two umbrellas

The NYT has a fun essay by Geoff Nicholson about food and eating in literature.

I’ve realized that the moments of literary eating I like best are the ones in which the characters suffer because of their food. In “Gravity’s Rainbow,” for instance, there’s an early scene in which the wartime inhabitants of a London maisonette enjoy bananas served in myriad forms, including mashed bananas “molded in the shape of a British lion rampant.” This is good stuff, but the truly magnificent scene in the book has Tyrone Slothrop sampling various hideous English candies, flavored with the likes of quinine, pepsin, eucalyptus, tapioca, until, choking, he’s offered a Meggezone, “the least believable of English coughdrops.” This is a real product, a nasty little black lozenge, still available, and if my childhood memory is reliable, Pynchon’s description of its effects — “Polar bears seek toenail-holds up the freezing frosty-grape alveolar clusters in his lungs” — gets it about right.

The article led me to Nicholson’s blog, Psycho-Gourmet. Very funny, indeed. But I read my blogs with Google Reader – now stylishly updated by mr. twoumbrellas with Helvetireader. I have a folder for food blogs and a folder for literary blogs. Where, oh, where should I file this one? I think I’ll put it with the food blogs; but I love when literature and food collide.

Over the past several years I have made a transformation in my diet. I learned to love food. Real food. Food that is grown or raised or in some form at some time had been a part of nature. I’ll admit I still like and will eat food that is not quite so natural (I think I’m addicted to breakfast cereal); but, for the most part, I am conscious of what I eat and do my best to eat healthily. There are a few reasons for this. One, of course, is that it’s good for you. We are natural beings and must eat, so we should eat natural food. Second, real food just tastes better. When the farmers’ markets come into the city during the summer (the influx has, thankfully, begun*), there is no question about the quality and taste, even for something as simple as lettuce. Yesterday I bought the most beautiful head of red leaf lettuce (better looking than the cover picture on Pollan’s book) from a teenaged Mennonite from Lancaster County and it still had the taste of soil. My love of food has become not just about authenticity – that is too superficial – it is more about being a natural person.

In Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, he mentions that he is surprised that a book like the one he is writing has to be written at all. Why do we need to defend food? Food is real and food is necessary. How can it be more complicated than that? Unfortunately, it is. He begins to outline how humans (well, mostly those of us who live in the Western world) have made food complicated by putting our faith in industry instead of agriculture – and culture, in general – in Omnivore’s Dilemma. We have lost a sense of food as part of our culture, lost our sense of how food is part of a natural way of life. We have accepted that even farming can become mechanical and have (or have been?) sheltered from how these mechanical processes are affecting the animals involved. A great distance has been created between ourselves and what we eat, despite the fact that we can eat foods that have traveled a great distance: I often do not think of the journeys that must be made in order for me to eat a banana every morning – year round. Pollan continues his argument, what he calls a ‘manifesto’, in his follow up book, In Defense of Food.

I had read excerpts from his book in the NYT Magazine and had an idea of what he would be writing about: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” He starts the book that way and, if you consider yourself to be an informed eater, that may be all you need to read of the book. I would prefer to call this book an extended essay and probably could have been another section of Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan ‘defends’ food by tackling nutritionists who have stripped whole foods down to science. Pollan attacks the scientific way of looking at food by using the flawed science against itself. While I found these arguments interesting – there is a lot of food science history that I didn’t know about, I didn’t find the overall argument compelling. Pollan wants us to stop thinking about food as individual nutrients and yet uses nutrition science as an argument. Granted about two thirds into the book, he admits this; but, admitting a weak argument doesn’t make it stronger. Now, I can look past this (to a degree – I did finish the book, although I couldn’t justify not finishing, considering it’s only a little over one hundred pages) because I agree with his overall premise. However, I could hardly call it a manifesto.

I believe Pollan’s aim is to get many of the general public – those that can afford it – to eat real food (food that’s not overly processed and made mostly of corn and injected with individual nutrients) and to bring culture, which he often identifies as ‘Mom’, back into our diets. It is a great idea and one that I will strive to maintain with my family. It seems as though he wants this to be the crux of his argument but only lightly discusses it. It is easy to gloss over it, considering most of the general public could not afford shopping for whole foods and skipping the bulk, processed, high calorie foods. He’s correct that they are unhealthy and they lack any type of culture. Yet, in a seemingly populist argument, it is hard to focus on an issue that has unfortunate roots in an economic gap. That may not be the reason he skirts the issue; but the issue is skirted nonetheless.

