Specialized Restaurant

The NY Times blog Diner's Journal had a great photo
today, illustrating an article about a very specialized trend. They featured Ganja Gourmet, a restaurant in Colorado shown in the illustration to the right. (Of course I own a copy of the poster hanging behind the counter.)

The Diner's Journal piece links to a more detailed story that explains what's going on:

In Denver, a new medical-marijuana shop called Ganja Gourmet serves cannabis-infused specialties such as pizza, hummus and lasagna. Across town in the Mile-High City, a Caribbean restaurant plans to offer classes on how to make multi-course meals with pot in every dish. And in Southern California, a low-budget TV show called "Cannabis Planet" has won fans with a cooking segment showing viewers how to use weed in teriyaki chicken, shrimp capellini and steak sandwiches. ...

Ganja Gourmet's menu includes lasagna ("LaGanja"), "Panama Red Pizza" and an olive tapenade called "ganjanade," along with a sweets such as cheesecake, muffins and brownies. Employees wear tie-dyed T-shirts that proclaim, "Our food is so great, you need a license to eat it!!!"

All patrons at the Ganja Gourmet must show a medical marijuana card that proves they have a doctor's permission to use pot for some kind of malady. The place opened last week, and so far, 90 percent of its business has been takeout.

Very interesting and different, isn't it? Just last night at my culinary book club we were talking about the distant predecessor to this: Alice B. Toklas and her recipe for "Haschich Fudge."

Addendum: my friend Bob emailed me this reaction: "A chicken in every pot and some pot in every chicken."

Favorite Bloggers

It's the season for lists. So here's my list of some of my favorite food blogs.

Individual Blogs

• Months of Edible Celebrations: Louise, the blogger here, finds amazing little corners of American history to describe at a perfect level of detail with lots of pictures and links. Her current post, for example, describes household gifts from a 70- or 80-year-old Westinghouse Christmas advertising brochure. A wizened Santa holds up photos of early-20th-century toasters, percolators, chafing dishes, and other old-fashioned appliances -- very amusing. Her blog posts also describe early cookbook authors, inventors of still-staple foods such as cotton candy, and many other historic oddities.
• The Perfect Pantry: Rhode Islander Lydia Walshin manages to feature a new pantry staple several times a week. Spices, condiments, grocery-store basics, and home-made items all appear, with historic and general background as well as specific recipes for their use. One of my favorites among the home-made pantry/freezer items is her recipe for slow-cooked tomatoes -- I have one baggie of them hoarded in my freezer from last tomato season. A recent discovery she recommended: Sriracha sauce, of which I am now consuming my second bottle.
• Gherkins and Tomatoes: Cynthia Bertelsen offers serious historic essays and accounts of her experiences in far-off places. She includes lots of interesting text, intriguing recipes, and wonderfully chosen illustrations. I thank her for the inspiration to make a list of favorite bloggers to celebrate the coming New Year -- and I'm starting to read some new bloggers thanks to her list (this list includes only my ongoing faves).
• Cooked Books: Blogger Rebecca Federman explores "the delicious culinary collections of the New York Public Library." She posts images of historic menus, old cookbooks, or culinary-themed prints, and writes about old books and other food themes. I wish I could get to the NY Public Library to see a lot of the items she posts about.
• Obama Foodorama watches food events at the White House and describes food-related political and social actions by the President and First Lady and their chefs, gardeners, and associates.

Blogs Sponsored by Online Newspapers and Journals

• The Atlantic Food Channel: This is a cross between blogs and magazine writing. Many writers post new food stories, recipes, human-interest sketches, chefs' portraits, farming news, and food politics all the time in this offshoot of the Atlantic magazine. Marion Nestle writes about food and politics. When Gourmet folded, they picked up more food politics from Barry Eastabrook. And Ann Arbor's local food celebrity, Ari Weinzweig writes a column -- often promoting the products of his business here, Zingerman's Deli.
• L.A. Times Daily Dish -- combines Los Angeles restaurant news & trends with more generally interesting material on the world of food.
• Guardian Food and Drink -- a totally English approach to food and dining.
• Houston Press Eating Our Words -- lots of Texas-specific stories, but also some general ones. Recent example: "What the oughts brought" -- an interesting list of trends from this decade.
• New York Times Diners' Journal -- I liked it better when it included many posts by the previous restaurant reviewer -- he brought up interesting topics of restaurant etiquette, tipping, and the like. But there are still good things, such as a current Q & A on Latkes by Joan Nathan.
  

