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.

For years there’s been plenty of hand-wringing about whether or not Canada has a real cuisine, and talk about poutine as a national dish. As if a national dish were a badge you could wear to prove your country had a cuisine. As if a cuisine—something so tied up in histories of immigration, class differences, geography, even religion—could be summed up in just one dish. As a former classmate and friend John McGrath put it a couple of days ago: “If the national dish of the UK is curry, then surely the concept has no meaning.” That may not be a popular take on what for some countries is the equivalent of a flag or beloved soccer team, but it’s one I agree with. And, foie help me, especially in the case of poutine.

The basics: it was invented about 50 years ago in rural Quebec, though like Caesars and nachos, exact ownership of the dish remains in dispute. From B.C. to Newfoundland, we’ve since come to love it—it’s on Harvey’s menus and diner sandwich boards everywhere—and at least a couple of high-profile restaurants have incorporated it into the 2010 pantheon of Comfort Dishes Made Fancy. It’s made of fries and gravy and cheese and stuff, though you probably already knew that. It’s by no means a health food, and by all means delicious. We get made fun of for it all the time.

That last point alone should be enough to tell you something’s wrong. When Calvin Trillin (a writer I otherwise admire) wrote about the dish for the New Yorker—Is a national joke becoming a national dish? he asked—the gist of it still felt that, though delicious, it was still something to laugh about:

“As a punch line, poutine has a lot going for it. Many Canadians believe that it is also good to eat. Their fondness for it is, in fact, often the basis of the punch line, since an outlander who hears a description of poutine in its basic form—French fries with cheese curds and brown gravy—is likely to think that it sounds, well, disgusting. Jokes about poutine on that level are the equivalent of jokes about the Scots eating haggis or Scandinavians in the upper Midwest crowding into church basements to feast on lutefisk—an ethnic ritual that my first taste of lutefisk moved me to compare to teenage circumcision.”

Watching Anthony Bourdain talk about it is sort of the same.

I realize these two examples is puts a lot of weight on what two Americans think of us—another supposedly Canadian thing to do. But we do this to ourselves, even when making fun of others.

And our other options, summed up in a recent Globe & Mail slideshow, either suffer from the same problem or are too specific to speak for a country of such diverse geographies.  One thing Trillin had right in his piece, because it’s right of every country, was that as Canadians we don’t like to be defined by symbols, be it a moose or a canoe or even our godly, gut-busting mess.

P.S. A poutine image search came up with at least two pictures of a shirtless Vladimir Putin. Talk about unappetizing.

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.

I went to Eating Words on Saturday, a panel of four food writers brought together by the Stratford Cooking School to talk about, well, words on eating. I nearly jumped when I heard Corby Kummer of The Atlantic and the editor behind their website’s fabulous food channel would be there. And yet still managed to arrive late.

Self-deprecation aside, I’m glad I still made it. It was refreshing to see writers who a lot of people look up to talk about their troubles, insecurities and thoughts about their jobs, which is essentially a tight market (writing, editing) in an even smaller niche-box: food.

The best thing? Hearing these writers say that if you do the job well, food writing is not at all niche. At its best, food writing is like any other kind of writing that inspires.

Margaret Webb, author of a fabulous book on Canadian farmers called Apples to Oysters, said that any time you write a story about GMO’s, you’re writing a food story. An environment story. A science story. Any time you investigate the effect of processed foods on the health of our generation’s kids you’re also writing about education, social policy, medicine.

It was surprising to hear of how Kummer runs his Food Channel on The Atlantic. With his assistant, he personally handles every one of the five or so features that go up every day on the site. That’s 25 stories a week, at least.  And though he can’t yet pay for it with the budget the mag’s on right now, he made an argument for at least providing a kind of “payment” doing the best job he can in ensuring that the work is good, that fans of the Food Channel can be assured they’re going to get good quality food journalism. I know a lot of freelance writers would scoff at this, part of me did too, but it was interesting at least to consider.

There were also a lot of thoughtful questions — people wanting to know how you can write politically about food, what’s supposed to be a democratic topic, without coming off as condescending. Some questions that we’ve heard before — what these four writers think the tectonic shift of print to internet is going to do to journalism in general. And some just kind of sigh-inducing: what’s your favourite dish?