Pollan almost gets to the crux of his argument by highlighting some of the food culture in other countries; but he focuses on the French, which is not a bad thing – the French food culture is one to envy – but I can’t imagine it’s the only one. If his ‘manifesto’ is to bring food into our culture – or recreate a culture of food, than he should have focused on how culture and food can be symbiotic, healthy, and delicious.

*See here for a list of Philadelphia (and surrounding area) farmers’ markets.

aside It is obvious that Pollan is influenced by Wendall Berry and I haven’t read much by him; but I am becoming aware that I am missing out (as usual). There is a very interesting essay in Harper’s, “Faustian Economics”, where he discusses consequences of the presumed limitless of American culture.

Morimoto: The New Art of Japanese Cooking is a beautifully designed cookbook. With lavish sushi presentations, action shots of Morimoto cooking, and numerous money shots of all of the dishes, the book is exquisite with its simple beauty. Many of the recipes are complicated and precise: Squid Ink-Salmon Gnocchi or Crispy Duck with Port Wine Reduction and Red Miso Sauce (this recipe requires making foie gras croissants). There is a section titled “Recipes to Contemplate” (with ingredients such as blowfish, abalone, and sea urchin) that hints at Morimoto’s sense of humor.

When I went to see Morimoto speak at the FLP, I was excited to walk into the auditorium and see a small kitchen station. He arrived on stage with his sous chef and immediately entertained. His fierce appearance in photographs seems to contradict his persona on stage. Every other line was a punch line and he is quite aware that he is there to promote is many products. He quickly got started with cooking. He prepared a Tuna Pizza, which looks like one of the more simpler recipes in his book. It took him only about ten minutes (with everything already prepped – we were at the library) and it looked good enough to eat. However, I can only hope that he gave the pizza to someone after the reading; it would be very disappointing to see a very expensive piece of tuna go to waste. He then took questions (with his chef de cuisine to help interpret) and I was surprised to hear his thoughts on TV, which he hates. Someone asked about Iron Chef, which he also hates and quickly added that he also loves. The show requires a lot of prep work and they only get so many hints about the secret ingredient. There is great pressure on the Iron Chefs to create new dishes for each show. At this point in his career, he added, he does not need to create new dishes so often.

Morimoto’s eponymous restaurant sits inconspicuously on Chestnut street. Once recognized, it’s smooth facade and translucent florescent green doors do begin to contrast the abandoned or reconstructed storefronts. There’s a deli or two on the block and a karate studio shares the building. I have yet to eat at Morimoto but I pass the restaurant almost everyday on my way to work and each time I do, those green doors tempt me to consider spending at least half of a paycheck on what I will assume would be one of the best meals I would ever have. Since I haven’t given into temptation (the sushi is always at market price – from Tokyo – and the wagyu is twenty dollars an ounce – with a six oz. minimum), I have to resort to the cheap version of food porn – the cookbook.

Philadelphia’s Fall Restaurant Week is approaching. mr. twoumbrellas and some friends and I will be dining at Lolita. It’s ‘bring your own tequila’ so good food and good times for all.

Nicolas Freeling published The Kitchen in 1970, after becoming a successful crime fiction writer, based on his life in kitchens around Europe in the 1950s. He describes kitchens of a different era, of a time before “the accountants came in” and everybody used the same “system.” Hotels were grand indoor city parks, where people would come and eat and rent rooms to just to have a place to be. I am reminded of the tulmultuous scene at the end of The Great Gatsby where everyone is drinking gin and it’s hot and Jay Gatsby loses everything. There is a beautiful hotel about two blocks from my apartment and, even in the heat of summer, I can’t imagine going there to rent a room for no other reason other than to have somewhere else to go – very decadent, but I must say also quite tempting.

The Kitchen is an interesting read for its descriptions of a by-gone era, but also for Freeling’s style and persona on the page (or maybe those are one in the same). For Freeling, the writing is just as important as the kitchen and it seems to come naturally:

It was autumn, and quiet. Lunches busy still, but little work in the evening, though the parties would soon be beginning…In the kitchen cooks cleaned their stoves, polished their knives, and turned all the year’s rubbish out of the drawers in the benches. I was quickly happy. Outside mist came down over the little town, the grey sea snored on the shingle; everything was marvellously peaceful and the placid rhythm of the Atlantic rocked me upon waves of content. The hotel had in reality left its mooring upon the low chalk cliff and was drifting out to sea rapidly, but that I was seeing the last years of the Grand Hotel Thermes et Bains de Mer before the final shipwreck I had then no idea.

