Books'n'at

Name this blog!

I used a gift certificate from work to pick up two food-related books this weekend: The Complete Book of Mexican Cooking by Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz, and The Indian Grocery Store Demystified by Linda Bladholm. Haven't cooked anything from the Mexican book yet, but it seems, in my limited understanding, like a reasonably comprehensive guide to Mexico City cooking. Should be fun. The Bladholm book...

OK, here's the thing about the Bladholm book. The introductory material is fairly Orientalist.
Here's an example of what I mean:

You pull open the door and a string of brass bells jangle, ushering you into
another land. The heady aromas of cardamom, black pepper, perfumed
incense, and rose-scented sweets fill the air. You are surrounded by
exotic provisions with colorful wrappers and labels. The strains of a
sitar resonate from a far corner. There is the rustle of a saree...

And so on and so forth. This is worthless at best and racist at worst. However, the explanations of various spices, their origins, uses and alternate names, are incredibly useful, as are the sections on cooking instruments and produce that are hard to find in the US. I'll at least stop confusing kalonji with black cumin!

If you're going to be in Philadelphia this weekend (and I am not), the White Dog Foundation is sponsoring a local food event at Yard's Brewery:

Yards Kick Off Event:

All Local Ingredient Cheese Steaks
(Pastured Beef and Veg.) * Hand Crafted Ales * Live Music * Dunk Local Food
Leaders in Dunk Tank

Sunday, July 15th 2:00pm - 6:30pm

2439 Amber Street, Philadelphia, PA. Located in the
Kensington neighborhood of Philly. The brewery entrance is on Martha Street
close to Hagert St.

There will be a dunk tank at the event in which Local Food
Leaders (including Judy Wicks) from Fair Food, Farm to City, Reading Terminal
Market, The Book & The Cook and The Food Trust will be submerged — that is,
provided you can hit the target.

Milk is $3.50 a gallon and rising-- that's way too expensive AND unrealistically cheap.

A quick tidbit: This article rightly condemns the fact that milk prices are soaring. It argues that this is the case because corn meal (cow feed, in other words) is rising in price due to the diversion of corn to the newly subsidized ethanol industry.

The article is absolutely correct in its argument that ethanol production is in fact not environmentally friendly. However, I would clarify that the overproduction of corn is so high in the US that it's not a matter of shortages; in fact, the push toward ethanol production is profitable because it allows agribusiness to grow the same amount of corn without the downward push on prices that is an inevitable result of overproduction. We produce too much corn; massive agribusiness producers receive huge subsidies from the federal government (subsidies originally intended to protect small farmers from the vagaries of the market); prices have to be kept artificially high in order to protect profits. Producers have for decades dumped billions of tons of grain (mostly wheat and corn) into the ocean in order to keep prices high-- an unforgivable crime in a world in which people still starve to death. But shipping free grain to, say, the Sudan wouldn't inflate prices; creating a new fuel industry that puts the grain glut to use does.

Furthermore, the article is right that ethanol production doesn't do a damn thing about global warming. Its carbon emissions are slightly lower than those of gasoline, but such massive quantities of fossil fuels are used in the production of the corn that the net lessening of emissions is negligible. (Agriculture produces more carbon emissions than any other US industry.) The only claim to 'sustainability' ethanol has is that it is a renewable energy source, unlike oil.

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan's eye-opening tour through food production in the US, Pollan demolishes these claims-- and points out that the milk we drink, like other industrial food, is artificially cheap. Paying a dollar for a gallon of milk-- or even $3.50-- doesn't reflect the true cost to our health, our economy and the environment involved in the production of that milk.

So the next time you see a slick ad for BP or Shell telling you how very environmentally responsible and kind-hearted and lovable energy companies are-- don't buy it. And consider getting your milk from your local farmstand, where the cows might just eat grass, like their bodies are built to do. It'll be better for you, and the way prices are going this summer, it might just be cheaper.

The Staff of Life

Hi all,

I've been doing some traveling and working some weird hours, so it's been a bad week for cooking. However, I spent five hours at my allergist's office today and found out that I now have the all-clear to eat as much wheat as I please! After two years (to the day, as of yesterday) of scrutinizing labels, buying $6 loaves of bread, and pretending not to mind sitting in the corner with a Luna Bar while everyone else eats something delicious, my ordeal is over.

Of course, it only happened in the first place because of incompetence on the part of my doctor's office in New York, but that's a long story. Just go see "Sicko" when it comes out, or read this, and you'll have the gist of it. Health care in the US is a criminally twisted system, and going without wheat for two years, even with all the trouble that entails, is small gluten-free potatoes compared to what cancer patients and pregnant women go through on a regular basis. In this system, if you live to complain about your health care, you're doing all right. And that, my friends, is why I'm a socialist.

As far as this blog is concerned, though, the menu is about to expand! I'll post some good stuff this week. Promise.

Eating Beyond Sichuan

I'm back from Chicago and ready to cook tonight! In the meantime, read this: a call for real Chinese food in the US, from the Zagats, whose job I would love to have. From yesterday's New York Times. I'm not sure what sous-vide cooking is, since unlike the Zagats I am not a rich gourmet, but the few tastes of un-Americanized Chinese food I've had in the obscure corners of New York's Chinatown make me wholeheartedly support this call.

Eating Beyond Sichuan
By NINA ZAGAT and TIM ZAGAT
Published: June 15, 2007

TWENTY years ago, American perceptions of Asian food could be summed up in one word: “Chinese.” Since then, we have developed appetites for Korean, Japanese, Thai and Vietnamese fare. Yet while the quality of the restaurants that serve these cuisines, particularly Japanese, has soared in America, Chinese restaurants have stalled. For American diners, the Chinese restaurant experience is the same tired routine — unimaginative dishes served amid dated, pseudo-imperial décor — that we’ve known for years.

