I don't make New Year's resolutions, for most of us they're empty promises just waiting to be broken by the second or third week of January. That's because resolutions are usually negative - especially the food-related resolutions:
I will lose 20 pounds (eat less)
I will cut down on diet Cokes (deny myself that pleasure)
I will eat more healthily (avoid the foods I like best)
Bah! In modern American culture food is an enemy, it's something we loath ourselves for enjoying and under a mistakenly puritanical impulse attempt to deny ourselves to somehow become more pure and deserving. I'm not saying we should overdue the ice cream before bed or eat a bag of pork rinds every day. But denying yourself is just begging for failure.
In that spirit, since I don't have any New Year's resolutions, I do have a few some food-related things I'd like to do this year - all positive.
Charcuterie: A couple of years ago I devoted some effort to learning to preserve meat, making pork and duck confit, sausages, corning a beef brisket, and so on. It was great fun, I got some marvelous treats from my efforts. I got to share this with friends and family and I learned a hell of a lot. Last year I ended up focused on writing and concentrating on making foods that I thought would interest a larger audience than my efforts to create a lamb sausage recipe. Enough of that! It's back to the meat market this year and learning to make some dried sausages like salami and Spanish chorizo.
Cheese: I've been meaning to learn to make cheese for ages. My ambitions aren't large, I'm not talking about 2-year-old aged cheddar or raclette. But I have access to cow, goat, and sheep milk - both pasteurized and un-pasteurized. I can make some fresh cheeses such as mozzarella, mascarpone, and farmer's cheese. The trick to this effort (and the next step in my charcuterie) is getting a wine refrigerator to age the cheese and sausages in since a wine fridge gives control over both temp and humidity, which is essential.
Meat & Beans: In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I'm not as conscientious about buying meat from my local farmers as I wish I were. One reason is that, unlike the supermarket, I can't decide I want a pork shoulder Friday morning and pick one up from Tracy the rancher that afternoon. There's a convenience factor, in other words. There's also cost. Meat that was well-cared for before it became meat is more expensive than the stuff at the supermarket. And part of it is I really eat too much meat.
I love meat. But I want to learn to appreciate it more than I do. Getting back into charcuterie is one way of doing that, but so is learning to use meat as a less central ingredient in meals. On the flip side, I'm not a big fan of dried beans, and yet some of my favorite recipes feature beans with a bit of meat for flavoring. So I'm planning to devote more effort to exploring this mixture. And it has the added benefit of being cheap. Win/win/win!
Ice Cream: Like dried beans, I'm not a big ice cream fan. But late last summer I got a Cuisinart ice cream maker on sale, and this summer I'm going to give it a workout. The truth is I do love fruit desserts and I enjoy both sorbets/sherbet and granitas. So I'll get a copy of Dave Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop and add ice cream to my cooking repertoire. I think that's a noble ambition.
Food isn't an enemy - something to be shunned and denied - it's one of the great pleasures in life. After touch, taste is the most sensual of our senses, a sense closely tied to our pleasure centers. So my goal, this coming year, is to enhance that pleasure not by over-indulging, but by indulging with thought, deliberation, and care.
It was still dark when I woke up for the third or fourth time that night. I reached under my pillow and pulled out my mother's little folding travel clock with the fake alligator hide and opened it to view the green-glowing hands and numerals: 4:45 a.m.!
We were under strict instructions to not wake my parents before 5:00, so I lay there. Christmas was hell.
A few minutes later my sister came into the room and I got down from my bunk bed. We sat on the floor whispering until it was one minute to 5:00. Then we woke my little brother and headed for my parents' bedroom.
Dad got up and went to make sure "Santa Clause was here" while we waited impatiently on their bed. He returned with good news and we dashed for the living room.
About 8:00 the folks started making breakfast. Dad made biscuits while Mom made cream and chipped beef (for some reason this was a common Christmas morning breakfast). There was certainly jam to go on the biscuits, and hot chocolate. We may have had cheese grits as well. And then we returned to our toys and books.
Everyone took a nap and then we started getting ready for the party. Mom and Dad always had an open house on Christmas Day and they put out an impressive buffet. There was roast turkey from Christmas Dinner the night before along with two or three mustards, two or three breads and rolls, mayonaise, cheeses, and similar sandwich fixings. Dad had cooked a ham earlier in the week and he sliced that up too. I don't recall when it began, but for years my job was making sausage balls and there would almost certainly have been spiced nuts, Chex mix, and crudities. Mom filled a large glass bowl with Ambrosia set out the leftover cranberry relish. I seem to recall a Waldorf salad as well.
