AND here's what I made for dinner from the foods I bought this morning:Note: for lunch we had lettuce from the market in our salad.
This morning the Ann Arbor Farmers Market was fairly busy, but not unpleasantly crowded. The number of sellers is so large that stalls now occupy quite a bit of the parking lot, as well as the established aisles.
In his blog this month, famous food author Harold McGee had an interesting post on post modern cooking: News For Curious Cooks: Modern cooking and "molecular gastronomy". McGee has been creating a history of gastronomic seminars at the Erice conference center that brought together leaders in this field uniting science and cooking -- his forte. I learned that McGee was an organizer of these seminars, along with a physicist, Nicholas Kurti. Of course I was especially fascinated by this, as I've been a trailing spouse at 4 or 5 seminars at Erice. Being there is a fabulous experience -- including the food served at the many restaurants in the tiny hilltop town where an ancient monastic complex has become a physics and science conference center. The photo at right is from our most recent trip there a few years ago.Misinformation and misunderstandings about experimental cooking have been accumulating from its very beginnings. They're now hardening into bad pop cultural history that tags very different chefs and their ideas with the impressive but empty terms "molecular gastronomy" and "molecular cuisine."
The two documents and many supporting letters and conference poster are a fascinating bit of history, which McGee is in a special position to preserve.
I was very interested in one link, to the website of the most famous of the cooks in this probably mis-named cuisine: Synthesis of elBulli cuisine, which is a manifesto (without specifically admitting it). I felt this set of principles resembled another such document: Marinetti's The Futurist Cookbook. I claim this in support of my recent observation (Futurists see the future) that Marinetti's food preparations and presentations -- which were meant only as an exercise in imagination -- closely resemble food of the so-called molecular gastronomists. It's bizarre how the pretensions of this modern cuisine resemble the rants of this 1932 document of strange surrealist intent.
For a simple family meal I cheated slightly, and bought the green beans from the prepared food counter at Whole Foods. However, I made the potato salad myself, and added some tuna. For variety, I put a few sweet potatoes in the salad along with the white potatoes and vinaigrette dressing.
I love rhubarb. The crumble in the photo, which I baked this evening, was really good. Do you remember the Laura Ingalls Wilder story about how, as a young bride, she made pie from rhubarb (she called it pie plant) and forgot the sugar? I think Almanzo ate it anyway: just sprinkled some sugar on it.
The recipes in the Larousse Gastronomique suggest cutting peeled rhubarb stems into 2 to 3 inch pieces when you make compote, jam, or "English-style" pies and tarts. My mother did it this way, and her rhubarb compote was delicious but full of stringy things around 2 or 3 inches long. I am in the habit of using the food processor to make extremely thin slices of rhubarb -- as shown. This process is very fast, avoids the need to peel the stems, and thus preserves the beautiful red color. Also: no strings! I also pour a kettle of boiling water over the slices to reduce the acidity.
I bought a lot of rhubarb, and prepped it all at once. While my crumble was baking, I made a pot of compote (AKA rhubarb sauce) from rhubarb, strawberries, and sugar. Cooking the very thin slices goes fast. It was done quite a bit before the crumble. I added a bit of vanilla after cooking. Isn't the color beautiful? We'll eat it later: it keeps in the refrigerator.
This pictorial series begins with Thomas Jefferson, who "pursued an informed love of fine food both at Monticello and at the Presidential mansion."
All the while that I'm blogging my essentially frivolous thoughts on food, I am also in parallel thinking about the looming food insecurity of the third world. Every day new events and problems are the subject of various articles, to which I make no comment. I don't have any enlightening ideas or facts."The world seemed to have been liberated from a Malthusian 'long night of hunger and drudgery.' Now the 'dark tints' have returned. The World Bank recently announced that thirty-three countries are confronting food crises, as the prices of various staples have soared. From January to April of this year, the cost of rice on the international market went up a hundred and forty-one per cent. Pakistan has reintroduced ration cards. In Egypt, the Army has started baking bread for the general population. The Haitian Prime Minister was ousted after hunger riots. The current crisis could push another hundred million people deeper into poverty."
"All of these authors agree that the entire system of Western food production is in need of radical change, right down to the spinach. Roberts opens with a description of E.-coli-infected spinach from California.... Industrial farming means that even those on a vegan diet may reap the nastier effects of intensive meat production. It is no longer enough for individuals to switch to 'healthier' choices in the supermarket. Schlosser asked his readers to consider the chain of consequences they set in motion every time they sit down to eat in a fast-food outlet. Roberts wants us to consider the 'chain of transactions and reactions' represented by each of our food purchases—'by each ripe melon or freshly baked bagel, by each box of cereal or tray of boneless skinless chicken breasts.' This time, we are all implicated."
