ass, gas or cash

Monkeys pay for ass too.

It is only a matter of time before the New Yorker publishes a facile socio-evolutionary explanation of why Denby is not a douchebag.

space-time distortions

I don't really have time for this, but someone needs to warn the innocents about the Times. First of all, Sam Sifton exaggerates the difficulty of making veal demi-glace, replacing it with a bottle of pinot noir, a waste of good wine and good money (although, considering what they charge for veal bones around here, maybe this would save you money). The concept ("the cheat") is good if misnamed, but this is the opposite of what you want. Sam, just explain to everyone how to make demi-glace. It's not hard. But making pasta is hard, and it's time-consuming. A lot of people are going to be very angry with the minimalist when they discover it takes a lot longer than 20 minutes, and the end product looks like it was extruded from the play-doh fun factory. That doesn't mean you shouldn't make pasta anyway. And he is right that it's a lot faster to ditch the machine.

Regina Schrambling's report on lentils reminded me to post this picture of Castellucio, on May Day. It is sunny and ~20 degrees warmer on the other side of the pass. After you descend from the clouds and come down into the valley, it is like you have entered another world: Patagonia, we said at the time, the moon. Everything is that pale green color you start to see after 4 or five hours of driving north from Boston. Shitty, acid soils. One imagines Le Puy is similar, if less extreme; Idaho maybe more so. "Bad" conditions = good lentils (smaller, more intense and more delicate).

Other ingredients: winter greens and whole grains (note that Fletcher wisely dodges the spelt bullet) and Velveeta [via Sauté Wed.]. The most exciting thing about the Fancy Food Show appears to be the long pepper; but I'd rather be at Madrid-Fusión. Damn you, Euro!

The Times's vodka review is its most e-mailed article at the moment -- which does inspire at least small confidence in the future of America -- but heavy drinkers can save themselves a lot of vodka problems by investing in a Brita [this blog is semi-broken; scroll down to the experiment, 11/5]. The last link, but the way, was unearthed with Technorati tags, which is something you should pay attention to.

Want human rights violations with that steak? Too bad, that's what you get.

there's a time and a place for everything

A New Hampshire judge who was suspended for groping five women at a conference on sexual assault and domestic violence resigned on Wednesday.

Alternate title: Larry Summers is not the dumbest man in New England.

miscellaneous criticism

Finally, a dear friend made me a very thoughtful gift of Schott's Food and Drink Miscellany a few months ago, and I just got around to reading it. Let me first of all say that this is an excellent book to read on the toilet. And I mean that in a good way. But the book is maddening, largely because it appears Mr. Schott is not terribly interested in food. Consider his introduction to an interesting entry on some of the technical terminology of Emilian cheesemaking:

Parmigiano-Reggiano, probably the finest Parmesan cheese...

What does that even mean? It is certainly not something that you would write if you cared about cheese. Other problems, taken at random: the discussion of the term "upper crust" appears to be garbled; a drawing showing how to steel a knife is labeled "How to sharpen a knife"; umami is called "recently recognized," although it was named in 1907; a list of wine barrel sizes includes both the barrique bordelais and the barrica bordelesa, the latter oddly plural (they are of course the same thing); an entire entry is dedicated to the discovery that toponyms can attach themselves to unrelated nouns (the scuola bolognese has nothing to do with spaghetti [sic]). There's plenty more where these came from, along with rather more inconsistency and banality than one would like. These are balanced by interesting informations, like the depressing Harris Benedict equation, a handy (though incomplete) list of Homer's "mmmm"s, and the Bristol stool form chart -- even if these are all easily had through the magic of google [follow that last link at your peril]. Perhaps the most annoying thing, though, is the absence of references [there is a cursory bibliography, and Schott does acknowledge Peter Lund Simmonds, whose Curiosities of Food is the source for many of his best entries]. The overall effect is a kind of fake erudition, probably meant to seem quirky, which has none of the charms and all of the irritations of the real thing.

