Hope for Michigan?

Michigan is in terrible trouble. Maybe the President will help the auto companies, but even with a bailout, the future here looks pretty grim. The icy pavement and wintery clouds we've been having seem to reflect the revenge that Michigan business and labor are suffering at the hands of the neo-Hooverites in the Senate recently.

Here's a little ray of hope: the Jiffy Mix plant, which has been in business longer than the auto industry, is still sending little blue boxes of cornbread mix, muffin mix, and many other products out to all 50 states and to military stores abroad. The grain elevators and the processing and packaging are all located in Chelsea, just down the road from here.

Says the Jiffy website:

Mabel White Holmes ... developed and introduced to the homemaker the first prepared baking mix product, “JIFFY” Baking Mix, in the spring of 1930. Currently we offer 21 “JIFFY” Mixes. Our mixes provide you, our consumer, with the best value available.

Chelsea Milling Company is a complete manufacturer. We store wheat. We mill wheat into flour. We use that flour for our own mixes. We make our own “little blue” boxes. We do it all-that’s why our mixes provide you with the best possible value.

The town of Chelsea is a fun place to go. You can look at the Jiffy plant, and within a block, shop at little galleries and gift shops and dine well at The Common Grill restaurant. The town is also know for the Purple Rose Theater, which puts on live performances. Everything is close together for a really appealing small-town atmosphere. If only they all or mostly can stay in business through these tough times.

ZouZou's cafe, a block from Jiffy, has delicious home made baked goods, sandwiches, and espresso. This afternoon, after taking these Jiffy photos, we had a nice cappuccino and a brioche.

Like Jiffy, ZouZou's has a sense of history. Among their ice cream concoctions are the Detroit Specialties -- a peppermint sundae using a recipe from the dining room on the 13th floor of the long-demolished downtown Hudson's department store and a hot fudge cream puff using the recipe from the old Sanders' Candy Company ice cream parlors. I hope General Motors isn't really on course to join Hudsons and Sanders in the nostalgic annals of defunct Michigan businesses.

Once more, bacon

Bacon again

Here's an illustration from inside my own refrigerator.

And for an update on the bacon fad, see this --

HIDING THE EVIDENCE OF A BACON ADDICTION

Quote "I've become totally obsessed with bacon. Can't stop thinking about it. Can't stop phantom smelling it. Can't stop putting it in food where it previously didn't belong."

The article mentions chocolate-covered bacon, bacon fat in spice cookies, and it links to bacon cupcakes. As the dog in the commercial said "bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon."

I have it!

I'm really glad I ordered this book! The story of Fernand Point is told almost as if it were a fable. How he treated his customers, teased his employees, turned away people he didn't want to serve... all the things that seem too legendary to be real. Idolatry with pen-and-ink drawings. It's marvelous.

Quotations from the Great Man:

• "Silence is golden," they say -- and yet, cuisine, one must speak of that!
• La grande cuisine must not wait for the guest; it is the guest who must wait for la grande cuisine.
• A good cuisinier never dirties his apron outside his work.

Just for laughs: Barbie's Kitchen

Barbie will celebrate her 50th birthday next year. Believe me, I do not advocate giving these toys to any child. In fact, I think Miriam and Alice outgrew Barbies a couple birthdays ago. So this is just to put in another kitchen photo to finish out a year of many kitchen photos.

Persimmon Mystery

At Thanksgiving, we were treated to these beautiful persimmons, which I'd never much tried before, and various family members sliced them up and passed them around. They had a mild but pleasant flavor. (Actually, I preferred the clementines that were in the same attractive fruit bowl.)

Last week, Lenny requested that I buy some when I went shopping. At Whole Foods, I paid $2 for ONE rather small, but nicely colored persimmon. Organic. It looked to me like the ones we had eaten.

We sliced it. It looked like the ones we had at Thanksgiving: brightly colored, sort of solid. But it was horrible. It made our mouths feel like cotton.

Food wizard Harold McGee, in his New York Times column today, has the explanation!

He writes:

The persimmons that we see in markets are an Asian species that comes in two general types, one of which requires special handling and should be sold with a warning label for the novice.

The flat-bottomed Fuyu type can be eaten when firm, and it usually is. This is the persimmon that many restaurants are serving now, peeled and sliced into salads.

