Kalidescope

Our dinner tonight was made from local food from the Farmers Market in Keahou. Above: salad of local lettuce, tomato, and avocado with lime juice; a bowl of exotic fruit -- rambutans and dragon fruits! Also a sandwich (maybe not so local). Earlier, we enjoyed some sweet Hawaiian bread with locally grown & made lilikoi jam. Lilikoi is the much superior Hawaiian name for passion fruit.

At the market, I used Photobooth to take kalidescopic photos of fruit, vegetables, local food products, and crafts. It was a lot of fun, and included some of the Kona Lisa logos from my favorite Kona coffee.

Kona Lisa Logo

White and purple eggplants

Tumeric in raw, unprocessed form (which I had never seen)

Persimmons

Painted gourds -- the artist suggested that I get this turtle...

Another painted gourd

Market stall for painted gourds

Rambutans

Dragon Fruit

Kona coffee

We are in a small condo with a nice view of the pacific ... Krona coffee for breakfast and a ripe papaya in the refrigerator for later ... Photos when I figure out the slow Internet Which wasnt even expected.

King of the Beasts?

Yesterday we went to a lecture by Brian Polcyn, a chef who specializes in charcutrie (right). He gave an excellent and amusing talk on pork, including raising, slaughtering, and butchering pigs and making many types of European salted and preserved meat dishes from the pork. "The Pig is King," was the title of his powerpoint presentation, and he says that pasture-raised animals from various heritage breeds make fatter pork, which is better to eat. "Fat is your friend," he says.

Polcyn showed us many photos of special types of pigs, both very large and very small, including one type, the Mangalitsa, a Hungarian breed with curly, woolly coats. One Michigan farmer is now raising them, and the chef pays several times the price of ordinary pork for the very special meat they produce.

The images of these pigs were so cute that I am including a photo that was published in the New York Times a couple of years ago, along with an article about this breed of pigs and their recent introduction into American pig breeding and fine dining.

Polcyn explained how every few weeks, he purchases whole or half carcasses and butchers them in one of his two restaurants, where he has a small area in his wine cellar that's temperature and humidity controlled for best hanging of salted prosciutto, pancetta, and sausages. He also uses a laboratory kitchen in the culinary science department of a local college. The entire process takes several months to a year, before he can serve these appealing products in his restaurants. His lecture included a small plate of samples for each attendee -- mmmmmmmmm!

By coincidence, yesterday in the New York Times a pork farmer with a very different point of view wrote an op ed titled "Don’t Presume to Know a Pig’s Mind." Blake Hurst, the author of this op ed, is finds problems in the recent pressures from Chipotle and McDonald's to improve the lives of pigs. He's in a completely different camp from Chef Polcyn, who finds the pigs' quality of life to be very important for many reasons -- including his own ethics for humane treatment of animals and also that better treatment creates better meat (if there's an ethical contradiction in treating an animal humanely up until you kill it, that doesn't figure in his lecture).

Here's what mass-market farmer Blake Hurst has to say about happy pigs:

"According to Chipotle’s Web site, the company uses only “happier” pigs. It doesn’t say how it measures a pig’s happiness, and I can’t help but picture porcine focus groups, response meters designed for the cloven of hoof. We can all agree that production methods should not cause needless suffering, but for all we know, pigs are “happier” in warm, dry buildings than they are outside. And either way, the end result is a plate."

And here's his view of the greater expense of raising pigs with more space and imputed happiness:

"Since we can’t ask the pigs what they think, we know only one thing for sure about the effects of scrapping our most efficient farming systems: the cost of bacon will rise. Wealthy consumers will reward farmers who are able to pull off the Chipotle ad’s brand of combination farm/tourist attraction and are willing to trade efficient animal husbandry for political correctness. Many big multistate operations will also be able to afford to make the changes, or will at least have the political sway to resist them. But the small farmers now raising hogs will be pushed out of the industry."

