THE GURGLING COD

Sushistapo!

It's the suede-denim sushi police, and they've come to your house for your uncool nigiri:

It might seem like a fine point to the occasional sushi eater, but to the Japanese, it's serious business. So serious that the Ministry of Agriculture has created a kind of international sushi police who will go around certifying whether or not restaurants are serving "real" sushi or not.

It was stupid before, and it's still stupid now. To use bigger words, it reflects a failure on the part of the Japanese to understand the difference between the nation and the state. Leaving aside troubling notions of sovereignty, (you can bet that plenty folk would have their tit in a wringer if the US sent cheeseburger inspectors overseas), it is foolish for the state to arrogate the power to regulate the culture of the nation to itself. The state works through coercive power (penal, financial), or its threat, while culture tends to work itself out through taste and the market. I'd argue, however, that the kind of regulatory power the state claims with AOC labeling of one kind or another  is legit, as it refers to products, rather than dishes, and there is at least a semblance of a subjective standard. Also, and I make the point in the earlier post, to presume a transnational Platonic form of sushi is to stifle the development of new indigenous forms.  One might as well tell the finches to keep their beaks all the same, or send a delegation of English soccer officials to Sao Paulo to tell the kids to stop playing the jogo bonito quite so beautifully.

When we go home, we play some didge

The internets are falling all over themselves bestow a new Nobel Prize for outstanding achievement in grime on M.I.A., but this time, the internets are correct. In a better world, "Mango Pickle Down River" would have dropped in May, because it has summer anthem all over it, and food it is themed, keeping it out of the Silica Gel category. I know not of this Wilcannia Mob, but they sound sort of like the Pack and Musical Youth were on a Gulfstream IV that ran out of gas somewhere in the Outback. In an even better world, M.I.A., and not some moody bitch, would be getting the mad steakhouse chain money.

M.I.A.-Mango _Pickle_Down_River_(with_the_Wilcannia_Mob).mp3

Axis of Eatin', Bonus: Philadelphia

Like the 5th Beatle, the 4th Beastie, or the 3rd man in,  Philly steps up as the newest member of the Axis of Eatin'. Cheesesteak, the celebrated Philly staple, is available with extra echt, as Bruni details:

John’s is essentially a hut by the side of a busy road, and you can see the blue-and-yellow leviathan of an Ikea store rising not far away. There are no seats inside the hut: if you want to sit, you do so at a picnic table outside, or in your car. Above the hut rises John’s signature image: a pig with a checkered napkin around its neck.

and without:

As menu items wrapped in quotation marks often do, Degustation’s “cheesesteak” makes cheeky, Thomas Keller–esque reference to the real thing without ever running the risk of being mistaken for an actual hoagie. It comes on a single square of pain de mie slicked with olive oil and toasted on the plancha. Then it’s delicately layered from the bottom up with roasted tomato and red pepper, and a pile of thinly sliced rib eye that’s been cooked sous vide for two hours to a rosy pink rareness. Chef Wesley Genovart tops it with tiny onion rings and a chopped herb salad of parsley, dill, cilantro, chives, and chervil, and then he paints the plate not with Cheez Whiz but with a few dabs of a foamy raclette-ricotta emulsion.

I'd originally planned simply to condemn the drollery of the Degustation version as hurtling across the Spinal Tap frontier between clever and stupid, but what would be the point? The distance between these two sandwiches brought to mind a line from England, England, which has been a part of my day job recently. As the minions of a Murdochesque tycoon discuss producing a hyperreal version of England on the isle of Jersey, one of the consultants wonders, "Is not the very notion of the the authentic, somehow, in its own way, bogus?" He may have a point, when it comes to things like cheesesteak. If you have read this far, you probably avoid the Olive Garden and its ilk, but if the pursuit of the authentic, (a common small-c chowhound preoccupation), becomes an end in itself, it can come at the expense of good eating. I've had crappy BBQ at places that looked promising in terms of their remote location  and decor; the Cubanos I get at the Montrose are better than the one I had at Versailles, despite the lack of Bay of Pigs Monday morning QBs in the 02138. I am not advocating a flight to the food court, but rather raising the possibility that there might be such a thing as too much authenticity.

Axis of Eatin', III: France

The final member of the Axis of Eatin' appears in a cosmopolitan,* rather than a nationalist context. As we see from the sushi police, the falafel war, and even Gopnik's casual dismissal of Italian cuisine, food gets the blood up like nothing except maybe for futbol. And yet very few people eat with this kind of single-mindedness. There may be a Frenchy somewhere who subsists on Calvados and brie, but most of us partake of a variety of cuisines in the course of a week. Especially in big cities, these cuisines tend to cover a significant global range. Certainly for New York, and London to a lesser degree, the richness of the culinary landscape is a function of the diversity of cuisines available to the diner. However, generally speaking, conceptions of cuisine, especially as expressed in cookbooks, unfold along nationalist lines. Even the Wells and Clotilde cookbooks written up in last Sunday's Times acknowledge the tradition of French cuisine by revising it.