One thing that didn’t come up, and that I’m almost kicking myself over not asking now since Ian set it up so well in his opening statement, is that idea of repetition. It’s fair to assume most people there to see Brown, Kummer, Webb and Symonds want to one day count themselves among their ranks. At least I do. What I kept thinking at the time, what I’ll be looking for now, are those repeated stories, tired story archs, beaten-to-death phrases we use when we talk about food. The things that I sometimes cringe at when I read another story out of Food & Drink.

If food writing can be as expansive as the pros say, it’s hard to know what you want to write about. I figure it’ll at least help to know what to avoid.

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.

You know how in Toronto the first two responses to the question Where can I get a really nice meal, for not too much? are either the Black Hoof or Pizzeria Libretto?

I get the feeling that David Chang’s Momofuku tree of restaurants are treated the same way by New Yorkers: a fail-safe recommendation to out-of-towners. They’re slick, constantly packed and most important, don’t take their image more seriously than their food.

And as such: yes, the food is really good.

And, as it happens, perfect for any occasion: dining among us at Momofuku Ssam were a troupe of Halloweeners dressed as the cast from RuPaul’s Drag Race, a couple of expensive suits with their well-coiffed dates and a man in bicycle shorts.

Though you won’t want to, Ssam is a place to share. The starters, from individual steamed pork buns to pulled pork sandwiches, were dutifully divided by the couples on dates — with ties clipped to their shirts lest they get some spicy pig on their $300 Hugo Bosses. Either way, try the buns: the pork belly is mighty fatty, and a sweet surprise against the crunch of cucumbers.

And that pile of speckled fruit you see there, with the cream? Apple kimchi and maple-spiked labneh.

Can’t say if what Chang’s doing here is actual labneh: it’s got the consistency a creme fraiche and has the same effect when you pair it with the apples (like how one does with an apple pie), but it’s freaking delicious anyway. Try it. And start with that smoked pork jowl on the plate: the whole thing will be that much sweeter.

And, as if we hadn’t gotten enough pork already: spicy pork sausage on rice cakes and broccoli. Crunchy, salty, oily, hugely filling, don’t eat this if you’ve just come here for drinks.

But who does that here anyway? This animal is worshipped at Ssam! I doubt business ever skipped a beat for them in those first few months of swine flu confusion — not that the situation is a whole lot clearer now.

PS. Jennifer Bain, food editor at the Star, got to talk to David Chang recently about his newly-released cookbook. You’ll find it here, along with a recipe for those pork buns and   what this one-time GQ Man of the Year has to say about Montreal.

“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.”

Don’t know if I’d argue with that. Even if I could have at the time, my face was stuffed with wide-cut pappardelle and mushrooms.

I went to New York for the first time this weekend, and this was my first meal in the world’s dining capital. Some place called Nonna’s that deals in hearty, house made pastas served right on the sidewalk on 84th and Broadway. Think full pieces of smashed, roasted garlic, sage butter sauces and trios of lunching ladies in their mid-sixties who call their server “sweetie” and pretend like they’re going to get the salad, they want the salad, but somehow end up ordering the largest thing on the menu instead.

A good choice. It was Halloween in New York, and I’m glad I got to spend most of it outside. Did you know kids start trick-or-treating here at around four? Maybe its a safety thing, to get them out of the way before the after-dark debauchery happens.

Seriously: New York on Halloween is kind of like the telephone booth in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Only half of the people travelling never actually existed and you probably wish they didn’t, because they’re drunk, smell like boiled eggs and are loaded with stick-on rhinestones and dollar-store fangs.

Either way, it was relaxing to sit down to something I hadn’t obsessed over or planned ahead of time. Just walked, used our noses and sat down when a place smelled good.

I really ought to do this more often.

And blog too, yes.

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.

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.

The Sauce

Technically, this is one of two sauces you’ll be making for this dish. Why I call it the sauce? No clue. Most family recipes call for some sort of bolognese, and that’s what Nona Maria uses here, but that’s not to say a veggie version can’t be made or that you can’t use whatever type of tomato-based sauce you’re comfortable with. This isn’t the Ten Commandments of Lasagna.

