THE GURGLING COD

Corn on the 25th of July

I had a great meal Saturday night. The cinetrix and I and a friend we will call Xeres paid a final visit to Cod fave Cragie Street Bistrot before it moves out of its cozy 02138 digs, and over to the rougher precincts of Central Square. One challenge of writing about food, or at least the way I do it, is that the better the meal is, the fewer interesting things there are to say about it. I had the ragout of cocks' combs and local forest mushrooms with slow-cooked farm-fresh egg, Vidalia onion, and garden herb coulis. It was really good. For the main, I had the VT pork two ways -- suckling confit, and Alsatian sausage, with kohlrabi, kakurei turnips, pickled peanuts and ramp kimchee. It was really good, too. On the page, sometimes CSB dishes sound a little overinvolved, but on the plate, they make sense. But with really good food, unless one takes the exhaustive, fotocentric approach of Augie or the AG, it's hard to do more than sound like Chris Farley on the Chris Farley Show.

"Rmember, in Die Hard, when you blew up the terrorists with a flare?"
"Yes."
"That was great."

I hate doing this, so more often than I'd like, especially considering the small number of serious restaurant meals I get to eat in a given month, I end up not writing about places I like. Other than pointing out that while your favorite chef is in talks with his investors about opening a pan-Asian steak house in Dubai, Tony Maws is expanding his kitchen, and having a baby with his wife, there's not much to say. But the inbox provides a hook. The best thing anyone in our party had was the corn soup Xeres was kind enough to share. "Essence" is one of those words that I prefer to leave for the name of a magazine, and the festival in New Orleans,* but this soup is the essence of summer. Make it this weekend, and thank me on Monday. 

Chef Tony Maws Recipe for Corn Soup

We are serving this sublime soup made from from the very first-of-the season local corn right now at Craigie Street. We top it with crispy pork jowl croutons, but here is a fantastic version for the home cook. (Serves 6-8)
Ingredients :
12 ears of farm fresh corn
6 shallots, sliced thin
1 onion
3 cloves garlic
½ lb. butter
1 tsp coriander seed
1 small leek, sliced thin
2 bay leaves
1/2 fennel bulb
1 bunch thyme
1 bunch parsley
1 bunch marjoram
1 tsp fennel seed
salt & pepper

Method:

Remove corn kernels from cobs with a knife, cutting cobs in half and reserving kernels for later.
Scrape cobs with the back of knife and save all the "milk" you collect.
Place cobs in a stainlees steel, non-reactive pot with ½ the leek, 3 shallots, fennel, onion, garlic spices and ½ the herbs. Cover with water, season with salt and pepper, bring to boil, lower to a simmer and cook for 20-30 minutes. Strain this corn stock.
Place corn kernels in pot with strained stock. Add ¼ lb butter, remaining herbs tied in a sachet, and season to taste. Bring to gentle simmer, and cook for 20 minutes. Remove herb sachet and blend on "high" in batches, adding butter and seasoning to taste. Be sure to blend each batch for a few minutes to pulverize the corn kernels. Pass through a strainer or the fine disk of a food mill.

Serve hot with a sprinkle of chopped fresh chives.

Tony serves w/ pork jowl croutons, and if you have a pig around, it would be worth taking a stab at something similar.

*Nona Hendrix? Damn.

Sometimes I eat fast, sometimes I eat slow

The Gurgling Cod was gobsmacked into catatonic silence by the news of Slow Food's new corporate partners, which include Whole Foods and the Food Network.

To review, the Slow Foods movement has roots in anti-globalization, as much as epicurianism. In that respect, WF might be a good stateside partner, as both outfits seemed to have drifted from idealism (I may be thinking of  WF precursor Bread and Circus here) into a kind of conoisseurship that thinks it is idealism. If you lunch on a perfect Black Zebra tomato and buffalo mozzarella, you are a gourmet, not a revolutionary. No shame in that, but it's a difference worth not getting twisted.
 

