The X-Files for Foodies – the Lost WPA Files for America Eats

/in , /by

Nearly anything can become more interesting and have a certain sense of allure when found after a time of being lost. Especially when hidden away from public eyes for some reason, as if concealing secrets, like the X-files have done with the government’s involvement in U.F.O. cover-ups. A book by Mark Kurlansky, The Food of a Younger Land, may not have quite the same extra-terrestrial flavour, but the WPA files shed light on flavours of a different sort – the scrumptiousness of regional American cooking. Read more

Eating and Cooking as Storytelling

/in , /by

In the world of publishing, Jason Epstein, who sat as editorial director of Random House for many years, is legendary for his revolutionary ideas in the book business. But he is also full of pithy advice for anyone who dabbles in the kitchen, such as, “Let your taste be your guide” and “Recipes should be more like stories than like maps.” Surrounded by books for most of his life, it seemed appropriate to put these ideas into print by writing a book of recipes and the stories about why they are important to him. More accurately, Eating: A Memoir, is a collection of recipes told as stories, since there are very few measurements in sight and nary a grocery list of ingredients to be found. The cooking instructions offered by Epstein follow more of a narrative structure on how to make his favourite dishes like Lobster Bisque and Egg Foo Yung. These are not the type of recipes attached to your fridge with a magnet ready to be stained with oil or dusted with flour. These are recipes that Epstein hopes you read over a few times, try your hand at, and gradually integrate into your own kitchen storytelling. These recipes teach you that knowing your ingredients is more important than measuring them, and telling stories with your cooking is better than following directions.

Epstein attaches food to memories of his childhood and he has fine-tuned these memories into nostalgic recipes for Prime Beef Hamburgers, Homemade Potato Chips, and Chicken Pot Pie. The recipes in the book are often specific to a time and place for Epstein, but by sharing them with us they become timeless. With some cooking jobs in his past, some of the recipes are learned from his restaurant experiences, others are borrowed from the cookbooks of famous chefs he has published, but they are all perfected by the tried and true methods of a home cook getting creative in the kitchen. Epstein believes trial and error is a better tactic than a precise doling out of ingredients and a personal touch makes a recipe better than a formulaic script.

He may not be a trained chef, but his advice is no less professional and his dialogue with the reader is honest, such as his warning for preparing Penne in Tomato Sauce: “If you turn your back for a minute and the jalapeno blackens or the garlic becomes acrid, toss it out and start over.” And who of us hasn’t used the same line – “The dish is even better the second day, as leftovers” – as he mentions about his recipe for Bolognese Sauce. He is also a thoughtful writer, reminding us on more than one occasion to wash our hands immediately after cutting jalapeno peppers, because any inadvertent touching of the eyes causes searing pain (maybe he learned this first hand, as I know I have. One of the worst things that ever happened to me involved a jalapeno pepper, when I learned it is wise to keep them away from your eyes).

There is more than a whole page dedicated to techniques for opening clams for Clams Casino, but Epstein consoles us by saying, “Don’t be discouraged if you don’t succeed the first or even the fifth time.” Overall, the recipes are heavy on seafood, given Epstein’s proximity to fresh bounty from the east coast waters surrounding Long Island. Out of the forty-four recipes, there are twenty-one centring around seafood, six involving lobster, and we are even given step by step instructions for killing the crustacean before eating it. Epstein assuages us simply by writing, “There is no reason to be squeamish about this” and seafood lovers everywhere will agree the sacrifice is worth the taste.

Another compelling aspect of the book is that the recipes start out very homey, but are mixed with more elegant meals. Most of his forays into restaurants are in his stomping ground of New York and stories are not hard to come by for Epstein from a lifetime in the publishing industry: dining on Shad Roe with Sorrel Sauce with Jackie Onassis at the best French restaurant in New York; cooking Lobster Fra Diavolo for Norman Mailer at his home in Massachusetts; being the first to approach Alice Waters in San Francisco about publishing her influential Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook; enjoying an unforgettable meal with Gore Vidal in France with a salmon dish “so fresh that its eyes seemed to blink when it was brought to the table.” He also delves into his more exotic travels by extolling the virtues of Icelandic lamb and Omani goat. All part of a publisher’s job. But above all else, aside from the recipes and kitchen tips, Epstein illustrates that the events of a life are indelibly connected to food, whether it’s the first meal he prepared after 9/11 or how he has subconsciously, although not surprisingly, designed his kitchen in the same style as his grandmother’s.

