THE GURGLING COD

If you were born in the Gulf of Maine, Throw both claws in the air!

In a perfect world, this story in the Globe would be illustrated with  a picture of a lobster rocking a tatoo that read "Maine Thuggin'" or possibly a cute lady lobster in a MAINE Neighborhoodie. Sadly, no photoshop at the inn, but it is stll interesting to learn that

Under a new program that kicks off today in Portland, lobster dealers will be encouraged to tag the catch, identifying it as being caught in Maine waters. The plastic tags will hang from the claw knuckles and state simply: ``Certified Maine Lobster." On the front will be a picture of a lobster and a lighthouse; on the back, ``lobsterfrommaine.com."  At  a press conference,  Governor John Baldacci  will tag the first ``official" lobster, caught in Casco Bay.

At least at this time of the year, this bit qualifies as the kind of thing that makes you go hmmmm. Obvs, Maine wants to promote its indigenous product, and the Globe article notes "Like Idaho potatoes, Vermont maple syrup, and Florida oranges, Maine lobster has become a name brand." From my landlocked perspective, controlling this appelation seems a bit trickier, in that the idea of terroir makes less sense when you are talking about so much eau, rather than a patch of terre. For something less mobile, like naming the Bluepoint as opposed to Welfleet oyster, that makes sense, but its not clear to me how being caught by a boat out of Portland, rather than Portsmouth or Halifax, makes a difference.
A bit further into the article comes a clue:

Maine sells 60 to 70 percent of its catch to Canada, where much of it is processed and packaged as lobster meat, then sold back to US fish shops and restaurants as a ``product of Canada." (Canada has several lobster processing plants, which are subsidized by the government, while Maine has three privately owned plants.)

According to US law, retailers are required to disclose the country of origin for seafood, says Millar. But federal law also states that if a US product is radically transformed in another country, it becomes a product of that country. Hence, a Maine lobster sold to Canada where it is taken out of the shell, cooked or left raw, and then packaged is a product of Canada.

Viz the recent move by Whole Foods away from selling whole live lobsters in their stores, branding the unprocessed Maine lobsters as such might be a way to leverage the Maine Lobster brand to compete with processed lobster products produced in Canada. Watch this space for more deets, I imagine.
 

The Man Who Came to lunch

This is a business idea that I don't really have the time to develop, but given that the popularity of the Shake Shack rolls on like the Juggernaut, I think it could catch on. Very simple business model, low operating costs, and high volume potential. It is this: you create a system where aspiring patrons can hire Lawrence Taylor to cut in line for them. Really -- who is gonna fuck with LT? Also then, if you are a Giants fan, you can relive those glory years, and if you're not a Giants fan, I'm sure you still have questions for LT. (In addition to the fee, you would spring for LT's lunch, too.)

In a marginally more worthwhile vein, a hypothesis: Sunday Brunch is the most integrated meal of the week. In cities (Boston and Chicago come to mind) where generally most restaurants skew heavily either black or white, you tend to see larger proportions of black patrons in typically white-patronized restaurants at these meals. Speaking in gross generalities, the hung-over white childless twentysomething bon vivants seem to roll out of bed about the same time as the black folks are getting done with church (this is based on seeing stubble on the former, and suits and hats on the latter). This observation is likely not enough to bring about a thousand years of racial harmony, but I'd be interested to hear confirmations or denunciations of my theory.

Alimentary, my dear Buford

The Guardian digests Buford:

It takes a man with a large ego to accept one of my dinner invitations. Mario Batali, chef and co-owner of Babbo, Manhattan's most famous Italian restaurant is one of them. He came bearing his own quince-flavoured grappa. I took out my white, dense slab of lardo. He glanced down at it, his huge masculine frame rocking in a testosterone-busting parenthesis, before producing his own.

And it only gets better. (Hav, via Chocolate Lady.)

An idea

The Hav raises the persistent and nagging question of what to call people who like food, in lieu of the unacceptable f--die, which continue to sound like it refers to the preferences of the sort of patron brothel employees dread--closer to "shrimper" than to "gastronome." Allow me to propose "foodneck" as an alternative. I'm not making a  big push, just give it a test drive:

"My sister's staying with us on Friday -- she's a real foodneck -- where should we take her for dinner?"

Give it a try, and let me know how it works out for you.