So, he concludes, farmers are being asked to do two contradictory things to try to satisfy both the humanitarians (or in other cases, ecologists or advocates for other changes in farming practice) and those who want cheap or affordable food. I assume he knows pigs, and that the humane treatment will really cost more -- and Chef Polcyn definitely confirms the much higher price for differently raised animals and small-scale farming. However, I think the generalization is subject to much more analysis, especially when you consider all the other interests that are pressuring the food industry. I wish this discussion didn't remind me of how Monsanto has misled the public about what's good for anyone but Monsanto!

Another Look at Carbon Impact

Interesting article in the Guardian: "Local farms are vital to communities, but we shouldn't dismiss larger ones" by Jason Clay. He makes this point:

"Just because you bought your chicken from a local farm, that doesn't mean it has less impact than a chicken from the local grocery store, which may have been shipped from thousands of miles away. It all depends on how that chicken was produced."

In the article is something I've been looking for: a collective look at carbon impact of various foods. Instead of trying to show the impact of what's on your plate, this graph shows the total for all US food usage. It turns out that transport is the least significant part of the picture:


The author's conclusion about local foods: they aren't necessarily the only solution to global problems. He says:

"With a majority of our citizens living in cities, local agricultural production – from hydroponic greenhouses to small urban vegetable gardens – can help address the growing demand for nutrients and fresh produce in urban areas, and become key strategies to reduce overall food waste. However, it will be very difficult to produce our daily calories in cities, specifically bulk calorie crops such as cereal grains, roots and tubers, sugar and bananas that today still need to be produced where vast areas of land are available for cultivation."

Fritz Brenner Cooks... so does Nero Wolfe

What's fun about my new Nero Wolfe cookbook? I find it fun that throughout the entire book, it keeps up the fiction that Nero Wolfe is a New York detective who almost never leaves his home -- he solves crimes by thinking and interviewing people who come to him, and by sending out Archie Goodwin, his trusty sidekick. The recipes are attributed to his cook, Fritz Brenner, or to the other characters in the stories where the recipes are mentioned or described, including the chefs of "famous restaurants" or hotels, and even a few suspects.

The recipes sound marvelous! Will I ever try them? Well, some are ruled out by my lack of access to wild ducks, foie gras, chickens fed only with blueberries, hogs fed only with peanuts, and other exotica like caviar. Or by my reluctance to try really challenging techniques. But maybe I'll try something from this amusing book. I've been wanting a copy for a long time.

Pizza

Americans ate pizza yesterday -- one estimate, 4.4 million pies. Why should we be different? Well, for one thing, we weren't watching the super bowl, we went to see "The Iron Lady" with Meryl Streep instead, as I wrote here. But I did make pizza, using my old recipe and my new cookbook stand. I have now stored my recipes on the iPad, and the plexiglass stand keeps splatters away, at least so far. Much better than splashing tomato sauce on the back of the large screen of the desktop computer, which is now upstairs. Plus the screen is right where I need it, not facing some other direction. The result was our cheese pizza with Newman's Own Sockarooni sauce, crushed garlic and extra herbs and fennel seeds, and good imported French and Swiss cheese:

As far as I can see, I've never posted my pizza recipe, and if I can't find it here probably no one can. So here it is.

Pizza Dough

Mix and let stand for 10 minutes:
1 package dry yeast
1 cup water at 105 degrees (test on forearm -- same temp. as baby's bath water)
1 tsp. sugar
Place in food processor, using metal blade:
2 and 2/3 cups flour: up to 2/3 cup can be whole wheat flour
Pinch salt -- optional
1/2 tsp. oil

With food processor running, add the liquid slowly . Process until dough forms a ball and pulls away from sides of bowl. Add more flour if necessary to make this happen. This is a very sticky dough. Knead in more flour if you like, and place in large oiled bowl. Allow to rise for 1 hour at warm room temperature or several hours in refrigerator (if you want to make the dough in advance and go see a movie).

After the dough has risen, oil a round pizza pan and pat dough into place. It will rise a little again while you are placing the toppings on it and heating the oven to 425 degrees F. When the oven is hot, bake for 15 minutes, check for nice brown done crust and browned cheese on top; bake slightly longer if necessary. Allow pizza to firm up for 5 minutes before you cut and serve it.

