Author Michael Ruhlman was a guest blogger on this site for six weeks in June and July, 2006. All of his posts are collected below. An index of titles is available on the right-hand side of the page.
This morning Bourdain called my cell and said, "Ruhlman, I’ve got upsetting news."
He wasn’t kidding.
Apparently a New Jersey politician, freshman assemblyman Michael Panter, next week will introduce a bill to ban the SALE of foie gras in and out of state.
Not only would this put out of business or force the relocation of Ariane Daguin’s D’Artagnan--which would be a blow to the entire tri-state area and beyond and the countless restaurants that rely on D’Artagnan for foie-based products--but it would be a dangerous encroachment on the rights of New Yorkers and New York City chefs to eat what they want and cook what they want.
The whole issue of what happens to Daguin and her highly respected company, around whom the fine dining scene has grown during the past two decades she's been in business, is an important one that should be looked at separately.
But if the rumor is true, the foie brouhaha has reached New York in a serious way. And it's bad. The foie issue embodies the hypocrisy and corruption of so much of how our government operates. That our public officials continue to spend their time and our dollars on this is ludicrous. If they cared about their state and their country, they would address the catastrophe of how we're raising agri-hogs. That's truly inhumane. We're trashing our land and water, growing crappy food, contaminated chicken, feed lot beef and creating lakes of sewage polluted with e coli that gets on our spinach and kills our kids.
It’s a good rule to live by: don’t shit where you eat. But that’s exactly what we’re doing on a massive scale. So what do you do if you’re a local congressman? You outlaw a product that has little if any environmental impact, a product that few people buy, but that raises your stature and makes you look like a noble protector of all things cute and fuzzy.
Chicago's been through this. Now Jersey--living up to its cliché. Chicago been a laughingstock among people throughout the country who understand the issues. Its mayor is endorsing a REPEAL of the silly law that bans foie gras sales there. An article in today's trib describes how the pro-ban factions are struggling, in the face of widespread ridicule, not to lose ground. The city is not enforcing the ban anyway, so it's largely symbolic. But symbols are important.
And right now, foie gras banning is becoming a symbol of ignorant politicians grandstanding on issues they scarcely understand while the real horrors of our food supply go neglected, and continued silence is bought and paid for by agribusiness lobbying.
I've made myself clear on this issue before: more no-nothings in government telling me what I'm allowed to eat, corrupt government ignoring the agricultural catastrophes while taking self-promoting potshots at fundamentally humane businesspeople and farmers makes me mad. If this law happens it promises the beginnings of change in the restaurant scene in New York City for the worse--this, the most diverse and dynamic restaurant city on earth. That in itself is bad. But all that such a bill would portend is truly scary.
If this bill happens we need to use its indulgent foolishness to shine more light on the real problems with our food supply. And they don’t have anything to do with foie gras.
Time to say farewell, and to thank you, Meg, for your great hospitality and generosity in allowing me to post on your blog. It's been a great experience, and has allowed me to explore some ideas I'd never have pursued in traditional media while using a voice that is only appropriate to a blog. I'm very much a believer in the how-do-I-know-what-I-think-till-I-read-what-I-write effect, so the freedom of the blog has helped me to figure some things out. Such as why the foie issue is so troubling to me.
In the end it's not about the foie. Life would be diminished in a very small way without foie gras but not drastically so (they way it would be, say, if pork were outlawed). It's that it represents another way uninformed people are trying to legislate what I am or am not allowed to eat. Government is happy to subsidize corn and encourage horrific treatment of billions of cows, pigs and chickens, to encourage through big business processed food that is bad for us, and then tell me that I'm not allowed to eat a natural product from an animal that has (in my opinion, as of now, though this may change) been humanely raised. When people tell me what I can or cannot eat based on a moral contention of their own, that really pisses me off. It's happening throughout our society. The foie issue embodies this troubling trend in America.
I believe that the issues about food that are discussed on the food blogs are important because how we eat determines how we live, literally and metaphorically. How we eat, and the decisions we make, shape the world. From an evolutionary standpoint, humans are a dangerous species--a wickedly smart predator that has so far managed to avoid the ecological disasters of its own predation. I hope we continue to do so, for my kids' sake, but it's going to get harder and harder. We're trashing our livestock; through genetic engineering and the creation of a monoculture, creating powerful bugs that can kill; we're fishing out our oceans, working our way down the food chain, and we're pretty much at the bottom feeders now; we're creating massive dead zones in our oceans from agricultural pollutants, bankrupting our fossil fuel supply and burning holes in the atmosphere.