I am not sure what draws me into these books about being a chef and the so-called “underbellies” that are restaurant kitchens. I think it may be because these books are really about surviving failure and the understanding that there is no anticipation of success but every expectation of it. (Marco Pierre White’s The Devil in the Kitchen is another example that has recently been added to my TBR pile.) Nicolas Freeling’s The Kitchen has the usual characteristics of being a story of numerous failures in kitchens but this is the first I’ve read written with such literary flare. Nicolas Freeling left the kitchen in order to become a writer, giving his book a stronger foundation in drama of the kitchen rather than the food.

Anthony Bourdain makes an appearance on Michael Ruhlman’s blog, where he gives his two cents on the Food Network’s personalities:

MARIO!
Oh, Mario! Oh great one! They shut down Molto Mario–only the smartest and best of the stand-up cooking shows. Is there any more egregiously under-used, criminally mishandled, dismissively treated chef on television? Relegated to the circus of Iron Chef America, where–like a great, toothless lion, fouling his cage, he hangs on–and on–a major draw (and often the only reason to watch the show). How I would like to see him unchained, free to make the television shows he’s capable of, the Real Mario–in all his Rabelasian brilliance. How I would love to hear the snapping bones of his cruel FN ringmasters, crunching between his mighty jaws! Let us see the cloven hooves beneath those cheery clogs! Let Mario be Mario!

Of his Iron Chef match-ups, I personally would love to see Marco Pierre White vs. Gordon Ramsay.

(via the millions.)

Going out to eat at a restaurant can be a bit like watching a movie. You see what is on that plate in front of you, but often you have no idea where it came from or how it got there. There is no work involved: a beautiful plate of food appears before your eyes after a polite bidding to a complete stranger who appears more than happy (most of the time) to serve you. What a wonderful experience and at some restaurants almost magical. As with the movies, there are just some things you just don’t care to know about, like the means to the end – you just want to sit down and enjoy. Needless to say, I was a little nervous to read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. Maybe there are just some things I don’t want to know about.

I was greatly surprised by Bourdain’s ability to tell a story. I knew knew that he had written some fiction previously, but his story unfolds as a chaotic series of events – often labyrinthine travels through a maze of New York City neighborhoods, mobsters, famous chefs, names of fellow friends and colleagues that come and go like a summer storm – that seem to mimic the trajectory of his career. He begins as a young boy traveling through France with his family, where he has an epiphany with a raw oyster – a convenient start to a culinary life. But he winds down a path of culinary piracy, pillaging NYC restaurants of their chefs, closing failing restaurants one after the other, and scoring as much drugs as he can find. And all the while you are rooting for him. You want him to succeed and you can’t wait to hear what adventure will come next (and he has just as many stories about his friends a long the way as he does about himself).

The New Yorker originally ran pieces of the book titled “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” The book is divided into sections, or “courses.” The “Second Course” reveals much of the restaurant business, the nuts and bolts, and the magical secrets of the kitchen are revealed particularly in two chapters: “Who Cooks?” and “From Our Kitchen to Your Table.” The latter chapter goes paragraph by paragraph giving the inside dirt on when to eat fish, when to be suspicious of specials, and to trust the waiter’s opinion. I wasn’t too surprised at some of the revelations although I’ll probably never order Chilean sea bass again (unless I am in Chile). However, the most interesting chapters are “A Day in the Life” and “Mission to Tokyo.” “A Day in the Life” (obviously named) is a fast-paced chapter that follows Bourdain as he begins his day as chef at his restaurant, Les Halles. The day lasts at least 17 hours and you get a glimpse of how a chef can never really leave the kitchen. Bourdain’s enthusiasm and commitment are palpable. In “Mission to Tokyo,” the culinary traveler/adventurer is once again awakened in him from his young days in France (and most likely inspired A Cook’s Tour and his show No Reservations, which introduced me to the book when I saw a special last summer on his filming in Lebanon during the Israeli attacks – an enjoyable program that I still watch and he will eat anything).

Like any famous chef, the undercurrent of the story is the food. The money helps, but it is about the food, which he talks about a lot. Yet, the wave of Bourdain’s story is the subculture and the experience of living a life that takes risks and a lot of passion.

I am certainly an amateur in the kitchen. I have learned to become much more comfortable in the kitchen and have come to quite enjoy cooking. Every once and a while mr twoumbrellas and I like to try something a bit fancy: homemade cassoulet or pasta sauce. Crepes were fun; mustard was not. I need to follow a recipe. I don’t have a chef’s intuition about food combinations, tastes, or textures. But we have a good time and there is no pressure other than deciding where to eat when things don’t go as planned, which luckily isn’t too often.