The Food Net partnership is a little bit harder to explain. The glass half full guy  might point out that it's a partnership that will allow the SF message to reach a broader audience. The glass half empty guy will point out that this is a partnership that puts SF in bed with terrorist Dunkin Donuts pitchgal Rachael Ray, not to mention the guy with the hair that looks like frozen yak jizz who touts TGI Fridays. You ask me, bedfellows like that make for a long walk of shame over the Bay Bridge and up Shattuck Avenue, especially if you are a revolutionary.

Also.

(Steak N) Shake Shack

 Eater reports new Shake Shack uptown, with picture of storefront adorned w/ new logo. Like a couple of commenters, it reminded me of the Steak 'N' Shake logo. (Think Friendly's crossed with Johnny Rocket's, hold the seafood, and you are in the ballpark.) Maybe not actionable, but I thought Danny Meyer had people to look out for this sort of thing. Judge for yourself.

No shit, Sherlock

A slow week at the Daily Mail (via Radar) :
They say that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach but it seems the dining tables have turned as increasing numbers of men are taking up cooking in a bid to seduce women.

Dubbed 'Gastrosexuals' this new generation of men consider cooking more a hobby than a household chore and use their kitchen prowess to impress friends and prospective partners.

This is like writing a lifestyle trend piece on the annual salmon migration. Men are cooking for women because they think in will get them laid? You mean like the same reason they shave, bathe, and exercise?  Hell, I'd still be thawing out burritos if it hadn't occurred to me that if you cook for a lady, she's at your house already, obviating the need for any sort of "would you like to come in for coffee" lameness. And that was back when Gordon Ramsay was lugging a bus tub for Marco Pierre White. More recently, I doubt I could have persuaded the cinetrix to throw her lot in with me if it were not for the occasional fried sage leaf or other savory.

As a collateral phenomenon, this article raises the fear that "-sexual" will replace "-ista" as the hacky suffix that makes me wish I'd never learned to read.
Finally, the "report" the article refers to was commissioned by a food company, who also has grabbed the "gastrosexual" URL. I tried reading the report, and got only far enough to figure out that the Daily Mail reporter was significantly lazier than  Beetle Bailey.

Eldridge

"Instead of 'patrons,' we're calling them 'stupendous asshats of biblical proportions.'"

That Voltaires* it!

Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden? That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves.Call them the lazy locavores — city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Mr. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs.

As the noted philosophe would say if he were alive today, "Il faut (pay somebody else) cultiver notre jardin, (while we screw around on our macbook)."

*And now with Chris Ware!

The Day of the Locust

A lede, or a cry for help, from the WSJ's Ramond Sokolov?

Political commentators are busy analyzing and psychoanalyzing the presidential candidates' words for hints about the real Barack Obama and John McCain. We gastronomers have a better way of penetrating the campaign spin. We take the time-honored approach of that proto-food-blogger Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), who said: "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are."

Either Sokolov is protesting Murdoch's takeover of the WSJ through the canny subterfuge of writing the tritest ledes imaginable, or this this is his way of reaching out, of saying that he's tired of writing about food. If this copy landed on my desk, I'd check to make sure the author hadn't hung himself from a light fixture in his office.

Also, Obama's endorsement of Topolobampo, in 2008, has me clicking over to read up on the Libertarian candidate for president. This place was always overhyped, and my two experiences eating there suggested that it stopped being relevant about the time that Horace Grant left the Bulls. I suppose Alinea would not help with the whole "effete" thing, but a candidate who is about hope and change should be able to come up with a more cromulent answer than a long-in-the-tooth haute Mexican joint.

