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Famous Food

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Food books over the past few years have typically fallen into two categories: locavore and sustainable food manifestos, or excursions around the world to seek out ultra-exotic cuisine. Recently, there has been a new trend looking at food that famous people have eaten throughout history. Andrew Caldwell, known as The History Chef TM, has taken a particular interest in this topic by writing Their Last Suppers: Legends of History and Their Final Meals. Aside from the final requests of Death Row criminals, a last meal is not something that can usually be planned. But it can be historically studied and this book covers 2,000 years of culinary history, based on the final meals of twenty-one historical figures, from Cleopatra to Adolf Hitler to Elvis Presley, the book contains brief and enlightening biographies followed by recipes that are both historical in their own right and useful for trying at home to relive these legendary meals. Read more

Hamming it up in Havana

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I have a love/hate relationship with Cuban food. The love part is that it can be delicious when prepared properly, but when I actually spent time in Cuba, I struggled to find much food that was very tasty at all – the hate part of my trip. It is a trip from my past that has left the most indelible impression on me, but the food from that country has left me less than impressed. I spent the night at a charming little home in the Western part of Cuba in the pleasant town of Vinales, surrounded by tobacco fields and rolling countryside. Read more

A Perfect Quest

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After a successful career in political journalism, covering stories like the Homoka and Bernardo murder trial and the dismemberment of John Wayne Bobbitt, Jay Rayner turned his attention to becoming a restaurant critic, thinking that fancy food may be a respite from these heavier topics. One of the first things he realizes in his career change is that “nobody goes to restaurants for nutritional reasons” but rather for enjoying the culinary experience of fine dining. Noticing that high-end restaurants were cropping up around the world, Rayner heads out on a globetrotting menu melee, traveling to find his perfect meal and documenting his trips to seven cities in The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner.

Starting in Las Vegas, when the restaurant scene is graduating from its customary all-you-can-eat buffets to gourmet restaurants, Rayner samples the type of cooking from Wolfgang Puck, Thomas Keller, and Joel Robuchon that is intended to launch Vegas into a destination known for more than gambling. Rayner never strays far from his political journalism background and his trip to Moscow focuses as much on the food as the Mafia-style criminal activity, with restaurants riddled not only with expensive meals, but also the bullet holes of “bad old days of business-motivated assassinations.” Now, to him, the restaurants are a symbol of elitism; the decadence and opulence of the restaurant décor and the uninspiring menu items leads him to believe that “no one cares about the food. Just as in Soviet times, they only care that they are part of an elite who can visit them.”

The book is as much a cultural critique of the countries he visits as a look at their cuisine, such as the outlandish prospect of Dubai building bigger and better things. He is told that food coming into Dubai has quality issues due to Islamic laws, which is absurd given that the Dubai juggernaut (attempting to make the highest drawing tourist destination in the world) attracts the best chefs to run the most exclusive restaurants. He does have issues with the authenticity of the place, however, eating a poor attempt at Swiss fondue as he watches people ski on snow inside a mall in a 74 degree desert. Dubai may be an amazing place, but his food experiences were unmemorable. He can’t even say too many nice things about his British compatriot, Gordon Ramsay, who has set up shop there.

The Tokyo segment was my favourite in the book. Restaurants are so numerous in the Japanese metropolis that they are literally piled on top of each other and Rayner has no shortage of tales about being forced to eat the most unusual items from the Japanese culinary repertoire. He momentarily fears the Japanese chefs are “throwing all the weird stuff at me that nobody ever eats to see whether I’d be too polite to refuse” (139). Rayner does hold a personal philosophy that you must try everything once, if at least to say that you don’t like it, even if it is blowfish sperm, or lavender ice cream in green bean soup, or the trial of eating slimy sea urchin with chopsticks which is “like trying to eat jelly with knitting needles.”

His experiences tend toward the outlandish, garish, and extravagantly expensive. He makes no bones about the conspicuous consumption of modern restaurants; eating extravagantly requires extravagant spending (most often on the business dime of the London Observer). He is flirting with meals that are rumoured to be $1,000 a head in Tokyo, meals that bring to mind “an image of my platinum credit card, that dear sliver of gunmetal gray plastic that had become such a friend to me on this journey, now suddenly belching smoke, Mission: Impossible style, as it came into contact with the bill.”

He delves into the philosophy about why Michelin-starred restaurants even exist if only to please greedy eaters with no limits to their spending. “Travelling the world through its greatest restaurants, in search of the perfect meal, had made me question the point of them.” This questioning of a career that pursues a love of expensive food ultimately leads to one last hurrah in Paris to taste test seven restaurants in seven days. He likes some, abhors others, and ends his last night shaking his head at a $1,250 bill for two. He believes he had flashes of perfection, including L’Astrance in Paris and a sushi meal at Okei Sushi in Tokyo (the $475 bill being the highest he has ever paid for a single meal). Ultimately, Rayner concludes that his quest to write about the perfect meal may go unfulfilled because perfection is based on individual appetites. On a more personal level, he says, “My pursuit of the perfect meal was doomed to failure because I had been conducting it in entirely the wrong company, which is to say, my own.” This is when he returns to his hometown of London, England to dine at several of his favourite restaurants with his wife, making the statement that communing in the right company can make a meal taste better.

It is these personal touches from Rayner’s life that make his globetrotting narrative most enjoyable, whether or not he has more misses than hits at perfection. Even while dining in establishments once frequented by the Rat Pack in Vegas or the Russian first lady in Moscow, he attributes his family’s love affair with food for his good fortune of having a job that consists of eating in restaurants. But what should we expect from a man who tells us that one of his most lasting memories of childhood is sneaking away on a school trip four nights in a row to eat escargot in a nearby French restaurant instead of skiing with his friends?

The Most Important Cabbage in the World

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Cabbage is a versatile vegetable responsible for several side dishes that I enjoy, like coleslaw, sauerkraut, and my favourite of all smelly foods, Korean kimchi. I have never made it myself and I didn’t even like it all that much at first, but having lived in South Korea, I have experienced it directly from the source. That was ten years ago, when I first developed a liking for it and now, being back in Canada, I miss it and crave it occasionally still. Every part of the world has trademark food items that are linked to the regional identity of locals and that outsiders learn to either love or hate. No nationality takes this as seriously as Koreans do with their kimchi. This inauspicious side dish offers more than just nourishment – it defines daily lives, family rituals, and national pride. Read more

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.