The sauce was already waiting for us when we got to her place: a simple, simmered bolognese. Soften some onions in a butter/olive oil mix(“Brown, no,” Nona says, “gold is good”) and add a package of ground veal. Toss in some minced garlic once it’s rendered a bit (ten minutes?), and just before the garlic cooks through (four minutes?) add crushed tomatoes, salt, pepper and a bay leaf or two. Simmer for an hour and a half, set aside. Definitely a make-ahead, and keeps for a couple of days in the fridge. Or do it like Nigella and use the best stuff you can find out of a jar. I won’t tell.

The Pasta

When Robb’s dad was growing up, he says he remembers Nona Maria always making her pasta from scratch. For the past while though, she’s been making pretty bloody amazing lasagna from the dry stuff, but swears by Pirro, some Italian brand that she insists uses the most eggs. I’ve never seen it outside of Italian convenience stores, but may try a Highland Farms or Longo’s. Or go with what works for you.

Either way, boil up a lot of water. A lot a lot. And then salt it. I should point out here that this was the only time I’d ever been truly scared for my well-being in a kitchen. Nona Maria is a badass when it comes to this, and goes full-steam: that pot you’re looking you’re looking at in the picture? Was rumbling like a motherfucker, and burping out hot shots of water. I had to approach the thing like a rabid animal any time I went to stir the pasta.

Depending on the size and thickness of your pasta squares, you’ll want to adjust your boiling time. Nona Maria likes her pasta soft, and goes in for 20 minutes. Sounds unreasonably long I know, but trust her. It holds up well in the baking. In the last ten minutes or so, add just enough olive oil to bring down the bubbling.

The Besciamella

Or as it’s better-known, béchamel, the mother of all sauces. I don’t know how much of an argument this is in Italy, but some will tell you that lasagna made without this is not really lasagna. Others, like Robb’s Nona Gianetta, see it as perfectly fine to make it without the ivory elixir and will add spinach, making what’s otherwise known as lasagna verde. Either way, this is easy stuff, people. Melt your butter (I used close to 3/4 of a cup), whisk in your flour (two handfuls for me) and once you’ve got that smoothed out, whisk in your milk, and fast. Or, at least, if you’re cooking at the breakneck temperatures Nona Maria does. Like I said, she cooks like a badass.

If you’re looking to give yourself a heart attack, you can at this point add cheese and make it a Mornay sauce. But don’t. Add some nutmeg instead.

The Cheese

Easiest part of the whole deal: grate a shitload of parmigiana-reggiano. You’ll need a block or two of good mozzarella too, but don’t grate it just yet: if you’re using a good moist type, pre-grating it will only make it extremely difficult to spread on the pasta when layering. Them shits clump together and don’t come apart! Better to grate it directly over the pan as you go.

The Preparation

It’s really up to you how much work you want to give yourself here. Once the pasta’s boiled, Nona Maria sets out each individual pasta sheet on a clean tablecloth to dry a little (“The sauce, it go better,” she says), and nimbly lifts each sheet up as she needs them for layering. I ripped a couple on my first tries, but it’s no big deal: the cheese will get to it anyway. Start with a few smears of bolognese on the bottom to keep shit from sticking, put your first sheet of pasta, and start alternating layers: two scoops of besciamella, two scoops of bolognese, an even coat each of mozzarella and parmigiana. Stop maybe a centimetre from the top of your pan, and make sure your last layer is the mozzarella: parm has a habit of burning.

Cover with tin foil and bake at 350 °C for thirty minutes. Remove foil, bake ten to fifteen minutes more, until the cheese is gold, bubbly, and looks so goddamn delicious you almost forget to put on your oven mitts to take the thing out of the oven. Not that I did this or anything, I’m just warning you.

It’ll make a regular Garfield out of any of you. Promise. But as a note, keep an lighter hand with the cheese than I did. I don’t want to be responsible for any cardiac-type incidents as a result.

]]> http://petitpear.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/a-family-cookbook-lasagna/feed/ 3 petitpear DSCN1174 DSCN1128 DSCN1140 DSCN1127 DSCN1142 DSCN1146 DSCN1141 DSCN1137 DSCN1151 DSCN1165 DSCN1177 http://petitpear.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/172/ http://petitpear.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/172/#comments Sat, 05 Sep 2009 15:33:07 +0000 petitpear http://petitpear.wordpress.com/?p=172 ]]> 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.

When in Montreal, there are three inevitables:

1. I will say everything—street names, store names, even your name—in my abysmal french accent.
2. I will jaywalk at most street corners, and insist on walking everywhere.
3. 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.