But elongated persimmons, usually the Hachiya variety, are absolutely inedible when firm. They are more astringent than the worst overbrewed tea or overextracted red wine you have ever been assaulted by. Their mouth-drying tannins recede only when the flesh ripens fully into a translucent, almost liquid mass.

V.I.Warshawski

My guest post today at Catherine's blog is about private investigator V.I. Warshawski, a character in the long-running detective series by Chicago author Sara Paretsky. Catherine's home -- and the focus of many of her posts about justice and jury duty -- is Chicago, so she's also a fan of this series. I love the food scenes Paretsky creates, especially when V.I.Warshawski raids her poorly stocked refrigerator after a tiring day chasing bad guys. As I said, V.I.'s habits provide a dramatic contrast to the refined cuisine in Robert Parker's novels.

Is this a Bacon Fad?

Food writers, columnists, and chefs seem to be indulging in a bacon fad. Some quotes I've read in the last few weeks:

• "Bacon has a place at the table morning, noon and night. And venture beyond its natural pairings to the unusual yet sublime -- in an apple coffeecake or as a martini garnish. Enjoy. ...
  "And for a finale? Candied bacon. Sprinkle some brown sugar over bacon slices, and bake until crisp and caramelized. Go ahead, make the whole pound -- trust me, it's that good." -- L.A. Times: "Bacon recipes galore!"
• "Bacon: Delicious! Ice cream: My favorite! The combination of bacon and ice cream: a direct threat to my views of economics. You see, every bite was awful. It wasn’t even really good bacon; it was cheap bacon bits scattered through the ice cream. But somehow, even though each mouthful was terrible, I couldn’t stop eating it." -- Freakonomics Blog, November 19, 2008
• How To: Make Your Own Bacon Ice Cream -- Geekology, November 18, 2008
• "Yes, that’s right: chocolate-covered bacon." -- NYT City Room Blog: "Mmm … Bacon! (Of the Chocolate-Covered Variety)"
• Recipe: Arugula, Bacon, and Gruyère Bread Pudding -- Gourmet, December, 2008.
• “It was rumored that New York journalist A. J. Liebling used a piece of bacon as a bookmark.” -- New York Times Book Review: "Cookbooks"

I don't think I would like bacon ice cream, but if you are game for not just the ice cream but all kinds of bizarre accompaniments, watch this:

More Mystery Food

I'm guest blogging this week at Catherine Mambretti's blog: Postcard Mysteries. Catherine, a mystery author herself, blogs about jury trials and other issues of crime and punishment -- very interesting: check it out.

Catherine invited me to write about food in courtroom dramas (especially, what did the jury eat), and in other detective fiction. See my post here. More will follow later this week, interspersed with her ongoing posts.

Food in literature is one of my pleasures, and I often review books in terms of the way that food is used for creating atmosphere, character, ironic detachment, or whatever. Here are links to more posts about food and detective stories:

• What do members of the Yiddish Policemen's Union Eat? about Chabon's book and some of the borscht-belt food that he invokes.
  
• Tuna-Noodle Casserole, Literary Version about Robert Parker's detective stories and one particular example of his pretensions about food.
• Elmore Leonard's Kitchen about one mystery where several key scenes take place in the kitchen, and where food is quite central to the characters' development.
  
• Dining with Exotic Policemen about Chinese author Qiu Xiaolong’s mystery novel Death of a Red Heroine and the exotic foods eaten by the detective, including snake.
  
• Tony Hillerman (link to his obituary)

Also, Catherine wrote a guest post for this blog recently: Comment on Chinese Food.

A Classic Recipe

It's been 2 years since I posted this simple favorite here. I made some yesterday, so here it is again.

Classic Blondies
(also known as Butterscotch Brownies)

1 stick butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg
1 cup flour sifted with 1 tsp baking powder
1 and 1/3 cup (or slightly more) dried fruit, chocolate, and/or nuts*

Grease an 8" or 9" square pan. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

1) Melt butter and brown sugar in saucepan or microwave. Cool so it won't cook the egg in next step.

2) Add egg and vanilla to sugar mixture. Add flour and baking powder. Stir well. Add nuts and fruit to batter and stir well. (Or wait and spread them on top of batter in pan in step 3. Chocolate chips or chunks definitely work better if added to top of batter, without stirring, after it is in the pan.)

3) Spread batter in the greased pan. Top with remaining chocolate/fruit/nuts. Just press it in a little. Bake 40 minutes at 350°F. Tester may not be completely clean when brownies are done.

