THE GURGLING COD

Over the River and through the woods, to Irving St. we go?

I guess you have to move back catalog, and I guess it's harder with a dead cookbook author than with a dead rapper, b/c you can't release posthumous duets and stuff, but still, kind of a weird move from Knopf:

Yep, that's a banner advertisement on the online version of DI/DO suggesting that the answer to your Thanksgiving agit is... Julia Child? This is not quite like having Martin Luther celebrate Mass, but it's a headscratcher. Child dropped one (2 volume) cookbook that changed everything, and had a TV career that was even more infulential. TV chefs have to publish cookbooks b/c people want to buy them. Her bibliography reveals some essential titles, and some far less so. If Julia Child is the Wu-Tang Clan, then Mastering the Art of French Cooking is clearly her 36 Chambers, but there are some titles in the list that are more akin to Raekwon solo joints. The Way to Cook may be more of an Iron Flag, but I've never felt obliged to pick it up, what with a shelf full of books covering similar generalist territory. 

So, yeah, "Traditional roast turkey" is sort of the opposite of what MTAOFC was all about, but curiouser still, the livery of the Knopf advertisement, steering people toward Julia's Way to Cook, is the iconic fleur-de-lys and whatchamajig of MTAOFC. 

I have been thinking about icons and the wonkiness of our affective attachments to them at my day job, and this feels sort of similar. Anxious thanksgiving hosts fly to the pages of DI/DO in search of succor, and see the familiar face of Julia Child, click, and feel better. I would be sorry if this became a thing, as it works to reduce Julia to something like a posthumous career as a soigne 1-800-BUTTERBALL hotline. The essence of Julia's achievement was that she challenged home cooks, even as she made them feel they were up to the challenge. Situating Julia as the answer to Thanksgiving agit makes her more akin to a culinary Xanax, which is a shame. 

The Paula Deen affair - what happened on Saturday?

One funny thing about the aforementioned Severson Lady & Sons reax story. The lede: 

SAVANNAH, Ga. — The line of Paula Deen fans waiting for her restaurant here to open grew throughout the hot, muggy morning Saturday.

And there is a picture, see left. Meanwhile, on the same day, the folks at Eater ran this lede: 

The media firestorm continues to swirl around the now ex-Food Network personality Paula Deen, and the usually bustling scene at her Savannah, GA restaurant The Lady and Sons is nonexistent. Eater sent a photographer to scope it out, and above and below are photos from mid-day on Saturday. It is a ghost town.

And a picture, see right. Did folks suddenly have a crisis of conscience around lunch and decide to eat elsewhere (there are better restaurants in Savannah than Lady & Sons, but it has an Ozzie Cansecoesque relation to its sibling up the coast). Something seems not to add up. Were both pictures taken on the same day? 

The Paula Deen affair - some tips for journalists, esp @kimseverson

Speaking of  Paula Deen, the NYT reaction piece was a disaster. The way Kim Severson chose to cover this story was to interview people waiting to get in to Lady & Sons. On its own, this is a sort of interesting sidebar, but not the way to, you know, gauge a broad response to the Deen kerfuffle. It is tantamount to covering PEDs in baseball by hopping in a boat and interviewing the kayakers in McCovey cove hoping to snare one of Barry Bond's taters. 

And the Times social media crew did Severson no favors. The headline in the paper was 

On social media, it became 

Because the line outside Lady & Sons = the South. I'm no Foghorn Leghorn, but there is more to understanding the South than interviewing obese Ohioans waiting to get at the fake Southern buffet.

Frank Bruni: murderesses and strippers, oh my!

So, while "Didn't have to read no Bruni" would be a line in the Cod's reboot of "It was a Good Day," we noticed folks in our feed making approving mentions of Bruni's current "Sexism and the Single Murdress." I can save you the click and tell you that he explains to us that there is a double standard in the way the media covers defendants in violent and sensationalistic murders, and moreover, slutshaming is a thing that happens:

But we know this: the double standard concerning men’s versus women’s sexuality not only survives but thrives, manifest in the enduring notoriety of “Foxy Knoxy,” whose memoir was published on the same day last week that the ABC News special aired. Keep the rest of her story the same but make her a man in the midst of erotic escapades abroad. Are we still gawking? Is ABC trumpeting Diane Sawyer’s exclusive sit-down with the lascivious pilgrim?

It's important to recognize double standards that inflect our understanding of gender. At my day job, I spend some time every semester talking about the words "Coquette," and "Rake," and usually most of the kids get it before I've finished explaining, because, they, like, live it. 

But good for Bruni, in that decrying slutshaming in the media is progress from someone who decided it would be fun to make fun of strippers in one of his final NY Times reviews, including an encounter with a different Foxy:

Meet Foxy. When I visited Robert’s on Valentine’s Day in a mixed-gender group (not all that unusual at the restaurant), she approached our table to hawk neck and shoulder massages, also $20 apiece.

“Foxy,” I began, then stopped myself, wondering if I was being too familiar. “Are you and I on a first-name basis, or should I address you as Ms. Foxy?”