I hope to read more lists of blogger favorites -- I'd love to become a faithful reader of still more blogs.

Lebkuchen

Our friend Marianna in Berlin sent us a wonderful box of Lebkuchen, the German favorite Christmas pastry. Lebkuchen is ginger flavored, and each large cake-like piece is baked on top of a thin wafer -- so it's not a simple cookie, and not the same as American gingerbread either.

My culinary book club met last night (it's sponsored by & meets at a local bookstore). We were reading Stand Facing the Stove, which is about the authors of the Joy of Cooking. Since the German-American author Irma Rombauer's best recipes are for cookies, many in a German tradition, I shared some Lebkuchen with the group. They were very enthusiastic -- we don't normally have refreshments.

Our book discussion was very interesting -- especially about the history of cooking and cookbooks that's covered in the book. The Joy of Cooking was published at a moment when much about American kitchens and home cooking was changing, so the history is very important. All eight book club members enjoyed reading the book, though they agreed with me that it could have used some editing in spots. I wrote up my thoughts about it here.

Seasonal Cakes

In the New York Times, an article about Alabama cakes Festiveness, Stacked Up Southern Style. Some have 15 layers and all go beyond anything we would do up here in the lazy north. They also outdo the seasonal fruitcake that's so frequently jeered at. The Lane Cake described in the article is soaked in alcohol like a fruitcake -- but sounds a lot tastier, as you can see from this quote:

The Lane cake is made with lots of egg whites, the yolks reserved for a rich filling of ground pecans, coconut and raisins flavored with bourbon or local wine. That makes it something of an illicit treat here in dry Geneva County, which is thick with non-drinking Baptists, some of whom substitute grape juice.

Like many of these layer cakes, the Lane cake gets better with a little age. Some cooks still store theirs in a tin with cut apples, to keep it moist while the alcohol mellows and flavors meld.

Anyway, all this talk of alcoholic cake brings to mind (both my mind and others) an old favorite song warning about the dangers of rum and its relatives. Before this week I only knew the lyrics "We don't eat cookies cause cookies have yeast..." but this blog post provided still more: Fruitcake, Fermentation by Another Name.

A little research and I found the following Youtube video with many more verses -- and the singer says he didn't even sing all he knows:




Sorry, I couldn't resist adding a verse to honor the ladies in the Times article:

We don't eat Lane cake cause Lane cake has wine
And one sip of wine puts you in a decline.
Did you ever see victims of the cake-bakers art
Who blamed the pecans but were winos at heart?

Thanks to my sister and to Cynthia at Gherkins and Tomatoes for getting me started on this!

Trends?

From the L.A.Times: Bacon, sardines are among top food trends for 2010, ad agency says. Bacon sounds pretty last year to me -- just over a year ago, bacon seemed to be at a peak -- appearing everywhere, from normal to ice cream. Even I noticed it and wrote: Is this a Bacon Fad? So I think it should be very passe now.

Other fads on the list also seem questionable. Wine in mixed drinks and organic food from fast-food outlets also sound more tired than wired. And the faddish skepticism about health claims? That also doesn't seem very new. The source -- J. Walter Thompson -- sounds pretty out-of-touch. But what do I know?

Sardines are the last trend that's supposed to be hot, they say. Healthy, fresh sardines? I was quite interested, as this seems so counter-intuitive. I have elsewhere read that fresh sardines are very hard to keep from spoiling -- they can even rot when they are frozen! That's why they are usually seen from cans. Also -- unlike bacon -- they rank high on the aggregate list of people's least-favorite foods.