4) Cut brownies into squares after cooling 20 minutes. Loosen from pan. Remove when cool.

*You can use any nuts, chocolate chips, chopped chocolate, chopped dried apricots, dried cherries, fresh or dried cranberries, chopped candied ginger, or any other dried fruit etc. in a combination that appeals to you. Yesterday I used apricots, chocolate, and almonds. Two weeks ago I used fresh cranberries in the batter and chocolate on top.

What do members of the Yiddish Policemen's Union Eat?

Michael Chabon, in The Yiddish Policemen's Union, has written a bizarre masterpiece. Very bizarre. In a self-contained world located in Sitka, Alaska, live the remnants of Eastern European Jewry. These exiles, who lost the state of Israel in 1948, still speak Yiddish, and still produce wisecracks like one imagines from Borscht Belt comedians -- occasionally about food. Says Detective Meyer Landsman, a key figure in the story: "My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with." (p. 189)

The detectives eat like Borsht Belt vacationers, too. Sometimes. In the police dining room, called the Polar-Shtern Kafeteria, Landsman orders his dinner from Mrs. Nemintziner. She "gentles three tight blintzes onto a white plate with a blue stripe on the rim. To ornament the evening meals of the lonely souls of Sitka, she has prepared several dozen slices of pickled crab apple on lettuce leaves...He heads for the table he prefers... At the next table somebody left a half-eaten plate of corned beef and boiled potatoes and a half-empty glass of what appears to be black-cherry soda." Another patron of this establishment is "working over a plate of herring in cream." (p. 147)

In a seedier venue, a Mrs. Kalushiner had served "a metal bowl filled with pickled tomatoes and cucumbers, a basket of poppy-seed rolls, and a bowl of sour cream" to Landsman and his partner Berko Shemets. (p. 70) At both of these predictably Yiddish meals, the plot advances as the detectives eat and question various people.

But then, we see another side of Yiddish Alaska and its food, a side that goes with the mind-boggling alternate reality:

"The Filipino-style Chinese donut, or shtekeleh, is the great contribution of the District of Sitka to the food lovers of the world. In its present form, it cannot be found in the Philippines. No Chinese trencherman would recognize it as the fruit of his native fry kettles. Like the storm god Yahweh of Sumeria, the shtekeleh was not invented by the Jews, but the world would sport neither God nor the shtekeleh without Jews and their desires. A panatela of fried dough not quite sweet, not quite salty, rolled in sugar, crisp-skinned, tender inside, and honeycombed with air pockets. You sink it in your paper cup of milky tea and close your eyes, and for ten fat seconds, you seem to glimpse the possibility of finer things." (p. 172)

Then there's pie. At an airport far out in the bush, a pie man and his daughter make legendary pie. A piece of cherry pie, mentioned by chance, is a clue on which Landsman solves two mysteries that dominate the plot. (No spoilers here, though -- p. 226-236)

Chabon never blinks. He gives us complete detail on a history that has slued from reality in many unexpected ways. The book is full of smells and tastes; panic and pain; love and hatred. If at any point you think you have learned all about this alternate history, the author comes up with another surprise like this description of a clock: "Looted when Russia fell, then shipped back to Germany, it survived the droping of the atomic bomb on Berlin in 1946 and all the confusions of the time that followed." (p. 136) What? Not only has the state of Israel been destoyed in the 1948 war, and all the Jews who needed it exiled to Alaska, but the end of World War II was also different? Oh, wait. He's making this up.

The first time I read the book, I wrote this: Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Review of "Ma Gastronomie" by Fernand Point

The blog "More Intelligent Life" recently published a wonderful review by Jon Fasman:

IS FRENCH CUISINE DEAD?

This is definitely a question I have been wondering about.

Here is the summation of this author's answer:

"Traditional French cooking may in fact be dying, but then it always was. If the variety and openness of Robuchon's recipes are a dagger in Point's heart, well, Point's countrified, elaborate simplicity was the same to Auguste Escoffier and Marie-Antoine Carême. French cuisine owes its genius not to any specific dishes, but to the chefs who keep killing and reviving it, and to the diners who approach the table with the seriousness it deserves. Long may the resurrections continue."

I want a copy of Ma Gastronomie by Fernand Point more than ever! And the next time I get to France, I hope to see the original pyramid (in photo).

