients back to their source might offer some insight into the perversity of this foodstuff, and more broadly, on how we eat. A snack-sized Omnivore's Dilemma, if you will. No such luck. Each chapter traces a specific ingredient back to its source. Given the rather engineered nature of the Twinkie, that usually means a factory. It would be possible for this format to be interesting, but almost every chapter narrates a tour arranged by the proprietors of the factory. Reading this book is like being trapped in sixth grade with a perverse teacher who takes you on a tedious field trip every day. The author makes no bones about his cooperation with his hosts in his acknowledgments, but the end result reads like a Jetsons-era hommage to the lads in the white coats who are making our lives better and better every day. One imagines that if the author read McPhee's Oranges, he would point out that Tang has more vitamin C. Twinkie, Deconstructed need not be Silent Spring, The Lunchbox Edition, but I can't think of another monograph with a subject as dubious that is as fawning. I suggest retitling it Twinkie: An Authorized Biography.
In the spirit of fairness, I should mention that I read The Secret of Scent just before reading the Twinkie book, and it did a good deal to illuminate its flaws. The cinetrix had The Secret of Scent out from the library, and I took a peek before it was to go back, and was surprised to be enthralled in a subject that was of limited interest to me. This book lives up to its title, and puts the reader in the middle of the ongoing effort to understand how we smell, and how we can synthesize smells. Even with a heavy smattering of diagrams of organic molecules, the science is accessible to a layperson, and the author's passion animates the science. I gather that the status of scicence in our culture is a major component of the new CJR roundup of food writing, which I have not read, but Grinder suggests that it suggests that Pollan is a bit of a Luddite. Possible, but these two books demonstrate how healthy a bit of skepticism is for the author of nonfiction, and how dangerous its absence can be.
If you've been looking for a reason to go on living, look no more. The Butch Cookbook is here on the way (via Chow):
Unfortunately, Lynch, Hardesty, and Ward are too late, as the butchest cookbook of them all already exists.*
*The NFL Family Cookbook is a surprisingly strong runner-up. "John Elway's Hamburger Soup" is all you need to know.
To paraphrase Merle, the internets let me down. Well, first all the money my employer squanders on visors meant that the library where I work let me down. I seem to recall that Angela Carter had some things to say about Alice Waters/Chez Panisse. Can't find where. If anyone can throw me a bone, much obliged. Also, if you want, now you can be my imaginary friend.
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