One statement about sardines seems especially intriguing: "Once again plentiful in Monterey Bay, the fish [sardines] will appear on menus, often grilled or pan-roasted." I wonder about the old canning factories and fishing boats in Monterey that failed ages ago because the sea yielded no more sardines for them to process. Canneries were re-purposed as upscale shopping destinations. Could they somehow return to their Steinbeck-documented canning function? Would colorful working poor people come back to Monterey? No way: the canning will be done on ships, I bet. And they probably won't even be American ships. Alas.

Bookclub Potluck

Last night's book club meeting was here. We had a potluck -- around half appetizers, half desserts. My lazy organizing method: I told people with last names A through M to bring savory, last names N through Z to bring sweets. Dishes included sweet potato kugel, olives, hummus, babaganoush, cheese, smoked salmon rollups, cheese and cherry tomatoes on skewers, crackers, cookies, gingerbread and other cake, and a beautiful fruit salad.

The youngest participant was Mira, around three weeks -- mostly asleep as shown in photo. We were all delighted to meet her. Her brother Alan (almost 3) ate a sandwich with the bribe that when he finished, he could have a peanut butter cookie. He also pretend cooked with a set of pots and pans from my toy box.

After everyone had eaten, Alan, Mira, and their mother left and we discussed The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. (I wrote up my thoughts about it when I read it -- see: Potato Peel Pie.)

"Armageddon"

Armageddon by Max Hastings is the horrifying story of the last months of World War II. It's so horrifying that I can hardly find any way to discuss it. Hunger is an underlying topic when one writes about food. Usually I think about the hunger that people in my community are suffering, and I try to donate food or money to organizations that are trying to help them. The book puts this in a totally different perspective.

In Armageddon, one learns about the winter of 1944-45. Everywhere occupied by Germany was suffering from near starvation. On the Eastern front, which was practically all of Poland, vast numbers of people were homeless and without resources or food. In concentration camps, hunger had been used as a punishment; by this time most of the victims had already died. POWS, Jews, and others undesirable to Nazis continued to be intentionally worked to death without food. Inside Russia there was also terrible starvation.

Widespread hunger left no one to help. Numerous tragic examples appear in the book. One that piqued my imagination was a recipe from Holland for how to cook tulip bulbs. A liter of water, one onion, 4-6 tulip bulbs, seasoning, salt, oil and curry substitute were the ingredients. "The outcome was repulsive, but possessed some vestiges of nutritional value." Everything in this book is infinitely painful.

Magical Cooking

A few weeks ago in the New Yorker this article appeared: Jhumpa Lahiri: Rice. The author describes how her father makes pulao: "a baked, buttery, sophisticated indulgence, Persian in origin, served at festive occasions." Lahiri begins with details of both the ingredients and the method by which her father -- "a methodical man" -- makes this dish. But then she says: "I have no idea how to make my father’s pulao, nor would I ever dare attempt it."

On a variety of occasions, she explains, her father has fed large crowds with his pulao, under difficult circumstances as well as favorable ones. He's compensated for missing ingredients, inadequate kitchens, and other challenges. Nothing unnerves him, and every batch is good. And thus the description can never really tell how to do it.

Lahiri is of course a writer of great facility (I have enjoyed her books). She portrays her father as a complex and appealing individual in a very short piece of writing. I think she also captures what is so magical about cooking, about the mastery of a dish, about the nature of good food and the events it can celebrate. Read it and you'll see what I mean.

Hanukkah Song

Happy Hanukkah.

Happy Hanukkah

The pictures probably look the same every year, but it's a great holiday!

Thinking about Chinese Food

I've been thinking about Chinese food, so last night went to a Chinese restaurant downtown, Kai Garden. We haven't been there in several years -- I have no idea if it's still the same owners. We particularly enjoyed a dish of fried squid with various spices, and a bowl of noodle soup with shrimp wantons.

In thinking about Chinese food and culture, I'm collecting misconceptions about China. Which is why I wanted Chinese food, in a way.

