The Crud Strikes...Leading to Some Food Reading
When I refused wine after repeated offers, I knew I was sick. A combination of flu and cold knocked me out for about a week; several days later, the cold still lingers, but at least I'm back in form, of the cooking and drinking type.
Illness is an odd state. Long naps, punctuated by TV (I blew through the first season of Arrested Development, so arrestingly delicious) and reading. I finished three Rolling Stones, two Cooks Illustrated's, the September 3 & 10 food-themed New Yorker and the Zen of Fish.
In typical New Yorker fashion, the articles about food were somewhat intellectual, perhaps a bit high-brow, and all interesting.
I was completely and utterly jealous of my friends in Singapore after reading about Singaporean street food, a hodgepodge of various Asian cuisines. I so need to go, to eat.
Adam Gopnik collected ingredients for one meal from the five boroughs of New York: honey from a rooftop beehive in SoHo; forage from a park (lambs-quarter); produce from working farms in Staten Island and Red Hook; tilapia from Brooklyn Community College; and chicken, ostensibly from the Garden of Happiness in the Bronx, but from a Brooklyn slaughterhouse selling imported chicken from upstate. It turns out that the Garden of Happiness refused to slaughter the bird and Gopnik chickened out (pun perhaps intended) on the butchery thing. He also did a great job of describing the history of food and New York, as the area has changed from one almost completely self-sufficient to one, that well, isn't.
Jane Kramer (a favorite New Yorker author) wrote an amazing article about Claudia Roden, who is almost single -handedly responsible for documenting various ethnic recipes, particularly Middle Eastern recipes. She began with Egypt and has branched throughout the region. It isn't unknown for her to conduct thousands of interviews for a cookbook, talking not only to the home cooks, but family members, servants and innocent bystanders, among others. Not surprisingly, Roden is slightly eccentric. I just added The New Book of Mediterranean Cooking to my Amazon wish list.
I had never considered the business of wine forgeries, but learned quite a bit about one particular forger whose actions have rippled throughout the old wines trade. It began with a 1787 Lafitte "ThJ" bottle, in which ThJ was a Thomas Jefferson signature and bottle. The improbability that a real Thomas Jefferson bottle had been "found", plus the appearance of a large number of rare bottles lead to a still pending international investigation centering around the mysterious Hardy Rodenstock. Beyond the fact that Rodenstock was a master mixer of various vintages and varietals (imagine if he was actually doing legit work), in a roundabout way, the author also questioned the value of wine experts and their judgements of quality and authenticity. It did remind me - wine is a very personal taste. While we almost always agree on what is good, excellent, bad, these opinions are colored with shades of gray.
The Zen of Fish was about sushi, anchoring the story around a rather hare-brained, but determined student at a sushi school in LA, within a bigger framework of the history of sushi in Japan and the U.S. The author also providing a primer on the "correct" way of eating sushi. Not surprisingly, Americans get it wrong. Among the most interesting fact: fish as we know it will be extinct by 2050. Eat up people, eat up. Another point to ponder: American sushi chefs may be the beacon of keeping traditional sushi preparation and skills alive as the Japanese migrate away from tradition to American sushi habits. Interesting, but if I consider the history of sushi, change and evolution is a constant. History and traditions are important, but flexibility allowing change and evolution lead to new traditions, reflecting the times and interests. New combinations of food, taste and the all important umami have enabled sushi to continue growing in popularity, spawning new traditions amongst the new eaters.
My sushi tradition: Pete and I regularly dine at Hana Sushi on Broadway. The place looks like a cafeteria, but the food is solid and good. And we always have the same conversations: "are we getting too much food? Nah, we'll eat it...oh my gosh, we ordered that much?...I can't believe we ate that much". We have forged our own sushi tradition.