THE GURGLING COD

Grocery Miles?

(I have no idea why I am suddenly drawn back to this platform, but here we are again.)

A lot of time in one place has me wondering about a way to quantify a concept I will call "Grocery Miles," b/c "Bougie Food Desert Index" sounds bad. Some places are relatively expensive to live; others are less so. I feel weird invoking the wisdom of the market like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had a scaly baby and named it The Gurgling Cod, but I think sometimes we forget that some places are more expensive than others because more people want to live there, because there is more stuff there. (This formulation dramatically understates employment/gentrification, which I am still trying to figure out how to account for.) In some cases, a place is less expensive to live because it is further from stuff people want to be close to. I am very lucky to have a comfortable and affordable place to live, but I do bark my shins, frequently, against wanting to cook stuff, and not having access to the ingredients. I recognize that this is a bougie issue, and I do live within an easy drive/reasonable bike/long walk of a full service supermarket, but there's lots of stuff they don't have. I guess one problem w/ this as a metric is that the list would be different for everyone, but I am curious about the idea of grocery miles, or how far you have to go to get certain items that are an important part of your cooking. My list might be something like good bread (90 minutes), gochujang (2 hours), Gruyere (45 minutes). If my time is worth something (debatable), the time it takes to make bi bim bap or French onion soup, compared to living in a city, is arguably like a tax that offsets the lower cost of living in the sticks. I can (and usually do) make do with what I can find locally, but it is something that I wonder about. Again, fortunate to have enough to eat, and a place to live, but I am trying to think about the way we talk about "cost of living" vs quality of life. 

Exactly where are we going

I have been watching enough TV over the holiday to develop a small crush on Lily. Also to notice that most advertisers have not adapted to the realities of the holidays, or anything else, during a pandemic. In an effort to keep up my holiday spirits, I picked up some Tito's. The little bottles had Christmas sweaters on them, so now I am on the hunt for a Barbie or GI Joe in search of a dirtbag makeover. 

But. There was also a tag on the bottle that said BRING THE TITO'S MAKE SPIRITS BRIGHT. Bring it
where, exactly? I brought some of the Tito's in a glass into the living room to drink while I watched the Koresh biopic, rounding out a holiday trifecta of the Richard Jewell and Unabomber seasons of Manhunt. But the label implied that I would be doing something more festive than that. During a pandemic. And making a decision likely to add to the 300k plus deaths we have suffered in this country from COVID so far. I guess it would be asking too much for them to put on a tag that says, DRINK TITO'S WHILE YOU WATCH BIOPICS ABOUT TROUBLED DUDES FROM THE 90s, but it did make me think on how much of the way alcohol is promoted in the US revolves around Festive Gatherings. More generally, so much of what we see on TV now presents a fantasy of a COVID-exempt reality that simply does not exist. Given what a tough sell basic public health precautions are, that seems pretty bad. 

 

The Pretty Good Sandwich

One of the things I have missed the most during the pandemic are sandwiches. Especially the ones that someone else makes for you. I have strong opinions on sandwiches as a rule. If you live in a place where Publix Subs stand at the apex of the sandwich conversation, you get homesick for other sandwiches -- in my case, muffalettas and banh mi, both of which I have painstakingly tried to recreate at home, with varying results. 

The bread is almost always the hardest part to nail. The just rugged enough muffaletta bread, the shatter of a good banh mi loaf are difficult to impossible to get right, at least in my experience. But we had some bias cut sliced pickles left over from another project, and I had a hankering for a cubano, so I took a stab at it. 

Almost everything about this sandwich is wrong. The one thing I did the way I wanted was the roast pork, using Janie Campbell's recipe.* It went downhill from there. Publix was out of Cuban bread, so I had to use seeded. The pickles I had were Mt. Olive, for Pete's sake. I 100% did not want to wait in the line for custom cut deli meat, so I grabbed prepacked Boar's Head ham and Swiss. Our sandwich press died, so I used two cast iron skillets. If I brought this mess to Calle Ocho, I expect that the people there would throw their tiny cups of coffee at me. On the night before the night before Christmas, in a weird and sad time, it was a pretty damn good sandwich. 