Summary of what I know so far -- with references. Despite popular misconceptions:

• You cannot see the Great Wall of China from the moon. Chinese friends tell me that people in China also believe this. However, the astronauts who were actually on the moon definitively say they couldn't see the Great Wall.
• The word "crisis" in Chinese does not mean danger plus opportunity. For a discussion see the essay by Victor Mair, a linguist specializing in Chinese.
• Chop suey was not invented in America for the visit of a 19th century Chinese diplomat (though the details may differ in the recipes used in the two places). See the book Chop Suey by Andrew Coe if you want details.
• Fortune cookies as we know them originated in America, and before that, they were an obscure Japanese tradition. They are unknown in China. See the book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee for the full history.
• The Chinese aren't the lost 10 tribes of Israel. This seems so far-fetched that I don't feel a specific reference is necessary -- suffice to say, that Rabbi Hillel already said that the 10 tribes would never be found. That's around 1800 years ago.
• Eating shrimp or pork in a Chinese restaurant doesn't make it kosher. No one truly deep down ever believed that anyway, it's only wishful thinking.

Update: The New Yorker has published a list of 2009's top China myths -- none of them are the same as mine.

My favorite New Yorker myth: "China is a land of no siblings. Fact: In July, the Shanghai government began encouraging eligible parents to have a second child in effort to counter the effects of an aging population. This is a major sign of a more relaxed attitude about the one-child policy in place since the seventies."

Frozen fish has a smaller carbon footprint than fresh...

From the New York Times, a very interesting idea:

Eat Frozen Fish

The authors, Astrid Scholz, Ulf Sonesson, and Peter Tyedmers, all researchers,write:

"When it comes to salmon, the questions of organic versus conventional and wild versus farmed matter less than whether the fish is frozen or fresh. In many cases, fresh salmon has about twice the environmental impact as frozen salmon."

Because fresh fish must be transported by air, its carbon footprint is far greater than that for any form of frozen fish, which is usually flash-frozen at sea and then transported by more efficient means. I think this is a very important set of facts.

Unlike many suggestions about reduction of one's carbon footprint, this one is not challenging to act on. There are some very good frozen fish options at my local markets, as in many places.

Potato Peel Pie

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Shaffer and Barrows takes place mainly in the channel island of Guernsey just after the end of Nazi occupation. The form of this novel is a series of letters, mainly between a young writer named Juliet, several Guernseyites, and her various friends and colleagues. The point of the novel is to create a vivid portrait of what life was like under Nazi occupation, using Juliet and her developing relationships to provide a framework. Her story also makes it into a tale of romance, contrasting to the recent misery and tragedy of wartime.

Starting with the title dish, potato peel pie, the novel relies on a variety of themes of food and starvation as part of the fictional re-creation of the suffering people had experienced. The people of Guernsey had used a variety of imaginative strategies to feed themselves during the occupation, including making pie from scarce potatoes and no normal sources of sweetener (they used mashed beets). The Nazi troops brought in slave laborers from other occupied lands, who were treated as expendable -- sometimes they were let out of their miserable hovels to forage, which meant stealing from the scarce resources of the native Guernesyites. Stories of the Guernsey residents who were deported to concentration camps adds to the terrible discoveries.

The literary society gave residents a way to get together without alarming the occupying soldiers. Members of the society took turns presenting their personal book reviews at group meetings. They also escaped through this activity from the starvation, betrayals, abusiveness, and selfishness that surrounded them. The reaction to books by individuals who had little reading experience was a device by which the author presented the character of the people. And sometimes it wasn't an entirely convincing device.

Once a member of the literary society, Mrs. Saussey, chose to report on her own cookbook. She described a fantasy of the food that they all wished for -- crackling roast pork, five-layer cakes containing a dozen eggs, "spun-sugar sweets, chocloate-rum balls, sponge cakes with pots of cream." All the mentioned ingredients were of course unavailable, as was enough fuel to properly cook even a scarce potato (except that they had once secretly roasted a clandestinely raised piglet). What they actually had to eat in those terrible times was cake made from ground bird seed, half-cooked potatoes, and turnip soup. (p. 103)

I wish I had liked the book better than I did, but it frequently seemed much too predictable, as if the author had read many books about the suffering of Nazi victims, and distilled them into the usual vignettes of heroism vs. collaboration, kindness vs. cruelty, generosity vs. meanness, sacrifice vs. selfishness. It's too pat and pretty, despite descriptions of depraved human lapses. People imagining good food while starving, for example, has become almost a cliche along with many of the other little stories. I don't mean it seems inauthentic: just somehow manufactured or mechanical to me.