“You can call me Dr. Foxy,” she said.

“Is that an M.D. or a Ph.D.?”

“Yes,” she answered.

The doctor coated her hands with moisturizer and, less seductively, antibacterial gel. She knows how to make a guy feel special.

Bruni continues, and it gets worse:

The guy in question was one of my companions, whose collar she had already spread so she could get at his skin. She told us that she used to work at Scores, a disclosure that raised an interesting question. Is there a strip club arc of professional advancement, with the Hooters overachievers graduating to Scores and the Scores valedictorians to the Penthouse Executive Club?

Haw, haw haw. Valedictorians - get it? Finally:

Remembering my mission and the dictates of journalistic accuracy, I asked them how to spell their names. Although Indica no doubt deemed the question curious, she was too smooth a pro to let on.

But Brianna seemed rattled.

“Two n’s,” I said, “or one?”

She stared at me blankly.

“I never thought about it,” she confessed. “You know, it’s not my real name.”

I couldn’t have guessed. With a job like this one the learning curve is endless, and it takes you in directions you never expected to go.

So, we should respect female murder suspects, and respect their sexuality, but by all means, let's haul out tired stripper cliches. Granted this review ran in 2007, and one hopes that Bruni, like the rest of us have grown up a little bit. It is a) worth noting that the fellow getting likes right now for sticking up for murderesses used to get paid to make fun of strippers. And b) as good a time as any to revisit the Bruni Digest's take on this review. 

 

 

(Sm)okra and boubon, oh my!

Props to Rick's Picks for snagging the number one spot in the DI/DO gift guide. That said, and Rick is like a brother to me, The Cod cannot endorse the Smoky Burb. Love pickled okra, love bourbon, but some pleasures are meant to be enjoyed separate from some other pleasures. 

Pete Wells: are you familiar with Padgett Powell's recent novel, The Interrogative Mood?

Pete Wells, did you know that your recent review of that Guy Fieri restaurant is the fifth most e-mailed NYT article right now? Is that because many people enjoy how you structured your curbstomp of a review as a series of questions to the proprietor? But that some people thought it was elitst?  And did you know that #teamdonkeysauce might be trending on Twitter soon? 

More importantly, are you aware that there are those who have conducted similar prose experiments on a larger scale? Have you read The Interrogative Mood? Were you aware that Padgett Powell has written a novel that consists entirely of questions? Would you be interested in reading a novel like that? 

In a different vein, do you think this is the first review published in a major NY publication thus punctuated since Lester Bangs' classic "Sham 69 is Innocent"? Are you familiar with this review? Did you know that Bangs did the thing you did w/ Guy Fieri and question marks, except with Sham 69 and exclamation points? Are you familiar with Sham 69? Do you think they would enjoy Guy Fieri's restaurant? Do you suspect that Guy Fieri might play "Borstal Breakout" in his kitchen? Or is Fieri's populism utterly notional? Would you like to hear my favorite Sham 69 song? 

 

Please Kill Me: The Christopher Kimball Story

The NYT profiled joyless food mandarin Christopher Kimball. Not exactly a puff piece, but tough to figure why to bother with Kmball in 2012.* Even tougher to figure is this quotation: 

The food writer Francis Lam told me: “There’s always been something punk rock about Cook’s Illustrated. It spoke to me as a young culinary-school student, because it was all about the food. No cool-looking people, no rustic farm tables — who else is doing that?”

Implausible, but after some digging, we did uncover some scraps from an unpublished oral history of Kimball and Cooks':

Legs McNeill: "It would have been back in, oh, '77, when Chris and his girlfriend were squatting in that loft, and Cooks Illustrated was a typed newsletter that Nancy would clandestinely mimeograph. One August weekend, Chris and Nancy made 32 different versions of beef stroganoff, and wanted us to try them all. When we pointed out that a) it was August, and b) nobody really likes stroganoff that much in the first place, Kimball stabbed Richard Hell in the neck with a broken Heineken bottle. 

John Leland: "In January of '78, Malcolm McLaren managed to get Chris a pilot on PBS. It was a fiasco. First he spends a solid half hour talking about ricotta cheese in order to prove that the Stop & Shop brand was better for lasagna than the more expensive import. Then he freaks out and tests santoku knives by carving Nancy's name into his forearm seven different times. There was blood everywhere." 

Hilly Kristal: "Toward the end, it got pretty bad with Chris and Nancy. She'd wander around the East Village, covered with reduced fat sour cream. Kimball kept trying to use the walk-in at the club to store brining turkeys, but he'd forget all about them, then freak out and claim we had stolen them."

I will stop now, and am generally a fan of Lam, but her his comment only makes sense where "Punk Rock" means "joyless precision achieved through endless repetition." Maybe Kimball is, in fact, the New Order of the cooking magazine game? (Thanks, as always to Ms. Penny Pascal, of whom more soon, for Peerless Photoshopping.)  We'll leave you with a different punk rock food take: 

 

*Also, am I the only one w/ a parent or older relative who has seen them end up in a situation of borderline mail fraud? If you get the mag, you get offers for books, and if you get one book, it's hard to get the books to stop coming, seems like. 

