THE GURGLING COD

Press releases we were too scared to finish

So I mentioned on the Twitter that I'd gotten an alarming press release about a new steak house that read  like a series of threats  rather than a promotion for a restaurant a sane person would want to visit. Inquiring minds asked how this could be. 

Well, a Dallas location. (Are there still kids who carry those little boxes at Halloween to raise money so there can be steak houses in Dallas?)

But there is so much more: 

"Chef [Redacted] will prepare his signature C-Vap cooked burgers, praised for their perfectly medium-cooked insides foregoing the heavily charred edges that regular pan preparation causes."

Medium-cooked insides, and an absence of charred edges? I've eaten that burger, but on the Jersey Turnpike, what else can you do?    

And be sure to save some room for dessert: 

"Guests will enjoy modernist desserts including "Cheesecake 2.0" with cheesecake mousse and ice cream, liquid graham crackers and berry foam." 

Anyone can cook (like Nathan Myhrvold [if they have bank like Nathan Myhrvold])!

Our old friends at Modernist Cuisine have not changed the name of their cookbook to something that makes sense, probably just because they have been working hard to make their innovative cooking techniques accessible for the home chef! The book does not drop until Oct 8th, but you can preorder (for the low, low price of three copies of Mastering the Art of French Cooking!) While you wait, here's what you will need to get started! 

And while you wait to hear from the bank, see what you can get up to with a sharp knife and a skillet! Red beans and rice is traditional for Mondays, Guiteau or otherwise. 

 

WD-50 is the Honeydrippers?

Enjoyed the Wylie jawn in DI/DO. Seems like a nice guy. Interesting take on the challenges of being a destination restaurant when innovation is your brand. Nice props from Chang. Best of all, America's Newspaper of Record is standing shoulder to shoulder with the Cod: 

We’ve scratched the whole game plan,” Mr. Dufresne said, his grin growing wider and more Benjamin Franklin-ish as he described the changes ahead for this nine-year-old Manhattan vortex of avant-garde cooking. “We’ve never in the history of the restaurant flipped the entire menu.”

That's avant-garde, motherfuckers!

PS: still.

Achatz - now part of the solution!

"Modernist cooking"? Seriously, Serious Eats?

We've been over this before, several times, but there is new evidence that if you are a billionaire like Nathan Myhrvold, you can buy whole words, and not just vowels. I saw via Ideas In Food that they were talking about "modernist cooking" with Serious Eats.  Eternal optimist that the Cod is, we clicked through, looking forward to a fritatta receipt from Ezra Pound, or perhaps even Vorticist gelato. Unfortunately, instead it's folks repeating the lazy mistake that Nathan Myhrvold made when he rebranded molecular gastronomy as "modernist cuisine" -- perhaps b/c of negative stereotypes associated w/ molecular gastronomy. It's fine, as long as you are not concerned with words and what they mean, which is ok, if you are in a non-verbal line of work. On the other hand, if you have just published a cookbook, or if you run a blog you want people to take seriously, all the digital scales in the world will not redeem sloppy and imprecise use of language. IIF's Tweets are inspiring, and I like what the SE crew does, but people who care about food and who care about language should be able to come up with a term that is not misleading and imprecise. 

Is a red Sharpie the answer to Nathan Myhrvold's many problems?

The Cod saw over on the Eaters about a cookbook author who discovered an error in her cookbook, and had her assistant fix the mistake, by hand, in every copy of the cookbook someone had her sign. The Cod could not help but wonder if Nathan Myhrvold, author-cum presiding genius of the notoriously error-ridden Modernist Cuisine, will follow suit. Considering their track record, doubtful. I sent this email on 11 May:

I am taking you up on your offer that "if you spot a mis­take in your copy that isn’t already men­tioned here, please send it in." I don't own a copy, but I did notice an error in the title. Your book is concerned with avant-garde techniques popularized by the likes of Ferran Adria and Grant Achatz over the last decade or so. But the title of your book is "Modernist" Cuisine. Given the way this word is used in English, (see OED s.v.  Modernist, Modernism, and Modern) your title is misleading and confusing. You might consider "Contemporary Cuisine," or perhaps "Avant-Garde Cuisine," or maybe "21st Century Cuisine." Good luck with your edits -- it sounds like a very ambitious project! Hope this suggestion helps. Cheers, JBF, AKA The Gurgling Cod

I got this response the next day, but nothing since.

Thanks for your interest in our book! I’ve forwarded your email to Modernist Cuisine’s editor.

 

And speaking of E-Cookbooks: Or, Billionaire software engineers <3 paper?

This box, on the floor of Amanda Hesser's apartment, popped up in my Twitter feed. As you might expect, it contains one of the newly printed (corrected?) copies of Modernist Cuisine. The Cod has raised an eyebrow or three about the entire MC project. (Too lazy for links, but if you Google "gurgling" + "modernist," and skip the Ezra Pound fanfic, you'll find the eyebrows.) Despite my reservations,  MC is pretty clearly the cookbook publishing event of the year(s). In the context of the preceding discussion of cookbook apps for the iPad et al, it is interesting that Nathan Myrhvold, the guy responsible for MC, made his jillions in the software industry, but chose not only print for his big opus, but massive, enormous, unwieldy print. What's up with that? 

Update on Update on Nathan Myrhvold and his problems

Update:

On closer inspection, there is an I missing from the address that bounced back. I'm sorry I did not check further before posting the post below. If the mistake is mine, I regret the error. If memory serves, however, I cut and pasted the email link from the MC "To err is human" post. If the error originated with me, I apologize to the MC team; if the typo was in their link, I apologize to my readers for not checking more carefully. 