If you want twice as much pizza dough, make two recipes separately in food processor, do not double recipe.

Alternate proportions for dough: use the same method with 1 and 1/4 cups water, 1 pkg. yeast and pinch salt. For dry ingredients, use 3 and 1/2 to 4 cups flour, no oil. Makes a heavier dough. Allow this to rise 1/2 to 1 hour at warm room temperature, more in refrigerator.

As I said, I topped yesterday's pie with Newman's Own sauce, garlic, herbs, and freshly grated cheese. Other possibilities include using whatever other sauce you prefer (even your own); adding lots of vegetables like onion, olives, sliced tomato, or cooked eggplant; adding salami, meatballs, or ham; or making white pizza with 3-4 oz. goat cheese, herbs, and an egg instead of red sauce and hard cheese.

"Hungry Town" -- All about New Orleans

Tom Fitzmorris, whom I'd never heard of before reading his memoir Hungry Town, is a food journalist with a widely followed radio show originating in New Orleans. I have only spent a few days in New Orleans in my life, having made several short visits. I already admired the cuisine: he didn't need to convince me of its greatness. Over the years, I've bought regional cookbooks (though none by this author) and remember when NO cooking was a fad in the 1980s.

My slight knowledge of NO food doesn't make me an ideal audience for Fitzmorris's memories, but I found the whole book highly readable and enjoyable. He has a way of making each story vivid and making each dish he describes sound delicious beyond imagining. A small selection of recipes adds to the fun.

Three themes intertwine in the book. First, the history of NO cooking and restaurants, beginning mainly with the mid-20th century food trends. Second, the intense importance of food in NO culture. Fitzmorris makes a pretty convincing case that NO people have a deeper interest in food and what he calls a lust for food than those in other parts of the country. Third, the history of the damage and recovery from hurricane Katrina, the largest natural disaster to strike anywhere in the US, at least the largest in any recent memory. His selection of memories of cooks and waiters who died in the floodwaters or otherwise as a result of the storm is poignant (and I usually hate that word).

I like Fitzmorris's view of food, food fads, food celebrities, and food hype. His observations of trends that started in NO and were misappropriated elsewhere are interesting -- blackened redfish would be one of them. I've definitely eaten some bad burned fish as a result of that fad, and he suggests that I can't blame the originators as much as the pathetic imitations. Since he has spent his entire life in NO (except a few weeks as a refugee from Katrina) his point of view on this is especially enlightening.

Another interesting food trend that Fitzmorris covers is the decline of local and traditional foods; however, what makes this relatively common view more interesting is that he demonstrates that during the rebuilding of NO after the disaster, much of the local food made a comeback. He cites various reasons. For one thing Orleanean's exceptional food fascination is also reflective of their love of their city; when faced with near annihilation, they turned to the past for comfort.

As the rebuilding began and progressed, he describes how the locals recreated local restaurants in difficult circumstances; the fast-food places and national chains turned their backs and didn't necessarily reopen. His tales of heroic restaurant rebirths under terrible conditions are amazing. Within a short time after the waters receded, quite a few restauranteurs began serving free food to the clean-up crews and dedicated residents who remained in town.

Natives felt that their neighborhoods could only rebuild if they had good comfort food, and that the city as a whole also needed the fine dining establishments that gave the city its character. At times, Fitzmorris says, a small diner serving local specialties could be the only sign of life in a vast stretch of ruined homes; the people who were still there were scarcely visible.

I especially enjoyed his stories of east-coast journalists who were convinced that the small restaurants had died out, and how he convinced them that in fact, they were more numerous than before, while the chains were in eclipse. (I wonder what's happening more recently -- his book is a couple of years old, and as the city comes back the predators will surely return, I fear.)

All in all, this is a really good food memoir. I haven't tried the recipes, but maybe I will.

Food can be funny

Anything – even hunger -- can be funny in Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s sprawling satire of early Soviet times, The Little Golden Calf. Bumbling bureaucrats, resource shortages, redistribution of possessions, and redefined relationships on all levels provided the two writers ample opportunities for broad humor. The novel is episodic: more or less centered around an informal group of con men and opportunistic thieves who take to the road in a car called the Antelope-Gnu. Published in 1936, and now somewhat culturally a bit alien, the novel is still full of really funny scenes.

