Off the Bone

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is simply the question: “what do we eat?”

Michael Pollan takes the question very literally, asking exactly what we are putting in our mouths and where it came from, so this is necessarily a book about agriculture, about ways of coaxing usable nutrition from our environment. He organizes his study around four ways of doing this – industrial agriculture and production, industrial production of organic food, artisanal, ecologically sound production, and finally non-production, the hunting and gathering of your own food.

Along the way, he explains why we can calculate exactly how much corn is in our diet, describes the emotional experience of slaughtering chickens, and embarks on one of the most thorough discussions of the ethics of carnivorous behaviour that I’ve ever read. Pollan’s book is consistently well written, often revelatory, and always thought provoking.

I want to say that The Omnivore’s Dilemma is, in addition to all this, a transparent, even-handed piece of investigative journalism, yet some of the conclusions the book drives you to are so stark and unavoidable that you find yourself wondering if things are this close to black and white. Pollan’s sympathies are abundantly clear, but even after you take them out of the equation, the picture he paints doesn’t have much grey in it – the sense that Pollan himself didn’t know what he was getting into is palpable, and, what sells his view is the sense that he is formulating it as he writes.

As Diana pointed out, this kind of writing is becoming a genre – industrial food versus responsible food, McDonalds versus Ms. Waters. To misquote Pollan himself, this is Good Food Pastoral, a genre which could only have arisen because the target is so damn big and, much though I detest it, because the food network is so damn popular. Nonetheless, this book stands out for its personal inflection and determined clarity.

This is an invitation to consider, deeply, not merely what to eat, but how we choose what we eat. Should “what’s for lunch?” be a question of moral philosophy?

I don’t even want to touch that question, and Pollan doesn’t either – nonetheless, it saturates the book, just beneath the surface. What The Omnivore’s Dilemma does, admirably, is to ask us to take a long hard look at the true cost of our food. If you eat, you should read this book.

Spring means tastiness on the porch – burgers and fiddleheads and Dogfish Head ale.

We got our meat from McKinnon’s. They buy in sides and butcher in house, but most of their meat is sold precut, in clingfilm and Styrofoam, though they’ll take orders for special cuts. Their meat is heavily marbled and very red. They’ve never even heard of organic. Atop the burgers sat radish greens, chopped and sautéed with garlic (why more burger joints don’t do the sautéed greens burger, we’ll never know). The radishes came from Pemberton Farms’ organic shelf, but the staff couldn’t tell me where they came from. Fiddleheads were also from Pemberton – blanched and dressed with oil and salt. Foraged rather than farmed, and definitely from New England. We slathered French mustard on English muffins, and drank ale from Delaware.

We sat and talked, and the meal was no less blissful for the fact that most of the food had traveled miles and miles to reach us. It’s an odd blessing, this disconnect between the crisp pleasure of the meal and the knowledge of where things likely came from, of how much they cost.

Whats For Pud

It’s hard to imagine a dessert more virulently English than a Sussex Pond. It sounds inedible, is boiled (albeit in a bowl rather than a pudding cloth), and contains suet. At the same time, it seems altogether too fancy for a repertory of puddings which are essentially variations on the idea of “mix dough with dried fruit, then steam or boil”. This one involves an actual stuffing, which is meant to run out – not the untidy, inevitable spillage of mince from pie, but as a choreographed effect, a moment of culinary legerdemain. Put that way, it sounds positively French.

Basically, you line a bowl with suet dough, drop in a lemon, some butter and sugar, then steam the whole thing for three hours. When you cut it open, you’re rewarded with a puddle of something that looks like muddy water, and the sunny yellow lemon peeking at you resentfully from the mess.

We discovered this recipe in Jane Grigson’s English Food. Her notes describe it as:

“The best of all English boiled suet puddings. In the middle the butter and sugar melt to a rich sauce, which is sharpened with the juice from the lemon. The genius of the pudding is the lemon. Its citrus bitter flavour is a subtlety which raises the pudding to the highest class. When you serve it, make sure that everyone has a piece of the lemon, which will be much softened by the cooking, but still vigorous.
The name of the pudding refers to the sauce, which runs out of it, when it is turned onto a serving dish, and provides it with a moat of buttery brown liquid.”

The illustration in the book is beautifully geological. A lemon, fossilized in saturated fat.

Reading this recipe was like seeing the face of god. Diana, however, laughed herself helpless for a good five minutes.