In the latte ghetto

It seems to be the time of the summer when folks are hot and looking for an appropriate way to get bothered. It could be Obama NYer cover, or if Jezebel is the future of feminism, or if 20 year olds at NYU are the future of literature, or it could be the ethics of ordering coffee drinks. Generally, there is controversy about ordering a so-called "ghetto latte" -- ordering espresso over ice, then adding milk from the milk provided to improvise a latte. Evidently, because this is less expensive than a regular latte, some shops frown on the practice.
A more specific dustup happened involving a shop near DC called "Murky," devolved into threats of dick punching, and blew up like a Macy's balloon on the interwebs.
A couple of thoughts*: Milk is not free, and I can see how a coffee shop proprietor might be upset by people buying a cheaper drink, then using the milk provided as a courtesy to simulate a more expensive drink. I'd be mad if people passed on the cream of tomato soup at my restaurant, then made their own with ketchup and creamers. However, and no one I've seen has pointed this out, while the free dairy available at Starbucks and the like is a courtesy to the customer, it is also a convenience to the proprietor, in that it means the patron, rather than the barista, is responsible for adding cream and sugar, if desired. If this "ghetto latte" business is such a problem, have people ask for cream or sugar when they order. It was not so long ago that at least in New York, and at most Dunkin's, you had to work hard to get them not to add milk and sugar to your coffee.
But I really don't care, as long as I don't have to wait too long for the iced coffee I like to drink about 50 weeks out of the year, and said iced coffee does not taste like ass. What I do care about is this expansion of the term "ghetto" when it refers to something besides an actual ghetto. It's fucking tacky. It's not "ghetto" to steal milk from a coffee chain, or to sneak a Baggie full of jello shots into the club -- it's ghetto to roast to death in your own apartment because it is not safe to open your windows.
*Caveat -- I do not believe in milk or sugar in coffee, and think that people who order coffee drinks while regular people are trying to get coffee should be put in a special line behind the people buying scratch tickets at the convenience store.
To cool off, a story about free milk and a cow:

(Michelob) Ultraviolence

Are these the Last Days, or is it just another Guiteau Monday? (Via Goldenfiddlr.)

A Peach grows in Brooklyn

 I'm looking forward to Peaches. Not the one who lived with Feist, but the new restaurant in Bed-Stuy. It does not look as if it will change the face of dining in New York, but it interests me in a couple of ways. Most notably, it's clearly Southern inflected, but unlike some places in the very same metropolis, it does not seem to be doing a cutesy and overwrought version of that idiom. I'm eager to try the watermelon and country ham app., and I imagine it would not be the kind of place where the servers would be required to say "y'all."

The other ish comes up in a broader context of gentrification. TONY touts the opening thus: "The lineup will be market-driven (so no promises that you’ll find those fried green tomatoes on the menu if you make the trek out to do-or-die territory)..." which elicited the comment
“do or die territory”? are we really still saying that? While I’m happy to see some new businesses livening up the neighborhood, I’m disappointed that old prejudices and uninformed assumptions are still alive and well.

It raises a few interesting questions. My first encounter with the phrase "Bed Stuy - Do or Die" was when Spike Lee used it to welcome Flava Flav to his neighborhood on the B-side of the 12" of "Fight the Power" (also worth digging up for Flav's thoughts on George Michael's R&B Grammy. It also comes up on Gang Starr's "The Planet." It's ambigious, as it suggests pride in the effort it takes to live there, but does also suggest the violence that was endemic to the neighborhood.

Things have changed in Bed Stuy since then, or at least there was no calamari with aioli or sumer squash salad in the offing back in Radio Raheem's day, and there is now. It's a small thing, but in an age of Neighborhoodies and Cafe Press and suchlike, the politics of the neighborhood nickname are interesting. Sez Wikipedia, in 2005, someone launched a campagn to replace "Bed Stuy - Do or Die" with the less catchy "Bed Stuy - and proud of it." The question I have is is this Bed Stuy makeover a legitimate effort by its residents to make people cognizant of a new social reality, or is it part of a gentrifying campaign for the benefit of Park Slope economic refugees? On a related note, if you're a white guy who went to, like, Oberlin, and you and your wife buy a brownstone on the fringes of Bed Stuy, are you allowed to say "do or die"? If there's arugula on the menu, is the restaurant "do or die territory" at all?

I welcome answers to these questions, and will offer by way of extrapolation from my own home town, that I curse the day the publicist was born who came up with "The Ladder District" as a name for parts of the Combat Zone and Downtown Crossing that suggested fewer hookers and black teenagers, respectively, and more "small plates" and blueberry mojitos. For a control, when Savin Hill gets gentrified, it will be interesting if the architects and such continue to refer to it as Stab and Kill.