Then, of course, there was Dad's eggnog that he began making on Thanksgiving weekend and then finished (by adding the cream) on Christmas day. This was always a major hit. Mom's Bourbon Cake and Dad's fruit cake would be crammed onto the now-groaning board somewhere, and about 2:00 people would begin arriving. For the next four to six hours the house would be filled as people arrived and left and the food gradually disappeared.
My parents continued the open house tradition long after we'd grown up and moved away, but eventually it devolved to just family and then sort of petered out.
Although none of my immediate family is religious and the event is now much lower-key than in erstwhile years, we all still celebrate Christmas every year as a time when as many of us as possible gather together and remind ourselves that we're a family. We still usually have Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve. This year I'm hosting it and my sister is coming down from Virginia.
I'm planning to serve a Quebecois (French Canadian) savory pie known as a tourtière that is traditionally eaten at Christmas. My mother has quit making the Bourbon Cake, it simply became too much effort for a woman in her late 70s (now 80s), but I took over the tradition and so we'll have that for dessert.
I also mailed each of my siblings a huge slice of Bourbon Cake. It's not the same as having all of us gathered for the holiday, for the open houses of my childhood, but at least we'll all be able to share a taste of our Christmases past on Christmas Day.
A few days ago I received an offer to purchase unpasteurized milk for my pets from a local organic farm. For $103 I'd receive a gallon of raw milk once a week for 12 weeks. I'll save you the trouble of doing the math: that's $8.58 a gallon. I'm really fond of my cat, but not $8.58-a-week fond. Which is why I'm pretty sure this offer is an end-run around Tennessee's laws preventing the sale of raw milk for human consumption.
It's still very much on the fringes, but there's a growing movement in this country promoting the health benefits of raw milk. But a little history first.
When our country was largely rural, raw milk was a common beverage, often produced by your own cows, but sometimes purchased from a neighbor. There were no mortality and morbidity survey from public health departments or the Center for Disease Control to track illness from raw milk but it's certain no one thought twice about drinking it. Both of my parents, who were born in 1920, regularly drank raw milk as children.
But as our society became more urban, providing truly fresh raw milk became more and more difficult. Transportation was slow and there was no effective refrigeration. Perhaps worse, because the milk producers weren't the friends and neighbors of the people buying the milk they were less inclined to be scrupulous about the quality. And even for well-intentioned milk producers, the inability to easily test for contaminants like campylobactor, salmonella, and e-Coli meant problems could arise. And, given all these factors, they did.
Food poisoning from raw milk sky-rocketed in the first half of the 20th century. In 1938 25 percent of all cases of food poisoning were associated with dairy products. In 1924 the federal Public Health Service began mandating pasteurization for milk sold across state lines. With the passage of this ordinance (and subsequent legislation in most states) incidents of poisoning dropped dramatically (although they still haven't disappeared, as we'll see) and the program was deemed a complete success.
Jump ahead to today. Transportation is an order (or two) of magnitude faster and everything is refrigerated. Testing for bacterial contamination is easy, cheap, and highly effective. And these days, even living in a metropolis such as New York City, you can know and learn to trust a milk producer if you take the trouble to do so.
Still federal and state governments remain strongly antagonistic to raw milk sales (22 states absolutely prohibit it and where it's permitted sales are discouraged in various ways) and they are quick to point fingers at raw milk as a source of food poisoning. In 2008 three cases of campylobacter poisoning were blamed on raw milk from Hendricks Farms near Franconia, Pa. A single sample of the milk did turn up the bacteria - at the purchaser's home. Additionally, two of those sickened had just returned from travels abroad. No other samples tested positive and thorough testing at the dairy failed to find the bacteria. I happen to have a friend (a professional chef) who works at that dairy and he tells me the food processing areas are as clean or cleaner than any restaurant where he's worked.
In 2004 FDA Consumer published an article warning against drinking raw milk. Ironically, that same year 38 cases of salmonella poisoning in several states were traced to pasteurized milk but FDA Consumer didn't publish a subsequent article warning of the dangers of pasteurized milk.
Raw milk advocates argue that raw milk is healthier and tastes better than pasteurized milk because the pasteurization process kills helpful bacteria (probiotics) as well as harmful bacteria and that the process also destroys helpful enzymes. True or not, there are people who want to drink raw milk. Presumably they're aware of the risks - it takes some research to even find a source. And clearly pasteurized milk presents a risk as well.