criticism

Speaking of the Jamesian American, I want to draw your attention to Huge Johnson, who, despite the clever name, does not appear to be the sharpest candle in the deck. His heart is at least partially in the right place -- cheap wine should indeed be better and cheaper -- but it is unclear why he feels so strongly that "that the United States should not trail the civilized world in wine consumption per capita." Dude, it's not the Olympics. Why do you care? He was very excited about the LA Times Gallo story, but drew exactly the wrong conclusion. Red bicyclette is a hit because its label is unthreating while nevertheless evoking the mysterious frisson of frenchness that tantalizes and terrifies the american consumer (Gallo's marketing and distribution don't hurt). It is the Year in Provence of wines. The wine itself, as long as it is also unthreatening, has nothing to do with it. There is nothing wrong with this (although I don't see why the world would be a better place for anyone but Gallo if the masses switched from Coke to merlot). The problem is that once you "rationalize" those complicated french wine laws, so confusing to the poor Safeway shopper, you eliminate that sexy otherness that, banalized, sells the wine. Diversity, dear Huge, is the key to winning the wine Olympics.

Huge is right, however, about the pervasively stupid snobbery that accompanies wine in the new world. Witness the Times's mockery of a supposedly new supposedly Texan cocktail of merlot and 7-up [last item here]. If the Times were less provincial, it would know that this is a tinto de verano, and it is furthermore an excellent way to dispose of inferior wine, which, pace Huge, is an apt description of almost everything labelled merlot.

miscellaneous

This was originally attached to the following [i.e., above] two posts, but it was ludicrously long, so I divided by three, at the expense of my beautiful segues, which you'll have to recreate in your mind.

Shocking news:

A new study conducted by medical researchers in Switzerland indicates that the list of specified risk materials (SRMs) that makes up the firewall against human infection from bovine spongiform encephalopathy may be far from complete.

The study, released by the Institute of Neuropathology at Zurich's University Hospital, found that, at least in mice, prions — malformed proteins that cause the disease — are found in organs until now thought to be safe from infection.

How totally unpredictable [Science express abstract, meatingplace.com, news@nature].

The Dan Barber quote I mentioned the other day came from a full belly [which has now reattributed the quote to Paula Wolfert, who, at least, knows whereof she speaks].

NPR did a story on foie gras in Gascony last week. He said/she said, as usual. It will be interesting to see what the AVMA comes up with, not that it is likely to be definitive. More on foie gras tk.

For some reason, the girls eating sandwiches thing has its own flickr page [via kottke]. Further visual stimulation: crack sandwich and ham art.

Monsanto to buy Seminis for $1B+.

I forsee problems with wiki recipes, but it's an interesting idea.

Some eye-openers from the Posts's fish farm story:

With $11 billion in imports in 2003, fish is second only to oil among imported natural resources.

But salmon waste off the British Columbia coast still releases as much excess nitrogen as sewage from a city of 250,000, according to some estimates.

Goddamn, dong resin is on fire:

Document, there's a laugh. We'll see how your newfangled laptop document looks in 3,000 years. We'll just see who can read what. "But I wrote this on the train ride over here!" you whine "what convenience!" Right. "Convenience." You know, if hits like the Code of Hammurabi had been written on one of these things it would have gotten a worm or something 5 years in and we'd all be having sex with the stab wounds in our enemies childrens' pets without any real fear of evenly-weighted retribution. You might like to think of that as a society, but not me sir. Good day!

Paul Ford's pretty hot too, while we're at it.

One can only hope that this is the beginning of the end for Thomas Krens.

the bright side

Heretofore unsuspected benefits of staggering through January without heat, #1: at last, the wine is cellar temperature. I'm still working on #2.