Umami

"The term umami was first coined in 1908 by Kikunae Ikeda, a Japanese scientist who was researching the taste of dashi, a stock made from seaweed and used in many Japanese dishes. Ikeda discovered that the secret to the taste was the presence of high levels of an amino acid called glutamate in the stock, which gives it its unique brothy character."

So writes Andrew Shanahan in "The secret ingredient" in the Guardian. This detailed article summarizes the history of the discovery and the make up of this "fifth taste."

Umami in its various chemical forms is found in parmesan cheese, ripe tomatoes, fish, cured meat, the seaweed used to make Japanese dashi, and in meat stock, especially veal. MSG is artificial umami. Unlike the first four flavors -- salt, sour, bitter, and sweet -- umami is hard to isolate or taste when it's not in more complex food. Its presence, evidently, makes food consistently taste more appealing, though MSG is kind of a cheat.

When cooking and eating, I've found that it's interesting and useful to be aware of umami. After a while, though you can't isolate it, you just know it's there.

Gingerbread House

Gingerbread houses can be so clever. This one is on display at my local Whole Foods, made by the baker from a kit that's for sale. Tell me, does it seem excessive to you to use higher-price organic ingredients in a gingerbread house? I was confused by this. The kits I've assembled in past years have been edible only in theory (like they wouldn't poison you) but have very dry gingerbread and stiff sugar decoration that would not be appealing to eat. So why use organics?

That said, this chef was very creative and I love the penguins.

Here are photos of the making of a gingerbread house three years ago:

Stock

Last Thursday night, after we finished our Thanksgiving dinner, Lenny stripped the meat and put the turkey bones in Aparna's slow cooker. (It's not exactly like the one pictured, but sort of). He added water, sliced onion, carrot, celery, and dried herbs. The stock simmered overnight. In the morning he strained out the bones and we put some leftover pumpkin and wild rice in. For lunch (or dinner, depending on who was eating) we added cold turkey bits to our bowls of turkey pumpkin soup.

Almost any time we roast a chicken, turkey, or (more rarely) a duck, we make slow-cooker stock from the bones -- even at other people's houses. It's so easy and seems so virtuous. There's so much one can do with stock. Made the night before Thanksgiving, stock can serve as basting liquid or a start for the gravy. Last Thanksgiving at Elaine's we made the stock into French onion soup. The year before at Evelyn's I think she added barley or something like that.

It seems ridiculous that something as simple and natural as broth or stock would have a history. But consider this quote: "Centuries before a restaurant was a place to eat... a restaurant was a thing to eat, a restorative broth. ... In the fifteenth century, a recipe for a restaurant began by instructing that a freshly killed capon be cooked in an alchemist's glass kettle with sixty gold ducats, and noted that the cook might supplement the gold pieces with diamonds, rubies, sapphires, jaspers..." A restaurant, you see, meant something that restored you. The quote is from the book The Invention of the Restaurant by Rebecca L. Spang (p. 1). The book traces the history of this idea: that broth was particularly good for you. And so you need special places where, properly prepared, it will easily be available to restore your health -- you could eat a restaurant at a place called a restaurant, especially in Paris.

According to Thirsk's Food in Early Modern England, one of the first published English books to give recipes (in the 1580s) included a stew recipe with stock: "Fair water was used for the broth, with salt and pepper, adding root vegetables in winter (carrots were specifically named) and herbs in summer (....hyssop, thyme and parsley)." (p. 50) Another book from the same era "showed its first concern for a good broth, a subject that loomed large with nearly all subsequent writers. It was started with a piece of beef, plus marrow from bones (a prized delicacy...), dates, a flavouring of mace, pepper, salt, and if wanted, sugar, with verjuice as well, and possibly, but not necessarily, wine. The broth was thickened at the last moment with egg yolks. For white broth herbs from garden and field were the flavouring -- endive, succory, marigolds, marjoram, parsley, thyme and rosemary -- and again dates. Broth for fish used water and yeast with herbs, mace and prunes, verjuice, vinegar, and butter." (p. 51)

Stockmaking is so simple, but it's also an art. In the index of Julia Child's original Mastering the Art of French Cooking the heading "Stock" takes up almost a full column. It covers such topics as "Clarification of," "Degreasing of," "Ingredients for," "Jellied," "Substitutes for," and specific stocks for sauces, fish, etc. She has specific references for chicken, poultry, duck, fish, goose, meat, and veal, and separate indications for white, brown, and canned stock. (Index page xxix)