Eating Toronto

/in , /by

As Ontarians, are we supposed to take pride in or offence to the nickname of Hogtown for our provincial capital? What are we supposed to think about that section of the city known as Cabbagetown? Is there any deep meaning behind these blatant food references? Editors Christina Palassio and Alana Wilcox have compiled a collection of food essays in The Edible City: Toronto’s Food From Farm to Fork to not only explain how food defines Toronto’s history, but also how a city feeds its citizens and how those citizens can make the best food choices to keep a city sustainable. The book presents dozens of Toronto writers tackling a variety of current topics, such as the debate over opening up street food to healthier offerings other than hot dogs, legislation to protect agricultural land, school meal programs, immigrant workers in Ontario farms, food banks, humanitarian programs to feed the hungry, and food-related activist projects. Read more

Boob Tube Food

/in , /by

Watching celebrity chefs on the Food Network can be as addictive as eating your favourite foods. Television has brought the entertainment value of food from visceral to visual, even though it is quite paradoxical that an entire network serves up mouth-watering dishes that viewers will never eat. Although it may all be just a tease, Kathleen Collins tells us in her book Watching What We Eat that “people love to watch cooking, but it does not mean they love to cook or that they even do it at all.” Collins takes us on a tour of how cooking shows have become top notch entertainment, even though they started out as instructional programs for housewives, and she reveals how a combination of compelling chefs and scrumptious food presentation keeps us tuning in day after day. “The cable network gradually revamped the traditional instructional cooking program, adding live bands, participatory studio audiences, science, travel, and game shows, making the genre a microcosm of television and entertainment itself.” Read more

Raw & Uncooked

/in , /by

Raw fish. I often wonder how it became such a trendy meal. We can thank the Japanese for sharing their taste for uncooked seafood and making it is easy for diners anywhere in the world to get their fix on glistening slivers of silky smooth fish pressed over rice and adorned with wasabi and pickled ginger. We can also thank Sasha Issenberg for writing about the ultimate local versus global food debate in The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy and revealing sushi’s rise to fame as a world-wide commodity. Read more

Tips from the Waiter’s Perspective

/in , /by

I am hesitant to read a book that seems to be an outlet for complaining about restaurant customers. I spend my fair share of time in restaurants and I don’t want to hear about the things I’ve been doing wrong all these years. Those who don’t like negativity with their dinner be warned that the anonymous author known as The Waiter (who claims to be the voice of servers everywhere) may set out to entertain us with his witty tales of waiting tables in Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip – Confessions of a Cynical Waiter, but he does so without holding back any punches. The warning signs start with the use of the word “Rant” in the title and I fear a judgmental dividing line between those who eat at fine dining restaurants and those who work at them. I expect endless haranguing by a bitter waiter, always being short-changed his tips. But the book is far more than a tirade and turns into a well-constructed narrative taking a good, hard look at the restaurant industry. Waiter Rant has an accompanying website, also written anonymously to emphasize that his restaurant war stories could be any waiter at any dining establishment on any given night.

From what we know, The Waiter lives in New York and has worked a string of marketing jobs in corporate America. When he finds himself unemployed, becoming a waiter is at first a laughable suggestion. He sees himself as over-qualified (college-educated) and over-aged (31) with the typical reaction that waiting tables is a career for struggling actors and unemployable teenagers. Desperate for money, however, he takes a waiting job, thinking all the while it will be a temporary solution until he figures out what to do with his life.

In the North American, restaurant-festooned landscape, it is a shame that such a career is not taken seriously. Other cultures view it with a level of professionalism, like in “Europe where waiting is considered an honourable vocation (complete with formal schooling and internships).” After many years, amid stories of demanding customers and immoral restaurant owners, the author realizes he has grown into quite a good waiter, not to mention it has lasted longer than any other job he’s had. He knows he won’t get rich, but the money is good enough to make a living, which factors into his theories about why waiters get addicted to their jobs and stay longer than expected.

After seven years in the business, his complaints about annoying customers don’t let up and he comes up with the opinion that “20 percent of the American dining public are socially maladjusted psychopaths.” The other 80 percent are just nice people out to get good food, but even they can be annoying with grandiose culinary expectations from watching too much Bobby Flay and Barefoot Contessa on the Food Network.

Most of his rants are, predictably enough, about bad tippers. He is sceptical of diners who overly compliment his service because “customers who heap verbal tribute upon their servers often do so at the expense of financial tribute” and he is infuriated at after-church crowds who give religious tracts in lieu of a tip. He even gives one account of performing the Heimlich manoeuvre on a customer, literally saving his life and still being left a bad tip. His ultimate goal is to entertain, and he does so with cynical panache, but The Waiter also sets out to educate about the food-service industry and hopefully urge people to become better customers. Or at least, for his sake, better tippers.