Cold is the season when a young man's fancy turns to cheese. The papers will tell you about braises, root vegetables, and the like, but cheese is what you really want. Specifically Gruyere. By far the best Gruyere is Beaufort from France, but you can't afford it any more. But regular, waxy, Swiss, supermarket Gruyere is also delicious, and cheap enough to eat in quantity. One of its many apotheoses is the cheese souffle, which is simple enough to make in less than an hour. I was going to say that any recipe will do, but the internet turned up nothing promising, so here's what you do: make a bechamel with 3 TB each of butter and flour and 1 cup milk. Grate in at least a cup of Gruyere and stir, mixing in 4 egg yolks once it has cooled a little. Whisk 6 egg whites to the firm peak stage, fold in your cheese sauce, pur it all into a buttered souffle pan (any pan of appropriate size will do), and bake at 375 for about half an hour. You will be shocked at how easy it is. If you fuck it up, you still end up with an unnecessarily complicated but tasty frittata.

If this is too much work for you, you can always resort to the greatest toast in the world, invented by Jane: toast well a slice of the best peasant bread you can get. If you live somewhere less pleasant than I, you may have to make it yourself. Butter it liberally and quickly. Now cover it with generous slices of Gruyere. It may take some practice to get the thickness right -- the cheese should start to soften and sweat from the heat of the toast, but you want to get as much on there as you can. (Alternatively, you can "cheat," and sandwich thicker slices between 2 pieces of well-buttered toast). If your butter is unsalted, add salt. While you are eating this "snack," you will wonder why you bother to "cook" at all.

You do realize that the most important thing to read today is Carolynn Carreño's LA Times article on boullion cubes, right? Accompanied by Emily Green's profile of Justus von Liebig and a taste test, this is the perhaps the apogee of newspaper food journalism. I must admit, though, that I'm skeptical of the tasting. Boullion is not valuable as a simulacrum of whatever it is allegedly made from -- it never tastes like what it claims to -- but rather as an umami-rich background, which, when judiciously applied, enhances the real flavor of your real ingredients. Its value is its glutamate. Cf. the Chron's veggie broth tasting. Also notable: Obesity makes David Shaw, like everyone else, schizophrenic; what is the difference between marketing and winemaking? Nothing:

"French wine is the gold standard," says Gallo, noting that his research shows that American consumers consider it the best wine in the world. But they're drinking less and less of it because it's too hard to understand, Gallo says. It is a pattern of declining consumption that holds true with French wine drinkers in France as well, according to Gallo.

In the Chron, another beautiful installment of rent-a-grandma: make sure you read it. DOC pasta di Gragnano [Post]? I've lost the link, but someone (Dan Barber?) was quoted somewhere that he'd rather eat force-fed duck liver than Tyson chickens. Well, duh. That doesn't really qualify as a zinger. Here's the point, if you object to factory-farmed chickens on the grounds of animal welfare, it is inconsistent to eat foie-gras if that product also requires cruelty to animals. Someone needs to demonstrate that the practice is not cruel (or conversely, that it is), before anyone's posturing on the subject can be meaningful.

Turn to the other Times for the unedifying spectacle of Johnny Apple slumming in Virginia's suburban "chinatown"; compare to Neil MacFarquhar's very edifying discussion of Lebanese Arak. Meanwhile the critic, oblivious to the trickle-down sport of Bruni-bashing, discusses his record collection. Bad move. Update: now it appears to have trickled up to Maud.

Speaking of memes: yes it's delicious, but who the fuck calls it knob celery? Totally unacceptable. The USDA, of course, is on top of the important issues affecting our food supply, like scaring crows. And, via meatingplace.com:

In an effort to cater to consumers following low-carb diets, Smithfield Foods has introduced Smithfield Preferred Stock, a new pork product with higher fat content. "This is more of pork the way it used to be – tastier, with a little bit of fat on it," James D. Schloss, Smithfield's vice president of marketing, told the American Marketing Association last week. He said the company spent the past four years creating a new breed of hog that would provide more flavorful fresh pork. The product hit some test supermarkets in San Antonio and Maine in the past few months.

I wasn't really taking that salmon shitstorm seriously, but I guess some people are just whores. I can handle that. But anyone who says "Baked beans have got absolutely no place in any restaurant with integrity," is a fucking moron. [via tfs].