Pete Wells would like to tell you a joke

Pete Wells is tired of eating like a Chinaman screws. In re the tasting menu explosion he writes:

In the hands of a chef who grasps the challenges and possibilities of the form, a tasting menu can yield a succession of delights that a shorter meal could never contain.

At other times, though, the consumer of such a meal may feel as much like a victim as a guest. The reservation is hard won, the night is exhausting, the food is cold, the interruptions are frequent. The courses blur, the palate flags and the check stings.

 

Sorority snaps from the Cod, who has usually enjoyed meals of three courses more than meals of seven. Perversely, the better the chef, the greater the law of diminishing returns as the courses pile on -- its as much a question of running out of room in your brain as running out of room in your stomach. 

 

The more things change, Brooklyn squirrel hunting edition.

File under "look what you made me do, Addison":

It's the Post and 2012, and not the NYT and 2007, there are certain verities in features on Stephen Rinella: 

The Post, today: 

Steven Rinella grew up hunting and eating squirrel in rural Twin Lake, Mich.

So when he moved to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, six years ago, and squirrels began showing up by the dozen to steal the ripening tomatoes from his apartment’s 800-square-foot garden, he figured he’d make a meal out of them, too.

“Sometimes, I get such a craving for squirrel meat that I’ll go to extremes to get it,” writes Rinella, 38, in his new hunting memoir, “Meat Eater,” out Sept. 4.

That includes rigging up snap-type rat traps to capture the small game, skinning them over his kitchen sink, cooking them with a “Jamie Oliver-inspired” recipe and serving the resulting dish — lemon-thyme squirrel — to his wife, Katie.

“The method is of very questionable legality,” he admits in the book.

Hunting squirrel by trap is technically illegal in New York state (and the state-approved methods of capture — by hunting bow or firearm — are banned in New York City)  - but, since they are nuisance animals, according to the state’s Environmental Conservation Law, they may be killed at any time in any manner by the owners or occupants if they are injuring property.

The Times, five years ago:

He had better luck with squirrels — eight in all, though one had to be rejected for mange. He caught them in the same backyard using both a mink trap and a modified rat trap. The rat trap just knocked them out, he explained. “So then I went out and thumped them with a hammer."

(Technically, the state requires that if you want a squirrel for dinner you need to hunt it, not trap it.)

As I pointed out back then, in a post that evidently caused Mr. Rinella some distress: 

Without getting all Teddy, it would seem that someone who says   “If I’m not cooking with game, I don’t think it’s any fun,” would be aware of relevant game laws, especially the ones indended to prevent suffering of the kind a rat trap/hammer combo would inflict. Also, there is something insufferably droll in the use of "technically." The inference I take is "New York State game laws are beyond the concern of DI/DO readers, who are preoccupied with nanny poaching and where to get parts for the Viking, and are, as such, technicalities." One would never say, "technically, the state of Idaho requires trout to be taken with a fly or angling rod, rather than dynamite," or "technically, dogs die in hot cars." 

In this case, DI/DO and the Post readers are united in their blithe unconcern for NY state game laws, which are, for both constituencies, "technicalities." Perhaps this can be a building block for a new era of concord and amity among Times and Post readers! 

White people struggle with kale and Netflix.

In other  DI/DO news, Moskin gets raw. The Times has never been reticent in its coverage of first world problems, but  Produce Panic is a new one: 

What should be a beautiful and inspiring sight — your kitchen, overflowing with seasonal produce — is sometimes an intimidating tableau of anxiety. The knobbly piles and dirt-caked bunches are overwhelming. Already the peak-ripe multicolored peppers are developing soft spots; the chard is wilting and the race is on.

Don't get it? Well, it's like this:

Vegetable anxiety can strike anyone at this time of year: C.S.A. subscribers, compulsive farm-stand stoppers and even vegetarians. “All this produce arrives with a deadline,” said Benjamin Elwood, a lawyer in St. Paul. “It’s like when a DVD comes from Netflix. You feel like you have to watch the movie ASAP in order to get your money’s worth, but the pressure makes you not want to watch it.”

Actually, it's the opposite of Netflix. The whole point of Netflix is that DVD's do not have an expiration date. Skeptical? Leave that red envelope with a copy of Silkwood on your DVD, and jam that CSA kale in your produce drawer. Spend one month ignoring kale  and Silkwood in favor of dime bags of mesclun and Real Housewives marathons. Inspect DVD and produce drawer. You will find that you have made Netflix a little richer, and that the Creature from the Black Lagoon is now living in your produce drawer. 

Anyway, this receipt is on the shortlist, and the idea of prepping the vegetables the day they arrive in your house might help fight Silkwood syndrome. The title had me thinking that Moskin was advocating for raw vegetables, but not so much. But this time of year, fresh and raw peas and tomatoes are where it's at. As you can see, Big Daddy Kane agrees.