Some chapters in The Little Golden Calf consist of sketches involving other people besides the road trippers -- people who are about to come in contact with the main group. One such diversion is titled “Vasisualy Lokhankin and His Role in the Russian Revolution” (The Little Golden Calf, transl. Fisher, p. 170 -177) It begins: “At exactly four-forty in the afternoon, Vasisualy Lokhankin went on a hunger strike.”

Vasisualy’s cause was simple: his wife Varvara had just told him she was leaving him with her lover, Pitburdukov. He says she can’t: “One person can’t leave another person if the other person loves her.” Varvara’s response: “She can too.” He vowed not to eat until she comes back, not “for a whole day. A week. A year. … I’ll lie here just like this, in my suspenders, until I die.”

She began to walk away: “I’m leaving. Farewell, Vaisisualy I’m leaving your booklet of bread vouchers on the table.” Now things are clearer even to a 21^st century American: food was rationed, but he was going on a hunger strike. As she walked toward the door, he ripped up the booklet and shouted “Save me!” She began to take him seriously: “Don’t you dare keep on this hunger strike! … This is stupid Vaisisualy. This is rebellious individualism.”

He replied, “You don’t fully comprehend the meaning of individualism, or of the intelligentsia in general.” In response, she took off her hat “and quickly made an open-faced sandwich with eggplant caviar, muttering ‘crazed animal,’ ‘tyrant,’ and ‘private property owner’ all the while.”

She demanded that he eat the sandwich. He refused. “Taking advantage of the hunger-striker’s momentarily open mouth, Varvara deftly shoved the open-faced sandwich into the aperture between his little pharaonic beard and trim Moscow-style mustache.” He spits it out. “Eat, you good-for-nothing!... You intellectual!”

Wait a minute, 21^st century reader. How did such political jargon get into a quarrel between a couple as they are splitting up? What’s really behind this? Lokhankin’s next gesture, while brushing the crumbs out of his beard, was to lie back down on the couch: “He really did not want to part with his wife. As well as a multitude of shortcomings, Varvara had two key advantages: a large white bosom and a job. Vasisualy himself had never worked anywhere. Work would have kept him from thinking about the significance of the Russian intelligentsia, a social group of which he considered himself a member. Thus Lohankin’s extensive ponderings all came back to the same pleasant and deeply personal theme: ‘Vasisualy Lokhankin and his significance,’ ‘Lokhankin and the tragedy of Russian liberalism,’ ‘Lokhankin and his role in the Russian Revolution.’”

Later that evening, Varvara’s lover Ptiburdukov arrived, determined to convince her to leave despite the hunger strike. She explained: “There he is! Just lying there! Animal! Vile private property owner! The thing is that this feudal landlord, this serf-owner, has gone on a hunger strike because I want to leave him.” She tried and again failed to force the now-stale eggplant-caviar sandwich on him: “Eat, you vile man. Eat, you serf-owner.”

The next morning, he said: “There, now the sharp pains in the stomach have started. … And then there’ll be scurvy caused by malnutrition, with loss of hair and teeth.” Wait a minute, modern reader! We are picking up a reference to the real results of real starvation; such starvation had been widespread during the growing pains of the Soviet system a few years before this publication.

Ptiburdukov’s brother, a doctor, was called in for a visit. His recommendation: “the patient didn’t need to adhere to any particular diet. He could eat everything. Soup, for example, or meatballs, or compote. He could also have bread, vegetables, and fruits. Fish was also a possibility. He could smoke, within reason, of course. He wouldn’t recommend that the patient start drinking, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to introduce a shot of good port into his system... the doctor didn’t really understand the Lokhankins’ spiritual drama. Puffing up importantly and treading heavily in his boots, he left, declaring in parting that the patient was also not prohibited from bathing in the ocean or riding a bicycle.”

