An identity crisis, of two kinds
Cheese Louise. It’s been a while, no?
I’ve no good excuse for shelving this blog for so long. And less impressive: no concrete reason for bringing it back into use, except for maybe that I’ve felt restless for some time about not being able to put into words, whenever I wanted, something that’s inspired, irked or interested me about the way we eat. How selfless!
It’s not that I stopped writing about food. In that sense, it’s been a good year. I went mushroom hunting, learned a thing or two about small-town Chinese restaurants and met the world’s best chef. I even moved to that city I almost killed myself with foie in two summers ago.
So while I haven’t been bored, I have missed this space. I’ve just no idea what to do with it yet. It’s a blog about food, but what about food? What I’d written about here up to this point has been so jumbled and nebulous it’s hard to identify what to write about, or why. Which probably explains 90% of my unplanned hiatus.
Until that’s worked out, if it ever is, let’s talk about poutine.
On Writing (Food)
One of the reasons I don’t read a whole lot of food writing is because it’s often the same thing told over and over again. Just as it is in a lot of other kinds of writing. Of the broad spectrum of human experience, it’s the same five per cent that gets repeated. The same phrases, story archs, reactions. What makes food writing, as with any other king of writing, good is its ability to surprise you, lead you places you didn’t expect to go.
- a very clumsily paraphrased Ian Brown, on food writing
There will be nothing to eat in this post. Except maybe (get ready for a tired metaphor!) a thought to chew on.
Pork in New York
So … I think I have a crush on Sam Sifton. Or maybe Marea, the restaurant he recently handed three stars to in the New York Times. Maybe this will explain it. Here he describes ricci:
a piece of warm toast slathered with sea urchin roe, blanketed in a thin sheet of lardo, and dotted with sea salt. It offers exactly the sensation as kissing an extremely attractive person for the first time — a bolt of surprise and pleasure combined.
Uh, wow.
That said, I didn’t go to Marea when I went to New York this weekend, and didn’t intend to from the moment I got there. It was my first time in the city and, as Sifton notes in his gorgeous-cusping-on-overwritten review of the splashy Italian seafood spot, Marea is more a place for proud, post-recession exclamatories. I’m not one of them.
Good thing then, that you don’t need a lot of money to eat well in this city. Really, really well.
Urban Planning
“Of all the type of pasta out there, I think spaghetti is my least favourite.”
“Really?” I ask. Why?”
“It just kind of sucks. It’s the hardest to eat, and doesn’t hold sauce well. Plus,” and this he says with a lowered voice, “some people cut it with a knife and fork.” He looks around to make sure no one’s in the middle of doing this at the restaurant. “That’s just fucked up.”
Pollan’s Predecessor?
Ever notice how many used bookstores there are in Montreal? Seems like every couple of blocks you stumble across one, almost as many as your average 905 crams in the Timmie’s. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s actually one of my favourite things about the city, and I usually return with a couple of armfuls whenever I go. It’s started a bit of a hoarding problem: I’ve got half of the Time Life collection of Cuisines of the World, including a copy of MFK Fisher’s volume on France that took me months to find.
But sometimes this pays off. I came across a beaten-up copy of a book called Much Depends on Dinner at Cheap Thrills on Metcalfe and Sherbrooke when I last went. It looked interesting enough, a book about “the extraordinary history and mythology, allure and obsessions, perils and taboos of an ordinary meal:
You’ll discover the religious significance of pouring milk over your cornflakes, the overwhelming importance of salt to the auto industry, and dozens of other astonishing and stimulating facts. After reading this book, dinner will never seem routine again.
Alright, so it sounded a bit overzealous. But it was cheap (two bucks) and written by a Canadian (Margaret Visser). How bad could it be?
Pretty damn astonishing, in fact. I’m only a third-ways into it, but even at this point find it safe to say that this book is remarkably similar to Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.What’s near-remarkable was that it was published in 1986 by Mclelland & Stewart, twenty years before Pollan’s seminal food politics novel.
The premise of Visser’s book is the history, journey and political significance of nine basic ingredients she lays out as a typical, North American dinner. It’s a pre-Pollan examination and indictment of the North American diet, but without the sparkle of Pollan’s dialogue or Joel Salatin’s jovial character. She’s got some of the big players Pollan wrestles with (corn, salt, chicken) and some others that I’ve yet to read (ice cream, lettuce, rice, lemons).
In no way is this a damper on Pollan’s work. In a lot of ways in fact, I think he deals issues brought up in Much Depends on Dinner a hell of a lot more entertainingly and, more important, critically. Which is important when you’re trying to convince a readership of why its current attitude towards food needs to change if the industrial food system is ever going to follow suit. But with what I’ve read so far, I think it’s fair to say that the success of Pollan’s ideas owe a lot to Visser’s earlier work. I wonder if he’s read it.
A Family Cookbook: Lasagna
To eat good food is to be close to God.