I'm a believer

Of course, I'm all for snark, but I don't understand what Bruni has done to earn all this seething vitriol. Sure he writes ridiculously at times, but tell me how not to do that while reviewing restaurants. Was Ruth really better? Her books annoy me at a pretty high frequency, but I didn't read the reviews. I can understand why people hate Amanda, but Bruni seems harmless.

Look at the big picture: it is so much more important to prevent Caitlin fucking Flanagan from ever writing again.

things to do today

paper

The Tuscans must be stopped; awkwardly coupled to Shaw's didactic drinking instructions. Perhaps necessary in LA? As long as we're calling attention to wines that I would love to drink if the rest of you weren't driving the prices up, see Asimov on Aglianico in the Times. Bastards. Maybe the masses are still so distracted by pinot noir that they won't notice. An interesting correction raises questions about what people want to believe about organic food. I have to admit, I couldn't even read the Chron article on teen cooks, despite wanting desperately to make fun of it. And then there's the foodie community on the internets. No comment. And t-muffle takes on "Panchito."

corrigendum

Mere hours after discussing the demise of Veuve Cliquot last week, I drank some more of it, and it was newly delicious. The sullen, sour, going-through-the-motions quality that put me off on New Years had been replaced by the delicate happy tickle that makes one want to drink champagne all the time. It just goes to show you that context is everything. Nothing tastes good when you're contemplating your own senescence. Still, you are going to get more bang for your buck with prosecco and cava.

news

Canada is now officially fucked, having just discovered their third mad cow, born after the ruminant feed ban. NBT on the NAFTA mexican maize report [quoting one of the authors]: "It's kind of amazing the US is so reliant on its regulatory system [for biotechnology] but shows such disregard for regulatory systems in other countries." The Economist on GM trees. Monsanto fined $1.5 million for bribing the Indonesian government. The Times's Jane Brody is allowed to publish a ridiculous op-ed in the guise of an article on biotech food -- her only "authorities" are everyone's favorite douchebags Miller and Conko, just days after their latest ravings for the Moonie Times about -- of all things -- the Pew Initiative. Anyone who takes these two seriously is by definition a hack, or a credulous fool. Similarly stupid farmer's market screed in the Financial Times. Hexaploid bread wheat with Fusarium head blight resistance from farro. The latest ISB News Report has more research on on FHB, among other things. More wheat: Slade et al., "A reverse genetic, nontransgenic approach to wheat crop improvement by TILLING," Nature Biotechnology 23, 75-81. In case you were wondering:

TILLING is a reverse genetic approach for mutation generation and discovery that does not rely on transgenic technology. With TILLING, a library of DNA samples from thousands of individuals can be screened in a high-throughput manner for induced or naturally occurring single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Typically, DNA is pooled from multiple mutagenized individuals to increase throughput, and PCR is used to amplify a targeted region of the genome. This PCR product is heated and reannealed to allow heteroduplexes to form between mutated and wild-type DNA. Heteroduplexes are identified through cleavage of mismatched sites by the CelI endonuclease. Cleavage products can be visualized by size separation from the full-length PCR product on a polyacrylamide gel. The individuals composing the positive pools are sequenced to determine which individual carries the mutation and to reveal the exact nature of the mutation. Using this technology, large populations can be screened rapidly to obtain an allelic series that contains numerous point mutations in any targeted gene.

Ocean view tragedy of the commons: Martínez-Garmendia and Anderson, "Conservation, markets, and fisheries policy: The North Atlantic bluefin tuna and the Japanese sashimi mark," Agribusiness 21/1, 17-36:

The optimal results indicate moving away from gears such as purse-seines and long-lines in favor of harpoons and rod-and-reels, and concentrating the catch towards the end of the season. The analyses further indicate that it is more profitable to harvest fewer tuna but of greater size and quality than to focus on a great number of fish captures. This allows for a lower mortality and therefore a greater level of conservation of the resource.