Bill Buford’s Heat is a story about the average man who decides that he wants to learn what it takes to be a chef. As you begin the book, there is an understanding that Buford is slightly more than an amateur, if not in his skills at least in his palate. He begins his cooking adventure with Mario Batali, whose restaurant, Babbo, has three stars in New York. I had never heard of Batali before reading Heat, but apparently he was a pioneer of the “new” celebrity chef – not the traditional Julia Child, who became a household name; but the celebrity chef as rock star: a bad-ass demagogue of trendy food with an inflated ego. Batali transformed the Food Network (or according to Food Network, they transformed him) into its modern day spectacle, leaning a little towards food porn, where personality and presentation are more important than food, taste, or technique. Buford does present Batali as a rock star – luckily as the kind that everyone wants to believe in: lives too fast and too hard, drinks, eats, and parties harder than most thought humanly possible. What I appreciated about the celebrity Batali is that he seems to always have food and cooking at heart. We learn that the real celebrity chefs (i.e. the ones you don’t hear about because they are too busy to be television stars) see food and cooking as an art. I don’t think I thought about food that way until I read this book.

The book (as the subtitle suggests) takes the reader on a cooking adventure from the depths of a famous kitchen, with all its personalities, to Tuscany, where food is not an art but the living history of generations of Italians – the ghosts of families and traditions lingering in every bite. Buford writes eloquently yet personally throughout the book. While a kitchen slave at Babbo, he gets humilated, stressed, burnt, sliced, and a thorough education of what is necessary to make a three star kitchen. There are few secrets left and I will think twice before I am quick to order specials (particularly if I think they could have come from the trash). Buford also skillfully addresses food history and even some techniques that I was able to take away from the book and use in my own kitchen.

The book focuses on Italian cooking (Babbo is an Italian restaurant) and the focus made for a stronger book. He doesn’t ignore other styles of cooking (there are some elements of French vs. Italian styles) but the focus gives the book a greater roundedness where I didn’t feel like I was just following some guy around who was able to quit his day job (writer for the New Yorker) to work for free for a year or so in the kitchen. The book wasn’t about him. It was about the food, the history, the restaurant business, and an almost mythical Mario Batali.

As in many cities around the country, Philadelphia will be having their Winter Restaurant Week from January 28-February 2, 2007. mr twoumbrellas and I will be dining at Django.

At only $30 per person for a three course meal, it’s a great way to sample the more expensive treats at a reasonable cost. As I find myself becoming a bit of an amateur foodie, I am very excited.

I’ll admit that I am one of those people who used to love “treating” myself to fast food and drinking soda everyday. But then (with much influence and help) I stopped eating junk food and soda and now I am one of those people who couldn’t possibly believe that I used to be one of those people. I became more conscious of what I ate for my own good. I read Fast Food Nation, tried to buy organic or even just “fresh” in a town where the wait for the Olive Garden was about two hours every night. Then I moved to Philadelphia, where it is much easier to get “fresh” food. Now I am in suburban New Jersey and I am back to searching for fresh food and driving twenty minutes to the nearest Whole Foods. But at least I am getting food that’s good, right?

Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma traces meals from seed to consumption on a usually windy path to our tables (or in some cases the quick meals in the car). The books lays out the modern omnivore’s dilemma: what are we to choose to eat after combing the aisles and aisles at the supermarket? Should we eat meat? Should we go gluten free? Vegan? or just non-dairy? A good question for those of us who can afford to make those decisions. Unfortunately, the poorer you are the easier it is to make these decisions. You’ll buy whatever will feed your family and be able to satisfy their hunger. Now, after the books was published, Wal-Mart is going to sell organic food in their stores – making organic food more affordable for all; but at what costs? (Debate about the effects of Wal-Mart can be inserted here.) The term organic (at least in the United States) does not have a clear cut standard thus leading to further ambiguity in grocery store labels. Pollan poses a lot of questions and not many answers to the dilemma of what we eat and how it can affect not just our appetites but also the world and the environment around us.

Yet, in the wake of all the confusion, Pollan gives a wealth of information of where food begins to where it ends. The book is divided into three sections. The first explores the industrial food chain. What I found amazing was the history of corn, both past and present. Corn is used in so many foods and in so many ways that the processing changes the names into those chemical strings on the end of the ingredients section on the side of the cereal box. In the second section, he follows the organic and self-sustaining farms, a path that splits into industrial and family factions. In the final section, Pollan hunts and gathers his own food, a section that becomes a little too personal and unfortunately irrelevant.

The highlight of this book is that Pollan presents material to allow the reader to make his own choice. What we eat is a personal decision based on philosophies and the food that is available. What is important is that we think about what we eat and that eating is always a communal act. Is fresh food really fresh when it’s shipped from South America? How much energy (both human and fossil fuel powered) does it take to get the food we need? These are questions that I didn’t ask myself when I first started to really think about the food I ate. Now I think (and not just about myself) before I eat.