Saxelby -- say it soft and it's almost like praying

The Cod spent formative years watching the Formaggio empire gobble storefronts on Huron Ave, turning it into Totebagistan's one-stop choice for fancy foods. The Cod also spent a deformative summer around the corner from the Essex Street Market, a period known as the "Midnight Dragon Era," after the niche market malt liquor we (four colllege kids subletting a one bedroom apartment) favored as a thirst quencher.   

Thus, I was interested when I heard about Formaggio's move into the Essex  Street Market for two reasons. One, Formaggio made its name selling cheese, not the dented cans and expired batteries that seemed to be the Essex market staple back in the day. Two: Generally, New York-based businesses colonize Boston, rather than the other way around (memo to New Yorkers--you can keep Todd English -- please).

So with a spare moment and the knowledge I could not get any sweatier, a stroll down to the Essex Street Market seemed in order. I could see how gentrified the ESM had become, and give FK proprietor Ihsan Gurdal a pound or a belly bump, revisit the 2004 ALCS, and invite him to NYC Sox stronghold Professor Thom's for a beer.

As you might have guessed, ESM is gentrified, (though the website needs updating), but not entirely--there are botanicas and clothes shops as well as fancy meats and cheeses. However, Formaggio is the second best cheese shop in the joint, with the blue ribbon going to Saxelby Cheesemongers. Even in its small ESM space, Formaggio is a bit overwhelming--they try to bring the best from all over the world, and the only point of cohesion is that it is all wicked expensive.

Saxelby, on the other hand, is Anne Saxelby, a former Murray's Cheese employee gone solo. She does American farmstead cheeses, and that's it. A focused, well-curated selection of interesting cheeses. If you like shopping at Other Music, you will like shopping here. And the logo is really good, too.

Somewhere, Roberto Clemente is uneasy

Chorizo is the new racing sausage for the Milwaukee Brewers.
Somehow, I'm not quite ready to salute this as the civil rights story of the year:

Chorizo, a tasty Mexican sausage, will join fellow meaty friends Hot Dog, Bratwurst, Polish and Italian as the newest member of the Klement's Famous Racing Sausages team at Miller Park.

Chorizo, who will be adorned with a sombrero and decked out in red, green and white, will be formally introduced on Thursday at a press conference at Miller Park.

Latino community leaders had lobbied the Brewers and Klement's to add a Mexican mascot. The unveiling is in conjunction with Cerveceros Day, set for Saturday night at Miller Park.

I hate to tell someone else how to do their job, but just how does a sausage mascot in a sombrero advance the interests of Wisconsin Latinos? The only way I buy a ticket to a Brewers game is if they introduce the sixth racing sausage: brooding, existential Boudin Noir. Boudin Noir chainsmokes and refuses to particpate in the race at all.

Quick Hits

Fuller reports to follow, but a few quick thoughts:
1) If I were a reasonably hot woman working as a server in a resonably hot restaurant in NYC, 20 minutes into my first shift I'd be on the sidewalk phoning Valierie Solanas, planning the re-launch of S.C.U.M. On the other hand, I might feel the same way if I were a lady hunchback working the lunch shift at a TGI Fridays in Alpharetta, GA.
2) The Union Square Whole Foods appears to have some sort of funicular to get shopping carts between its three levels, but I did not get to see it in action.
3) For non-Blackberry owners, some equivalent object to caress when Blackberry owners at your table are checking their messages at three minute intervals needs to be found. Early contenders are:
a) Refurbished Mattel Football  II video games
b) Those paddles with a rubber ball attached by a rubber band
c) A hedgehog to stroke and whisper to.

Lede of the year

In Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, a man’s soul is compared to an onion: many-layered, but ultimately hollow. (Scandinavians don’t boast the highest suicide rate for nothin’.) We don’t think that’s true of Al Groh. We think his soul’s more like a watermelon, and if you crack it open, there’s a Betamax tape in a plastic bag. And on that tape, if you manage to unearth a functional Betamax VCR, is a five second clip of Groh in a sleeveless sweatshirt looking right into the camera and saying “Get off my fucking lawn, kid” over and over for an hour.

Grantland Rice, eat your heart out.