"Minor crop" research at the USDA. The problem of invasive non-natives.

update

Turns out Voltaire is more relevant than I realized.

revue des vins

On balance, I find I prefer my sauvignon blanc without spunk.

A little cat piss is ok, but please, no spunk.

Also, the Target box wine is not bad. I don't know if I have the strength to try the whites, but the Cab./"Shiraz" blend is certainly drinkable.

You will certainly not find many people as fond of Kermit Lynch and his wines as myself, his first book is among the best things I have read about wine, and his newsletters have entertained me for many years, but there is something offensive about charging $40 for the privilege of reading from them between hard covers.

all the people who died

I have to admit, I hardly missed the internets. Especially with all the bad news -- Susan Sontag and Artie Shaw seemed a fitting end to a year of death, at least until a cruel piece of natural philosophy added 150,000 to the total. Unfortunately, it turns out that my job escaped "the holidays"* unscathed, and with it the internet. Some solace is to be had in t-muffle's alleged return, and the official coronation of bad news hughes as the funniest man on the internet, but one is really better off reading books.

The danger, in my current circumstances, is not that this will turn into a chronicle of home improvement disasters, but rather that, reading only plumbing-supply catalogs, I will have nothing to explain to you that is worth knowing. I can, at least, report on the food: Noche Buena tamales norteños: ok, but not quite right; Christmas Cassoulet (Paula Wolfert's recipe)**: excellent, thanks more to Taylor's charcuterie than my cooking; torta di mandorle, limone, e polenta (from the first River Cafe book): delicious, but too much butter, and ridiculous quantities as usual; Paula's panade (not the tarted-up version that Steingarten concocted with Bertolli): a keeper (leftovers not so much); New Year's Hoppin' John (from Serious Pig): good but a bit austere. There was more, including a fine New Hampshire ham and some initial inquiries into "ryaninjun" to be reported presently, but those are the recipes you might wish to attempt. As for the wine:

We have had, since high school, a silly tradition of drinking a bottle of Veuve on New Years. We always save it for midnight. In the old days, this was stupid, because we were far too wasted by then to appreciate the good stuff. Now, pathetically, this is stupid because we fall asleep before we even finish the first flute. The point, however, is that with more of my wits about me when the ball drops, it has become clear that Veuve is really not so good. I rarely drink champagne anymore, precisely because of the qpr, so it was something of a shock to see how poor that ratio has become relative to Lombardy, Catalonia and even -- I hate to admit it -- California. Either fork it over for propriétaire recoltant or get your mass-produced sparkly swill from elsewhere. The widow too has expired.

Enough about me. Read here about the market's invisible hand, which currently appears to be engaged in a sweet bit of dairy price-fixing at the CME (not that dairy farmers, for the most part, don't need all the help they can get). Also: you can, in Oklahoma at least, eat half-decent food on food stamps [via MeFi]. It just takes more time (and gas) than you can afford.

Finally, we return to the fascinating subject of how there will always be an England, as if Boswell's Johnson and buttered knobs weren't enough. Could a woman of any other nationality have written the following sentence?

He tittled round his girl so busy with with his clicks and and passes that the slender, apparently indifferent, girl seemed to be assailed by a fussy little cock.

(That is the great Patience Gray describing a village dancing champion on Naxos, from the most exciting of the many Christmas gifts I am very thankful for).

* the best thing about the latest tiresome annual whinefest was that while the persecuted red-staters were tormenting semi-literate teenagers at the mall, or Wal-Mart or wherever they propitiate the god of commerce, the liberal elite was home watching A Charlie Brown Christmas, or at least listening to the soundtrack.

**Too lazy to upload the real picture. This is the first cassoulet I made, several years ago, from MtAoFC, in the biggest pan I had at that penurious time ("liberated" from a college girlfriend). It didn't seem to be crusting sufficiently, so I broiled the fuck out of it, which was not a bad idea, especially since I garnished the top with whole pieces of confit.