FOR BETTER AND WURST

It never rains: a book review I did for the Angeles Review of Books

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Geoff Nicholson on The Wurst of Lucky Peach : A Treasury of Encased Meat

Sausage Subversion

Los Angeles Review of Books

The Wurst of Lucky Peach : A Treasury of Encased Meat

author:	Chris Ying
publisher:	Clarkson Potter
pub date:	04.05.2016
pp:	240

 “PEOPLE WHO LOVE SAUSAGE and respect the law should never watch either one being made.” I thought that was a quotation from Mark Twain, and it’s possible he did say it at some time, but if so, he was quoting either Otto von Bismarck or John Godfrey Saxe of The Daily Cleveland Herald (there’s quite a lively online debate about origins).

In fact, although it has a nice ring, I don’t think there’s very much wisdom in the quote. I can’t speak for jurisprudence, but as an amateur sausage maker, I’d happily let you see me at work, and I hardly think you’d find it unwatchable. There’s nothing very mysterious or objectionable about the process, and we all more or less know what’s involved. You take the tasty but less pretty parts of an animal, grind them up, add some fat, season well, and put the result in a length of gut. Ok, sure, I know there are non-animal and skinless versions, but these are the outliers, and as Robert Sietsema says in the book under review, the skinless variety “are the orphans of the sausage world.”

But if you’re really too sensitive a flower to be able to watch, then you probably shouldn’t read The Wurst of Lucky Peach, or indeed any other “treasury of encased meats,” as it styles itself. It also professes to be a “cookbook as a scrapbook,” partly a work of reference, containing a “curated atlas we call the Sausage Quest” — sausages of the world arranged by continent — as well as an anthology and celebration, by multiple writers, some of whose pieces have been reprinted from Lucky Peach magazine, although most of the selections are new. Contributors include Rick Bayless, Jonathan Gold, René Redzepi (of Noma), Amelia Gray, and a host of others.

They provide some very readable essays of greater or lesser length, from a short rant in favor of mustard and against ketchup by Peter Meehan, to an attempt by Gideon Lewis-Kraus to explain the dubious appeal of the currywurst, “this disgusting cut-up hotdog we inexplicably like to eat,” all the way through to long-form examples such as Adam Leith Gollner’s account of traveling through the back roads of rural Ontario in search of Mennonite summer sausage: “The trademark flavor profile in the sausage comes from the bacteria, not from the spicing,” says one Canadian sausage maker. 

The book has sprightly illustrations by Tim Lahan, and some fine moody photographs by Gabriele Stabile.

In order to gauge accuracy, rather than to find fault, I began by looking at what the book had to say about the British sausages I know best. I grew up in Sheffield, Yorkshire, eating “tomato sausage” from a butcher named Funks. No mention of tomato sausage here, nor of haslet or Oxford sausage, or a few of my other favorites, but what’s included — on haggis, saveloys, chipolatas, toad in the hole, and so on — is perfectly sound. It’s also pretty funny when it comes to black pudding: “Attention UK blood sausage marketing team,” reads a typically chatty entry in the atlas section on Europe, “You were on the right track in swapping blood for black, but you missed the mark in designating your national boudin noir as a ‘pudding.’”

A fair point, and nicely put, and this kind of wit is what makes the book a success. Nobody wants a solemn, humorless tome about sausages. There’s something inherently subversive, irreverent, and vaguely lewd about the subject, and those of us who already know and love Lucky Peach magazine, are well aware that subversion, irreverence, and lewdness are part of the stock in trade of its editors and writers, even as they remain thoroughly serious about their enthusiasms.

The introduction by editor Chris Ying, who is also editor-in-chief of the magazine, encapsulates the attitude and sets the tone:  "We tried halfheartedly to limit the number of dirty jokes in this book but failed often and with gusto. Sausage’s phallic nature never ceases to make me giggle, and although The Wurst of Lucky Peach is rife with references to this fact, there could have been more. Please feel free to jot down your own additions in the margins."

 

Ok then — allow me one bit of sausage humor that’s not in the book. Rob Gronkowski, the New England Patriots tight end (no, that’s not the joke) made a guest appearance on Top Chef, and was interviewed by Padma Lakshmi who said, “I have a feeling you eat a lot. ”

“Yes, I eat a lot,” Gronkowski replied. “I need a big sausage.”
“Me too,” said Lakshmi.
(It’s funny because she used to be married to Salman Rushdie.)