Dining Out With Dictators

/in , /by

Kitchen bookshelves have never seen a cookbook like this before. No Julia Child or Bobby Flay in sight, but watch out for Fidel Castro and Kim Il Sung alongside recipes of their respective countries. Those looking to keep political conversation alive over dinnertime, Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States is the book for you. Chris Fair, a military and political analyst, knows that humans crave more than food alone and she dedicates her book “to everyone who is hungry for justice, peace, and security” by bringing international relations and world politics to the dinner table in an interesting cross section of ideas; with plenty of recipes, it is shelved in the cooking section of a bookstore, but there are equal parts foreign policy, dinner party etiquette, and evil dictator biography. Read more

The Name Game in Korean Classrooms

/in , /by

Being newlyweds when we left for South Korea, we promised our families back home we wouldn’t procreate any children of our own while living abroad; mostly so our parents wouldn’t miss out on all the grandparent-y stuff, but also because we were travelling to delay any domesticity in the early stages of marriage. As English teachers at a private school, we saw dozens of students, between the ages of five and fifteen, in rotating classes throughout each day, so having children of our own was the furthest thing from our minds. But that did not stop us from thinking about baby names, because naming children in South Korea is not only a parental duty – foreign teachers in ESL schools are responsible for giving English names to students who don’t already have one. Read more

The Luck of the Fortune Cookie

/in , /by

The telling of interesting stories must come with the territory when your middle name is the number 8 (Chinese for prosperity) instead of a word, as Jennifer 8. Lee proves in her book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. The chronicles begin with the symbolic item that all ends all meals in a Chinese restaurant – the simple, yet venerable, fortune cookie. Lee writes: “For people who don’t have time to contemplate the life well lived or read Confucius, Immanuel Kant, or Aristotle, fortune cookies provide the Cliffs Notes version of wisdom.” Along with pithy bits of insight, the slips of paper inside the cookies also offer a set of lucky numbers for lottery players. On a fortuitous day in 2005, beyond all statistical probability, the Powerball lottery was won by 110 people across the United States – all playing the same numbers “spoken” to them by fortune cookies. This intriguing story sets Lee off on a cross-country spree to the Chinese restaurants that had unwittingly passed on the lucky numbers to the jackpot winners. Read more

Eat Local, Eat Fresh

/in , /by

Becoming a locavore (someone committed to eating only local food) takes a dedication to the natural food chain and requires certain sacrifices, such as never eating bananas, unless you live in a tropical country. Or sometimes it entails relocating to areas with more agricultural variety. That is what novelist, Barbara Kingsolver, did by moving her family from Arizonan desert to Appalachian farmland for a more rural lifestyle, where the family had a better chance of reacquainting itself with the knowledge of “what animals and vegetables thrive in one’s immediate region and how to live well on these.” As a mother, Kingsolver instils these family values the same way grammar and algebra are taught in school.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the resulting book in this shift in eating philosophy, and the book itself becomes a family affair.  Being the matriarch author, Kingsolver writes the majority of the text, but her husband, Steven Hopp, adds several environmental segments, and their oldest daughter, Camille, contributes the perspective of a college student. Another daughter, Lily, is only in second grade and does not contribute any writing, but she is the family’s biggest entrepreneur by tending the chickens in the egg-selling business.

Not only does their local experiment keep grocery money in the neighbourhood, but it allows the family to celebrate the freshness and flavour of food as the seasons govern their daily menus. As a mother, she wants more than “a cartoon character with spinach-driven strength” to inspire children to eat greens, and she believes palatability will save the day; “even Popeye only gets miserably soppy-looking stuff out of a can” she writes. It is the flavour of local produce that hasn’t been tampered with by genetic modification that Kingsolver knows will make families and children relish vegetables.

The subtitle of the book is “A Year in Food Life” and these twelve months capture a lifetime of food education, including a cornucopia of topics such as canning tomatoes for the winter months, finding heirloom vegetables from nearby markets, nutritional recipes, environmental sustainability, nourishing seeds into a garden of their own, making cheese from scratch, and living among animals that are not pets.

The mission of “eating home-cooked meals from whole, in-season ingredients obtained from the most local sources available” is better for their health, their finances, and the environment. It is no small task to give up convenient food to feed a family, but Kingsolver sees it as a small gesture given the scope of global problems. There are so many lessons that bloom from this book it is impossible to encapsulate them all, but Kingsolver shows us that her efforts make a difference by writing: “Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren’t trivial. Ultimately they will, or won’t, add up to having been the thing that mattered.” This year of eating deliberately documented in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is just the beginning for this family, their neighbourhood, and, if enough people follow their example, the world at large.