Raw milk does taste better, but not so much so that I'm willing to pay $8.58 a gallon for it. But it's ridiculous that in order to sell raw milk here in Tennessee, the farm near me has to emphasize that it's for pets, not humans. As I said, I'm fond of my cat, as most people are of their pets, and if I thought raw milk was unsafe for me I certainly wouldn't feed it to my cat. But at that price neither of us are going to be drinking it.
I had an odd conversation with my mother the other day. We were talking about my father's third volume of memoirs (not published, a purely personal project of his) and my mother commented, "We were rich!"
"Rich?!" That's not what I recall. Sure, we were comfortably middle-class, and, with two well-educated working parents in the 1950s and 60s, probably upper middle class. But I still remember my mother borrowing back the allowance she'd just given me in order to buy groceries for supper that night. And that allowance? I had to pull weeds, dig post holes for fences, split firewood, and generally work far more energetically than I ever had any mind to in order to earn it. I didn't grow up lacking anything, but I didn't grow up vacationing on the French Riviera either - I think we went to Cape Hatteras three times, once in January - and it snowed.
I don't know how old I was when I first tasted "caviar", perhaps 9 or 10 - and it wasn't real caviar. It wasn't Beluga, Sevruga or even Osetra from the Caspian Sea. It was lumpfish roe, dyed black and salted. I don't recall if I liked it, but my guess is not. Nevertheless, this ersatz caviar became a regular canapé (on a cracker with cream cheese and a thin slice of lemon) at our family's holiday gatherings - along with the California sparkling wine.
With Christmas on the way, I've been wanting to try some high quality domestic caviar and when I learned about Collins Caviar I figured this was my chance. I picked up the phone, called, and got the owner, Rachel Collins. I didn't have an expense account, she offered to give me the caviar if I paid the shipping costs (which came to $51), I agreed. Wednesday afternoon my parents joined me for a tasting.
Now, good caviar - regardless of source - should taste distinctly of fish but should do so in the way a breeze off the ocean smells of fish. Not overwhelming, just clear. It should be salty, but again, not overwhelmingly so. Think salt spray on your lips. And the "berries" should burst in your mouth (it's a textural thing), which is why Beluga's large eggs are so famed.
I had Collins decide what to send me and she chose salmon, whitefish, and hackleback sturgeon roes. She also has paddlefish roe as well as some specialty products such as smoked salmon row and what they call a Caviar Margarita flavored with tequila. I tried a small spoonful of each before my parents arrived and liked the salmon best. When they got here I sliced a baguette very thin and offered the bread with a small round of excellent domestic chèvre thinking it's tartness would complement the caviar. My parents contributed a bottle of Domaine St. Michele sparkling wine.
Our conclusions...
All were lightly salted allowing the flavor of the eggs to shine. This is very different from the stuff you get at most grocery stores, which is over-salted and pasteurized to make it shelf stable. In each case the eggs were perfectly whole - very well cared for during processing and another mark of good caviar.
The Great Lakes Chinook salmon caviar was our unanimous favorite. It had a gorgeous salmon color and the eggs were large (Beluga-sized) and burst perfectly between the teeth - an important textural aspect of caviar. It also had the most distinctive flavor: I could have easily eaten 4 or 5 ounces of it all by myself - and at only $18/ounce that's not a far-fetched idea. In fact, given shipping charges, the more you order the cheaper the price.
Our least favorite was the whitefish caviar. It was almost flavorless with eggs the size of pinheads and even at $10/ounce I wouldn't order it again. I wish she'd included the paddlefish caviar (paddlefish is a close relative of sturgeon), but beggars can't be choosers.
The sturgeon (hackleback) was a surprise. It's the most expensive of the lot at $48/ounce and the taste I ate plain wasn't impressive. Nor are the eggs impressive, also the size of pinheads. As with the whitefish roe this means getting the full flavor is mitigated because many eggs simply aren't broken when chewing due to their size. But I found that using a heaping spoonful made a difference. The flavor is light and supple and really stood out against the tartness of the chèvre.
I would love to do a side-by-side comparison of domestic and imported caviars, but that's an unlikely event and really isn't my point here. What I wanted to know is if premium domestic caviars, a wild food-stuff that is managed to at least some degree and that doesn't require shipping from 6000 miles away was a reasonable alternative to $300/ounce beluga. My conclusion was: absolutely!
