THE GURGLING COD

Department of you say "Potato," and I say "Potayto"

Urban lobster?* A palmetto bug by any other name would smell as sweet. And probably taste about the same, too. Granted, Urban Lobster may not actually be a euphemism, but when they also make with the "urban mussels" served in a "fisherman's bag," no less, I'm thinking less "shore dinner" and more "under a table at Danceteria."

*"Urban" is one of the slept-on shibboleths of our culture. It rarely means what it means, that is to say, roughly "municipal." It either means in a positive valence "hip" -- at one point, there was a forgettable breakfast place in Chicago called "Hilary's Urban Eatery" -- they served chilaquiles, which made them hipper than  the Bus Stop Cafe a few blocks south. Or it means, usually as a circumlocution, "black" -- often modifying "schools." See also "inner city."

It's also hard out here for a Huckabee

I've already  heard some muttering that yesterday's NYT feature on Mike Huckabee, the newly trim gov of Arkansas, labored to find an angle on a feel-good story -- gov loses over 100 lbs, saves life, encourages constituents to do the same. But in Timesland, it is not so simple:

In the South, the fight against obesity is essentially a culture war. And while the campaign may have raised Mr. Huckabee’s national profile, not everyone here appreciates a governor whose policies include weighing schoolchildren and sending home report cards on their body mass index.

Mr. Huckabee, a teetotaler who now rises before dawn to jog five miles, has been accused of nagging the populace, banning birthday cakes in schools (not true, he says) and trampling the personal freedoms of smokers with an indoor smoking ban. While he says he uses the carrot, not the stick, to encourage better health, his virtue alone has a way of making people like Pearletha David, the owner of David Family Kitchen, a soul food restaurant here, feel henpecked.*

After the governor’s nutritional guidelines for school lunches took effect, one girl wrote a letter to him demanding “real food” like nachos and pizza. A columnist for The Baxter Bulletin imagined a future of diners picking at their “sautéed soybeans with flavor-free dressing” and discussing the criminalization of cheese curls.

Mr. Huckabee knows what he is up against, namely all-you-can-eat buffets, cheese grits and a local ice cream flavor called Woo Pig Chewy. One of his own family dogs is named Sonic, after the fast-food chain whose cherry limeades are favored by his wife, Janet.

To paraphrase Clara Peller, where's the Kulturkampf? The notion that obesity is part of southern culture is problematic. It is a national pathology. The author seems to hope to find militant southerners defending the sausage gravy spring, and finds instead a schoolgirl lobbying for traditional southern staples like pizza and nachos. To be sure, cheese grits, BBQ, and other regional specialties are calorie-dense, as opposed to NY specialties like, uh, pizza, bagels and cheesecake. I am not from the south, but I enjoy eating and cooking the food, and I will bet my copy of Charleston Receipts that it is shit like this - Cheetos you can pound with one hand while you steer with the other, rather than shrimp and grits that is making folks so fat. As the map indicates, the +25% obese states overlap with SEC territory pretty closely, but there is considerable regional variation south of the sweet tea line, and states in the icefishing belt with citizens who must be gorging on lutefisk and cheddar. Obesity is a national epidemic, and conceiving of it as an exponent of  southern  culture does no one any favors.

It's hard out there for a pimp peckish Yale undergrad

Farming, cooking, and eating sustainably means thinking more wholistically about the impact a meal has -- does it require pesticides? Are the people who produced it paid fairly? Does the harvest damage the landscape? Most important, will it inspire Yalies to drop rhymes that are no fresher than your average ho-ho? Alice Waters,  we are looking squarely in your direction:

One-eighth of you may have already heard the seminal rap anthem about Yale's Berkeley dining hall. For the rest, here's a catch-up: When Alice Waters's daughter Fanny came to New Haven, the famous chef spearheaded the Yale Sustainable Food Project -- introducing locally grown ingredients and training the college's kitchen staff to create the kind of dishes ordinarily found in three-star restaurants. Forget shell steak and dry chicken; we're talking primo organic shit here, man. The Wall Street Journal quickly called Berkeley the best dining hall in the country.

But of course: apres Waters, le deluge. The dining hall was so popular the ID-swiper guys citizens were forced to crack down and allow only true members of the college in. Seething, stomach-rumbling frustration ensued. And then the magic happened. Via MCs Furyus (Peter Furia '05), Fitzgeezus (Matthew Fitzgerald '04), and NuSonRize (Leveille McClain '06), here is "BK2Night":

You can stream the song here, or read the footnoted lyrics here.

DeHeinzificaion

I'm reluctant to share this, as it hardly rises to the level of cooking, but it a) tastes good, and b) is a way to whittle away at the tomato glut,  even as we make the transition to the all-meat diets of winter. A long day of attempting to gather converts to the Church of Ferdinand de Saussure left me with a thirst, and a desire to revisit Tartare on a Bun. The patties were in the pan before I realized we had no ketchup. I know that commercial ketchup is basically an oozy red crack rock of sodium and high fructose corn syrup, but I do like it on a burger. But this night, it was not to be. We did have a few tomatoes I salvaged from out back,* and of course we had mayonaise. Thin slices of tomato, thin layer of mayo on burger and on bun (English muffin, natch). It was a remarkable synthesis -- I'd bothered to get some decent beef, and the mayo was like Charlie Watts, tying the beef and the tomato together. If there are still good tomatoes where you are, I urge you to try this.