Unsweet

It has, as Anchower says, been a little while since I rapped at you. More to come, including a post where I wonder if sharing a meal with me is like sleeping with Dr. Ruth. In the meantime, a very brief and ill-informed speculation about iced tea. Yesterday, I found myself in Madison Park with some,  but not a lot, of time to kill. It was hot and I was thirsty, so I availed myself of the non-burger line at the Shake Shack and got an iced tea. As you know, in some parts of the country the default state of iced tea is a Jarritosesque level of sweetness.* Something about the retro feel of the Shake Shack made me, irrationally, suspect the tea would be presweetened. It was not, which I prefer, but it did raise another question. Generally,  in the south, sweet tea tases like sweet tea, and what is called "unsweet" tea often tastes sort of skunky and yeasty, because it is likely to sit around while folks guzzle the sweet tea. However, the Shake Shack iced tea had the same not fresh quality, even though I imagine they sell it pretty fast. Is it a) impossible to make and store unsweet tea on a food service scale or b) does no one care what it tastes like or c) do restaurants generally just use crappy tea leaves?
*Evidently, the presweetened tea is a relic of the Depression--sugar sweetens much more effiiciently added to hot water than cold, so when sugar was scarce, people added it while the tea was brewing.

Don't Quit your Day Job

    Much of my July was like a muggier East Coast Shining, filled with day-job related wrassling with the history of the concept of authorship -- briefly, the Iliad is not by Homer in the same way that Digital Fortress is by Dan Brown. My interest lies in the middle, and involves people getting their ears cut off, but I've promised myself not to blog about work. Anyway, the FT, via TFS, is interested in the same question, as it relates to cookbooks:

Some of the most famous cookery writers in the US and the UK couldn't publish a usable book without extensive help. Of those who do write the first draft, about a third need substantial rewriting. This figure comes from a highly experienced source who has worked with many of the most famous namesin UK food publishing -and who stoutly defends the practice. "These people have something importantto contribute: their own unique way of cooking. Their recipes are original. The words are not; that's what we contribute."

Actually, chances are the receipts are not original. There are very few new dishes that emerge fully formed from the brow of their creator--99.9% of the time, a receipt is a refinement/reinterpretation of an existing idea. However, this notion of the receipt as the secret formula to be jealously guarded is popular--viz the video for Body Movin',  a Diabolik sendup where a French onion dip receipt is treated as if it were the launch code for Poseidon missles. No big surprise there, but this idea of originality does raise some useful questions about what cookbooks are for:

Not everyone in the field agrees. Jill Norman, long-time cookery editor at Penguin (she was Elizabeth David's editor) and now a distinguished author herself, would never have taken on an author who needed such substantial rewriting. "People who need this help should stick to cooking," she believes. If it's argued that their cooking is unique, she would want to see "how good they are". And there's no law that says chefs can't be good writers. Norman has recently edited a book (The Cook's Book, Dorling Kindersley) with chapters contributed by more than 20 distinguished chefs, of whom the great majority did all their own writing.

"Elizabeth David's editor" carries some clout with me, and the result of this approach to cookbook publishing would mean fewer cookbooks, which would not be a bad thing. Unfortch, as the article points out, the point of buying a cookbook is not to have the definitive minestrone receipt:

It's hard to understand the reticence about owning up to ghostwriting. If tennis players aren't assumed to be good writers, why should we expect that skill of cooks? The problem is that in our celebrity-obsessed age, readers of cookbooks don't just want recipes that work. They also buy into a dubious notion of personality. They're not just looking for minestrone, they're looking for X's minestrone. Eager to have their kitchen touched by his magic, they probably don't realise that authorship of the recipe is sometimes debatable. This question wouldn't make a bit of difference if the personal imprimatur of the celebrated author weren't the unique selling point of the recipe.

Actually, this is not the question. The question is why every proprietor of an eating place that does not serve hash browns expects/is expected to write a cookbook. For instance, I imagine that one of these days, someone will talk Tony Maws into writing a cookbook. Many of these bistro-influenced dishes will be similar to those in Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook. As a source of information about how to cook steak au poivre, Bourdain's book is manifestly inessential, as Rose's Lime observed. This information is widely available in cookbooks you already own--if you shell out for this book it's because you dig the way Bourdain explains how to cook bistro standards.

To this end, it might be more useful to think about writing most cookbooks as an enterprise more akin to recording an album of Cole Porter songs than it is like writing a novel.  It is a question of interpretation, rather than invention. I'm undecided whether this makes ghostwriting more or less acceptable.