In Japanese cuisine, stockmaking is just as important -- in the book The Folk Art of Japanese Country Cooking author Gaku Homma dedicates much attention to dashijiru, Japanese stock. "The word dashi directly translated means to 'take out.' In other words, from good ingredients, one can extract good tastes," he writes. "If you asked an old farmer for ... rules he would be surprised: he put dashijiru together without thinking." Every locale had its own version often based on the locally available fish or preserved foods. (p. 76-77)

I think even more than with bread, every cook and expert has a different opinion about the subtleties of stock.

Note: for more about these books see these earlier posts: Japanese Traditional Food and Bread.

Bread

Bread in England 400 years or so ago was enormously varied. Manchet was a white bread, made with fine wheat flour, and valued by some diners. Others loved barley bread for its dense texture and ability to sop up food when it was used as a trencher. Tastes in bread constantly changed, and also depended on individual location and regions of the country. In the north and in Scotland, people loved oat bread. In London, many bakers supplied diverse tastes. I just learned a lot about bread from rereading Joan Thirsk's book Food in Early Modern England.

Some bakers in this era -- beginning around 1500 -- liked to leaven their bread with barm, a leftover from brewing ale. They bought this from brewers or saved it when brewing at home. To some tastes, the residue from brewing gave the bread an off-taste. Thus some bakers preferred to use sourdough starter. They would leave a bit of dough in the kneading trough, or just scrape up the bits of dough that adhered there, to start the new loaf. Flour and water were mixed with yeast the night before baking, and then left to ferment; the remaining flour was kneaded into the dough in the morning. Gervase Markham, an early food writer (17th C) preferred "barm for manchet but sourdough for ordinary household bread." (p. 232)

Most bakers' flour came from a miller; millers in many places had a monopoly on grinding grain (and were thus resented mightily). In remote places, kitchens often had a quern in which the bakers or servants ground grain. The quern was a common kitchen tool for grinding other substances in smaller quantities. I found a photo of one on the web, as I was curious what they looked like (right).

Some homes had ovens in which the household's bread was baked. Poorer housewives sometimes baked bread directly on the hearth on a griddle or something similar. Mysterious mentions of "rasping" the exterior of a loaf seem to refer to the process of removing the ash that would form on it on the hearth or in a less-good oven. Some villages had communally shared ovens. Over time, professional bakers became more common. The "assize of bread" (a government body) regulated prices for standard loaves, so bakers devised fancy loaves and priced them higher.

This book is so full of material it seems more like a reference book than a narrative; this time I noted so many ideas about the use of bread. A year ago, when I first read the book, I wrote about manor houses and how they were supplied with food in this post: What would you serve to Queen Elizabeth?

Andy Warhol and Food

Saturday we visited the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. The top floor of the museum (which has 7 floors plus a basement) illustrates the images that Warhol took off from. It's full of kitchen gadgets and their packaging, as well as examples of his early work as a commercial artist. A TV set even plays the Veg-o-Matic commercials from the 1950s. Plastic food storage containers decorated with red flowers, ads for things like knives, and all kinds of food prep images are included. I think the objects are from Warhol's extraordinary collections of stuff. (I remember after he died that a lot of it was sold, but there's so much...)

On the next couple of floors going down, one sees what he did with these ideas -- there's much more in this imagery than just Campbell's Soup cans and plywood boxes painstakingly painted with logos to look like they came from Heinz, General Foods, or Campbells! I don't have anything profound to say, since someone else no doubt said it 40 years ago, though I do remember the first time I ever saw any Pop Art at a museum in Amsterdam in the 1960s. Every time I see this, I feel again that the grocery store is a wealth of visuals.

My conclusion is that the art seems to have very little to do with actual food or with eating it -- just with selling it. Interesting.

Not a turkey dinner

We drove through rain and snow and sleet and are now back home. Here is last night's family dinner, and now I'll go back to blogging about food history and what not.

Weekend Wrap-Up

Arny and Tracy have now left here, so we wrapped up the reunion with a group shot. More to come.

Delia's Kitchen

Of course I have to have one picture dedicated to a kitchen. Aparna and Joel's kitchen has been featured throughout the day of "live blogging" (if it's ok to call it that). But here's a good pic of Delia making eggs.