Primo, Big Night
I think it started sometime when I was eleven, when in addition to leaving me home alone my mom started to trust me with the charge of making dinner from time to time. Now “dinner”, for someone my age, was a fluid concept. More often than not it was one of those tin-foil bake lasagnas, the kind you leave on the counter to defrost, bake for an hour and set on the table as soon as your parents get home so you can beam in that childlike-kind-of-pride one gets out of simplified accomplishments. It made me feel the way an easy-bake oven might have, had I had one.
But the pride that comes from good lasagna, beloved lasagna, the kind that only comes out of a family cookbook and will be different for every lasagna lover depending on who makes it for them, is incomparable. I got a little taste of that this past Sunday when Robb’s nona Maria decided to hand over she’s been making for his family for over thirty years.
A few weeks earlier at a birthday dinner, she’d taken me out to her garden to point out how well her tomatoes were growing—an accomplishment in the season the fruit’s been having this year. And to tell me this: “I teach you how to make the lasagna,” she said.
“What?”
“Yes.”
Oh man. Here goes.
I should start by saying this is more a picture-book recipe than a step-by-step, and there will be close to no measurements. Nona Maria didn’t give me any. And yet somehow, it was easier to follow that way—just use the size of your pan as a guide to how much of each element you’ll need.
And speaking of elements, there’s really only four to this: a bolognese sauce, besciamella sauce, boiled sheets of pasta and grated cheese. Oh, and two to three spare hours to dick around in a kitchen.
Between last Saturday and this, if you’d asked me what I’d done with my week, chances are I wouldn’t be able to say. Not that I’ve been extremely busy, it’s just been one of those incoherent, dog days of summer type weeks.
A lot of last minute movies, tape recording incidents, and spoons were involved. Maybe this is easier to explain what went down.
I hope what I have next can make up for this lackluster post. It’s kind of a secret right now, but it’s got something to do with family recipes. And lasagna. And a 72-year-old domestic goddess.
This isn't product placement, I swear!
This is a baby frittata.
A lunch-time present from a friend. Jealous? Yeah, I know. She plucked it from her garden, I ate it with a knife, fork and salt.
Cupcakes, wraps, brie and cauliflower gratin. Delicious, incoherent picnics.
Foie and Loathing in Montreal
When in Montreal, there are three inevitables:
- I will say everything—street names, store names, even your name—in my abysmal french accent.
- I will jaywalk at most street corners, and insist on walking everywhere.
- I will eat. A lot. Even when the food isn’t amazing.
Bagels St-Viateur
I’ve yet to figure out why this is the case. Till now I’d only ever come here to act like a frosh kid. But I’m happy to report that I’ve nixed the jaywalking, poor talking and most of the bad food for this trip. Maybe it’s because I came here to work. Maybe part of me is actually starting to grow up. Either way, I eat like it’s my job (even though it’s not) and have been, till now, pretty professional about the fact that I’ve made quite a pig of myself over the last three days.
Ketchup in the House of Jazz
So I’ve been in Montreal for four days and on an eating marathon. Words about it tomorrow, but for now some fun facts about ketchup I’ve learned from the little packets placed on the table of where I was at last night: The House of Jazz.
Not that I’m reccommending this place—I’m here to work, not to eat—but it’s a fun detail in an otherwise tacky environment. Think Blues Brothers-type figurines on the ceiling and a dining room packed with more memorabilia than a Hard Rock Cafe. The food’s about the same.
But back to the ketchup. This is what Heinz is printing on their squirt packets:
- Psychologists say people who dunk food in ketchup are methodical and trustworthy.
- Richard Nixon used to put ketchup on his cottage cheese.
-Heinz is the largest purchaser of tomatoes on the globe.
Why this makes me smile? Being a ketchup dunker myself, I did some reading on it a couple of years ago. Two must-sees are Malcolm Gladwell’s and Steingaarten’s take on the world’s no. 1 condiment (ketchup chapter of The Man Who Ate Everything). They’re lengthy yes, but I promise you will never look at packaged food marketing and consumer habits the same way again.
(And don’t believe what they tell you about salsa. Jeffrey will tell you why. And give you a fabulous recipe for some catsup of your own.)
Those pears that we stole were fair to the sight because they were thy creation, O Beauty beyond compare, O Creator of all, O thou good God–God the highest good and my true good. Those pears were truly pleasant to the sight, but it was not for them that my miserable soul lusted, for I had an abundance of better pears. I stole those simply that I might steal, for, having stolen them, I threw them away. My sole gratification in them was my own sin, which I was pleased to enjoy; for, if any one of these pears entered my mouth, the only good flavor it had was my sin in eating it.
- Confessions, St. Augustine
As of midnight yesterday, I will not be eating a solid meal for a week. I’m getting four teeth removed, am none the less wiser, and still not upset about it. Maybe it’s the codeine, and clindamycin?
Or maybe it’s the pears I ate yesterday morning. Picked straight off the branch with yes, again, Not Far from the Tree. I want to say they’re Bartletts, certainly taste like them, but they’ve got the texture and blush of an Anjou. Either way, they came up fabulously in this bittersweet chocolate and pear cake I made, my last tribute to hard fruit for the next seven days.