“You should send this to Pierre Herme.”
“You’re totally right. This is an amazing recipe.”
“He might die of shock.”
“He might be inspired. It’s a self-saucing pudding! It’s so… modern.”
“All right, all right. We can make it if you send him the recipe.”

We haven’t heard back yet. Perhaps we need to send a copy in French. Clotilde, if by some chance you read this, perhaps you could translate it for him? Is there even a French word for pudding? “Steamed cistern of yuzu” would be a lovely addition to the fall collection.

Ms. Grigson did not oversell the recipe. The rich, animal notes that come only from using fat of beast underscored the exchange of sweetness and acid in the sauce. A bit of bitter rind in each mouthful completed the picture – I can imagine how good this must be with a bitter orange instead. She suggests you reserve it for “the most special occasions.” I suggest reserving it only for the largest parties – eating this is work for at least 6 people, and leftovers look appallingly inedible in the fridge.

There is a brief discussion in the Joy of Cooking, with reference to Christmas puddings, about how to wangle suet from your butcher. I cheated a little, and used lard instead – since, however, I rendered this lard myself, from a Tamworth (an English heritage breed), I figured it was an acceptable substitute.

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Agony – being in tech during the first real weekend of spring, when ramps have just appeared and duck eggs are in, the same soft grey as the sky. I’m walking through the market on my way to the theatre, which will be dark and grim and smell of mulch and iron, and I just know the first words out of my mouth will be “duck eggs scrambled with ramps” and everyone will look at me with great consternation.
I’m counting the weeks it will be till I have time to cook and the answer is far too many, and I see David Chang wandering around the market in shorts and a shit-eating grin, and my god he looks so happy he should be dead of it by now, only he’s a big guy, so I suppose it takes longer for lethal levels of happiness to build up in his body. And over there’s a guy from Union Square Café checking off a list with intense concentration, like he’s trying to coordinate a river assault with baby greens.
A raincloud has settled down on lower Manhattan for a lie in. It’s swallowed the tops of the buildings and softened the canyonlines and the air is wet and cool and crisp like the inside of a lettuce leaf. The only people in the market at this hour are either devoted cooks or professional, the market is all quiet bliss and anticipation, and maybe if I’m very very good, I’ll be able to squeeze in time to cook next weekend.

Helen tagged me for a cookbook meme, and I do like talking about books, so here it is.

How many cookbooks do you own?

I have thirteen here in Boston… no, fifteen! I just bought two more! Two of them are food writing rather than cookbooks, although they do contain recipes and I have cooked from them, loosely speaking. Tse Wei also has a couple of my cookbooks in New York, and owns a few of his own, so between the two of us we’ll probably top 20.

When I first became intersted in cooking, I owned only the Joy of Cooking. But I moved in with foodie roommates, and immediately got access to a much larger collection, which had a great influence on me as a cook and which I still remember fondly. There was James Beard on Bread, from which I made my first loaf, Chez Panisse Fruit and Vegetables volumes, which encouraged me to try sunchokes and parsnips, several Moosewood cookbooks, which introduced me the joys of Waldorf salad, and Deborah Madison’s book on vegetarian cooking, which just had some really cool recipes. I would love to have some of them back in my kitchen.

Which book did you buy most recently?

Alan Davidson’s Mediterranean Seafood and Seafood of South-East Asia. I love Davidson’s writing - fun, and charming, and irresistibly academic. I can just imagine him behind a great oak desk, chewing his pencil and pondering his notes on the Finnish cuisine (”unremarkable”) and accurate English translations for the names of South-Asian fish (”never mind; this must rank low among the problems of the world”).

Which book did you read most recently?
I’ve been reading Marcella Hazan and Silver Spoon, trying to put together a menu for my Easter lunch.

List cookbooks that mean a lot to you

Jeffrey Hamelman, Bread: A baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes

Mr. Hamelman is a serious bread baker, and purchasing this book was symbolic of OUR commitment to baking bread. Tse Wei and I made our first sourdough loaf in December 2004, and have been baking bread ever since, with the same sourdough starter. We started with Paul Bertolli’s recipe in Chez Panisse Cooking, but were soon craving both technical knowledge and a greater variety of recipes. After a fair bit of research, we bought Hamelman.
We don’t really use his recipes - I am largely back to Bertolli’s, with weekly variations, and Tse Wei has developed a lovely multigrain loaf of his own, but the wealth of technical information Hamelman provides has been very helpful.

Isabelle Allende, Aphrodite

Food is more interesting when it comes with stories. And although this book has a section of recipes, it is mostly a collection of stories about food and sensuality. I have not read anything else by Allende, but her voice in Aphrodite is pure mischievous joy, and her stories are wonderful.