Oatmeal trendy...what?

I made oatmeal for breakfast this morning, as I do once a week or so. I use Quaker Old Fashioned Oats and cook two portions in a pyrex cup in the microwave. Everybody does it this way, or directly in the bowl they're going to eat from, as far as I know. The result is good -- especially with maple syrup and maybe some dried fruit -- and the clean-up is easy.

In England, they call this porridge. And it's a BIG TIME fad, according to this article by Louise France in the Guardian online food section:

Why porridge is the new power breakfast

Sales are increasing rapidly --

"Suddenly an old-fashioned fry-up or a pain au chocolat seem like folly, as indulgent and unwise as an MP's expenses claim. Call it nostalgia, or a childish longing for comfort food, or a rampant fear of cholesterol, but everyone is going to work on versions of oats, water and salt."

Health claims are rampant -- porridge has become "a kind of heroic superfood, able to do everything from hoover up cholesterol, boost testosterone levels, fend off heart disease, suppress the appetite and beat depression."

Celebrities who eat porridge are named and extolled. Restaurants create "posh" porridges of various sorts costing over $10 a bowl (if I did the exchange rate math right). The author gushes: "At the casually stylish Modern Pantry in east London I'm served jumbo and rolled oats in a moat of cream with crunchy dark muscovado sugar scattered on top, the swirl of dark sugar contrasting with the off-white puddle of cream."

Competitors enter contests for best recipe -- "including braised pigeon with porridge (not to be recommended) and a porridge spotted dick, with spices and dried fruit (surprisingly delicious)."

A funny fad!

"Stand Facing the Stove"

The Joy of Cooking, 1964 edition, has been one of my most reliable food references for much of my life. If I want to bake cookies or a cake, it's the first place I usually look. I use it if I just want to know something about some ingredient (though these days, I am more likely to google). I'm pretty fond of ethnic cookbooks and of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but sometimes I need a simpler recipe -- my old battered, food-stained Joy of Cooking is where I go.

I was never terribly curious about Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, the authors. They never made a popular TV show like Julia Child. I never saw them in person in my local venues as I've seen Joan Nathan, or read their autobiography in the start of a book as I did Claudia Roden's. But I was enthusiastic when I bought Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave America The Joy of Cooking by Anne Mendelson -- the selection for an upcoming discussion group.

The first hundred pages describe the life of Irma Rombauer up to 1931 when she wrote the first edition of the Joy of Cooking. She was then a recent widow in her mid-fifties. This part of the book was particularly fascinating as she was a native of St.Louis, as am I. Her family background thus appealed to me. I could picture many of the places mentioned, and learned quite a bit about 19th century St. Louis social history and the German immigrant background she came from. Most amazing: somewhat before her book became a big money-maker, Irma Rombauer moved to an apartment not far from my parents' first apartment. So for the first 8 years of my life, I learned, I lived about 2 blocks from her!

Mendelson's treatment of the origin of the Joy of Cooking and of its influence and importance includes much very interesting material. I enjoyed the stories of how Irma Rombauer collected recipes from friends and their cooks, edited the material, and with her daughter designed the innovative book. I was interested in how they invented its way of presenting recipes and information, and how Marion Becker re-invented much of the book for the later editions. Comparisons to other classic cookbooks of the era such as the Settlement Cookbook and Fanny Farmer are also enlightening. Mendelson covers many issues: social changes, decline of availability of household help, invention of better stoves and refrigeration, improvements in basic food products like seedless grapes, and development of convenience food like canned soup and Jello.

