REGIONAL VARIATIONS

When I first went to San Francisco in the 1970s I went along to Fisherman’s Wharf and looked at all the seafood and felt baffled and overwhelmed by it all.

I was especially confused by the hollowed out loaf of sourdough bread filled with clam chowder. I’d never encountered a clam or a chowder and the concept of sour dough was completely unknown to me. I was drawn to it, but it seemed too strange and exotic. I wouldn’t have known how to order it or how to eat it or how it was supposed to taste Sour bread sounded strange though somehow attractive, and eating the “vessel” you’d eaten from seemed so decadent. I bought some bread and cheese and felt on much safer ground.

These days I eat soudough pretty much every day – it’s the basic bread we buy at the supermarket, and I certainly know what clam chowder is, though it’s not something I ever crave.


Even so it seems impossible to visit San Francisco without going to Fisherman’s Wharf and having clam chowder in a hollowed out sour dough loaf, usually at the Boudin Bakery. I was there a couple of weeks back and that’s exactly what I did. These days it not only seems unexotic it seems downright dull, and I was left wondering how this dish has become such an attraction to me and everyone else. Maybe it’s like eating fish and chips at the English seaside or eating Nathan’s hotdogs at Coney, you’re not sure you’re really enjoying them but you think you should.

My San Francisco visit wasn’t especially food-related but, to my surprise, I did find a kind of potato I’d never eaten before. It was in a French restaurant on Grant Avenue called Café de La Presse, I ordered the the Confit de Canard Maison and it came with “potatoes salardaise.” I didn’t take a picture, because the restaurant seemed too classy and I didn't want to seem like a rube. It looked like this:


I wasn’t completely sure how they were cooked, though garlic and duck fat were certainly involved, and when I got home I couldn’t find a recipe in any of my cookbooks, least of all Julia Childs. I figure it must be in Larousse Gastronomique but my copy has (not so mysteriously) disappeared. Online recipes are of course wildly various, not least in the spelling of the word itself, which sometimes appears as “sarladaise.” They seem to be a speciality of the Dordogne.

But the basics are simple enough, essentially you fry slices of potato in duck (or goose) fat along with garlic, onion and parsley. It’s the cooking time that gets really interesting. Some recipes suggest twenty minutes, some suggest two hours, by which time you’re pretty much making a confit of the potatoes themselves, which is OK by me. And the fact is, it’s hard to go wrong with those ingredients, as my own humble efforts (below) prove.

THAT BOURDAIN REVIEW

My review of Medium Raw, as it appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.



In the interests of full disclosure I should say that, about a decade ago, Anthony Bourdain gave one of my novels a snippy review. He described it as “always clever, seldom fun.” The wound has healed, but as you see, I still remember the line, because let’s face it, it’s a damn good one. Today I can also console myself with that knowledge that by Bourdain’s standards, I got off very lightly.

His new book Medium Raw, is subtitled “a bloody valentine to the world of food and the people who cook,” and much of it reads more like a poison pen letter than a love note. Sandra Lee is the “hellspawn of Betty Crocker and Charles Manson.” The movie No Reservations makes him want to “vomit blood.” Rocco DiSpirito’s TV series is a “reality-show driven abomination.” (p106) Alan Richman starts out as a douchebag, but then Bourdain upgrades him to the c-word. Even the saintly Alice Waters is dissed for her “crude and obvious blend of self-aggrandizement and genuine good intentions.”


Elsewhere, Gael Greene, Alain Ducasse, Wolfgang Puck, and many more, come in for varying degrees of evisceration. This, of course, is all great fun, even if some of it’s the shooting fish in a barrel variety. But just in case you’re wondering whether Bourdain can take it as well as he can dish it out, he turns his verbal knife skills on himself. “A loud, egotistical, one-note asshole who’s been cruising on the reputation of one obnoxious, over-testosteroned book for way too long,” “the angry, cynical, snarky guy who says mean things on Top Chef”, “the very picture of the jaded, overpriviledged ‘foodie’.” Well, he makes some good points.

He also approves of many people too: Thomas Keller, Ferran Adria, Jamie Oliver and Jonathan Gold among them; but it’s probably inevitable that the compliments tend to be rather less memorable than the blazing though finely-honed putdowns.