How do we read this? Surely we are being told that the doctor is not only not understanding the family drama, but also not understanding what foods would be available even if the “patient” were not on a hunger strike.

As time passed, the hunger strike continued. Varvara continued to stay in the apartment with her husband instead of running away. But one night she awakened from a bad dream about the doctor and discovered Vasisualy “standing in front of the open cupboard of the buffet, his back to the bed, chomping loudly. … Having ravaged an entire jar of preserves, he carefully took the lid off the pot, plunged his fingers into the cold borscht, and extracted a piece of meat from it. Even if Varvara had caught her husband at this game during the happiest days of their marriage, Vasisualy would’ve had a bad time of it. Now, however, his fate was sealed.”

She left him for good. “Lokhankin suffered openly and majestically. He luxuriated in his woe… His great sorrow gave him the chance to devote even more thought to the significance of the Russian intelligentsia, as well as to the tragedy of Russian liberalism.”

I read The Little Golden Calf as a part of my project on the city of Odessa for my other blog. Ilf and Petrov were both natives of Odessa, also the location of the apartment where Vasisualy and Varvara lived. My posts about Odessa are here.

A New Take on the Still Life

Still Life from Scott Garner on Vimeo.

The fruits move around -- see this LA Times Article!

Pie for Breakfast

Hardest recipe ever! Why? The key limes were tiny and very stubbornly held onto their juice. 21 limes were barely half as much juice as Evelyn needed, so it was a key-lime-tangerine pie. Delicious!! Note that Alice has converted her 3-D glasses to hipster glasses. And Miriam is gleeful about our decadent breakfast.

Scenes from a Mall

Lunch at Villa Mozart

The first photo shows my delicious calamari with small discs of polenta, peas, and cherry tomatoes (mainly hidden under the thin slices of toast). Our pasta courses were all very delicious too. The second photo shows Evelyn and Tom about to have their soup and salad, and suggests the very pleasant atmosphere of this Fairfax restaurant.

Fifteen minutes would have been enough

The New Yorker this week has a brief but wonderful summary -- "Julia Child's Taqueria" -- of the author's special trip to the Super-Rica Taqueria in Santa Barbara, which became a legend because Julia Child liked it something like 30 years ago.

In my mind this little Mexican diner may defy any other cultural institution as the most overrated hole-in-the-wall in America, or maybe on the planet. But note I defined this to avoid including the Iowa caucuses, which deserve an overrated category all their own.

I'm glad someone has validated my impression, which is shared by many native Santa Barbarans that I know. The everlasting line out the Super-Rica's door -- that's been there, I think, since I first tried it in 1983, or was that 2003? -- is an eternal mystery, but people keep driving up there from everywhere. Last summer I found a taqueria at random that was better and had less waiting, though I admit that the tortillas weren't made fresh by hand as they were when I was at the Super-Rica. See this post for more about the taqueria I enjoyed.

 The New Yorker's image (above/right) doesn't really show the line the way it usually looks -- it often goes out the door to the right and past the back door of the tiny kitchen. Last summer we stood in line for a while, still curious to see how the place was lasting, but the pretentious conversations all around us drove us out.

Why we didn't have Chinese food for Christmas

Christmas dinner for Jews is Chinese food -- old New York custom. Right? We thought we would finally join in this tradition, which we've never observed in our past.

Well, not tonight. The one Chinese restaurant that we thought was open seemed to have left the phone off the hook, so we figured they were over-taxed with Christmas customers. They have a few service issues anyway, so we definitely didn't want to drive over to see what was wrong with them. We stayed home, lit the Hanukkah candles, and had tuna melts and champagne. Good combination! Elaine and Lenny, in the photo above, are ready to eat.

Earlier, we took a walk in the park and watched "Midnight in Paris" on streaming video. Great way to enjoy the holiday. Great movie, too. From the walk, Lenny's photos:

Latke Dinner

Our latke dinner included latkes, leg of lamb, and lemon layer cake. I made the cake from scratch instead of from a mix this time. In the photo: Elaine and Larry, here to enjoy the holiday.