The hackleback and salmon roe were excellent with an edge to the salmon because of the large eggs (and lower price). If you have a foodie on your Christmas list - or are trying to decide on an hors d'oeuvre before Christmas dinner - domestic caviar is a great option. Even the domestic stuff isn't really cheap, but at least you're supporting a nice lady in Indiana instead of a member of the Russian mafia.
Polls are indicating that people are eating out less, and when they do it tends to be at fast food joints. For example, Applebees sales are reportedly down about 15 percent while McDonalds are up by eight. But people are also doing more of their own cooking in order to economize. So this Christmas, I thought I might offer some suggestions for practical gifts to make home cooking more economical, easier, or both.
Few of the items mentioned below are actually inexpensive, but they cover a gamut of prices points and degrees of economy and I've either used or own most of them. So I know where-of I speak.
First on my list is to reduce costs by eating less meat and eating tougher (cheaper) cuts of meat. A great tool for this approach is a slow cooker. Toss a chuck roast, some red wine, and a few vegetables and herbs in a Crockpot in the morning, set it on low, and come home to the most marvelous pot roast you can imagine. Or mix some dried beans, canned tomatoes, a smoked ham hock, and a few herbs and vegetables in a slow cooker and again, you come home to a meal packed with flavor. The trick here is the slow cooking, a technique that gently teases the flavors out and melds them. You can do the same thing using a Dutch oven (which is what I use).
Next on my list is a Gelpro kitchen mat. I spend way too much time standing on a tiled kitchen floor and not only do my feet get sore, but at the end of a full day of cooking everything is sore and stiff. I'd settle for one, but a couple of these would make my life far less painful - and I think making my life less painful is a good idea. At $125 for a small mat or $150 for a large one, they're not cheap, but they are cheaper than the commercial mats. And if a mat like this makes you more inclined to cook then it's a good idea.
Food Loops are a home cook's substitute for kitchen twine. They're made of silicon and are used to tie up rolled roasts. I've used them and they don't hold as tightly as properly tied twine, but they're a good substitute for someone who doesn't know how to tie a roast and they make a nice stocking stuffer.
When the vacuum food sealers first came out the reports on them indicated they were expensive and not particularly effective. But since then the prices have dropped and the reliability improved. I just threw away a couple of pork chops that had migrated to the back of my freezer and avoided my notice for six months. Despite double-wrapping in plastic and storage in a zippered freezer bag, they were badly freezer-burned. A vacuum sealer solves this problem by eliminating air from around the food. Less wasted food means lower food costs.
There is no one more cognizant of food costs than a chef. Chefs waste nothing if they can avoid it because food costs are the bane of a chef's existence - well, one of them. A great way to use up things like carrot peels, leafy celery tops, onion skins, bones, shrimp shells, and so on - stuff that most of us would think of as garbage - is to make this detritus into stock. Homemade stock is not only cheaper than anything you can buy, it's usually far better-tasting as well. So I think a good, big stock pot is a great investment in better and cheaper meals.
I spent last week answering questions by panicked home cooks about their Thanksiving meal. In many cases I had answers from my own experience on tap such as "How do I cook a beef tenderloin?" But in other cases they were facing difficulties I hadn't personally encountered like, "I burned 
the turkey gumbo, how do I fix it?" In these cases I fell back on both personal experiences and a general knowledge (book-learning) of food and cooking. Michael Ruhlman's Elements of Cooking is a great source of information on fundamental cooking techniques and processes, if all you own are cookbooks, you need this book. I also highly recommend Food Lovers Companion, an essential reference I can't imagine living without - my copy is almost worn out.
So far I've remained practical in these recommendations, but I have a contrarian nature and when I know I should economize my inclination is to splurge (on the other hand, when I know I can splurge my inclination is to splurge), so I have a couple of suggestions along those lines. After all, Christmas is a celebration and some festivity is called for. How better to celebrate than enjoying a special treat?
The first treat is domestic truffles. These come from Tennessee and are the famed Perigord black truffles of France. They are reportedly an excellent alternative to European imports at a fraction of the cost. The second splurge is domestic caviar. I recently tried this product and wrote a review.
I'll be reviewing both of these foods before Christmas so if you want to hold off on ordering I'll be providing more information to go on, but for the right person caviar from the Great Lakes, country ham from Tennessee, or truffles from Oregon are a wonderful gift.
