THE GURGLING COD

Someone's in the kitchen with Foucault

New-to-me DC blogger Harmany Music wonders about receipts* and copyright. As I prepare to raise this very same question at my day job, and evidently unsuccessful  in my effort to delineate the difference between PR and journalism,  I welcome thoughts on how the concept of authorship applies to receipts. The category of the secret receipt, like Coke or Col. Sanders' eleven herbs and spices** seems worth considering, in that if receipts functioned entirely like copyrightable works, they would not ever need to be secret -- it would be absurd to, say, keep The Corrections secret, out of fear that it would be duplicated -- the whole point of authorship is to allow for copies to be produced, with the stipulation that you have the right to control the process. The end use of a receipt is different, in that it functions more like a printing press than like a book. One can produce an infinite number of, say Lobster Savannahs from one copy of the receipt, so in order to control the production of Lobster Savannahs, one must guard the ingredients, proportion, and process. However, and here is where it gets tricky, copying the receipt does not mean the same end product. Nobu could hand out its black cod with miso receipt in fortune cookies to every diner, but the vagaries of supply, technique and equipment would stack the odds against Nobu diners replicating this dish at home. A few thoughts to conclude:

1) Despite relatively pervasive awareness that much comes in what Pampille calls the coup de main, home cooks continue to fetishize receipts -- again, the best evidence of this comes in the persistence of the secret receipt, common to Coke and KFC, not to mention Mrs. So-and-so, who will not divulge her Oysters So-and-so receipt for the Junior League cookbook. An excellent example of this mentality comes in the Beastie Boys video for Body Movin', an hommage to Diabolik with a plot that revolves around the struggle over a Betty Crocker fondue receipt card -- in the last shot, we see the villain savoring the fondue he has prepared from the purloined receipt.

2) If it is not all about the receipt, what of the enduring popularity of chef/restaurateur cookbooks? Your food is not gonna taste like Mario's or Alice's but folks seem to like these books anyway.

3) Is anyone researching scribal publication in the context of cooking?

*That is to say, "recipe"; for reasons lost to posterity, and trouble spelling "recipe," the Gurgling Cod style guide specifies the older usage.
**Lest we forget, PETA wants you to know that KFC tortures chicks. <Image deleted due to teeming hordes of google fueled onanists with nothing better to wank to than some poor young woman in a yellow bikini outside a KFC. Like Billy Bragg says,  safe sex  doesn't mean no sex, it just means use your imagination. So keep your Noxema out of my bandwidth.>  Hard to pick a favorite here, though if you boil it down to making people fat, and  scalding chickens alive vs. causing activists to stand in snow in bikinis, I'll give the nod to the animal rights folks in this matchup. But speaking of the Beastie Boys, authorship, and PETA, what about this?

Sis boom blog

    I kept a recent post on relentless chef boosterism blind on the grounds that a little bit of cheerleading from the sidelines of Typepad or Blogger was amusing, but not especially worrisome. I certainly have my favorites, (Tony Maws, Dave Roberts, Stetsasonic and Five and Ten come to mind) and I'll mention them freely. However, if round one and round two  was holding up cards spelling J-O-E-L, round three is a PR marching band spelling out a flowing script "Robuchon," complete with downloadable menus.  Still, so what? Perhaps Robuchon is this blogger's Bynes, and this blogger makes it clear in one of the posts that she is a pal of  Robuchon:

Before we get to the main course, let me note I was indeed a friend of the house and chef was not only on premise, but actually served a plate or two. Consider this my habitual disclaimer* that accompanies my non-review reports.

However, if you follow the blogger's own link, a similar piece appears in the New York Sun, without, or as she might say, sans,disclaimer. Unlike readers of a blog, people who pay to read the New York Sun have a reasonable expectation of objectivity, and to my mind, this crosses the line. I am aware that this is a) not a first in the world of food writing, and b) not exactly Stephen Glass territory. However, like the guy pictured on the right, this is a cheerleader I'll have a hard time trusting in the future.

*The disclaimer is not to be missed. A morsel:

I do believe I gauge restaurants on a level playing field; it’s just not a field usually open to the general public.

Don't step to Jeffy

Via I dislike your favorite team. Get your Don't step to Zidane shirts here.

Extreme Theology

Jesus reviews His favorite flavors of Mountain Dew, via the Fiddler. Happy now? Go outside and run around, whyncha?