I came here to write about jazz. The major institutions of which aren’t really known for their food, and some are more of a mop-up-your-beer-spills-with-the-toilet-paper kind of haunts. But just like this city rolls solos and and high hats, good god can it cook. Schwartz’s, L’Express and Au Pied de Cochon have been three good reasons for me to live off apples and kale for the rest of the week. Beauty’s, Kaizen and SoupeSoupe, not so much.

But hey, there’s still Marche Jean-Talon. Plenty of veggie opps there for the six-hour drive home, right?

L’Express Bistro

"Why am I in every picture???"

One of the few, if not only thing about L’Express Bistro that’s not French is that there doesn’t seem to be any patio seats at the restaurant. The kind that litters the Paris streets from which this place gets its inspiration. But the black-and-white tile floors, globe light bulbs, tucked-shirt servers and crisp linen tables? Spot on. And especially charming when Robb and I get there at six to an empty restaurant, a couple of rubes off the street looking for a table.

“Sans reservation?” the host smiles. “No problem, but we only ’ave de table till 7:30, yes?”

Forty minutes in, I can see why: Monday night, the place is crammed. (Kind of like their confusing wine list.) But the service here never skipped a beat, the dining room wasn’t too loud and any time between courses we amused ourselves with their mini house pickles and mustard.

The courses themselves have started a kind of game: My Dish Is Better Than Yours. Robb insists he’s won this round.

Me: riesling; magret de canard on wild greens with radish, croutons, liver and the best-balanced oil-and-vinegar dressing I’ve probably ever had; orange creme caramel (which tasted kind of like an orange lollipop, only huge and creamy).

Robb: orange juice; ravioli and mushrooms in a savoury, thick veal gravy; apple-and-pear bread pudding.

Considering how many pieces of pasta I stole off his plate, I’ve got to hand the point to him.

Schwartz’s

I have only ever seen lineups at this place in the past. At 1 p.m. on a Tuesday, it was kind of a miracle we got a seat in less than five minutes.

So is their smoked meat. But you don’t need me to tell you that: Schwartz’s has been doing this for 71 years, and written about so much that chances are you already know about their high-piled sandwiches, stomach-busting platters and pickles the size of my face.

On sandwiches Robb got the lean, I got the medium. There is no way he’s won this round: while the lean tastes great, it doesn’t come apart, flake (yes, this meat does that) or smell anything even close to what I had. And no pickle? Point: me.

Beauty’s

There’s a scene in Mordechai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz that has arguably lent a hand in making this place as famous as it is. Jimmy Kimmel’s lip service to the diner in this month’s Bon Appetit can’t hurt either, but I don’t think I can recommend this place on their food alone. I mean, it’s a hell of a lot better than Chez Cora (or Cora’s, whatever you will), but for the most part our late-morning breakfast was pretty unremarkable: an undersalted omelette each (one cheddar/backbacon, the other potato/backbacon), a perfunctory bagel and coagulated jam. And crunchy, black potato hash to top it off. Great for a hangover I suppose, but I felt no shame in drowning the whole party-on-a-plate in ketchup, and that says a lot. I’d say we tied on this one.

SoupeSoupe

Don’t know if this really counts as a round. Needed an early breakfast before an interview, Reservoir was closed, and this place was across the street and just starting to write their daily specials on the board.

We shared a brownie and a ham sandwich on the patio, in the middle of a roof repair happening next door. At least a fraction of whatever it was they were ripping out of the building ended up in our food.

Another tie.

Kaizen Sushi Bar

This place lauds itself as being the best sushi in Montreal. With little experience in that department in this city, I don’t have much to compare. But the take-home ‘kobe’ hot dogs should tell you something, or the fact that their walls are covered in chintzy paintings of samurai warriors and glowing rocks. It kind of feels like stepping into some nu-age California take on Japanese food in the sixties. Not in a good way. Did I mention they deliver?

But being grumpy about atmosphere probably isn’t fair as the food is pretty decent. Or the fish, at least: a few slices of mackerel, freshwater eel and yellowtail tuna will set you back about 25 bucks, and is fresher and so much better-textured than most places I’ve eaten at home. Not so impressed by the blue fin tuna on the menu, but being in a fairly well-to-do area I’m sure this place is definitely the neighbourhood’s idea of a classy night out. In a kobe-burger, kobe steak sandwich and WAY over-juiced kobe tartare kind-of-way. (Robb ordered it: lemon-flavoured meat?)