If you're short on cash this Christmas, you're short on cash and there's probably little you can do about the fact. So I'll be cooking up gifts again such as my grandmother's Bourbon Cake and the pancetta I sent out last year. But if you have a little flexibility in your budget some of these gifts can go a long way toward making economizing a pleasure, not a curse.
It's not even Thanksgiving yet, but I've been concentrating on Christmas for over a week.
It isn't that I'm particularly enamored of Christmas, in fact I prefer T'day, but even as a cook and a writer and a food writer I have to plan for holidays. I had to create, test, and write up Thanksgiving recipes for my CookingforTwo site back in early October and I'm finishing off Christmas now. I also have to consider my blog, Seriously Good, and how it relates to the holidays. Then there's my work as a consultant with ChefsLine, and this column.
Even as a kid Thanksgiving was the beginning of Christmas for me, as it is for so many families. For us it wasn't a mad battle with traffic and shoppers on the day after, but rather preparing the first three items in our Christmas feast: Eggnog, Fruitcake, and Bourbon Cake.
One of my earliest memories is of standing beside my father in the kitchen as he made his eggnog base of eggs, whiskey, and sugar. I must have been six or seven at the time, because I remember the silvery bowl was almost as big as I was. The bowl shrank over the years, as I grew, but in the beginning it was huge. I also clearly remember the tintinnabulation of the metal beaters against the metal bowl.
The base, once made, was poured into a small, antique, terracotta butter churn, covered with cheesecloth, and placed at the back of the pantry to age and mellow. On Christmas Eve my father would mix a portion of the base with whipped cream and we would have a toast - even we kids were permitted a small punch glass of 'nog although, of course, these days my parents would likely end up in jail if anyone found out.
Dad also made the fruitcake on Thanksgiving weekend. It was actually a pretty good fruitcake as such things go. But when it came down to it everyone, except possibly my father, preferred the Bourbon Cake my mother made that same weekend.
The Bourbon Cake was passed down from her mother and my guess is the recipe is at least 100 years old. It could well be older. It's a dense butter cake with raisins, nuts, and spices and like Dad's eggnog and fruitcake it ages for a month and gets a weekly dose of bourbon. As children we were permitted a small slice, as adults we limit ourselves to a small slice: It's that rich and that alcoholic.
The Bourbon Cake has become too much work for my mother. The batter is thick and heavy and she no longer has the strength, suppleness, or stamina to make it: I've inherited that task (made much easier with a stand mixer) and this coming weekend I'll be making the cake using my mother stained note card. Between now and Christmas, I'll carefully tend the cake, providing weekly does of bourbon, before finally cutting it into sixths and mailing the huge slices to my family and, if she's lucky, my editor.
I've made Dad's eggnog on occasion, but he also continues to make it sometimes so eggnog at Christmas is less predictable but always welcome. As for Dad's fruitcake... well it's gone if not forgotten.
Our traditions link us to each other and the past we share with our family, our friends, our ancestors, our culture. Whether those traditions are religious or sectarian, familial or cultural, they provide context for our lives and a framework for defining our selves. The acquisition of new traditions , the modification of those we know and love connects us to our current reality.
Happy Thanksgiving.
I first fell in love with Spanish food while attending a programming trade show in Washington, DC. Some friends and I had dinner At Jaleo's, a tapas bar. Prior to that I'd had Americanized paella, which my mother occasionally made when I was growing up, but that was the extent of my experience with Spanish food. Then in 1997 two weeks with my family in a villa on the Costa del Sol confirmed my passion for this simple cuisine.
Consequently when I was recently offered a review copy of Spain: A Culinary Road Trip, I jumped at it. This is a companion volume to a PBS series in which chef Mario Batali, food writer Mark Bittman, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, and Spanish actress Claudia Bassols tour Spain exploring it's art, culture, and food.
Because Batali is a chef and Bittman a food writer I assumed the book would essentially be a cookbook with some narrative related to the TV show woven through it. But it's not. There are indeed about 70 recipes in it of which some are traditional Spanish fare, others more modern dishes, and some are recipes invented by the four participants. But as the dust jacket notes, it's more like a scrapbook.
In the introduction Batali writes: "I must say that my truest roots in the world of food are still deep in the heart of Castile where my family traveled simply but comfortably with a constant eye on the best place for a tortilla Espanola or a pincho moruno." It turns out he lived with his family in Spain while he was growing up. It also turns out he owns two Spanish restaurants in New York, something I didn't know having thought he was purely an Italian chef.