"So, yes, cheap food can be nasty, not to mention bad for farmers and the environment. Yet it has one great advantage that neither Patel nor Roberts fully grapples with: people can afford to buy it. According to the World Bank, four hundred million fewer people were living in extreme poverty in 2004 than was the case in 1981, in large part owing to the affordability of basic foodstuffs. The current food crises are the result of food being too expensive to buy, rather than too cheap. The rioters of Haiti would kill for a plate of affordable chicken, no matter how pale, soft, and exudative. The battle against cheap food involves harder tradeoffs than Patel and Roberts allow. No one has yet discovered how to raise prices for the overfed rich without squeezing the underfed poor."
It's food section day in the major daily newspapers that I read online. Last night I read the week's food feature in the L.A.Times: Old-fashioned cheesecake. My mouth watered as I read and looked at the incredibly appetizing photo (right)."Cheesecake has that kind of power; it also has range. Stamped with an ancient provenance (Alan Davidson reports a description of a Roman cheesecake in Cato's 2nd century 'De Re Rustica') and European pedigree, it's made with ricotta in Italy, quark (a fresh curd cheese) or farmer cheese in Eastern Europe. And the distinctive texture and clean flavor of classic American cheesecakes comes from silky smooth, creamy but tart cream cheese."
What I wondered is this: does L.A. have its own special kind of cheesecake? I suspect it does. I remember it as quite often available in California.
This morning in the N.Y.Times food section -- a compendium of past articles titled Times Topics: Cheesecake. The list was illustrated with several tempting photos (one at right). The articles listed are all at least a couple of years old, and many deal with a fight over who invented some New York classic version of the dish. Not nearly as mouth-watering.
Although I'm a faithful reader of the N.Y.Times and its food section, I've rarely been to the city and have little interest in its priority claims about foods. I suspect that all New York foods originated with the diverse population one way or another. (In preference you can find me almost anywhere else: Hawaii, Washington D.C., Australia, New Zealand, Paris or London... just not New York.)
Anyway, I wonder if the food editors in New York noticed the L.A.Times article and put in this retrospective to stay competitive. That would be funny. The Washington Post isn't evidently playing the game: their food section leads with morel mushrooms, and their weirdness article of the day is on raw reindeer meat (in case you thought we hadn't gone off the deep end last week with yak cheese.)
Are you planning a trip to Italy? A reading project about an aspect of Italian life? If you plan to go even slightly away from the big, crowded tourist attractions, there's a 35-year-old classic book that can give you some unusual insights. In The Food of Italy, Waverley Root presents Italy's distinguished past as background for the development of Italian cuisine. Root connects amazing details about the foods produced and served in each region to the cultural past. These details can be overwhelming, but also fascinating.
Then he gives all sorts of details about the most famous Sicilian sweets, caponata, couscous, pasta with sardines (only in Palermo, you'll learn, the photo shows some I had last summer), and all sorts of mouth-watering vegetables and meats."The ring shape of tortellini suggests to the Bolognese mind the human navel -- or more exactly the feminine navel, for it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that the male umbilicus possesses inspirational qualities. Obsession with this resemblance has produced a number of stories about the origin of tortellini which contribute little to history, but do shed some light on Bolognese psychology. A 17th-century story is the simplest: it maintains that tortellini was born when a cook molded his pasta directly in the navel of a Bolognese woman. The image is fetching, but the exact process by which edible pasta could thus be arrived at is not easy to figure out." (p. 195)
Root goes on to cite literary sources in which the navel origin of pasta plays a role. Similarly, Root grounds his disquisitions of food and wine in details about the leaders of the land; for example, when describing the foods of the region north of Rome, he writes that eels become so tasty in the waters of Bolsena "that they led Pope Martin IV into the sin of gluttony. He was from the Touraine, where matelote of eel is a much appreciated dish; but this was not considered an extenuating circumstance by Dante (anti-French anyway) who punished him by placing him in purgatory in the Divine Comedy." (p. 99)
Another papal story: "In the 14th century, an offbeat gastronomic note was inserted into history by one of the less admired members of the powerful Visconti family, then ruling Milan. This was Barnabo, who had been excommunicated by the pope." This tyrant forced the monks who represented the pope to eat the bull of excommunication: "parchment, ribbons, seals and all." While the bull didn't poison the monks, Barnabo himself was poisoned somewhat later. A food story? Well, maybe. (p. 257)
Root often digresses from his vivid descriptions of the many dishes from every region of Italy. "In ancient Roman days, as in ours, a whole roast pig was customarily served with an apple in its mouth, and the apple was likely to be Picenian. Horace described Picenian apples as small but exceedingly tasty, whose like could be found nowhere else. A few centuries later another famous writer, Boccaccio, praised Picenian salame, whose superiority he attributed to the fact that the sausage casings were made from the intestines of the same pig which produced the meat." Delightful digressions! (p. 129)
It's impossible to summarize his work, as it's encyclopedic. In reading it -- preferably one regional section at a time -- you realize numerous connections in Italian culture. The Renaissance, for example, was a rebirth not only of art and literature, but also of food; Root shows you exactly how this truism might apply to your dinner, if you find the right small, non-touristy restaurant. The Romans left an indelible mark on the land and its food; you'll be more likely to notice the marks if you read the book.