Chinese food in its native land is vastly superior to what’s available here. Where are the great versions of bird’s nest soup from Shandong, or Zhejiang’s beggar’s chicken, or braised Anhui-style pigeon or the crisp eel specialties of Jiangsu? Or what about the tea-flavored dishes from Hangzhou, the cult-inspiring hairy crabs of Shanghai or the fabled honeyed ham from Yunnan? Or the Fujianese soup that is so rich and sought after that it is poetically called “Buddha Jumps Over the Wall,” meaning it is so good that a Buddhist monk would be compelled to break his vegetarian vows to sample it?

Like so many other aspects of Chinese life, the culinary scene in China is thriving. As capitalism has gained ground there, restaurants have become a place for people to spend their newfound disposable incomes. Cooking methods passed down within families over the centuries have become more widely known as chefs brought the traditions to paying customers. Today, there are a number of regional cuisines known in China as the Eight Great Traditions (Anhui, Cantonese, Fujian, Hunan, Jiangsu, Shandong, Sichuan and Zhejiang cuisines). Unless you’ve visited China, they most likely have never reached your lips.

That’s because the lackluster Cantonese, Hunan and Sichuan restaurants in this country do not resemble those you can find in China. There is a historic explanation for the abysmal state of Chinese cuisine in the United States. Without access to key ingredients from their homeland, Chinese immigrants working on the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1860s improvised dishes like chow mein and chop suey that nobody back in their native land would have recognized. To please the naïve palates of 19th-century Americans, immigrant chefs used sweet, rich sauces to coat the food — a radical departure from the spicy, chili-based dishes served back home.
But today, getting ingredients is no longer an issue. Instead, the principal obstacle to improving Chinese fare here is the difficulty of getting visas for skilled workers since 9/11. Michael Tong, head of the Shun Lee restaurant group in New York, has said that opening a major Chinese restaurant in America is next to impossible because it can take years to get a team of chefs from China. Chinese restaurateur Alan Yau planned to open his first New York City restaurant last year but was derailed because he was unable to get visas for his chefs.

If Henry Kissinger could practice “Ping-Pong diplomacy,” perhaps Condoleezza Rice could try her hand at “dumpling diplomacy”? China and the United States should work together on a culinary visa program that makes it easier for Chinese chefs to come here. With more chefs who are schooled in China’s dynamic new restaurant scene, we would see a transformation of the way Chinese food is served in this country.

Imagine, if you will, what it would be like to discover for the first time Memphis-style barbecue, New York deli food, soul food and Creole, Tex-Mex, Southwestern, California and Hawaiian cuisines all at once. Eating food prepared by an influx of Chinese chefs would be like opening up a culinary time capsule.

When authentic Chinese cuisines reach our shores, we can expect a revolution in ingredients and styles that will change the way we prepare food for years to come. Look how quickly our taste for offal, sous-vide cooking and tasting menus have grown. We have a much more ambitious dining culture today than we did 150 years ago.

So, we welcome Chinese chefs to share their authentic cuisines with us. American palates, unlike those of previous generations, are ready for the real stuff.

Nina Zagat and Tim Zagat are the co-founders of the Zagat restaurant survey.

Two excellent articles

Two excellent articles on food and allergy-related subjects from Orion Magazine:

A Place-Based Malady
How we help create our allergic landscape
by Gregg Mitman
Published in the May/June 2007 issue of Orion magazine
The scream of chainsaws gnawing through full-grown oak trees abruptly announced summer’s arrival in 1987 in the leafy enclave of Lake Forest on the Lake Michigan shore north of Chicago. Most residents of the exclusive historic neighborhood treasured the trees that shaded their mansions, but Laurence Tureaud wasn’t like most residents. Tureaud, known to Americans as Mr. T, star of the 1980s hit TV show The A-Team and Rocky’s nemesis in Rocky III, had moved to his seven-acre estate the previous fall, when the hundreds of oaks and other native plantings lay dormant. That spring, as the trees came into bloom, the six-foot-tall, 220-pound, well-muscled actor suffered terribly. Pity the fool, or in this case the tree, that tangled with Mr. T. Saying that allergies to tree pollen provoked him, the man who wore gold chains to remind him of his slave ancestors took action. With a chainsaw in hand and the help of hired workers, Mr. T cleared the property of more than seventy trees, many of which had been planted in the early twentieth century under the direction of famed landscape architect Jens Jensen.

and:

The Tortilla Cycle
by Rebecca Allen
Published in the May/June 2007 issue of Orion magazine
Rosa can, and does, make tortillas in the dark. The ancient generator needs a new belt and a prayer and can’t always be counted on to power the light bulbs of Unión Victoria, the Guatemalan village where I live with Rosa and her two young daughters. Rosa’s husband works in Florida. In his absence Rosa carries on, feeding her pigs, hauling firewood, planting crops, and making three meals a day. In the midst of all this, she insisted on teaching me to make tortillas.

Indian Mangoes

Indian mangoes are being imported into the US for the first time in 18 years.

I love a good mango, but these are being built up as the Best. Fruit. Ever. I'd like to find out for myself.

They haven't reached the Reading Terminal Market yet, as far as I can tell, and Gagan didn't see any in Edison last weekend either. Anybody have a hot tip on where to find them? I have salt, pepper, lemons and chat masala ready to go...