So yes, dammit, that's why foie gras is important: because it's NOT important. Does that make sense? It shouldn't be important, but it has become important, and that is the shame of it.
See, there I go. I start out thanking Meg, and I tumble into another rant. But it seems to be the only way to be heard. Flannery O'Connor once explained that all her characters were in effect caricatures because it was the only way to make people see. Blogs seem to be particularly good at this as well. Food is important, arguably the most important thing there is, that and water. And blogging well and intelligently about food is important. Maybe it can change things. I hope.
So many thanks to all the excellent readers who commented on the issues, elevating and enhancing them and giving them perspective and balance. And again, many thanks for the opportunity to hang out for a short time on your excellent blog, Meg. I'll be reading.
Onward.
When I first spent time at the CIA, one course I took was taught by a woman named Eve Felder. I wrote about the class, and her, and by the time I returned to the CIA she'd become one of the academic deans. Eve, a former Chez Panisse chef, is probably the most humane-minded chef I've ever met. The depth of her care for students, for chefs, for our food, for cooking and for the earth seemed to me then and now to be boundless.
So I asked her where she stood on the foie gras issue, and here's what she emailed back:
Thanks, Michael. No, I do not have an issue with foie gras. My philosophy in most everything is that one has to experience what another person (or animal) is experiencing prior to making an informed judgement.
When I was a young chef, I spent about a week on a foie gras farm in the Dordogne valley in France. I spent days force feeding ducks.
The experience I had in France is that they fed the ducks a warm mash of corn, water and duck fat that was administered through a funnel.
The funnel had a wire in it that helped to expedite the mash from the sides and through the tube. The wire moved when you pressed a peddle with your foot. Sort of like a sewing machine.
I sat in a comfortable small straw lined corral with 6 ducks in 6 corrals on a small stool. The warm mash was poured into the funnel. I held the duck under one of my legs and extended its' neck upwards and gently opened its' mouth and inserted the tube to about the top of the chest. As I pressed the machine with my foot, I gently pulled the funnel up until the bird's throat was filled with mash.The funnel moved across
the ceiling from corral to corral.
It was an extremely gentle and intimate experience. The animal does not have a gag reflex. They always waddled away perfectly happy and full and ready for a nap.
As you know, I'm sure, ducks naturally gorge prior to migration. They are genetically programmed to make sure they are full for their ultimate flight. People who are taking issue with this have attacked a very small artisinal industry that is easy to target. I am actually heartsick that they have made such inroads. What will be next?
I'm 43 today and while I say this with neither joy nor sadness, more just a general sigh at the nature of time, or rather of the way we perceive it--an acceleration, a rush, like falling, rather than a metronomic procession of days--the day occasioned an unexpected delivery from Hudson Valley Foie Gras. Not a fresh foie gras, but rather two excellent cuts from the bird that gives us the foie gras and are every bit as excellent. Wonderful duck legs and duck breasts, called magret, from the moulard duck--it's not just about the foie gras. The card inside read happy birthday, from my mom. Is that a great mom, or what? I'll confit the legs and save them for fall; I'll dry cure two of the duck breasts with salt and thyme for duck prosciutto, and grill the other two (they're as fat and rich as strip steak and even more flavorful).
--In another package, also from my saintly mum, a can of Whitely's Peanuts. These peanuts I tell anyone who will listen are arguably the best in the United States. They're large, very crunchy, and the driest fried peanuts I've encountered. One of the company's owners told me why: they soak the peanuts in water before cooking them; when they're fried by hand in 130 pound batches, the steam they release apparently prevents them from absorbing tons of oil. They're fantastic.
--A final more somber note. Bourdain has written a complete account of his Lebanon trip at salon.com. You may have to watch a quick ad for the travel channel for the whole story, but the commercial is brief. I emailed Tony to ask if writing it had been cathartic. He replied "I wish that were true." And this is a guy who is not easily rattled.
Nobody knows. But we DO know they have digestive systems. Meg's oyster posts over at epicurious.com got me thinking about Penn Cove oysters and that company's sensible practice of storing harvested oysters in the water. "Some distributors often treat shellfish like fish, and this is the problem," Ian Jeffords, gm of the company, once explained to me. "When you take them out of the water and hold them in a cooler, they're still alive. You think about it, all the things that make shellfish taste good, fats and sugars, theyre living off those in the cooler, they're metabolizing those fats and sugars, so by the time you eat them everything that makes them taste good is gone."
What do those tasty fats and sugars become in that oyster you're slurping down? I'm not sure I want to know.
"How long have these oysters been out of the water?" is a good question to ask the chef who purchases them at your favorite raw bar.