Almost at the beginning of the book, Root writes: "while French cooking has become professional cooking even when it is executed by amateurs, Italian cooking has remained basically amateur cooking even when it is executed by professionals. It is, in short, home cooking... human, light-hearted and informal." (p. 18) Throughout this work, I appreciated the range of specific details that demonstrated how Italian cooking comes from the people.
My previous post may seem very negative. To offset that impression, here are images of some Italian food and cooking books that I really like -- besides the PBS show "Lidia's Italy.""Let me illustrate... with a recipe for broiled red snapper. I created it some time ago as a sort of by-product of another dish that I was preparing at the moment. The genesis of this recipe has a further value. It shows a cook at work, experimenting with ingredients that he thoroughly understands and the quality of whose synthesis he can confidently predict." (p. 186)
These words from The Unprejudiced Palate by Angelo Pellegrini demonstrate why I find him a tedious, tendentious self-advertiser -- this must be the millionth time in the book that he mentions that he is a skilled cook. Everything he does, in his view, illustrates his confident competence.
In addition to being vain, he's an incredible male chauvinist of the worst old-world self-unaware school. Although his book dates to the 1940s, he has no use for the many achievements of women to that date, and more important, he views the women of America as incompetent, lazy, and inadequate to his lofty European standards. Here is a typical paragraph about the American housewife:
"If excellent meals require exotic and unavailable ingredients, endless hours in the kitchen, and a lifetime to perfect, Mrs. Jones is content to whet the can opener and concentrate on bridge. But she cannot consistently ignore the call to culinary self-improvement. To meet special occasions she will now and then hazard an invasion of the sacred precincts. After a hectic shopping tour... she advances gaily into the kitchen and takes a snort of this or that -- whichever she happens to have on hand -- to bolster her morale and quicken the imagination. A survey of her posts and pans reveals that they are woefully inadequate. Quaking with a sense of impending failure, she begins to mince and saute, simmer and strain. Her nerves kept in perfect equilibrium by her favorite cigarette, she meets each crisis as it emerges. Well in advance of the dinner hour, each little culinary symphony has received the final blessing, and the casseroles gurgle all over the stove." (p. 10-11)
I'll spare you any more of this! His contempt is so great he needs only hypothetical or fictitious examples of the degraded American woman to offset his vast superiority. When Pellegrini gets on the subject of American cookbooks and American housewives, or above all, of American working women, he becomes really offensive. It's a clue to his attitude that he never actually names a real cookbook or real anecdote: everything is a generalization about the superiority of his way, the inferiority of what he has seen in America.
Pellegrini delights in contrasting his Tuscan peasant childhood with the west-coast decadence and lack of taste he discovered later in his life, as a college student and professor. In the parts of the book where he sticks to his Italian memoirs, one can find lots of fascinating food facts about the unvarnished Mediterranean diet, as well as about the life of peasants in Italy before it became prosperous. His descriptions of wine-making are especially fascinating. I enjoyed his explanation of why polenta wasn't much of a treat as served without meat or flavoring at a peasant's table, though it was becoming a gourmet item in America. Even when he's engaging in self-congratulations about his ingenuity in making money to offset his family's poverty, even when he's quoting corny Italian proverbs, his memoirs are interesting.