*Tomatoes, it turns out, do not flourish in a Waldorf school-style environment. They want discipline, or at least not to be left on their own all summer.

Put your state on your plate

Cool news out of South Carolina: Emile DeFelice,  has taken the Eat Local Challenge and made it the focus of his campaign for Commissioner of Agriculture.* They seem to take "Put your state on your plate" seriously -- in an unprecedented move, the heart of the DeFelice campaign appears to be a food blog, including such entries as "put my pork on your fork," and "put your soul in your bowl."** Puns aside, DeFelice seems to be the real deal -- he raises heirloom breeds of pork on an organic farm, and understands the office he is running for is one that involves promoting and supporting local agriculture. In a state where fealty to corporate interests is too often synonymous with good citizenship, this DeFelice will be fighting an uphill battle, but I wish him well. You can read more here, or break off a donation here.

*On the other hand, the incumbent Commissioner of Agriculture is evidently willing to rassle his Georgia counterpart for the title of "Peach State." I'm still in Emile's corner.
**Feel free to amuse yourself by imagining, with apologies to Parliament's "CC," a food blogocracy.

Frankblocking?

Something is rotten on East 18th that the Cod call smell all the way from the Upstate. A new form of chicanery -- Frankblocking. This is not, in fact, what might happen if you try to leave a sausage fest, but the more nefarious practice of deliberately torpedoing a known critic's dining experience. How else to explain the following:

Meals at Japonais were usually herky-jerky affairs, veering quickly from elation to exasperation and undercut by odd pacing and off-key service.

“Are you hungry tonight?” a server asked my friends and me. “You’ve come to the right place!” That statement struck a clumsy note in a restaurant going for glossy enchantment and charging $58 for slices of smoked wagyu rib-eye.

So did a comment by another server, who was steering us away from one of the desserts. “I don’t even know what a panna cotta is,” he said.

Either Japonais is recruiting its watistaff from Applebee'ses in the greater Youngstown area, or someone from a rival "invariably theatrical, obliquely Asian and ostentatiously huge" restaurant infiltrated the staff, and managed to wait on Frank, and drop the science, Bob Evans style. Given Bruni's identifiability,  it would be, at least, not hard for a) servers to know they are waiting on Frank, and b) for management to know who waited on Frank. Keen-eyed diners may want to look for the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner at Chinatown Brasserie.

Pizza Hut is Bullshit

    They are far from the only culprits, but seeing the sign for the new "Sicilian Lasagna Pizza" outside a Pizza Hut led me to an epiphany. The epiphany: Fast food is bullshit. Not that it is bad for you, or may contain bovine fecal matter, though those are safe bets -- I mean bullshit in the specific sense that the concept was developed in Harry Frankfurt's monograph, On Bullshit.* Bullshit, as Frankfurt explains, is different from regular untruth because of its relation to the truth. Lies misrepresent the truth; bullshit is indifferent to the truth. To skim the scum from the pool outside the rendering plant, strain it, bleach it and sell it as "Pure Leaf Lard" is to lie, or to misrepresent the nature of the product you are selling. Bullshit, according to Frankfurt, operates in a realm outside truth and falsity, where discourse displays a cheery disregard for actual referents. Frankfurt offers this analysis as a politically inflected polemic, a kind of Politics and the English Language, Rel 2.0, but the influence is more pervasive. It may be a result of the manipulation and adulteration of our food,** but the notion that the words we use to describe food refer to particular foodstuffs so defined by social convention seems to be losing traction. I saw a Seven-Eleven promoting some item called a "Bistro Griller"; the various staples of Mexican or Tex-Mex dining seem to exist as sounds without sense to combine on menus. Sicilian Lasagna Pizza may not be any worse for you than the Pizza Hut stuffed crust pizza that was so popular in the late 1990s, but it is worse for our culture. The same mental laziness that permits haphazard formulations like Sicilian Lasagna Pizza also permits haphazard formulations like "war on terror."

*Evidently, OB sold like hotcakes, at least by academic press standards,  leading to an amusing scenario where On Bullshit is Seattle in 1990, and other academic presses are looking for their own tiny and transgressive smash hits, viz Harvard's edition of Benjamin's thoughts on hashish.

**The beginning of the end may well have been when we, as a culture, agreed to extend the definition of apple pie to include chubby pop tarts full of unnameable slurry.

Retarded things are afoot inside the Circle K

Cat Cora! Krispy Kreme!! Kooky Kopy!

First Rachael Ray,  now Cat Cora. Evidently Sport is in charge of the alliterative talent at the Food Network. It is sort of sad that the FHM appearance is becoming mandatory for female TV chefs that did not work for the OSS during the big war, but in this case the text is more embarassing than the photos could ever be.