Also to celebrate, we saw the movie "Hugo" with Ben Kingsley and Sasha Baron-Cohen this afternoon. It was great. How could I not love a movie about wind-up toys?

The cake:

Bread

I just read Bread: A Global History by William Rubel and "Barms and Leavens -- Medieval to Modern," an article about bakers' yeast, brewers' yeast, and sourdough starters, by Laura Mason, in the collection titled Over a Red-Hot Stove: Essays in Early Cooking Technology edited by Ivan Day. Here's a photo of these two books sandwiching a few other books about bread:

Rubel's first chapter presents the prehistoric origins of bread. He writes: "Long before the Neolithic Revolution, when the hunters and gatherers in the Fertile Crescent made the cultural shift to farming and raising large animals..., the peoples in the region were harvesting and eating grains from vast fields of wild barley and wheat." He sets the earliest date for some type of bread-making in this region at 22,500 years ago, explaining that both wheat and barley, when winnowed, ground, and perhaps roughly sifted, could be used for a dough that would form "an aerated crumb, not a dense mass of starch." Archaeology identifies grindstones and traces of hearth fires that confirm this early bread-making. One major theme of his work is that early examples of bread were not necessarily primitive or crude: early people had and used tools and ingenuity to make bread that was tasty by modern standards, and moreover, was often visually creative in its decorative uses.

Both Rubel and Mason explore at length the chemistry of bread-making. Mason's concentration is on the historic use of various substances to raise dough, mainly in England, and on the flavors and varieties of bread that resulted from the choices of housewives, noble kitchens, or professional bakers. The early bakers depended on either yeast -- which came from brewing beer or ale -- or on sourdough starter -- which resulted from exposing dough to ambient yeasts and bacteria. Both types of leavening resulted in a variety of flavors; only in the last 200 years or so has yeast exclusively intended for baking bread been prepared, preserved, and sold. Chemical baking powder is very recent, and is barely mentioned in either source.

Rubel discusses the same choices in a number of historical and modern contexts, exploring not only the taste and chemistry, but also the social and cultural associations of various types of bread. He makes a case that the past 40 years or so have been a time of very rapid change in bread consumption and in worldwide changes in taste in bread, and especially in the globalization of some types of bread with the possible decline of some local products.

Some tastes come and go, for example in some eras bread made from yeast has been highly prized, while in other eras, including the present, a higher value has been placed on sourdough. Also, some bakers cultivate practices that make sourdough bread more sour or less sour -- the famous Poilane bread (described in one of my books depicted) is much less sour than the well-known San Francisco sourdough breads. Mason interestingly pointed out that sourdough, relying more on bacteria, facilitates baking with non-wheat flour such as rye, while yeast creates less of a rise in rye or other grains.

My previous favorite bread history was H.E.Jacob's Six Thousand Years of Bread. The two more recent works are much more scientific, and more based in analytic archaeology than in Jacob's more mystical views of bread, though his descriptions are very fascinating. All these books have a large and interesting amount of information and historic detail -- the subject seems almost inexhaustible.

Latkes

We used 10 pounds of potatoes, and two electric griddles, and made latkes for 10 people.

The Belly of Paris

I just read Zola's The Belly of Paris in a new translation by Mark Kurlansky. It's the topic for the next meeting of the culinary history book club I belong to.

What a masterpiece! The perceived conflict between thin people (who crave social justice) and fat people (mainly the small shopkeepers of the area) is presented vividly. The descriptions of the sights and smells of the market combine perfectly with the pettiness of the characters and their escalating quarrels. The market itself is the central image, along with the streets all around. The map above (from here) shows all the little streets that he mentions.

Does this look good to eat?

The plastic food in restaurant windows really didn't look all that good to me. But it was useful since I can't read Japanese. I did not eat at this restaurant, which I think was a chain.

Food is not Magical

Haruki Murakami's new book 1Q84 conforms to his normal genre: magical realism. It's also very long: 925 pages, described as a doorstop in one review. In an earlier version of our real world, a book this huge would have been completely impractical as airplane reading -- but I bought the Kindle version. In fact, I couldn't finish it in a 13 hour flight from Japan, but now I have finished.