When he gets to America, though, his observations become less penetrating. To quote a review on the amazon.com site: "He writes as if he was the first immigrant to come to America, the rest of us have been here forever clutching in our greasy paw a hotdog in one and a can of cream of mushroom soup in the other."
What really bugs me is that he can't present a recipe without continually making note of his superiority as a gardener, cook, and man of the world, and without putting down some American straw man (or more likely, straw woman) who uses inferior and tasteless ingredients, overcooks the pasta, deep-fries the delicate sole, doesn't like garlic, turnip greens, or kale; has never tasted rabbit or artichoke; or commits some other heinous culinary offense. That said, they may be good recipes, but there's no lack of good Italian peasant cookbooks these days.
His wrap-up attack (Chapter 6) on the American fried-chicken dinner is the least hypothetical of his diatribes, as it's based on an experience with a 4-H banquet from his youth. Most people would feel that the choice of frying, grilling, or roasting chicken, and the choice of biscuits or Italian bread were matters of personal taste. Most of the cooks he despises would simply not like the result of his suggestion to add chervil to fried chicken. For this author taste that differs from his is a moral failing -- "I am insisting upon old-fashioned virtues." (p. 234)
In the Conclusion, Pellegrini claims that he has simply explored "the significance of bread and wine," (p. 230) -- but this is false naivity on his part. The book is full of judgments and advice.His observations on American abundance and waste weren't all that original even in 1948.
I wonder that this passes for a classic -- the edition I own has now been replaced by one with laudatory notes by both Ruth Reichl AND Mario Batali. Give me the works of Pellegrini's near-contemporaries M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David any time! For a real treat, read M.F.K.Fisher's afterword to the Lyons & Buford edition -- she describes her actual meeting with Pellegrini at a wine-tasting where he reviled her for wearing perfume -- only to discover that he was smelling the odor of the soap he used at his motel.
There's certainly a lot of nostalgia, as well as irony, in reading this historical document, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you are really doing research.
The Futurist Cookbook by F. T. Marinetti, published in 1932 denounced all forms of pasta and called for a new, bold type of cooking. Here is example from a futurist meal he imagined:The second course consists of four parts: on a plate are served one quarter of a fennel bulb, an olive, a candied fruit and a tactile device. The diner eats the olive, then the candied fruit, then the fennel. Contemporaneously, he delicately passes the tip of the index and middle fingers of his left hand over the rectangular device, made of a swatch of red damask, a little square of black velvet and a tiny piece of sandpaper. From some carefully hidden melodious source comes the sound of part of a Wagnerian opera, and simultaneously, the nimblest and most graceful of the waiters sprays the air with perfume. [From Marinetti: The Futurist Cookbook, translated, Suzanne Brill, 1989]Before I continue, perhaps you need a brief summary of this 20th century cultural movement that had its origins in Italy about 100 years ago, developing in Italy and Russia with strange resonances to Fascist thought:
FUTURISM was one of the longest lived and broadest encompassing artistic movements of the 20th century, although it tends to be denied the importance it deserves because of its political associations.
Many of the early Futurists were anarchists, the movement was welcomed by Gramsci and emulated amongst the Bolsheviks, but it was the association of Futurismo with Fascismo that has left it somewhat tainted amongst progressives. This is ironic in that Futurism was the quintessenence of 20th century modernism and paralleled 'the cult of the new' exemplified in Lenin's dictum "socialism + electricity = communism". Although Mussolini's regime utilised modernist traits, it was more at home with the neo-classicism of Novecento.
Although mainly associated with the visual arts, Futurism began in 1909 with the proclamation of a manifesto by the Italian poet, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944). The manifesto not only celebrated the dynamism of the machine age but strongly negated the past: "We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind..." [From "The Challenge of Futurism," Flux Magazine]
Obviously, the purpose of Futurism, like the purpose of much of modernism, did not seem to be to predict the future.
BUT I say that it did. And most bizarrely, the food preparations and presentations in The Futurist Cookbook that were meant only as an exercise in imagination, closely resemble food that many critics in the last 10 years have been thrilled to consume at expensive restaurants.
These meals -- that I've only read about -- come from a food trend called Molecular Gastronomy. Its principal inventor, Ferran Adrià Acosta, prefers to call it deconstructivist cooking. Adria is particularly known for making unexpected substances into foam -- foamed espresso, foamed mushroom and foamed beetroot are among these products.