To most people, the local mini-mart is just a source of Squishees and amusing security-camera robbery footage. But Iron Chef America star Cat Cora proved that a convenience store can be so much more when she gustily accepted FHM’s culinary challenge—to prepare dishes worthy of a five-star restaurant using only the ingredients and equipment found in a Los Angeles–area Circle K. “I’m going to take mini-mart foods to a whole other level that has never been attempted before,” Cat vowed.

I would have to think that the interest in a "gusty" TV host would be limited, and largely confined to German speakers. But the copy fun continues:

Napolean Krispy Kremes:

Ingredients Vanilla ice cream, Krispy Kremes, whipped cream, cherry Hostess Fruit Pie, chocolate syrup, cashews

Cat uses just three Krispy Kremes for her tooth-rotting delicacy. “But you can keep going until it topples over,” she says. “It’s like Jenga.” Unfortunately, most Jenga games don’t involve ice cream, chocolate syrup, whipped cream and the sweet, sweet innards of a cherry Hostess Fruit Pie.

Upon completing this sugar-coma-inducing treat, Cat has proved herself more than worthy of the day’s convenience-store challenge. “After this,” the triumphant Iron Chef declares, “I’m going to look at mini-marts in a whole new way and go, ‘Wow, I could really do some good stuff with those Doritos.’”

Jam two scoops of vanilla ice cream into the doughnut hole. Spray on a layer of whipped cream, add a second Krispy Kreme, then repeat until you reach a good height. Top the creation with more whipped cream. Use the Hostess Cherry Fruit Pie’s filling as a topping. Drizzle on chocolate syrup and sprinkle on some cashews.

Somewhere, the Corsican tyrant is pissed that this Greek hoyden can't even spell his name correctly. For reasons beyond my imagining, I cannot post the foto here, but good to see Cat has the Global chef's knife for slicing through those Krispy Kremes.

Happy Labor Day

The Hotel X was a vast, grandiose place with a classical facade, and
at one side a little, dark doorway like a rat-hole, which was the service
entrance. I arrived at a quarter to seven in the morning. A stream of men
with greasy trousers were hurrying in and being checked by a doorkeeper who
sat in a tiny office. I waited, and presently the CHEF DU PERSONNEL, a sort
of assistant manager, arrived and began to question me. He was an Italian,
with a round, pale face, haggard from overwork. He asked whether I was an
experienced dishwasher, and I said that I was; he glanced at my hands and
saw that I was lying, but on hearing that I was an Englishman he changed
his tone and engaged me.
 
'We have been looking for someone to practise our English on,' he
said. 'Our clients are all Americans, and the only English we know is----'
He repeated something that little boys write on the walls in London. 'You
may be useful. Come downstairs.'
 
He led me down a winding staircase into a narrow passage, deep
underground, and so low that I had to stoop in places. It was stiflingly
hot and very dark, with only dim, yellow bulbs several yards apart. There
seemed to be miles of dark labyrinthine passages--actually, I suppose, a
few hundred yards in all--that reminded one queerly of the lower decks of
a liner; there were the same heat and cramped space and warm reek of food,
and a humming, whirring noise (it came from the kitchen furnaces) just like
the whir of engines. We passed doorways which let out sometimes a shouting
of oaths, sometimes the red glare of a fire, once a shuddering draught from
an ice chamber. As we went along, something struck me violently in the
back. It was a hundred-pound block of ice, carried by a blue-aproned
porter. After him came a boy with a great slab of veal on his shoulder, his
cheek pressed into the damp, spongy flesh. They shoved me aside with a cry
of 'SAUVE-TOI, IDIOT!' and rushed on.
-From George Orwell, Down and out in Paris and London

Now, we all know that Labor Day has about as much to do with labor as Boxing Day does with boxes -- nevertheless, as an endeavor, labor is far from obsolete. As we face increasing corporate consolidation, the right to collective bargaining, safe workplaces and so forth, becomes more and not less important. So, tip your waitress or bartender, or ask your cashier and bagger about their union the next time you go to the grocery store.*
*Of course, if you are shopping at Whole Foods or Wal-Mart don't bother.

 

Zen and the art of tailgating

The much anticipated first weekend of the college football season brings with it a new season of tailgates. In many venues, the tailgate is an occasion for conspicuous consumption, involving portable satellites, generators, custom grills and perhaps even a staff. In any case, restraint is not the norm -- any conceivable object that might bear a collegiate logo,  does, and a typical spread features about an acre of dips and grilled meats spread out with wanton disregard for cardiac and bacterial health risks.

And then there was the gentleman I observed yesterday. He had a full sized white Chevy pickup parked in a prime location. His tailgate repast consisted of a 1.75 liter handle of Chivas Crown Royal, in the velvet bag. That is all. The bed of the truck had that matte black spray-on liner, which set off the purple handsomely. From time to time, we are aware that more highly evolved beings walk among us. The gentleman who can subsist excusively on Canadian whiskey when both temperature and humidity are above 85 is such a being.