Special Health Update

Do not, repeat, do not, attempt anything as foolhardy as dumping a flat of cherry tomatoes in your cupholder and speeding down the road. In fact, do not attempt to consume any tomatoes until you have purchased the proper equipment. Before any summer meal,  make sure you have a Tomato Slicer, a Mozzarella Slicer, and a Kernel Cutter. Do not attempt to use your Tomato Slicer as a Mozzarella Slicer -- serious injury or death may result. Do not attempt to remove kernels of corn directly from the cob with your teeth -- serious injury or death may result. Do not, under any circumstances, consider purchasing a sharp knife from another vendor, and using this implement to slice tomatoes or mozzarella.*
*More on sharp knives, not to mention the Cod's very own pigskin preview, next week.

New York State Rest Areas

"They're not just for Cinnabon and anonymous sex anymore." That's what I imagine was the lead on the press release touting the farmers' markets at NY State Thruway rest areas. I am not sure how long this program has been in effect, but it was a pleasant surprise. As I-90 veterans know, beyond the insult of extortionate tolls and bad maintenance on the Mass/NY Turnpikes, there is the injury of  the entry/exit system of toll collection, which essentially forces the motorist into stopping at  rest areas and monopoly chains, rather than exiting the highway and foraging more or less locally.* Ask yourself -- when was the last time you saw a Roy Rogers in a location where it actually had to compete with rival fast food franchises? The actual farmers' market was not that exciting -- some faux granny canning stuff, indifferent baked goods, and, um, mangos, which I suspect may not have been a local item. But there were flats of grape tomatoes. If you have a long car trip over the next several weeks, I suggest getting a flat or two of cherry or grape tomatoes, and rigging up some container where driver and passenger can snack on them. (We used an otherwise useless indentation in front of the shift lever, which was nice b/c they were out of the a/c, and the sun kept them nice and warm.) You defininitely want to make sure you pick out any that have gone flaccid, and in a perfect world, you might even give them a rinse. In this situation, I felt safer ingesting farm residue than in eating food I'd cleaned in a rest area men's room. (Though a shot of fake Jovan musk from the coinop dispenser might have been a taste sensation.)

*Obvs, eating within a mile or two of an exit is a crap shoot, unless you are riding with an obsessive chowhound with an encyclopedic memory, but there is at least not a guarantee you will have a bad meal. To put it another way, Jane and Michael Stern have never rhapsodized about a Sbarro.

Hold the mucus, hold the vermin...

Special orders ain't disturbin'
All we ask is that you please have it your way, read our painstakingly worded mea culpa:

As you may have heard, Shake Shack performed poorly when it was inspected by the Health Department on July 25, 2006. There is no excuse for these results, and we have already addressed every point aggressively with the goal of getting an "A" on our re-inspection. The facts are not nearly as bleak as what you may have read or heard.

Operating a small, stand-alone establishment in a park is both a privilege and a challenge; we work hard every day to provide the cleanest possible environment for our guests, as well as the safest and most comfortable workplace for our employees. The major violations for which we were cited were either structural or operational. None found conditions of vermin, mucus, urine or feces.

In the course of  my day job, about once a week, I find myself  glad I am not president or dean of this or that university, even as I tweak my imaginary restaurant empire (the flagship is a white tablecloth place called Gout, since you asked). However, being a restaurant impressario that gets whalloped like this is just about as bad as it gets. There is no "quoted out of context" for actual physical filth. And generally speaking, when your spin is "the problem is systemic," you really do have a systemic problem.

Gimme a J...

If a cheerleader* is trying to get the fans spell Mr. Robuchon's first name, is there some special gesture she makes with her pompoms to indicate that there, is, in fact, an umlaut over the "e"?**
*Insider blog tip: If you must search the internets for an image of a cheerleader, make sure that "safe search" is on. Trust me.
**It is August, and most folks seem to be finding more entertaining ways to goof off than sitting in front of their computers, so I thought I'd try a Gastropoda-style blind item, rather than link.

Don't call it a comeback

Evidently, at least in Boston, Todd English is still red hot-- Boston.com, the Globe's web portal for those who want news, with out the messy ink and words of a newspaper, features a slide show of images from a press conference promoting Restaurant Week, and old Todd manages to get his face in more than half of them.* This is  the kind of thumbsucking provincialism that makes it hard for folks in the rest of the country to take Boston seriously. The shame of it is, there are a lot of new and interesting places to eat - Rendezvous in Cambridge produced one of the best meals I had all summer, and at least a half dozen places I didn't get a chance to try.
*Somehow, I suspect that Todd, with the more is more ethos documented so hilariously by Grimes, would enjoy the 18-layer burrito Taco Town sketch from SNL.

Cooking with Terry Francona

Read it and weep panic.