Unfortunately for a work whose topic is editing, cutting, shaping, and creating quality written material, much of the book itself is terribly undisciplined and badly in need of editing. I found too little of interest in the extensive treatment authors' enormous fights and lawsuits with their publisher about money and editing. The very sad later years of both women and Marion's husband -- their illnesses and family problems -- were perhaps also treated at too great length. Worst of all, a 50 page chapter "Chronicles of Cookery 2" has vast amounts of undigested observations, the history of cookbooks mingled with other social history, repetitions of Joy of Cooking background from other chapters, and gossip about American food history, and really doesn't come up to the standard of the rest of the book.

It's a very long book. It should have been shorter.

Hanukkah Geld

I thought I remembered foil-wrapped chocolate coins as part of our Hanukkah celebration when we were children. My father said that even in his poverty-wracked shtetl, they received a few real coins, with which they gambled in the dreidel game, so we also received a few pennies each night -- sometimes one for each candle, which is less than $.50 total, if I'm not mistaken.

I just read an article Deconstructing Chocolate Gelt by Leah Koenig which traces the adoption of chocolate coins into American Hanukkah celebrations. She writes:

Along with playing dreidel, frying latkes and lighting menorahs, gelt and gift exchanges solidified Hanukkah’s appeal as a bright spot on the long, dark stretch of calendar between the high holidays and Passover, as well as a significant celebratory parallel to Christmas.

Hoping to capitalize on the blossoming interest around Hanukkah, American candy companies like Loft’s first introduced gold and silver-wrapped chocolate gelt in the 1920s. Rabbi Debbie Prinz, who is researching the historical connections between Jews and chocolate, said that these companies may have drawn their inspiration from the chocolate coins (called “geld”) given to children as part of the St. Nicholas holiday throughout Belgium and the Netherlands in early December.

The article also notes something that has bothered me recently: the chocolate coins I've had are waxy and not very nice to eat. Last year I bought a whole box with something like 20 of the little mesh bags of coins. This year, I passed up several opportunities to buy them. They just aren't that good.

Wasted Food

I often see references to the large amount of food wasted in America. Finally, here is a summary of how that waste occurs:

Food is wasted at all levels. Farmers growing vegetables will plow under their crops if they learn that the selling price has gone below the harvesting cost. Retailers and distributors throw food away as it approaches its "sell by" date. ... Households account for about 15 percent of total food loss.

This is important, as some writers suggest that personal management of food could alleviate hunger -- that would only save 15%, not insignificant, but not the main problem. Connecting this in some snarky way to the obesity "epidemic" is also not very useful.

Colm Tóibín's "Brooklyn"

Brooklyn by Irish writer Colm Tóibín sounded like an interesting read -- and I found it so. In one way, it's a totally typical story of immigration to America. The Irish immigrant girl, her innocence, her wish for education, her reaction to the immigrant communities where she finds herself ... all typical. The post-World War II time frame is a little unusual in my reading experience: most of the books about this experience dealt with the mass immigration prior to World War I. In fact, few other groups than Irish were being admitted to the US at that time, so in a way it's about the trailing end of an era.

What makes Brooklyn an interesting read is not its sociology or historic background -- though these are well done and support the story effectively. It's the portrayal of an ordinary young woman, Eilis, and how she feels about a life that seems to be happening to her without her consent. She suffers from the sense that in her old life in Ireland and her new life in America she's really two different people. This is explicitly mentioned when she returns home to visit her mother, and looses a sense of what she had been doing in Brooklyn.

Eilis struggles to assert her own opinions, but is bullied by strong-minded women such as her employer in Ireland and her landlady in the US. She often ends up just fearing that she's acted inappropriately. The many connections between her relatives, friends, and neighbors create enormous pressure -- someone always seems to be reporting whatever she does. She tries to fit in, and with coaching from friends succeeds in dressing and acting like her peers -- these efforts are particularly described in the context of a dance in Ireland and one given by the church in Brooklyn, organized by Father Flood, her sponsor who organizes her immigration, her American job, her boarding house, and her school fees. But she's always in some way outside herself, observing but not quite fully participating, and often feeling that her real self is being defeated or disabled.

Her visit to the home of her Italian-American boyfriend points up the unacknowledged conflict that she's experiencing. Her reaction to the food she's served is emblematic of her reaction to the unfamiliar life in America. She had, as usual, been coached by a girlfriend before going into an unfamiliar experience -- in this case, her friend Diana had instructed her "about how to eat spaghetti properly using a fork only."