The book is organized by the routes they took through Spain so, for instance, the first section is named "From Madrid to Toledo." The section then consists of short descriptions of Madrid and Toledo, photographs of hanging hams and Batali and Paltrow in a restaurant, a description of the restaurant and it's owner, assorted chunks of dialog and random thoughts, a few recipes, and a description of a birthday dinner. In short, each section is a diverse hodgepodge of elements related to each other primarily by geographic proximity.
The problem with the book is that if you don't care that Batali is a celebrity chef and Paltrow is a famous actress then a lot of the material isn't particularly interesting. A photograph of Paltrow and Bittman standing over a paella pan is less interesting than the same photo would be if the people were native Spanish herders. And a quote by a restaurant owner - "Everyone has eaten here but the Pope, he's too busy." - is more amusing than a silly exchange between Bittman and Bassols.
I did try a few recipes. The recipe for escabeche is good as is the one for pisto manchego but the empanada recipe doesn't even look good and using puff pastry is just wrong.
All in all, I'm disappointed in the book. As I mentioned, my expectation was that it would be a collection of recipes for one of my favorite foods with some narrative to knit the food together. But despite the recipes it really isn't a cookbook and the narrative is more like a collection of random elements probably better conveyed in the television series. It is handsome in its way and would look nice on a coffee table but I'm glad I didn't pay for it.
Pisto Manchego
Adapted from Spain: A Culinary Road Trip
4 ripe plum tomatoes
2 sm Japanese eggplants
4 red bell peppers
2 sm red onions - not peeled
2 tablespoons plus 1/4 cup olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Heat oven to 375F.
Coat tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers with 2 tablespoons of oil and arrange on a baking sheet with onions. Roast for 45 minutes to an hour until onions are tender. Cool until you can handle the vegetables.
Remove skins from tomatoes and seed and core peppers. Cut the eggplants in half and scoop out the flesh. Peel, trim, and cut up the onions then coarsely chop vegetables with remaining oil in a food processor. Taste and adjust salt and pepper.
Serve on toasted coarse bread.
By the time I got to Sonoma it was dark and drizzling rain - a really unpleasant December evening. I had printed out a map and directions to my bed and breakfast from MapQuest but for the first (and only) time MapQuest had it wrong and for the life of me I couldn't find the place and no place I stopped and asked for directions recognized the street. Finally I spotted a UPS truck, followed him to his next stop, and then asked the driver for help. He knew the place and I arrived there about 7:00 PM, two hours late.
I tried the front door - locked - and as I left I mis-stepped on the dark, slippery, wooden stairs and fell heavily on my thigh and butt. Limping around the building I couldn't get in the backdoor either. Finally, I checked an out-building with a light where I found a note to me and keys. I got to my room sore, tired, and soaking wet. It was now 8:00 and I was starving. I drove into the center of town and looked for a place to eat, getting wet - again - as I wandered the town square.
I finally settled on a place named The Girl and the Fig. I recall the hostess was a large woman and the place was packed on a Tuesday night. I wearily requested a table for one. She looked me up and down, told me a table would be about 30 minutes, and commented that I didn't look happy. So I recounted my tale of woe. She escorted me to the bar and told the bartender to serve me a drink on the house. Five minutes later she came back and directed me to an empty stool. Fifteen minutes later I was at a table nursing a second free single-malt scotch while I looked over the menu.
On the waitress's recommendation I ordered a braised lamb shank, which was served with Baby Artichoke Gratin and polenta - she also suggested a Zinfandel to wash it down. Service was impeccable, the food perfectly prepared, and the hostess stopped by once to check on me. My horrible night had been transformed. As I left I asked the hostess, "Are you the Girl?" She was.
The Girl and the Fig is an example of why I so seldom eat out. It was a stellar experience. Few restaurant meals are even good.
I ate there twice more while I was living in California. There was no pretense - ever. The food was simply prepared and yet offered complex flavors, the sort of stuff that can hold up well on a busy night when service slowed. The wait-staff was completely professional and if the tables were somewhat tightly packed, that's typical of a brasserie. That evening has remained in my mind as the quintessential restaurant experience.