Silver Spoon

I don’t know why I love this book yet, but I do. Perhaps it’s the heft. Or cryptic, four-liner recipes. Or childish line drawings of addled animals and wistful fish and tomatoes on a plate with arrows pointing at them: “You are here.” It conjures an image of Italian countryside, and plump happy grandmothers, and scurrying children knocking tomatoes off the table, and joyful chaos that may occasioually make one butterfly a chicken wrong, but doesn’t prevent anything from coming out delicous.

Tse Wei and I have been on an English kick lately - thanks to Mrs Grigson and her lovely books. The New Yorker published a confession a few weeks ago from a woman who held virtual conversations with cookbook authors. Mrs Grigson is a great conversationalist, and we had quite a talk about stargazey.

Take at least 6 pilchards, Mrs. Grigson said, and I ran to Mario’s cousin the fishmonger, who happened to have a huge bucket of them in the store, plump, fresh, and bright-eyed. I bought a dozen, because six sounded kind of thin, and the picture in the book had a dozen anyway.

Make shortcrust pastry, instructed Mrs Grigson. That was a bit interesting, because nowhere in her book did she give the recipe. Apparently it’s something English housewives - and the fishermen of Cornwall - just had in their blood. Russians also make fish pies, but my Russian genes were not very useful - we make yeasted dough, and Mrs, Grigson frowned at the very thought. I ran to Joy, but it only had sweet shortbread to offer. I finally found a recipe for crust used in English eel pie (who knew the English liked fish in pastry!), and we settled for that.

The crust was done, the sardines cleaned and stuffed with herbs, and there was Mrs. Grigson telling me with all authority that spaces between sardines should be filled with chopped hard-boiled eggs.

No, I said.

What about spinach, I said.

Mrs Grigson rolled her eyes.

It was a lovely pie, spinach and all, and made for delightful dinner conversation. Perhaps it’s best not to make it around sensitive children, though - I was filled with inexplicable guilt deboning the fish with their heads still attached.

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Entirely by accident. I left some cocoa nibs sitting in a pint of cream for a week (I initially thought I’d be using it at Foodie). I also had a bunch of egg yolks sitting around from making mousse.

That, of course, means crème brulee. This was one of the top 5 chocolate desserts I’ve had, and there wasn’t even any chocolate in it.

1 oz. cocoa nibs.
450g heavy cream (2 cups)
8 egg yolks
75g sugar (6 tbsp)

Put cocoa nibs and cream in a jar. Shake well, then forget it in your fridge for a week.
One week later, discover the jar and sniff suspiciously. Upon realising that it smells good, dump into a saucepan and bring to boil. While waiting, boil some water, and whisk egg yolks and sugar together.
Pour cream slowly into yolks, whisking constantly. Strain into something with a pouring spout (or not - the cocoa nibs are entirely soft by now).
Pour into 4 oz. ramekins, bake in a water bath, 275F for 45 minutes to an hour, or till just jiggly when shaken. Chill.

One of the many reasons I like Foodie is that your perspective changes when you have 60 people paying not inconsiderable sums to eat your food. I normally try never to do the same dish twice, but, when I had to provide dessert for last week’s event – a dinner incorporating chocolate into every course – visions of angry diners storming the kitchen convinced me that repetition might be the better part of discretion.

And 17 different failures is plenty of repetition.

I technically wasn’t serving up an established flop – merely a concept which I’ve never managed to execute properly. I have, you see, this problematic obsession with tea in my desserts – victims remember a long string of awful, bland, and frankly puzzling affairs – and if they don’t, they damn well should, because those things were abominable. Diana is politely mystified by the whole thing, especially since I barely drink tea, but, as with opening nights, beer ads, and the tango, the tea itself is not the point.

It’s about balance, precision, delicacy, and, above all, the idea of getting it right the 18th bloody time. It’s about trying to make something work because damn it, if a world-class patissier can do it, you can too.

If it doesn’t work, I’ve probably tried it. I’ve produced Tannin Surprise Cupcakes, Pear and Oolong Mousse of Doom, Plaster-Green Brulee of No Discernable Flavour, and, my personal favourite, “What Are All Those Weird Black Flecks?” Cake. I’ve tried cold-infusion, hot infusion, hot then cold, cold then hot, and simply emptying six teabags into the mixing bowl. Until now, however, I had never tried using matcha – and while I’m not going to say that it’s the only way to work with tea, I will say that I finally made something that tasted the way I wanted it to.