But actually, Bourdain’s at his best when he isn’t playing the part of gastronomic insult comic. He writes, “I like making things. And I like telling stories,” and this shouldn’t come as news. His breakthrough book Kitchen Confidential wasn’t a success only because of its revelations about bad behavior on the countertops. It was an engaging and skillful narrative that beckoned and seduced you into the world of the professional chef.

Medium Raw is being marketed as a “follow-up” to that first book, though to me it reads more like a collection of magazine articles and opinion pieces. So we have lip-smacking descriptions of eating pastrami at a deli on Houston Street in New York, waiting for the first batch of pain raisin at a bakery in Paris, consuming freshly made blood sausage in a village outside Prague. These are fine as far as they go, but the book is better when Bourdain goes further.

The prologue describing an illegal ortolan feast involving some of America’s greatest chefs could be the first chapter in a suspense novel. Who are these people (Bourdain doesn’t name names), why exactly do they wear “shrouds” while eating, and what kind of man enjoys the taste of “figs, Armagnac, dark flesh slightly infused with the salty taste of my own blood”?

A memoir about being on St Barts with a crazy, cokehead girlfriend is comic, vicious about the girlfriend, the island and its food, but ultimately it’s strangely compassionate and moving: at least about the girlfriend, not so much about the food on St Bart.


But for my money the stand out chapter in the book is “My Aim is True” which describes the work and life of Justo Thomas, who cuts and portions at least seven hundred pounds of fish every day at Le Bernardin, the New York seafood restaurant. The man is a brilliant craftsman and a force of nature, and when he goes on vacation, three people have to be employed to do his work. Bourdain observes and describes Thomas in wonderfully fine detail. We “see” the way he employs different methods for different fish, how he uses his knives, the way he removes skin and bones, how he’s able to cut absolutely identically sized pieces. Then we learn about his background in the Dominican Republic, and the role he still plays in his family there. And finally, in a masterful flourish, Bourdain takes Thomas to eat at Le Bernardin. It’s generally unthinkable for kitchen staff to eat in their own restaurant, but for Justo people make exceptions. By the end of the piece I felt I knew Justo Thomas better than I know most of my own friends. You have to hand it to Bourdain; this is really good writing, not just really good food writing.

Bourdain says he spent twenty-eight years as a professional cook and chef. By my reckoning he’s spent fifteen years as a professional writer. Will it surprise you that he doesn’t think much of writers? He says, “hanging out with more than one of them at a time is about as much fun as being thrown in a cage full of hungry but toothless civet cats.” (p48) Just once in a while, even Mr. B overcooks his similes.

HUBBA BUBBA

An old friend from England was in town; author, anthropologist and all round style tribe guru Ted Polhemus. He was here to lecture on the semiotics of denim (don’t ask).

When I say “in town,” he was actually in Santa Monica, a place I don’t know all that well, and so when we set off to find somewhere for lunch, for one reason or another we ended up on Santa Monica pier at theme restaurant called Bubba Gump’s. It’s a chain, and maybe you’ve heard of it, but I hadn’t. It was evidently inspired by the movie Forrest Gump, and although I’ve seen the movie, it was a long time ago, and I’d more or less forgotten about the shrimp boat part.

Of course the food snob in me hesitated at the prospect of a heaving, theme restaurant, a tourist place, full of large family groups with howling children and a lot of dropped shrimp on the floor. But you know, food snobbery is unattractive in anybody, and especially in a food blogger. So I decided to go with it.


And you know, really, the food wasn’t bad. Ted (see above) had the Shrimper's Net Catch “Our best Peel'n'Eat Shrimp steamed in Beer - You and your crew will be begging for more!" I had the Dixie Fishwich “Forrest and Lt. Dan had one everyday!”

And the ambiance? Well yes, it was loud and hectic, but if you got the right table, which we did, i.e. one by the window, you can see all the way north along the coast of Santa Monica Bay, with the mountains in the background, so you get a million dollar view to go with your ten dollar fish sandwich. That’s really not such a bad deal.

The waiting staff was efficient and efficient, and seemed supernaturally happy, which can’t be easy. But the best feature of all was a thing on the table that looked like a car’s license plate. When you sit down it’s in this position,



That means you don’t need anything from the waiting staff and they can run right by you. But then other times you can flip the plate up and reveal this one underneath.


