Don’t let that forty year span between the late 19th and early 20th century turn you off. Andrew P. Haley’s Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920 is an engaging look at how restaurant culture shifted from a high brow soufflé affairs to mom and pop Italians and burger joints. And — wait for it, wait for it — the “Knight of the Napkin” is even profiled. Knighted napkins! Don’t tell the Queen.
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09 Aug 2011, Posted by admin in MEET, 0 Comments
There are those people you meet whom inspire you to look at the world in new ways. Not in that Hallmark card cliche interpretation of the phrase, but genuinely. People like Roberto Cortez, a chef I met for the first time while on assignment. Roberto is really more of an artist than a chef. Yeah, yeah, it seems all chefs these days love to put themselves in that category. But there is a real parallel here between his work and that of artists I’ve worked with over the years.
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Been a bit blog-behind lately (aren’t we all?), no doubt a never-ending predicament these days, but something that I prefer to squarely blame on the “W” word (yeah, work). But it sounds much sweeter if I blame my online procrastination on summer, so I shall do exactly that (Shall? Pretty soon, this illogical blog post shall be moving into the realm of etiquette. Potlucks and picnics, too. Just wait).
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Like so many things in life, the glorious rules of the Pastry Kitchen — always use chilled butter in a pie crust, always temper egg yolks into a hot liquid — are made to be precisely and respectfully learned. And subsequently broken. Which gets us to Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home, the best ice cream cookbook I’ve seen in years (considering that like BBQ books, ice cream books seem to be a summer publishing requirement, that’s a hefty compliment on my end).
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The Prudence Penny Recipe Series continues with candied jujubes circa 1929. Where might you find the fresh jujubes these days? Apparently, you can mainly find them in the early fall. If you know of any summer sources, do share. In the meantime, here’s the crazy easy, original recipe that I now want to make simply for this line: “Prick jujubes with a fork, or anything sharp.” All sorts of fun kitchen potential there, as well as in her pronunciation sidenote.
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16 Jul 2011, Posted by admin in MEET, 0 Comments
When I dub a cookbook that I have reviewed for the newspaper a personal “keeper” these days, it has to be a book that does something that the dozens (OK, 100+ or so) of cookbooks in my library at the moment don’t quite do. A new look at a cuisine I’m quite familiar with (say, Saveur’s recently released comfort food book, which is great, by the way), or perhaps an in-depth study of a someone else’s kitchen, like Vefa’s Kitchen, that I’m not intuitively familiar with. And yeah, if the book has anything to do with history — Gil Mark’s Encyclopedia of Jewish Cooking, the newly updated Escoffier cookbook (more on that later), or a good old Larousse Gastronomique classic — chances are I have it.
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Really good comfort food is both nostalgic *and* tastes great. Not so great (anymore) comfort food gets points on the nostalgia side — mom’s lasagna at your first slumber party, the sweet potato casserole at grandmom’s every Thanksgiving — but falls short on the still-really-great-tasting aspect today. It should be an easy tweak here and there kind of fix, right?
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28 Jun 2011, Posted by admin in MEET, 0 Comments
Norma Lyon had a way with churned milk. She could turn 600 pounds of cold butter into a life-size diary cow (hence her straightforward nickname, the “Butter Cow Lady”) or a likeness of Harry Potter (and more recently, President Obama). Lyon passed away at the age of 81 over the weekend.
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I’m all for the recent rise of CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture). Who doesn’t like the idea of a box of produce from local farmers regularly arriving at your doorstep? One week that box is full of baby lettuce, tomatoes and nectarines, the next week there is enough zucchini and summer squash to last the entire month. All great, but I am still an old-fashioned (and avid) farmers’ market goer. Sure, it takes a little more advanced planning, and perhaps the occasional (even regular) canceling of other plans. And yet every time I show up, it’s like being a kid in a candy score.
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14 Jun 2011, Posted by admin in MEET, 0 Comments
We have more food blogs, “foodie” Facebook pages and look-what-I’m-eating-now Twitter accounts than we could ever possibly read, assuming we actually wanted to, of course. What could we be missing? Guilds. The real, straightforward, 16th century baker-brewer-butcher kind. The sort of thing you really want to join, like the new online national Butcher’s Guild that launched last month, but you can’t. You know, because sometimes memberships go deeper than a click of a button. You have to be invited.
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