I started drinking tea for its own sake perhaps 3 months ago. I don’t do it frequently, and only ever in the company of others, but at least I do it consciously now, and not because it’s warm and within easy reach. Now I feel that perhaps my earlier difficulties were due not to technical problems, but a misunderstanding of what to do with tea. It is odd to obsess about an ingredient you don’t actively enjoy, and odder still to expect anything to come of it. And even if obsession was inspired by a concept rather than the taste of tea, what comes out still needs to taste like the concept, if not tea.

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Cepage Arbouriou 2004 is a sprightly wine, driven by a bubbly acidity. A sun-baked, raisiny nose belies disciplined rather than overpowering fruit, and the tannins are similarly held in balance. The finish is earthen, with an interesting hint of blue mould, and the overall effect is gulpable and above all youthful. It’s not a distinguished wine, but it was one of the best bottles I’ve drunk. Dennis, my junk-food ninja friend, and I found ourselves at the bottom of it a little before 2am one Thursday night, when we were done talking about broken hearts, old friends and future plans, and about to start on serious conversations, about games and comics and TV.

My oldest friend said this about learning to drink: drink a lot of cheap wine, and remember why you remember it. I’ve been fortunate to remember many wines, and more fortunate still to have forgotten the names of most. A bottle of Gewurtztraminer from the year we were born, at a sort of decent restaurant that’s no longer there. Non-vintage prosecco, lactic and minerally, drunk outdoors on thick, lazy afternoons, when it was okay that we weren’t going anywhere because the world wasn’t either. Fritz Haag with Peranakan food, tasting like old friends and home.

I sometimes wish I could remember exactly what these wines were, because they’re all well worth drinking, these and so many others since I started taking note of these things – and I know the ipsophage formerly known as Wonder Boy has their actual names written down somewhere, but I like the thought that I’ll only ever rediscover their exact identities by chance, a familiar trace of chalk when I’m not looking for it, or a shape in the acid I recognize.

I keep tasting notes now, a deliberate attempt to educate myself, to facilitate my finding wines again, but my notes read like a diary. Writing them down, as I usually do, the morning after, bottles and conversations become inconveniently seamless memories, and I write with nagging doubts as to whether I am recalling the feeling of the evening or the character of the wine.

The conjunction of Cepage Arbouriou and Thursday night was lovely because the wine actually tasted like the conversation we had, and it was the first time I noticed this halfway down the bottle. Dennis’ first impression of the bottle was that it was thin (in fairness, it acquired a little more heft as the evening went on and its flavours opened), so I hope he doesn’t find this comparison unflattering. But the conversation did feel young, energetic, acid, even if we dwelt on the past and talked of careers and other huge decisions like what TV show to obsess about now that Firefly is done and dusted.

The academic blog community has been running poetry Fridays since the beginning of the year, and I, a hopeless beginner at poetry, brought up on a diet of iambic parameter and class struggle, have enjoyed it a lot. So why not steal a good idea. Tse Wei and I will post something here once in a while - and if you have a favorite food poem, let us know and we’ll post it too. After all, we read a lot more than we cook.

Cooking from the Silver Spoon fills one with immense gratitude for the amount of work Ms. Hazan puts into her Italian cookbooks. Italians, it seems, do not want their cookbooks to tell them how to cook. They want ideas. Lots and lots of ideas, to fit any pantry, any grocery list, perhaps even a fridge a day before marketing. I was craving chicken - roasted, if all else failed - and before long I found a recipe that matched what I had exactly. A chicken. Olive oil. Garlic. Rosemary. It was called “pollo alla babi.”

“In Piedmontese dialect, babi means toad. To make the chicken look like a toad open it along the breast and pound several times with a meat mallet” (920).

Do not attempt this recipe if you don’t have a mallet.

I have butterflied my share of chickens, and one does not usually open them along the breast. There’s a good reason for it. A chicken with a spine taken out falls flat, while a chicken with a ribcage split in half is not at all inclined to do so. You’ll have to pound it flat (I wonder about the provenance of this dish).

Once your chicken is flat (I removed the ribcage and the spine and basically ended up with two butterflied chicken halves), the rest is easy: take a heavy-bottomed skillet, splash a generous quantity of olive oil, brown the bird on high heat on both sides, toss in a smashed garlic clove or two and a sprig of rosemary, and cook on gentle heat until done. The results are tasty, and you get lovely browned bits with which to make a pan sauce - but unless you want to get creative with a meat mallet, I’d recommend broiling your chicken instead.