This means that any waiter who happens to be passing – not just yours – will stop and ask what you need. “Another Hefenweizen, please.”

I think this is the most wonderful dining innovation: no more trying to catch the eye of some distracted waiter. The sign, the signifier if you will, is right there on the table. Of course, given some of the restaurants I’ve been in, a license plate might be too subtle. How about a light, like on the roof of a taxi, and maybe it should be flashing, or the could be flag you could raise, or a small distress flair you could launch, that could return to earth by parachute, with the message, “Actually, make that two Hefenweizens.”

BENT

I’ve been reading Anthony Bourdain’s new book “Medium Raw” to review it for the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s a lot of fun, and especially if you have negative feelings about Alain Ducasse, Rocco DiSpirito and Wolfgang Puck, among many others. They all get a lashing from Mr B.

Among the many provocative statements in the book is this one: “The care and feeding of the Fourth Estate – and their bastard offspring, food bloggers – has become an important skill set for any chef looking to hit the Big Time ... ‘turning’ a journo is usually a pretty simple matter. Just feed them for free. You’ll never have to remind them about it later. Believe me. They’ll remember. It’s like giving a bent cop a Christmas turkey.”

Now, I'm an odd kind of journalist, an especially odd kind of food journalist, though I think my bastardly blogging credentials are real enough. Even so, nobody has ever tried to ‘turn’ me. The nearest I came was having a chat (rather than an interview) with Fergus Henderson, when I was writing about his restaurant St John for Bon Appetit magazine. (The piece got spiked, but I got paid – a triumph). Fergus insisted that he never gave free meals to journalists, and I certainly wasn’t asking for one, but he did give me a glass of Poire William liqueur to go with my espresso.


For what it’s worth, St John is my favorite restaurant in the world, and I think I can look into my heart and safely say that it wasn’t a single glass of Poire William that made me feel that way. It takes more than a single shot of liqueur to corrupt me. How much more, I don’t know. Perhaps somebody would like to try a few experiments.

AIN'T NO SNAFU, NO FOL-DE-ROL

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THEY SPEAK WELL OF ME SOMEWHERE

Here's my interview with Squid Ink



LA food blogs
Meet Your Food Blogger: Geoff Nicholson of Psycho Gourmet

By Erica Zora Wrightson, Monday, May. 17 2010 @ 9:30AM
Categories: Food writing


When asked about Volkswagens -- the subject of a trilogy of his novels -- writer Geoff Nicholson says "Well, I just kind of like 'em is all." Nicholson mainly writes novels, but he's got a blog about walking, an addendum to his book about it called "The Lost Art of Walking." He also keeps a food blog, Psycho Gourmet. It is updated rather infrequently, which is a shame because it's a rare specimen of superb writing in blog form -- really almost too beautiful to be labeled blog posts, more akin to vignettes. Luckily, Nicholson says he just finished a few projects and "it's definitely time to get back on the horse and do some more psycho-gourmet-ing." On his blog, you'll find the author's "ruminations on food, and its relationship with sex, decadence, obsession and the madness of the mouth."


Squid Ink: When and why did you decide to start blogging about food?
Geoff Nicholson: Well, like most writers I feel I should "get my name out there more." My publisher of course feels this even more than I do. It's not so much because I want to be "famous" per se, but because the better known you are the more likely people are to pay attention, read your work, buy your book etc.
And I looked at a few of these "random jottings from a tortured mind" kind of blogs (please tell me there isn't really a blog with that title) and they seemed just hopeless. There had to be a thematic connection between the posts, and I do have a number of more or less interesting obsessions -- and food is certainly one of the main ones. So why not a food blog? I started about 18 months ago.
And of course we all have the Julie and Julia fantasy, some insightful editor/publisher/filmmaker will see how great it is and I shall conquer all.

SI: How does writing fiction differ from writing blog posts? Is it hard to transition from one to the other?
GN: Well, for better or worse (I think better) I'm one of those writers who does have a recognizable voice; skeptical, subversive, quite warm, quite witty, but occasionally quite dark. And it's really the only one I've got, so that's the voice I use whether I'm writing a novel, or an essay for the New York Times or a blog entry. So the transition isn't so hard in itself. But of course a 3,000 word chapter is easy to read in a novel -- pretty hard work online. So in the blog I tend to writer shorter, more broken up paragraphs -- I haven't decided if this is good or bad.