All the time, but especially right now, thinking about what is possible, rather than what is perfect seems like a way not to be so down at the corners of your slice all day long. Staring down a Christmas that will not look like any of the other 50 I have experienced, I hope I can keep this in ming. 

*I had to get a whole bone in shoulder, so I used half for the sandwiches, made saucisson sec out of the other half, and made the braising stock for the pork out of the bone, which was fun. 

No Joy In Whoville

 

(I wrote this right after Thanksgiving, and never found a place for it. Sharing it here now in the hopes that it will not be relevant next Christmas.)

2020, the year of the pandemic, has managed to be both incredibly sad and deeply weird. It’s not the biggest disruption, but as we roll into the Christmas season, we are staring down a bitter irony tangled up with a cherished Christmas tradition. Like so many things, The Grinch That Stole Christmas hits different in 2020. If you haven’t watched it in 11 months or so, a brief recap – the Grinch is a grumpy solitary creature who lives in the mountains with his dog, Max.  Down in the valley, the citizens of Whoville are getting ready to celebrate Christmas. Determined to put a stop to this, the Grinch masquerades as Santa, and with the reluctant help of the long-suffering Max, steals every material trace of Christmas from every house in Whoville, and carts it back to his lair. To the Grinch’s surprise, all of the Whos in Whoville, seemingly unphased by multiple B&Es in their town, gather, absent stockings, trees, or presents, in the center of town, join hands and sing Christmas songs anyway. The Grinch, moved by this spectacle, turns from evil to good, and plays Santa for real, returning all of the Christmas things to all of the Whos, and joining them for Roast Beast.

Even if you have seen it many times before, it’s a moving moment when the Whos gather and sing. This year, though, that moment looks like a superspreader event. One of the most notorious outbreaks from the early weeks of the pandemic came from a choir practice, and standing shoulder to shoulder and singing out loud is just about the worst thing you can do in the time of COVID.

What makes this irony even grimmer is that Grinch is just about the only canonical part of Christmas pop culture with a strong anti-consumerist message. I have a friend who is a pastor, and every year, he posts just these lines: “It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags.” Seuss’s poem continues: “Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more?” Seuss wrote How The Grinch Stole Christmas back in 1957, and the animated version voiced by Boris Karloff premiered in 1966.

Despite the enduring popularity of the book and the cartoon, Seuss’s Grinch does not seem to have done much to slow down the relentless commercialization of the holiday. Even a pandemic seems to translate into Black Friday starting around Halloween, and lasting until early December, when we will be bombarded with messages about LAST MINUTE DEALS. If you watch television, the idea that for those who celebrate it, Christmas might mean more than a Lexus in the driveway with a big bow on it in the driveway is hard to find. For Seuss, the “little bit more” that Christmas might mean is embodied in the moment where the Whos gather and sing in the town square. For anyone who celebrates Christmas, and is uneasy with the more commercial aspects of the holiday, moments like the Whos singing are what the season is all about. In 2020, this kind of effort to recoup the true meaning of Christmas would be reckless for all, and lethal for some.

Bythe time you read this, if you read this far, you will have made up your mind about the balance of risk and reward that you will choose for yourself (and anyone you encounter) this year. To my surprise, some of the sorrow I feel about spending this Christmas in a place I have never been for Christmas before, and far from friends, family, and traditions, has been mitigated by realizing I have to do much less than usual this Christmas. It’s a chance to heed the wise words of the Waitresses, who perform the only Christmas song I know that concludes with a reference to consensual and enjoyable sexual intercourse “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas / But I think, I'll miss this one this year." More broadly, reading a delightful essay by Alex Kirshner about why Christmas is the best day to be a Jew helped this lapsed Episcopalian come to terms with how to make the best of this sad and weird season. Still not sure what my plans are for the 25^th, except for eating a lot of oysters, but I know I won’t be doing much I don’t want to. There are a lot of things I will miss on the 25^th, but a sense of being shackled to what we always do won’t be one of them.