The small town of Maryville about 10 miles south of Knoxville has an excellent restaurant named the Foothills Milling Company. Again, the food is well-thought-out and well-executed, the service unobstrusive, and the price appropriate to the experience. You see, eating out is a combination of fact - the food and service - and ambiance - the promise realized or not, of comfort. And I would be deeply disappointed if I had a meal at a renowned restaurant like Alinea or Per Se that I could have gotten at The Girl or Foothills Milling, Three-star restaurants (and their reviews) promise a great deal more. But I'm constantly astounded at how many restaurants make much smaller promises than the three-star joints make and still can't even hit the low bar they've set.
One of the last restaurants I visited was horrible. The chairs were uncomfortable, the wait-staff by turns overly familiar or missing, the décor was pretentious without being appealing, and - sin of sins - the food poorly thought out and badly executed. The very the last place where I ate out was in a concrete-block building serving basic southern fare (collard greens, barbeque, cornbread, and so on) served buffet-style on paper plates with plastic utensils. The food wasn't good, but it wasn't bad either. It was honest, like The Girl and the Fig, and while I wouldn't go back to it, I wasn't disappointed.
A couple of days ago I called and spoke to The Girl and The Fig's owner, Sondra Bernstein, for the first time since my first visit. I told her my story and we chatted a bit. She opened a new restaurant, The Estate, this fall. It's Italian-American rather than French-American and apparently more upscale than The Girl and the Fig, but as we talked it was clearly a place I wanted to try because with every word she reminded me of my most beloved meals in Italy.
Sondra isn't a chef. By training she's an artist and she got involved in the business as a waitress, but she understands food and the way it connects us to the world. If that means spending a few minutes caring for a bruised stranger, understanding a cuisine's fundamental strengths, or celebrating a location's beauty - it's all part of the role good eating plays in our lives. So find the Girls near you, and help them succeed.
Today , Nov. 3 is the birthday of Lord John Montague, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich and, reputedly, the inventor of the sandwich. In point of fact, sandwiches were likely invented the day after bread was invented, nevertheless there is a good chance that Montague is the namesake of the portable delight we've all enjoyed at one time or another.
The story goes that the earl was gambling and to avoid having to stop and eat he ordered that he be brought a slice of meat between two slices of bread. His fellow aristocrats were impressed with his dedication to losing farthings and the Sandwich idea quickly spread among the upper-crust before trickling down to the masses - thus proving Ronald Regan's economic thesis when it comes to mustard.
As a sandwich-lover from way back, I always celebrate the earl's birthday with a carefully planned sandwich, but this year I thought it might be fun to consider what sort of sandwich the presidential candidates might choose. The easy one and first to occur to me was Sarah Palin, the "real" American. I suspect it would be a grilled cheese sandwich consisting of margarine, a Kraft Single, and Wonder bread demonstrating a complete lack of sophistication, experience, and judgment in food as in other matters. This is not to put down the grilled cheese sandwich, which can be extraordinary when made well using, er, real ingredients.
Palin's running mate provided a greater challenge. Arizona is far better known for it's Southwestern cuisine than for sandwiches. I've spent a good deal of time in Phoenix and never had a sandwich there worth remembering. But Sen. John McCain is a conservative and, at one time, the conservative motivation was more about preserving the past (or, at least, slowing and controlling change) than about promoting fundamentalist Christian teachings or giving tax cuts to the wealthy. Since in the past, Arizona was part of Mexico I elected to be generous and define the fajita as a sandwich - after all, it is a filling wrapped in bread. So what if the bread is flat?
Moving on to Sen. Joe Biden, as best I could determine Scranton, Pennsylvania - unlike Philadelphia with its cheese-steak - doesn't have a unique sandwich. So I called Biden's office in Wilmington, Del. Odd thing, politics. I knew Biden was from Scranton, I knew his political reputation and a fair bit of his history in the Senate, but somehow it had never registered on me that he represented Delaware and not Pennsylvania. Anyway, the person I talked to (who wished to remain anonymous when discussing the Senator's sandwich proclivities) dug up his schedule, called the campaign, and reported that Joe's favorite sandwich is a "turkey and Swiss with tomato on wheat." I asked about his position on condiments, specifically raising the issue of mustard and mayonnaise, but she claimed she didn't know. Cover-up? You be the judge.
Barack Obama posed the biggest problem because of the cultural wealth of his background: Indonesia, Kansas, Hawaii, and Chicago. For instance, I found a couple of Indonesian sandwiches, the Nama Nama and the Variasi, but I couldn't find English descriptions of them. Kansas took me the Palin direction and, having already been there, I didn't want to return. Hawaii: James Cook the first European to find the Hawaiian Islands named them the Sandwich Islands and they were, in fact, named in honor of John Montague - this could hardly be a coincidence! But again, there was a dearth of sandwichs associated with the islands and so I was left with Chicago.