SI: On Psycho Gourmet, You write a lot about food-related memories, or the disappointing lack thereof. As you mention in your post about the party at Taschen's house, all of this documentation of the meals we eat means we have less responsibility to remember. Do you think food photography makes us lazy? What is lost when we have photos of every aspect of a meal, instead of only a menu and our memory?
GN: Gastronomica just published a piece of mine, about my mother's weird eating habits (she only really liked white food). And I dug through all the family photos hoping to find some picture of the Nicholson family eating. Nothing there apart from my parents cutting their wedding cake, and one of me eating white ice cream. Now, of course since everybody photographs everything all the time it seems nobody can eat a sandwich without memorializing it somehow.
On the other hand, I do have a very clear memory of the best sandwich I ever ate -- at the Sidewalk Café in Sheffield -- grated cheese with pickled onion, eaten with my first ever girlfriend the morning after we'd spent our first ever night together -- actually perfectly chastely -- in her parent's house, and obviously the memory is about a great deal more than just the sandwich -- but I do wish I had a picture of it.


SI: You have a revolving-restaurant fetish, although few have lived up to your expectations. If you were going to open a revolving restaurant, where would it be and what would it serve?
GN: Well "fetish" is a tricky word -- I just like 'em is all. In the realms of complete fantasy I'd open one high atop a tower in the middle of Death Valley -- endless desert to the horizon on all sides.
The food places in Death Valley serve the most awful slop -- a decent hamburger joint would be a fantastic improvement; but if it was the all-Geoff-Nicholson-all-the-time-menu, half a dozen oysters, braised pheasant with roast potatoes, a good cheese board. I can always live without dessert.

SI: What was you favorite thing to eat as a child?


GN: It was cheese -- and probably still is. Never found one I really didn't like -- but the cheese of my childhood was crumbly white English Cheshire -- partly my mother's "white food" influence -- but I've shaken off most of the rest of my her influences when it comes to food.

SI: In your post about "Picnic at Mougins," you discuss the notion of a meal in which the company is the focus, over the food. Do you often eat out with friends? Do you ever eat out alone?
GN: I certainly don't eat out as much as I used to when I lived in New York and London -- and really it's the drinking and driving problem. Going out in London, at least in my set, meant drinking at least a bottle of wine per person with dinner. In New York it wasn't a night out unless you started with a couple of martinis.
In L.A. I, and everybody I know, is scared to death of driving drunk, or at least of being caught. So dining out tends to be a rather well-behaved business, which means it's less fun, so I do it less often. Is this a terrible confession?
I can eat lunch out alone, but not dinner.

SI: Do you read other food blogs? Who are some of your favorite bloggers? Food writers?
GN: Among bloggers I loved the guy who tried to eat in an L.A. restaurant of a different ethnic group every day -- I've just searched for it and can't find it. (SI: That's Noah Galuten's year-long eating project, Man Bites World)
But I see someone's doing the same in Washington D.C. I like a blog with something quirky, obsessive and "conceptual" about it like The Great Taco Hunt.


Among food writers I loved the late Alan Davidson and waited eagerly for his Companion to Food -- but then was a bit disappointed -- he was a genuine obsessive and scholar and I felt it should have run to 20 volumes -- I still re-read his collection A Kipper With My Tea from time to time.


I used to love an English food writer called Jonathan Meades -- but he's gone on to bigger things. I guess the burn out rate is high for food writers. And I'm sure it goes without saying -- but I'd better say it -- Jonathan Gold.

SI: Oh, and about the Volkswagens...
GN: I confess to having written three novels about them. As may be obvious from the blog if nowhere else I'm obsessed with obsession I'm not really a true obsessive myself but I'm fascinated by people who really are and many have been obsessed with VW Beetle -- basically from Hitler to -- well you name it, but certainly Charles Manson and Ted Bundy. And, of course, this makes a great structure for a novel.

MUNCHIES

There was a hilarious piece in yesterday’s New York Times by Kim Severson, with the headline “Marijuana Fuels a New Kitchen Culture.”