The book doesn’t claim to be encyclopedic — for that you’d probably look to the various works of Antony and Araminta Hippisley Coxe — but if you want to know what goes into a Greek loukaniko as opposed to a Brazilian linguica, as opposed to a longganisa from the Phillipines, The Wurst of Lucky Peach will serve you well. You’ll also find plenty of basic information about the more familiar boudin, boerewors, chorizo, and merguez, and many, many kinds of hotdog.

And comprehensive or not, I can’t imagine there’s any reader who won’t find something new and surprising here. How many of us are familiar with the Estonian verivorstid or the Korean sundae “often dunked in gochujang (chili paste) to counter the metallic tang of its iron-rich filling”?

For that matter, how many of us could actually stomach the opka hesip — sausage and stuffed lung — a favorite of the Uyghur people in the far northwest of China, sold by street vendors on the old Silk Road? It’s described here by Fuchsia Dunlop, the English author and Chinese-trained chef, who writes, “Cooked, the sausages are pleasantly piquant, the lung a strange hybrid of savory custard and offal that appeals, surprisingly, to those who like English puddings.” This seems more than surprising, but I’m prepared to trust her on this one.

Elsewhere you’ll find instructions for making your own sausages, Texas Hot Gut and duck crépinettes among them, and there are recipes using ready-made or store bought product: brown jambalaya, pigs in a blanket, little smokies with grape jelly and chili sauce.

All this is fascinating and valuable stuff in itself, but in the end it’s the quality of the writing that hooks you, and is the book’s real attraction. These writers know their stuff and know to wear their knowledge lightly and elegantly. You might open it because you want to know the defining features of sheftalia, but then your eye will be caught by recipe for a “Gatsby sandwich,” then you’ll turn to a piece by Ivan Orkin explaining why the sausages you get in Japan seem so downright German (because of World War One prisoners of war apparently), and then you may end up immersed in Lisa Abend’s piece about Swedish tunnbrodsrulle, a hotdog on flatbread with instant mashed potatoes and shrimp cocktail: “it is unspeakably

vile” she writes having sampled one example.

In the introduction Chris Ying writes, “Our team dug deep into our libraries […] to pull together as much accurate sausage reconnaissance as possible.” And this book had the same effect on me. The contributors’ enthusiasm for research and arcana is catching. I found myself searching through my own collection to see what Apicius and Alan Davidson and The Decadent Cookbook had to say on the subject. Plenty, let me tell you. In the last of those works the pseudonymous authors, Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray, give a 15th-century recipe for porpoise sausage: blood, oatmeal, and ginger are involved, and the instruction to “let it seethe easily.”

This in turn led me to a few fictional texts. There are, of course, references to sausages in Great Expectations: for instance, “I was so very nervous,” says Pip, “that I had already lighted the Aged’s sausage like a torch, and been obliged to blow it out.” No double entendre intended there as far as I can tell. There are sausages in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, too, where the secret ingredient is rat. And there are certainly sausage rolls in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

I even found myself leafing through Moby Dick in hopes of finding a mention of whale sausage, but as far as I can tell there isn’t one. Nevertheless I was reminded of a line in that book when Melville seems to be making a direct address to the reader and to posterity, “To write a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme.” The sausage fits the bill perfectly.

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Geoff Nicholson is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Link to the LARB right here:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/sausage-subversion/

MAGIC MEN

Ever since I wrote about Ricky Jay, Herman Boaz, and Charles Dickens and his trick of cooking hot pudding in a hat, I’ve been thinking about magic and cookery.  They both involve some of the same things: transformation, surprise, delight, the question “How the heck did they do that?” 

Of course this doesn’t fit with “the freshest ingredients simply cooked” trope as popularized by Alice Waters et al.  Many of us like to think that given a great piece of sea bass we too could cook it simply.  We want our chefs to have skills and dexterities that we don’t. 

As it happens Wylie Dufresne, in conversation with Anthony Bourdain and David Chang in the launch issue of Lucky Peach magazine, seems to agree with me.  “Ingredient-driven food.  What the fuck does that mean?  … Get good ingredients and cook it.  It’s called cooking.  Are you crazy?  Who’s like 'I’ve got some shitty stuff let’s cook it?’ … Ingredient-driven doesn’t mean anything.  That’s what good cooking is  ... Come on, do something to it!  Cooking is a skill.  It’s a craft.  It involves a lot of steps.  At restaurants of a certain caliber, all the ingredients are going to be good.  So why don’t we talk about what people are doing with those ingredients?”  