It’s not a place to head to this city for, but if you find yourself there the chocolate souffle is fantastic.

Point: Me.

Au Pied de Cochon

I read somewhere that Martin Picard says that when you go to a restaurant to eat a salad, you have a problem. While I only half agree (and besides, there’s three of them on his menu!), I’m 100% glad I knew about this beforehand. In some kind of weird preparation, we skipped lunch and furtively sliced an apple at the hotel before heading out to the foie-sodden bulwark for Canadian cuisine. It almost felt like pre-drinking. For what turned out to be one of the best (and kind of conflicted) meals I’ve ever paid for. If you come to Montreal, are NOT a vegetarian, and have a healthy heart, this place is a must. If not for their fried zuccini blossoms alone.

Which were, by the way, one of the closest things I could find to a naked vegetable on Cochon’s menu, aside from greens or a tomato tartlet. I tried to be smart about this. I came to order Cochon’s plogues à champlain, which the Star’s food critic Corey Mintz describes as:

…a dense, buckwheat pancake mounted with potatoes and cheddar cheese. Shreds of thick-cut bacon are strewn across the plate. As a mandatory brick of foie gras crowns the dish, it’s all covered in a reduced maple syrup sauce, plus scrambled eggs that have been cooked in the sauce. This isn’t dinner. It’s a weapon. If United Nations inspectors had found this in Iraq, the whole world would have applauded America’s invasion.

So I had to start with a vegetable you see, which just happened to be fried. Perfectly. Not my fault. Also not my fault that the batter was glass-crisp, salty enough to make the zuccini baubles inside tender and sweet, and smelled curiously of duck fat. Robb, a fan of the Burger King version, got the poutine. (Don’t ask. Once he tried to get this made at a BK in Boston, one of the worst fast food experiences of my life.) But bad BK memories are totally washed out by Cochon’s thick, thick gravy, plump curds (and squeaky too!) and fries. Which too, smelled a little of duck fat.

But maybe that had something to do with the fact that we’d been seated right in front of the kitchen, with all its pressure cookers, fryers, pots of mashed potatoes and skillets of sizzling foie gras to see. I was practically eating the plogues with my eyes as I watched it get assembled. And laughing as I watched bloated goose livers get tossed around like potatoes, or single beef ribs the size of small tennis rackets put on a plate.

Robb had ordered another tartare, but Pied de Cohon’s version did not disappoint. It was creamy (probably why they serve it with toast, a testament to it’s perfect texture) and balanced. As in, enough acids to make it taste delicious, but not turn it into steak ceviche. And enough meat to amount to a 12-oz steak.

And my plogues? In light of what you just read about them, it’s kind of embarrassing to admit that I tore though that dish as though I hadn’t eaten all of what I’ve just written about. But maybe that’s the point behind the kind of comfort food Picard is making here. Aside from the almost-ridiculous lack of restraint element the foie-gras adds, everything about my meal tasted familiar in that kind of feel-better way. That is, until, you finish dessert (a poached pear, what else?), feel like you want to put your head on the table (but don’t, because you’re sitting in front of the kitchen for God’s sake, have some decorum), and head back to the hotel, hair still smelling of duck fat, to lie down in some trans-lipid intoxication.

“You realize you’ve just eaten about 3,000 calories in one meal, right?” Robb asks me.

Point: I don’t know. I’m still full.

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.

I’m not one to make choices, but I think I’m in love. I think pears are the perfect fruit, and represent a lot of firsts for me. My first taste of Paris: snowy anjou sorbet at Ile St Louise’s Berthillon. My first fruit pick at the age of two. Baked with wine, the first dessert I ever prepared on my own (and at the age of 11, was subsequently not allowed to eat).

Some things about pears I’ve learned:

- they are one of, if not of the only, fruit to naturally continue ripening after being picked without the aid of ethylene gas

- they have a span of four to five hours in which they are perfect, perfect, perfect (what would that even taste like??)

- according to some, they ripen better when placed next to bananas, and keep longer in the fridge

Though to be honest, when I’m around they rarely last long enough for any of this to be confirmed.

Nor did the cake I made with them. Thanks, SK!

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