The article comes up with the startling revelation that a lot of younger chefs and their customers like to smoke dope.

Now I can see it might be a great thing, if you were running a restaurant, to have customers who were stoners because they don’t much care what they eat. Open up the cupboard, and what have you got, a box of Coco Puffs, refried beans, a spray can of cheese whiz, yep, that’s pretty much all it takes to keep a pot head happy.

But the article doesn’t stop there, it refers to, very possibly invents, “the haute stoner cuisine movement.” Oh boy, and according to Kim this has something to with the democratization of eating.

She quotes somebody named Rick Darge, 27, who’s a big fan of the roaming taco truck. “We don’t have to go into an establishment, or be a certain way inside,” he says. “It’s more organic than that.”

Then she quotes one Mr Choi, who runs a fleet of trucks says, "It's this silent message to everyone, to the every-day dude ... Weed is just a portal."

Oh give the kid a Twinkie and let the grown ups get on with their dinner.

FROM SOUP TO NUTS

I’ve been thinking lately, the way you do, about the Bucklands, father and son, William and Francis. William (1784-1856) was a geologist, the first man to identify what we now recognize as a dinosaur fossil, though he used the word megalosaurus. That's a pair above. This is him below:


His son Francis (1826-1880) was a surgeon, then a naturalist, and an important figure in the history of fish farming,nd here he is. The thing in his left hand is a tile for cultivating oysters.


Both of them were zoöphages: animal eaters, who tried to eat their way through the entire animal kingdom. No Leviticus-style prohibitions for them, and William was indeed a clergyman. As the crown of creation, man was obviously entitled to eat all the other creatures on earth, though some were a lot more palatable than others.

Between them they certainly ate giraffe, leopard, porpoise, hedgehog, puppy, rhinoceros, elephant, and eland, among a menagerie of others. And William certainly once, experimentally, and slightly accidentally, tasted bat urine. For a long time he said the mole was the worst thing he’d ever tasted, though he later decided it was the bluebottle.


In February 1868 Frank organized a horse-flesh dinner at the Langham Hotel in London, and served horse in various form to 160 people. It wasn’t a great success apparently, and it surely can’t have helped that they passed round a photograph of one of the horses before dinner.

Buckland concluded “Among the better classes the flesh of horses will never become popular; for in the first place cooks will not cook it … in the second place, the ladies will object to it; and thirdly the master of the house will find it vastly inferior to beef and mutton.”


Of course, once in a while, I think of eating my way alphabetically through the animal kingdom, and I start out pretty well, having eaten alligator, bear and camel, but I can’t get any nearer to Z than whelk, which you could argue isn’t really an animal, anyway.

Waverley Root in Food, and Alan Davidson in the Oxford Companion to Food, both start with the aardvark, Dutch for “earth pig” and which Davidson says is porky tasting. At the other end of the alphabet Root’s last entry is zebra, which his pals tell him is “more palatable on the plain than on the plate.”


Davidson also includes zebra but goes as far as the zebu, the African and Asian hunchback cattle. He doesn’t say how that tastes, but perhaps it’s not so different from any other cattle.

Both Waverley Root and Alan Davidson mention the eating of rats - the latter gives a Maori recipe, which is a kind of confit- but neither specifically discusses mice. William Buckland would have thought this a serious omission. He evidently served mice to his guests. John Ruskin wrote, “I have always regretted a day of unlucky engagement on which I missed a delicate toast of mice.” Good for him, you’d have thought Ruskin might be a bit squeamish in these matters, but no.

I don’t know anywhere that serves a good dish of mouse on toast, but there is a place here in LA where you can at least go to look at one, and that’s the Museum of Jurassic Technology. A couple of mice are displayed there in a vitrine, laid out on a slice of toast, not as an example of a culinary treat but as a cure for bewetting. The mice have to be eaten whole, fur, bones, head and all; I’m sure the Bucklands, father and son, would have had it no other way.

SMALLER POTATOES

And speaking of potatoes, it probably won’t surprise anybody that I have a taste for eccentric and vaguely ludicrous cookbooks, and that I have a smallish collection of them.