1Q84 is enjoyable, but I think it could really have been shorter. Before I left for Japan, I reread Murakami's much earlier novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, as preparation. I think I like it better, though it's less suspenseful. The magic in it is more spontaneous, the sense of unreality develops more effectively and maybe more naturally if that makes sense.

One thing I've noticed: magical realism has to be anchored in some sort of realistic world, and in Murakami, one area that stays real is food. While sampling or observing the many and remarkable types of restaurant food in Tokyo last week (Japanese-French banquet food, authentic sushi and other fish, tempura, noodles, rice bowls, kaiseki lunch, Edo hotpot, Wagyu beef, street vendors' offerings, small cakes and pastries in tea shops, and more) I wondered what Japanese people cook and eat at home. Murakami's descriptions of food are probably a reliable indication, even in the midst of the unreality of the plots of these novels.

Here's a sample of how Tengo, one of the two main characters, makes a meal for himself, after having shopped for the ingredients. He opens a beer, preps some "leathery edamame pods," and puts them on to boil. Then he daydreams about Aomame, the other main character, whom the magical side of things has destined as his own.

"Tengo chopped a lot of ginger to a fine consistency. Then he sliced some celery and mushrooms into nice-sized pieces. The Chinese parsley, too, he chopped up finely. He peeled the shrimp and washed them at the sink. Spreading a paper towel, he laid the shrimp out in neat rows, like troops in formation. When the edamame were finished boiling, he drained them in a colander and left them to cool. Next he warmed a large frying pan and dribbled some sesame oil and spread it over the bottom. He slowly fried the chopped ginger over a low flame." (p. 255)

It's almost like a recipe. As the ginger is cooking, he continues to think about Aomame whom, at this point, he hasn't seen in 20 years, since they were both 10 years old.

"He put the sliced celery and mushrooms into the frying pan. Turning the gas flame up to high and lightly jogging the pan, he carefully stirred the contants with a bamboo spatula, adding a sprinkle of salt and pepper. ...."

The cooking and daydreaming continue. "When the stir-fried shrimp and vegetables were ready, Tengo transferred the food from the frying pan to a large platter along with the edamame. He took a fresh beer from the refrigerator, sat at the kitchen table, and, still lost in thought, proceeded to eat the steaming food." After eating half, he puts the rest away in the refrigerator.

In contrast, in an earlier scene, Aomame was served an elegant meal prepared by a professional chef at the home of a rich woman: "boiled white asparagus, salade Nicoise, a crabmeat omelet, and rolls and butter" -- showing, I guess, the evident value of French food to the Japanese that I also observed. (p. 233) In her own home cooking, she prefers fruits and vegetables, as she's a fitness instructor with highly-developed standards for her own health and healthy eating.

Other characters mention eating packaged food, ready-to-microwave dishes, or packaged puddings, while Tengo cooks other elaborate dinners for himself as well as for a guest. He makes rice in a rice-cooker to go with sun-dried mackerel, tofu, daikon radish, pickled turnip slices, and pickled plums. Sometimes the foods mentioned are even less recognizable to the non-Japanese reader.

"Cooking was not a chore for Tengo. He always used it as a time to think -- about everyday problems, about math problems, about his writing, or about metaphysical propositions."

In an inn where he stays, Tengo is served the same breakfast every day "dried horse mackerel and fried eggs, a quartered tomato, seasoned dried seaweed, miso soup with shijimi clams, and rice."

During the course of the story, Tengo checks what is the number-one best selling book. It was a diet book entitled Eat as Much as You want of the Food You Love and Still Lose Weight. Tengo thinks: "What a great title. The whole book could be blank inside and it would still sell."

My suspicion has been that the Japanese choice of home-cooked foods differs substantially from the American diet, and these various scenes from the real side of magical realism seem to support that thought. I think Tengo was made special by the fact that he is a man who lives alone but cooks elaborately, but that his choice of food was suggested to be roughly normal. In any case, the level of realistic detail about food is an interesting inclusion among the magical events of 1Q84.