Chang and Anger

Hola. It has been a really long time since I rapped at you. Not a fan of this pandemic. Anyway, I have mostly enjoyed my few trips to Dave Chang restaurants. I have enjoyed cooking out of the Momofuku cookbook. I enjoyed the run of Lucky Peach and the associated cookbooks. I enjoyed getting to write about his TV show. I looked forward to reading his memoir. It was interesting to read about the struggles and growth of the Momofuku empire, but much more than I expected was about Dave Chang's brain, his depression, and his rage. A remarkable longform piece by Hannah Selinger captures the damage that rage caused to the people who happened to be adjacent to it. Go read it before you read this, because it's a much more important story than the one I am telling here. 

Selinger's piece caused me to reflect on two moments I am proud of, and a whole lot of moments I am not. The not proud points are moments where I have poisoned the atmosphere in my own house when things aren't going well in the kitchen. Throwing spoons in the sink, that kind of thing. The time I lacrossed a failed grilled pizza off the deck and into the woods. The proud moments are further apart. In about 1998, I was just getting into cooking. I was very excited to make Korean short ribs for my dearly departed friend Dave, and some other folks. One of the other guests was  Portuguese fighter pilot, who was on ecstasy at the time. (A long story, and not mine to tell.) Rolling Fighter Pilot volunteered to make the rice to go w/ the short ribs. When I brought the ribs in from outside. I discovered that RFP had made Portuguese red rice. Not at all what I had in mind, but I managed to say thanks and just go with it. It was fine. It was definitely better if I'd gotten mad and cooked white rice.  

The other one was more recently, and not long after I finished reading Eat a Peach. My partner had a birthday, and requested bone marrow pizza. (In part as revenge for my infatuation with this.) I have been making pizza -- white, margherita, pepperoni -- a lot during the pandemic, using the Roberta's dough recipe and a Baking Steel, and it's something I feel confident making. Getting the required amount of bone marrow turned out to involve a lot more bones than I figured, and to take longer than I figured. On the way into the oven, the whole thing went pearshaped, and what came out of the oven was half pizza, half calzone. 

Reading through Chang's memoir reminded me of something that had been haunting me since I read the Momofuku cookbook. Discussing oysters, after recounting a sleepless night after a service where Marco Canora ripped him apart for sending out a less than pristine oyster at Craft, he says "The big teardrop of juicy meat of the oyster is called the 'belly.' You do not want to puncture or pop the belly. (Whenever I see someone do that, I cringe; when I see someone at one of the restaurants serve a popped belly, I am powerless against the rage that overtakes me.)" Being stuck at home since March, we've ordered oysters from Island Creek or Rappahannock -- "for morale," as my partner likes to say. Ever since I read about Chang's oyster rage a decade ago, I have been haunted by the fear of a popped belly, as if Chang would manifest in our kitchen or picnic table and start yelling at me. I understand that being yelled at from a decade-old cookbook is not the same as being yelled at in front of a kitchen, but it gave me a tiny sense of how toxic this rage could be. 

To return to the pizza -- I realized the situation was not ideal, and not really retrievable that night, and I also managed to realize -- in part from Chang's memoir -- that getting angry was not going to improve my beloved's birthday. So I went with it. We each got a decent slice of the bone marrow pizza -- pretty good, BTW -- and we had the malformed calzoneish thing to pick at. It was fine, and I'll take another crack at the bone marrow pizza sometime, I guess. Make no mistake, Eat a Peach is not a self help book. And as the Selinger piece details, admitting the harm you have caused is not the same as making amends. Chang would not be the first to write a memoir full of examples of what not to do.

In a different context, I have been thinking for a while about messy men -- colleagues or friends whose anger or narcissism makes messes that other people have to clean up. Any chef book will talk about the importance of working clean, having your mise set, and cleaning as you go. There are not Beard awards or Michelin stars for husbands or fathers or teachers, but I am aiming to move into 2021 trying to work a little bit cleaner.