Well in fact I think I have been in some restaurants where they said I think 'I’ve got some shitty stuff let’s cook it?’  But his point is sound.  I think he’s saying we should talk about the magic, not about the hat.

I’ve also been thinking about Arthur C. Clarke’s line, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” which for some reason is described as his “third law.”  It strikes me as a remark rather than a law, and in any case I think it not exactly true. Technology’s resemblance to magic isn’t based on how advanced it is, but rather on how ignorant the perceiver is.   If you know about light and lenses and exposure and pixels, then a camera isn’t a magical instrument.  If you don’t, then maybe it is.  If you absolutely don’t know how to boil an egg, then a boiled egg is going to seem astounding.  And I admit that the very idea that beating eggs and oil together will eventually give you mayonnaise still strikes me as just amazing.  The fact that even I can do it seems more amazing still.  Though admittedly I use a food processor which Julia Child sneers at, and says requires no culinary skill whatsoever.  But somehow for me that doesn’t make it any less magical.  Of course the best-known food processor in Europe is the Magimix.

I can only imagine what Julia Child would have thought about cooking with a sous vide machine.  I imagine she’d be against it.  But here’s David Chang celebrating the joys of sous vide in his cookbook Momofuku, “If you know what temperature you want the thing to be, just cook it at that temperature for long enough to bring the whole thing up to that temperature and presto! It’s like magic: you’re not sitting there poking or prodding the meat or worrying that it’s rare or raw or overcooked.”

Of course you might argue that the poking and the prodding is where some of the magic lies.  In this case the magic may be in knowing what temperature you want the thing to be.  Certainly sous vide machines doesn’t seem very magical in themselves, just a hot water bath with a damn good thermostat.  The vide (vacuum) part simply involves sealing the ingredients in an airtight bag.  Or maybe the magic is in thinking to do it in the first place.

I see that earlier this year, for Pancake Day, my boys Bompas and Parr, the Jellymongers, launched a magic kit (described as “a box of food and magic”), in collaboration with Tate and Lyle Golden Syrup: exploding and levitating cans, glowing and gilded pancakes, that kind of thing.  And they did a performance at the Magic Circle HQ, which seems a bit surprising.  I thought the Magic Circle were a bit sniffy about outsiders encroaching on their patch.  But apparently not.

Not having access to the magic set, and frankly not being that big a fan of Golden Syrup, I searched for some magical food I could make for myself.  The easiest seemed to be to make food glow, not least because all it requires is a black light and a bottle of tonic water. Tonic water contains quinine, though not nearly as much as it used to (fear of hairlessness, I guess, and a very reasonable fear given my own experience with anti-malarial tablets), but that’s the magic ingredient, and it does indeed glow under ultraviolet light without you having to do anything to it whatsoever.

But in fact what you're actually looking at above is jellied tonic water. With Bompas and Parr in mind I made some jelly, using tonic water and Rose’s lime juice, and once it was set I sprinkled a few blueberries on top.  I may be easy impressed but I thought this looked pretty cool.  You could of course argue that you’d have much the same visual effect with a gin and tonic and a black light, which was precisely why I added the blueberries.

Flush with this success I boiled some potatoes, imagining I might end up with a plateful of glowing spuds, and to me they did look pretty amazing while they were boiling.

         But once they were cooked they looked pretty much like any other potato, even under a black light.  I did wonder if they’d taste incredibly bitter because of the quinine but in fact they tasted rather sweeter than usual, and were perfectly edible.

         Next I tried boiling rice in tonic water.  Disappointment ensued.  It looked like nothing while cooking, didn’t glow when cooked, and tasted pretty much like vomit, so much worse than you’d imagine a mouthful or rice and tonic water would taste. 

         One could spoil a lot of food this way, but I’m thinking a bit more experimentation with absorbent vegetables mightn’t come amiss, something that really soaks up water; mushrooms, courgette, boiled onions.  The possibilities aren’t quite endless but I haven’t given up yet.

Finally something else from David Chang.  The first issue of Lucky Peach is the ramen issue, a subject that evidently fascinates him a lot more than it does me, though his fascination is in itself fascinating, and I’m certainly a good deal wiser having read the issue. The magazine contains recipes, and in some ways reading a chef’s recipe is a bit like discovering how a magician does a trick.  Chang gives his own recipe for salt cod omlet, as cooked in Roxario’s, a restaurant in San Sebastian.  He has to guess how it’s done because the eponymous Roxario wouldn’t let him into the kitchen to see exactly how she did it.  She evidently wanted to keep a few tricks up her sleeve.