You can buy Penn Cove oysters via company called farm 2 market.
Amidst the righteous PETA bluster attending foie gras legislation and the earnest journalists trying their balanced best to cover the issue and the misslonelyhearts marching outside Union Square Café (a business that's an emblem of quality and excellence in the culture of American restaurants), indignant foodies railing, committed gourmands wailing, and the food terrorists harassing chefs--well, it's actually relatively quiet now, so I thought it a perfect opportunity to cut right to the core of the issue. The fat liver itself. Which no one seems to talk about anymore.
Foie gras is a marvel and a wonder. If I'd had some left over fresh a few moments ago, I'd have diced it and sprinkled it over my gently scrambling eggs (or should I call them unborn chickens?). That would be a treat on a Wednesday morning! Foie in farm fresh eggs. Almost reason enough to open a bottle of Schramsberg blanc de blanc to go with it (but that would kill the day, wouldn't it ((not necessarily a bad thing!))?).
What's the great fact about foie gras for American home cooks? It's this: that what's available to you is the exact same thing that's available to the country's best chefs. This is a rare circumstance. The caviar that Eric Ripert gets you and I can't get, don't even think about it (and he sends half his back at the delivery door, and you couldn't even get that). Not available to you and me, wouldn't be even if we were rich as Bloomberg. The truffles and fingerling potatoes Joel Robuchon can send to his Vegas outpost--you and I can't have it. Gotta head to Vegas and pay through the nose (entirely worth it, surely, but a nose is a nose). The lamb Grant Achatz lovingly heats sous vide, fragrant with the smells of the carefully grown alfalfa raised and cut and stored by Keith Martin in Pennsylvania--gotta go to Chicago for that.
But foie gras, here the playing field between the chef and the home cook is leveled. There are four growers in the United States, and you can buy from the same one most chefs do, Hudson Valley Foie Gras. Daniel Boulud's A foie is going to be of the same quality as the A foie you order. Yes, he's going to pay a little less because his volume is greater, but even so, and even though it's considered a luxury item at restaurants, it's not really more expensive for the home cook having a dinner party, say, than a beef tenderloin. An A foie, will serve ten healthy portions and it will cost about a hundred bucks with shipping. Ten bucks a head, which, if you're one to go all out for your guests or you're having a special party, is not out of control. And it's a very cool thing to offer your guests, if you run with that kind of crowd.
Moreover, foie gras is one of the easiest things in the world to cook, one of those the-less-done-to-it-the-better food items. Salt the whole thing, put it in a hot pan to give the top a beautiful golden brown, flip it, drop some thyme and garlic in the pan and pop it in a hot oven for ten minutes, basting once or twice with the copious fat that renders. Slice at the table. Or slice it an inch thick, pluck out any large dark veins, salt it, and briefly cook in a really hot pan on either side till you have a nice crust (you'll need a good exhaust system for saute, not a method for the unventilated fifth floor studio walk up).
Or for something truly amazing, the foie-iest foie of all, spread out the lobes, remove the veins, give it a healthy sprinkle of salt and some white pepper and some pink salt if you have some, pour some milk on it to help leach out any residual blood and refrigerate overnight. Then rinse it roll it into a cylinder in cheesecloth and poach it for a couple minutes, just so it all melts together inside. Chill, unroll, slice an inch thick and serve with something sweet and acidic and some good bread and Champagne. That is a luxury beyond luxuries, and available to you, home cook. (This preparation has the fancy name torchon with the unfancy translation dish towel--really all you need for this preparation: a dishtowel to roll it in.)
Foie gras can be roasted first, then pressed into a terrine mold and chilled, maybe layered somehow with a fruit that goes well with it, mango or quince. Slice and serve it cold. Poach it in wine. There are so many wonderful thing you can do with foie gras, so easily, there's so much fun to be done, so much pleasure to give to your closest friends, it saddens me that we've lost sight of the foie itself amidst all the noise.
There's nothing else like it in the culinary world. It's a gift. We need to protect it or we'll lose it.
In addition to Meg's two posts, I'm adding this essay by a supertaster, David Leite, who runs the excellent website, Leite's Culinaria, which won the Beard award this year for best food site.
and the so called additive sodium nitrite. Just came across this and this suggesting the salt might be an effective vasodilator and have a role in helping to palliate some diseases.
I'm sensitive to the nitrite issue, not only because it's emblematic of our incorrect or misinformed convictions regarding food, but also because I write about what hot dogs really are and what I believe to be the best hot dog in the United States in the August issue of Gourmet. Condé Nast does not put this online and has forbidden me to talk about it further to anyone who hasn't paid their $3.99.