Chicago loves sandwiches and is famous for it's hot dogs. These are distinguished from other dogs by being a steamed or boiled all-beef tube on a poppy seed bun. The dog is topped with mustard, onion, sweet pickle relish, a dill pickle spear, tomato slices or wedges, peppers, and a dash of celery salt. Ketchup is prohibited. Chicago also serves other sausage-based sandwiches, but perhaps it's greatest claim to sandwich fame - at least according to my friends - is the Italian Beef sandwich.
This is made of thinly-sliced, seasoned roast beef that's then kept warm au jus. The meat is spooned onto a hoagie-style bun (often the bun is briefly dipped in the jus) and topped with giardiniera or sauteed sweet bell peppers. It's one of those sandwiches that requires "assuming the stance" (standing, legs spread, leaning forward from the hips, elbows akimbo) to eat without spilling everything down the front of your clothes.
It sounds like an excellent sandwich and I'm sure Obama has eaten many of these while organizing communities. Hell, I'd organize a community for one.
On October 12 Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food took over the New York Times Magazine for his polemic, "Farmer in Chief" framed as an open letter to the next president. Pollan writes: "what's needed is a change of culture in America's thinking about food ... focusing the light of public attention on the issue and communicating a simple set of values that can guide Americans toward sun-based foods and away from eating oil."
The article is a tour de force of the problems facing the American and world food supply. Pollan begins with food prices but moves on to farm policy, climate change, economic policy, health care, energy policy, and diet. He does a masterful job of showing how these issues relate to and affect each other.
There is much with which I agree. Pollan notes: "Monoculture is the original sin of American Agriculture." We have a system designed to produce the most possible calories of food for the least possible price - factory farms are the result of this policy. It began with Earl Butz during the Nixon administration when he completely revamped farm policy to encourage maximum production and instead of offering farmers insurance during hard times the government began actively subsidizing crops such as corn, soy beans, and rice. This meant that farmers could make a profit even when their costs of production exceeded the market price of the commodity.
The most obvious result of this policy are CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) and the increased use of HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) in processing our food Both encourage obesity and both are based on the over-supply of corn due to subsidies. That's corn. But there's also oil. Another product of corn subsidies, Ethanol - possibly the first bio-fuel - is increasing the demand for corn and thus contributing to increases in food prices. And, as the cost of oil and natural gas increase so does the price of crops dependent on high levels of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, made in many cases from petroleum by-products.
Pollan's point is that the next president needs to have a Food Policy, a set of principles and plans that account for how energy, health, economics, and diet relate to and influence each other. Pollan's thesis is that a piecemeal approach to the issues makes things worse and the next president needs to use his bully pulpit to encourage Americans to think more deeply about these issues and their interconnections. He even recommends turning part of the White House lawn into a vegetable garden as Eleanor Roosevelt did during World War II.
Frankly I think the chances of the next president even reading Pollan's article, much less considering his ideas, is slim to none. But that's not really the point. Food issues, whether the issue of animal confinement being addressed by California's Prop 2, or buying organic, or even entertainment in the form of the Food Network is becoming something more and more Americans care about.
We see this interest reflected in the media. For instance, we not only have a Food Network, but one of Bravo's hits is "Top Chef" and the Travel Channel offers both "No Reservations" and "Bizaare Foods." The cover story of the November 2008 issue of Wired is "The Future of Food." And equally telling, two years ago Spot-On asked me to write this column - not a food and cooking how-to but instead about how food and cooking fit into and are reflected in our culture.
This increased interest in food is a good thing because we're approaching a food crisis that will affect even those of us in the developed world. The more thought we give to the issues now the better prepared we'll be when the crisis hits and we actually do something about it. As Pollan writes, "...most of the problems our food system faces today are because of its reliance on fossil fuels, and to the extent that our policies wring the oil out of the system and replace it with the energy of the sun, those policies will simultaneously improve the state of our health, our environment and our security."
In other words: We need to quit eating oil.
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Update: Apparently I was wrong when I wrote:
Frankly I think the chances of the next president even reading Pollan's article, much less considering his ideas, is slim to none.
According to this article Obama read
at least a synopsis.