The boyfriend's mother's spaghetti, though was

"not as thin and slippery as the spaghetti Diana had made for her. The sauce was just as red, but was filled with flavours that she had never sampled before. It was, she thought, almost sweet. Every time she tasted it, she had to stop and hold it in her mouth, wondering what ingredients had gone into it. She wondered if the others, so used to this food, were being careful not to look at her too closely or make any comment as she attempted to eat it using only a fork as they did." (p. 154)

The main course was similarly familiar looking, but unfamiliar inside:

"a flat piece of fried meat covered in a thin coating of batter. When Eilis tasted it, she found that there was cheese and then ham inside the batter. She could not identify the meat. And the batter itself was so crisp and full of flavour that, once more, each time she took a taste, she could not work out what had been used to make it." (p. 155)

Dessert, "a sort of cake, Eilis thought, filled with cream and then soaked in some sort of alcohol" and thick, bitter coffee served in tiny cups, were equally unfamiliar despite a recognizable appearance. In a way, this was how she observed many of the experiences both at home and in her new country.

"In the Kitchen"

Monica Ali's recent book In the Kitchen should be everything I want to find in a novel. Much action takes place in the rough atmosphere of an upscale London hotel's ambitious kitchen. Gabe, the central character, is the chef of that kitchen. He's also trying to organize a new and excellent restaurant -- his lifelong goal is to earn stars in the Michelin guide. Money, jealousy, love, bigotry, class-consciousness, and family, are some of the large themes of the book, and at first, the kitchen seems primed to be a vehicle for expressing them. Alas, this was not sustained.

Gabe interacts with all the diverse members of his staff, who represent all the various ethnic groups and immigrant communities one would expect as prep cooks, bus boys, dishwashers, and so forth. In the Acknowledgments section at the end of the book, Ali even mentions Kitchen Confidential by Bourdain -- and the scenes in Gabe's kitchen often made me think of the outlandish and outrageous attitudes of Bourdain's kitchen scenes. As the story unfolded, I must admit, I was more and more disappointed with the early promise that this would really be a book about life in a microcosmic restaurant kitchen and the mind of a chef. Not to be.

As his control over his kitchen, his planned restaurant, and his life deteriorate, Gabe deals with the prejudices and expectations of his lower-middle-class family who lived in a mill town. He's torn between two women, and essentially bungles his love life. (This conflict is a central theme, but I'm not going to summarize it.) When he visits home, he's uncomfortable with his sister, who has accomplished nothing; her children are losers. He reconnects slightly with his father, a former worker in the mill, who is critically ill. The mill has become a mall. Everything is just as one would expect. Too much so.

The end, when Gabe unravels completely, seems to be almost an afterthought. Ali got the character in too deep. I found the last 50 pages nearly unreadable and the resolution painfully inadequate. And I was really disappointed that the early scenes of food, cooking, kitchen life, and so on didn't turn out to be as central as I would expect of a book called In the Kitchen.

Saturday Lunch

Saturday we decided to skip thanksgiving leftovers and go out to lunch at the Penn Avenue Fish Company. It's one of my favorite types of eating place: a fish market with dine-in tables, very informal, everything PERFECTLY fresh. Several of us had the special fish sandwiches -- mine was a thick piece of tuna with melted cheese on a crisp roll. Miriam and Alice had adult-sized portions of sushi. A couple of us had mussels too.


After lunch we walked around this interesting food, sports memoribilia, and tourist shopping district of Pittsburgh. It's known as "the strip." In an all-chocolate shop, we found Madecasse chocolate bars (which had been found excellent in a NYT review a few months ago). Also a vast number of other specialty chocolate bars (prices from $4 to $24 for a 2 to 4 oz bar!), special hot-chocolate mix, imports of various chocolate favorites and off the wall stuff like chocolate bacon bars.

This wraps up my long Thanksgiving blog post activities. We came back yesterday. Luckily the predicted rain didn't start as early as expected, so it was nice driving. Now back to prep for the next month of holidays!