The Cod mentioned the thing where there are a lot of problems with Modernist Cuisine the other day. Charging your beta testers a ton of money to debug your product is certainly an innovative cross-pollenation of the software and publishing industry, and The Cod wanted to be a part. Having pointed out a glaring problem with the book, namely the title, long ago, we thought it would only be courteous to share this info. After all Myrhvold had invited us to: If you spot a mis­take in your copy that isn’t already men­tioned here, please send it in."

On May first, I sent the following email:

 

I am taking you up on your offer that "if you spot a mis­take in your copy that isn’t already men­tioned here, please send it in." I don't own a copy, but I did notice an error in the title. Your book is concerned with avant-garde techniques popularized by the likes of Ferran Adria and Grant Achatz over the last decade or so. But the title of your book is "Modernist" Cuisine. Given the way this word is used in English, (see OED s.v.  Modernist, Modernism, and Modern) your title is misleading and confusing. You might consider "Contemporary Cuisine," or perhaps "Avant-Garde Cuisine," or maybe "21st Century Cuisine." Good luck with your edits -- it sounds like a very ambitious project! Hope this suggestion helps. Cheers, JBF, AKA The Gurgling Cod

I got this response:

 

 

 

from Mail Delivery Subsystem [email protected] to [email protected] date Wed, May 4, 2011 at 10:26 PM subject Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

May 4 (6 days ago)

 

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

    [email protected]

Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 451 451 Try again later (state 14).

 

Yep, the email to report errors does not work. What line of work was this guy in before he started writing cookbooks? 

Nathan Myhrvold has 251 more problems than Jay-Z

Over to the DJ, news that Cod special fave Modernist Cuisine has a few bugs in the system. Nathan Myrhvold, seen at left giving a TED talk on the subject of this one barista back home* checked in like this: 

“We had many copy editors and proofreaders to help us pore over the book, but after the nth reading, you become blind to any further errors,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, the enormous demand for MC and the unexpected delays in shipping the books to customers meant that we had very little time, with very few readers, to find errors."

And: 

"That’s not to say that we have now cor­rected every last error, how­ever. Indeed, in the days since the presses started run­ning again, we, Larry, and other read­ers have iden­ti­fied a few more mis­takes. If and when we under­take a third print­ing, we’ll cor­rect those, too. In the mean­time, we are mak­ing avail­able here a list of cor­rec­tions and clar­i­fi­ca­tions for the first print­ing. We’ll update this list when­ever new goofs are spot­ted. It’s avail­able in PDF for­mat as well, in case you want to print it out or have a handy search­able ver­sion on your com­puter. If you spot a mis­take in your copy that isn’t already men­tioned here, please send it in."

The Cod knows all too well that it sucks when your book gets fucked up in production. (Authors should emulate hoboes, and make chalkmarks outside of presses that have version control management issues, or who won't promote your book at conferences, or... but I digress.) But! Charging folks six bills plus for a cookbook, and then enlisting them as your beta testers, sounds like an idea that only a software engineer could dream up. Oh, right. 

The Amazon reviews are still overwhelmingly favorable -- if you had paid for it, it would be hard to admit to yourself that it was not quite the thing, but more surprising to the Cod is that the proliferation of errors are further testimony to the awesome grandeur of the book:

At times the errata read like science fiction –- fleeting glimpses into the world of “beet flexicurd,” “halibut cheek gel base” and “scallop mochi.” It’s a place where oysters, before they meet their demise, are fed sieved beet juice (and the juice should be strained through a 25 micron sieve, not a 500-micron one).

Also, the testers are drinking the Kool-aid through a relatively coarse sieve:

“When I read through the errata, part of what I’m realizing is 80 to 90 percent is rinky-dink stuff that has to do with a dropped ‘S’ for a verb or something like that,” Mr. Amirault said. “And then occasionally there are meaningful things, like a dropped decimal. You’re dealing with a cooking that really values precision and includes really small amounts of some ingredients. When you get to that level, you need to be really precise, and a missed decimal makes a difference.”

First, subject-verb agreements is rinky-dink? For athletes on Twitter, maybe, but in a, you know, book, subject-verb argreement are important. Also, "when you are dealing with a (sic) cooking that really values precision," you need to be precise in a cookbook about that cooking. Ask Julia Child and Judith Jones. 

At the day job, The Cod is in the early stages of working on a project to help engineers write gooder, and wishes he'd gotten started sooner. Also, I cannot resist pointing out that a proliferation of errors, involving rinky dink verbs, as well as important shit like decimals, is not surprising for a cookbook that betrays its blithe disregard for language in the first word of its title. 

I leave you with the Jigga: 

 

*Or not. 

Add Magazine/Cheeseburger Cobranding

The Cod is alive to the possibility that the aforementioned Men's Health/Carl's Jr. collab is not exactly Woodward & Bernstein territory, journalismwise. The upper management at the Cod's day job exhorts us to be "entrepreneurial," but partnering w/ the subject of your muckracking investigation seems, you know, tacky. Woodward & Bernstein, for instance, did not open a chain of steakhouses with Nixon.*

But if anything, the Cod is about making lemons out of lemonade, and embracing the new 2.0 realities of journalism is one of those. Rather than deploring the sordid, guacamole-spattered clench between a regional burger chain (Hardee's is involved, too, somehow) and America's leading journal of abdominal exercises, as a public service, the Cod would like to suggest and solicit other magazine/cheeseburger partnerships!

The first one is easy. Details?  Our friend Nathan has a burger that is nothing if not detail-oriented:

Feel free to leave your own ideas for burger/mag collabs in the comments!  

*Shula's seems like a decent approximation of what Nixon's steakouse would be like.