And one of my favorites is The Rock & Roll Cookbook, by Dick and Sandy St. John, aka Dick and Dee Dee, edited with the help of Pamela Des Barres. The idea is that rock and roll folk - or at least somebody in their press office - come up with recipes that seem vaguely to fit their persona or the title of one of their hits.

So Bobby Vee, who had a hit with The Night Has A Thousand Eyes, comes up with The Night Has a Thousand Island Dressing: and Jan and Dean have Dead Man Curve’s Spaghetti Pie. You get the idea. But two potato-related dishes particularly catch the eye.


One is Peter Frampton’s, slightly hesitant, recipe for roast potatoes, seen above. He may have cooked them once, but by now he’s forgotten how long you keep them in the oven cook. This at least sounds authentic.


The other is Sex Pistols Steve Jones’ recipe for Pie and Mash. I’m not sure if this is for real, or if somebody just came up with something that seemed “appropriate” for Steve Jones. The references to weird old minced meat and eating with your fingers, just seems to be trying a bit too hard.


In any case, the years of potato eating have been a little kinder to Frampton (above) than to Jones (below), but I don’t blame the potatoes. I blame genetics.


The recipe of her own that co-editor Pamela Des Barres includes in the book is for Pamela’s Morning-Aphrodisiac Brew Ha Ha (For Two) – it’s a smoothie, basically.


Now it so happens that I once ate breakfast with Ms. Des Barres in her hotel in London. It wasn’t the morning after anything. I was interviewing her for a men’s magazine, and she was hard work. But I’ve never forgotten what she had for breakfast: kippers smeared with HP sauce. I’ve never seen anybody else do that. I guess it was a bit rock and roll.

BIG POTATOES

Well it seems I’m back at the trough, blogging again, if for no other reason than even when not blogging I still seem to be writing about food.

I’ve just written a piece for Tin House about food and class in England and America – and yes, yes, I know it’s a PhD topic, but I managed to cover it in 1500 words.

I’ve also been asked to write something for Lotus magazine (as in the car) on the subject of whether or not food is cool. Simple answer, yes, but they want a little more than that.

And to cap it all I got an email from Erica Zora Wrightson who asked to interview me for her occasional column “Meet Your Food Blogger” at the LA Weekly, so I guess I’m back in the game.

One of the things I read while away from the table, was an article in The New Yorker about Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo – the guys who run the restaurant Animal in L.A.. It seems the New Yorker is very interested in LA food – what’s that about?

In the piece Shook talks about how he came to cooking. He washed dishes in a restaurant in his native Florida, and he loved it, because he says, “They used to feed me. My favorite dish was a mashed-potato sandwich, ‘cause they had French bread. That might have been the first time in my life I had French bread and real mashed potatoes.”

Now I can just about there are parts of Florida where French bread is unknown; but no real mashed potatoes? That’s what I call a deprived childhood. And I was reminded, obliquely, of Gene Kelly.


Now, I don’t know if you own a copy of the Official Special Olympics Celebrity Cookbook, the 1979 edition, but if you don’t, then you should really think about acquiring one. In it you’ll find Betty Ford’s recipe for Chuck Roast with vegetables, and Erik Estrada’s Pernil, which is Puerto Rican roast pork.


But best of all, along side these, you’ll find Gene Kelly’s recipe for True Old Irish Potato Sandwich. That's it above and if you click on it, it'll become legible. And as you'll see, he likes it pretty rough, cheap white bread, day old potatoes, onions, lot of butter and salt; eaten with a beer. Gene Kelly always looked pretty good on it, but I guess his dancing burned off a lot of calories.

And then, I found myself in LA’s Little Tokyo at the Yamazaki bakery where they were selling their own version Japanese version of the potato sandwich.


This one, illustrated above, is a buttered roll, with a potato croquette, cabbage and Tonkatsu sauce, which was sweet and sticky and I wouldn’t have been able to identify the ingredients, but various websites tell me (at least a homemade version) is a blend of ketchup, worcestshire sauce, sake, mirin, sugar, ginger and garlic, and it’s usually eaten with pork.



I like the Yamazaki bakery, not least because they sell something called British Bread. It bears very little resemblance to any bread I’ve ever eaten or seen on sale in Britain, but knowing that there’s a market for it, and that somebody somewhere thinks a food's Britishness might be an attraction, is incredibly endearing.