So Bourdain is trapped in Lebanon. I learned about this via egullet which had this nypost page six item. I do regret he and his great zeropintzero crew are stranded and hope for their quick safe return (they all seemed to feel pretty safe—haven’t been able to reach Tony or Grillbitch by email or phone), but what stuck in my tooth a day after reading, was the “celebrity chef” tag. I’ve been thinking about this knee jerk response a lot recently. We’ve really got to get past this. It’s an embarrassment to the chefs and an unintentional embarrassment to anyone to whom it means something good.
What is a celebrity chef? They don’t cook anymore. They don’t expedite. They put on jackets for photo shoots. Their hands are soft and smooth, their wrists and forearms are unblemished. This is not a criticism (as for so many people it seems to be). Tony is the first to admit it. He worked hard in kitchens for half his life, managed also to write a really good book, and then he went on to a second career, lots more writing and good television shows.
Why do we have to use celebrity chef? We don’t call Wynton Marsalis the celebrity musician. We don’t refer to Annika Sorenstam as the celebrity golfer, we don’t say celebrity actor and we don’t say celebrity celebrity, though surely there are those, someone who’s famous only for being famous. As far as chefs go, are we calling them celebrity chefs to indicate they don’t cook anymore? We should consider this.
I write about chefs in the age of the “celebrity chef” in Reach of a Chef. And at the end of the book I sit down with Thomas Keller, a friend with whom I’ve collaborated on two cookbooks, and he said these surprising words: “I’m not a chef anymore, and it breaks my heart.”
This is one of America’s peculiar gifts: To embrace people so hard that they cease to be able to do the work that made them famous in the first place.
What exactly are the criteria for being a celebrity chef? Here’s the wikipedia definition (it’s heavily reliant on the work of Juliette Rossant, citing her--she even has her own wikipedia page; sadly I do not—as well as her book called Superchef and her blog of that name…interesting…I wonder why it doesn’t cite, say, the work of Page and Dornenberg who wrote Becoming a Chef, the first book that meaningfully addressed chefs as they moved into the realm of celebrity…hmmm, a bit of a marketing effort from the camp of Ms. Rossant?).
My favorite “celebrity chef” is Cat Cora who, when I was interviewing her for an article on chef branding told me point blank, and with refreshing candor, “It’s something I’ve wanted all my life. To have the fame. Without beating around the bush, that’s the bottom line.” And she’s succeeding—she’s never owned a restaurant or been its executive chef, I believe, though she did run a kitchen at one point and cooked in numerous high end places I’m sure (not a single restaurant is listed on her Wikipedia page)—but she’s famous, often on Regis, the only female iron chef, etc. Being a working chef was once a prerequisite for being a famous chef during the 1990s, but that’s changing. Now you don’t even need a restaurant. You need what they call in the branding biz “a platform.”
Of course, the most famous of the professional cooks got that way by being good on TV, which is the best kind of platform there is.
I think we, and especially the media, should make a clear distinction. A celebrity chef is a chef who no longer cooks (or maybe never did cook). If they’re still cooking, then their working title should be used. If they don’t cook anymore or are just famous for it, then they should be called a “celebrity chef”—that truly would mean something.
In response to a meme tag a few chainlinks away from the original, I began looking back to moments that were truly revelatory in my food consciousness. There aren’t many. How many can there be? There are many times when you learn something. I learned a lot hanging out in Keller’s kitchens. “Chef, why are you seaming out the tuna?” I asked. He stared at me, scraped up some connective tissues on his knife, the stuff he was removing from the tuna; it hung from his knife like saliva. “Eat this.” I chuckled. Ok, got your point. He said “Eat it.” He wasn’t kidding--he looked pissed. So I did. I learned a couple things there, but that’s not a revelation.
When Parker Bosley in Cleveland told me how to make duck confit--the notion that you could poach a really rich fatty piece of meat in more fat, that was a kind of revelation, and one that would, 14 years later result in a book called Charcuterie. It gave me a course, but I don’t think it changed me. A true food revelation, in keeping with its theological implications, changes who you are in some way.
This happened to me for the first time, at age 33 after about 25 years as an aggressive home cook, in Skills class at the CIA with chef Michael Pardus, about whom I’ve written plenty. We were making brown veal stock most days and had used the brown stock to make a brown sauce (brown stock thickened with roux and with more aromats). It all smelled brown to me. That was it. Admittedly, I had a bit of an attitude about anything thickened with roux--where I got that notion I have no idea (I really thought béchamel had about as much flavor and usefulness in food as drywall joint compound). Brown sauce was then combined with more brown stock and reduced to make a seriously, ain't kidding around brown, brown sauce, which Pardus said was a classical demi-glace.