In contrast, the Ethnic Paris Cookbook reflects the Paris of everyday life.** With chapters on North Africa, Vietnnam, Japan, Africa, and Lebanon, the book reflects the cuisine of France's colonial past (except maybe Japan). At the risk of sounding like a total asshat, it is, perhaps the first post-colonial cookbook I've come across. Like the man in the white above, many of the things that make Paris Paris are not French.*** The design is a bit Putamayo for my taste, but the ideas are interesting. Presenting a handful of receipts from each of these culinary traditions creates an Epcot effect, but even setting aside the conceit of Ethnic Paris, there is something to be said for a cookbook with a few solid receipts from a variety of cuisines, rather than a shelf full of comprehensive ethnic tomes full of receipts you will never, ever, cook.

The dish that inspired me to start cooking out of this book was the Orange and Cumin Salad. The cinetrix and I enjoyed a similar salad at Cafe Gitane last summer, and had been meaning to work on reproducing it at home. Basically you toss orange segments with sliced onion, black olives and harissa, and serve on lettuce. Their harissa receipt I did not like as much as Didi's, but the next batch will be a synthesis of the two. It was a refreshing side on a warm evening, and would be a delicious counterpoint to grilled meats. If you know any young cooks who are graduating, and want to spread their wings beyond the New Basics, this would be a good place to start.

*Image from "From Homemakers to Corporate Mistresses." Thanks!
**New York, which has long embraced a more heterogenous self-image, got a similar treatment years ago in Molly O'Neill's New York Cookbook.
***The Don't Step to Zidane shirts may be gone, but it is still good advice.

Axis of Eatin', II: Japan

We return to our discussion of culinary nationalism with a look at strange things afoot in Japan. I started to post about this back when it happened but it is, perhaps newly relevant in this context. The sushi police are coming:

Officials of the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, claiming that some of the food served in Japanese restaurants abroad is not recognizable as Japanese, announced late last year that they planned to create a panel of food experts to travel abroad and inspect restaurants for authenticity.

Conservatively speaking, this is seven kinds of wrong. Most of all, the relation between the state and its culture that this posits is concerning, in that it suggest the government determines what are genuine exponents of a culture. It would be as if Oprah assumed federal powers, and could give a "Great American Novel" imprimatur the force of law. Even if one assumes that the government of Japan, or any other national  government, has the right to define official expressions of its culture, this question of "authenticity" remains wicked problematic. Obviously, the Aramark sushi I've been known to have for lunch in case of emergency might usefully be called "inauthentic," but any regional cuisine that has a global reach must a) adapt or b) wear out a lot of can openers. For instance, a chef could do any number of stages in France, then open a restaurant in California that would make the angels and Paula Wolfert weep, but without access to the fish species of the Mediterranean, there could be no "authentic" bouillabaisse in California. And so what? Considering that the French famously cannot agree on the definitive bouillabaisse from one village to the next, and have been known to fight duels over the constituents of a cassoulet, the notion of an officially authentic foodstuff seems foolish -- I would imagine that the sashimi in Kyoto is different from the sashimi in Tokyo, so which guy gets to decide if Masa, or the stuff in your supermarket's deli case, gets the seal? It seems as if taste and the market works pretty well to make these distinctions.

Axis of Eatin', I: England

Becks and Posh's St. George's day megapost dedicated to the proposition that English food is no joke is as good a time as any to tie up some loose ends involving food and nationalism that have been rattling around.
England:
"English food is no joke" is one of those assertions that by virtue of being uttered inevitably suggests that the opposite is true, like statements about the athleticism of stock car racers,* or Nicole Kidman's prowess as an actress. However, B&P lays out a pretty strong case. Beyond the points like the inadvisability of stepping to Fergus Henderson, there are celebrations of individual foodstuffs, and more global reflections, like the one that points out that Keith Richards eats it. To sum up: bangers & mash & heroin = eternal life.**

*Not sure how long this has been around, but NNDB, the source for the Cale Yarborough image, is a little bit creepy, in its inclusion of a datafield for sexual orientation. 

** Searching for images of Keith Richards is less NSFW than searching for images of Nicole Kidman, but in a way, the abundance of fan art devoted to making Keef look even more haggard than he is is more disturbing than a thousand blurry Blue Room pics.