Posts

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 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.

Very Expensive Wine

/in , /by

Until reading Benjamin Wallace’s book, The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine, I had no idea that a story about a single bottle of wine could turn into an enthralling page-turner reminiscent of a Sherlock Holmes mystery. The bottle in question is a 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux supposedly owned and engraved by Thomas Jefferson and bought for the collection of publishing maven, Malcolm Forbes, for $156,000 at a Christie’s auction in 1985. The controversy continues to this day with winemakers, connoisseurs, collectors, auctioneers, tycoons, and FBI agents, and the sale of this bottle has had devastating implications to the wine world at large. Not only did the auctioning of this bottle interest wine aficionados, but also American history buffs, and it “was comparable to the first edition of an old book; it was an esoteric object that would likely draw a free-spending fanatic or two.” And that it did.

Even in the playground of billionaire collectors, the question arises as to how someone could spend so much on an item that should, in theory, be purchased for its temporariness and its destiny of being consumed. Mainly a collector of art, Forbes “didn’t consider the 1787 Lafite a bottle of wine so much as a historical artefact” (73). A bit of a slap in the face for wine lovers, but auction houses intended to draw in crowds by marketing wine as rare commodities: the bottles themselves were works of art and the contents inside were valuable elixirs (even if never drunk). Wallace writes: “Inert antiques were all very well, but there was magic in old wine – a mysterious and wonderful alchemy in something that could live and change from two hundred years and still be drinkable.” The trend started by Christie’s in the 1980’s continues today, even amid controversy and criminal investigations. A further example of this extravagance is the 18,000-bottle wine cellar of theatrical composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, sold for $6 million by Sotheby’s in 1997.

Given such astronomical sums of money, it is no surprise that the authenticity of wine often comes into question. Wherever expensive things are valued, there are bound to be forgeries and “wine was among the easiest collectibles to fake. As a luxury commodity … a bottle of fine wine wasn’t carefully tracked in its peregrinations.” Robert Parker, an American wine critic, says in the book, “This is the only product in the world that you can sell for thousands of dollars without a certificate of origin.” So where does value come from? Michael Broadbent, head wine auctioneer of Christie’s, helped to develop a wine vocabulary commonly used in the business which includes provenance (the history of a wine’s custody since its creation) and ullage (the space between the base of the cork and the surface of the wine that grows as wine evaporates over time). Auctioneers emphasize these attributes, along with age and rarity of the wine itself, as well as the pristine condition of the label, the storage of the bottle, and the age of the glass used for making the bottle. Bottle size is also a factor; aside from standard wine bottles, most people are familiar with magnums (equivalent of two bottles) and double magnums (four bottles). But there are also lesser-known sizes, such as Salamancas (twelve bottles) and Nebuchadnezzers (twenty bottles). Simply based on the sheer volume of wine inside, these large bottles bump up the price and “collectors loved these – for their rarity, for their drama, and for the fact that wine aged more slowly in them.”

At auctions, “as wine became detached from its traditional role as a table beverage – as it became a fetish or a trophy or an investment – it became more common to find private collections of wine that far exceeded their owners’ abilities to drink them.” With this fetish, something other than monetary value arose, a term that Jefferson himself alluded to when he wrote that “things acquire a superstitious value, because of their connection with particular persons.” It was this “imaginary value” that piqued Forbes’ interest in the Lafite bottle which was found amongst a stash of unclaimed bottles in Paris that were supposedly owned by Jefferson. So the mystery ensues.  Authentic or not, it still stands as the single most expensive bottle of wine in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Have Fruit, Will Travel

/in , /by

With summertime upon us, there are delectable local fruits on offer in markets and roadside fruit stands across Ontario, not to mention the extra helping of imported exotic fruits that line the grocery store shelves. But how many of us know the stories of adventure and commerce behind those pyramids of mangos and heaps of bananas? Or about the staggering cornucopia of outlandish fruits around the world that are not even represented on our grocery shelves? Who knew, for instance, there is such a specimen known as peanut butter fruit? Or a charichuela that tastes like lemonade-infused cotton candy? Or apples that tastes like cinnamon? This is only the tip of the iceberg of facts that crop up in Adam Leith Gollner’s book, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession. Read more

If You Can’t Stand the Heat

/in , /by

Without formal cooking credentials to your name, it’s best to avoid inviting Mario Batali to dinner. Bill Buford, writer for The New Yorker magazine, knew the potential for humiliation, but he did it anyway. As if that wasn’t enough, he proceeded to get permission to work in the kitchen of Batali’s Manhattan restaurant, Babbo. For the enjoyment of restaurant enthusiasts everywhere, the details of this adventure are documented in his book, Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-quoting Butcher in Tuscany. Read more

Table for One Around the World

/in , /by

Even as a reluctant celebrity, Anthony Bourdain continues to unwittingly mould his career as a chef into that of a renowned TV personality and bestselling author, who has been treating readers to his irreverent style of writing since 2001 when his book, Kitchen Confidential – about the darker side of restaurant kitchens – became a hit. Since then, Bourdain has had no shortage of writing credits to his name and he sets out to find the nasty bits that make cooking and travelling darkly entertaining. Bourdain is an executive chef in Manhattan, as well as a multi-tattooed, chain-smoking, well-travelled, wickedly funny writer. Read more

The Food Connection

/in , /by

In no book has the phrase “You are what you eat” meant as much as in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. This book needs no further accolades after receiving numerous awards in 2007, including the prestigious James Beard Award and a nod as one of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year. With all this formal recognition behind it, the book can accomplish what it set out to do: educate the masses about how the elements of a meal get to our plates. Combining science, philosophy, anthropology, and journalistic investigation, Pollan sets out to answer the question “What should we have for dinner?” Since humans are omnivores, it becomes far more complicated than need be; thus, the dilemma. He writes, “When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety.” Later, he concludes, “We’ve discovered that an abundance of food does not render the omnivore’s dilemma obsolete. To the contrary, abundance seems only to deepen it, giving us all sorts of new problems and things to worry about” (7). He tries to assuage our dilemma by inspiring a conscientious approach to meals by remembering that food comes from somewhere other than the supermarket or refrigerator. Read more