His tortilla de patata, which in every other Spanish restaurant is a potato and onion omelet, is served in a martini glass and is liquid and foam. You are handed a spoon and told to dip it all the way to the bottom with each bite. You plunge through a white potato foam into a soft pudding of egg and caramelized onion. In his chicken curry, the curry is the solid, the chicken is liquid. [Amanda Hesser, "In Spain, A Chef To Rival Dali," New York Times, 1999]
Adria, whom you've probably read about, is widely imitated and his techniques, such as foaming, cooking in a vacuum, and creating little spheres from liquids -- a sort of fake caviar of arbitrary taste -- have been widely imitated and commercialized. The Chicago restaurant Alinea is one American version. Here are some futurist courses from an Alinea menu described a few years ago at its opening:
The first course was a visually nifty riff on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich: a peeled, heated grape, still on a sprig, that had been dipped in a peanut purée and encased in a thin layer of brioche.This is much more weird than life following art. Surely I'm not the first to notice.A later course paired slivers of rare beef with an undulating sheet of potato, which became a jagged landscape with discreet canyons and buttes of molasses, raisin purée, dried garlic, dried tomato and more: the flavors of A.1. steak sauce, candidly acknowledged on the menu.
...There was a deconstructed Caesar salad, a deconstructed guacamole and a "deconstructed glass of white wine," which was a translucent rectangle of grape jelly with pinpricks of herbs, nuts and fruits often evoked by wine. I was instructed to taste each and guess its identity. [Frank Brunei, "Sci-Fi Cooking Tries Dealing With Reality," New York Times, 2005]
It’s likely that there will never be a clear winner in the conventional versus organic battle if they are judged strictly by comparing their nutrient scorecards. But Dr. Grossman suggested that organic farming may have a more general nutritional advantage over a system that relies on agricultural chemicals.
“I think it’s likely that plants grown with minimal intervention by the farmer are chemically more complex,” ... “The biochemical machinery in plants is incredibly prolific,” Dr. Grossman said. “They can make hundreds of relatives of beta carotene alone. I’m sure we haven’t identified all the beneficial chemicals in plants. And diversity in the molecules we consume may be beneficial in itself.”
As for yak cheese, which has "higher levels of the essential omega-3 fatty acids that are found in fish and plants" -- he points out that as with the higher omega-3s in grass-fed beef, the total amounts are not actually very high. If you really want omega-3s you should eat fish, walnuts, greens, or other sources that are actually high. His conclusion is that taste should be your guide. I guess this isn't entirely different from Michael Pollan.
"To me, life lived in commercials was real life. Commercials were instructions; they were news. They showed me what perfection could be: in the right woman's hands, the layers of a cake would always be exactly the same size. In the right woman's kitchen, a cartoon rabbit would visit the children and show them how to slurp down a tall glass of Nestle Quik with a straw. ... Commercials had a firm definition of motherhood, which almost all of my friends' mothers had no trouble fulfilling. They swept floors and scrubbed bathtubs. They cooked casseroles and washed dishes. They had smooth, sensible pageboy hairstyles and serene smiles. They set the dinner tables every night and sang Cinderella songs and taught their children where to sit."
She also loved salty Vietnamese pickles, lychees, green sticky rice with pork in neat packets, and steaming soups that her grandmother cooked. The descriptions are vivid: I wonder how they relate to anything I've eaten. Probably nothing similar to the scallion pancakes or spring roll I tried on my last time at a Vietnamese restaurant. Her food is not symbolic: you can almost taste it.
Another set of changes you could make on chicken or turkey salad would be an American Oriental version. The dressing includes soy sauce, rice vinegar, canola or sesame oil, and optionally some grated fresh ginger or toasted sesame seeds. Vegetables: celery again, Napa cabbage, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, micro-wave-blanched snow peas, or water chestnuts. You could sneak some soba noodles into this one (use the cooking directions on the package). No recipe needed.
From yesterday's trip to Whole Foods: well, olive oil is one product that Mrs. Gioconda (see Mona Lisa is really Mrs. Gioconda) would have been familiar with at the time she sat for her famous portrait. I'm not going to try this new brand of oil. Why? Because recent scandals about the Italian olive oil industry have convinced me to choose Spanish, French, California, or Greek olive oil. In fact, Spanish olive oil often has that really delicious fruit-tinged flavor that I associate with being near the actual Mediterranean, while many Italian varieties no longer seem to have that quality. Maybe because they are adulterated with cheaper oils -- too bad.