One of the groups prepared Pardus’s derivative, or a la minute, sauce demo, one item of which was this mud-Jello he called demi. I’d tasted it. It tasted brown.
Then he did the Sauce Robert demo. Sauce Robert is one of the oldest extant sauces still pretty much in its original form, dating to Careme I believe. Pardus sautéed some minced onion, added white wine, reduce it a little, thwapped in the congealed demi, added some mustard and mounted it with butter. Then the whole class tasted (something you can’t do when your watching a demo on TV, which is why food TV will always be more about entertainment than about cooking), tasting spoons diving for the pan.
It didn’t taste brown anymore, it taste light and clean and delicious, smooth on the palate, bright from the wine and mustard, sweet from the mirepoix used along the way and now the minced onion. That something could go from drab brown to deeply delicious in a few moments was the first part of the revelation; the second was confronting the fact of my own deep ignorance. That was the moment I realized how little I knew about food and cooking and how vast this new country that I’d just set out to explore was going to be.
I remain devoted to Sauce Robert and to brown veal stock, which is probably the one preparation that, more than any other, can transform a home cook’s dishes from home-cook-like to that approaching high-end restaurant food. I’m serious--the stuff is magical.
So, herewith my recipe for really good veal stock, which I did years ago for Gourmet. The recipe says the tomato paste and pepper is optional--why the editors did that I don’t know. Always use tomato paste in your veal stock.
You can make a brown sauce by thickening it with a brown roux and more caramelized mirepoix, and skimming skimming skimming, then for a demi-glace adding more veal stock and cooking it down skimming skimming skimming. And this is a good lesson, but it’s a project. Veal stock, shallot, mustard, white wine, served with pan-roasted pork or some kind of pork, it’s traditional partner, is fantastic, a revelation.
I made my appointment today for my second and third visits to an oral surgeon to finish the $3000 repair of my jaw. There's now a gaping whole where tooth number 19 used to be. I'm not complaining or naming names here but you tell me what's fair.
My long-suffering wife and I were dining at one of the higher-end, cutting edge restaurants in this fair city. I was eager to eat here, the chef was enormously welcoming and sent out three interesting small dishes in addition to all we were ordering. It was a lovely evening, a lively room, the LSW had cast off the stresses of her week and the kids and looked longingly at me across the table, I returning her limpid gaze as we savored the fine fare. We were practically cooing.
The server set down the fried oysters, four, each in a separate square dish, with a piquant sauce and some chiffonaded greenery. They were crisp on the outside and hot and organy inside, perfectly cooked and delicious. I bit down on the second one and drove a piece of shell like a chisel into a back molar, splitting it in two.
After a moment of waiting for any spine searing pain, I found the offending weapon (a circular piece of shell about a centimeter in diameter). When I eat a restaurant and am well-cared for, I feel like a guest. So I didn't want to be rude, but eating was now an impossibility and we'd need to be leaving. I told the server and showed her the shell, she showed the chef, who was profusely apologetic. On the way home, I called my dentist at home and he said he'd see me the following morning (a Sunday).
The tooth was a goner, Dentist said grimacing, and I was looking at a $3-4000 tab between him (above the gum) and the surgeon (below the gum). He then removed the loose half of the tooth, did something unspeakably awful-sounding to make sure I didn't wake in the night howling in pain (I think he called it a pulpectomy, using his drill to scramble the nerve like eggs), and sent me home, the left side of my face dragging on the parking lot blacktop.
The oral surgeon was no less fun ("Betty, I'm gonna need more bone graft in here!")
So, I called the chef, told him my little company of one didn't carry dental, could he ask his insurance to look into it. No problem, he said. Two weeks later his insurance lady called me back ("I've got bad new for you and bad news").
I was going to have to eat this one.
According an Ohio ruling, Mitchell v. TGIF, seventh district court of appeals, the restaurant would only be liable if it had been foreign matter in my juicy fried oyster, or if it was unreasonable to expect the substance. Glass, for instance. Shell is natural and expected, say the courts. As the ruling puts it: "under either foreign-natural test or reasonable expectation test, neither restaurant nor supplier had duty to protect patron from her injury." In Mitchell's case it was clam.
This really pisses me off. Maybe at a crap restaurant like Friday's you'd best take your life in your hands at every step--that may be a "reasonable expectation." But at a fine dining restaurant? My attorney friend, big Stu, said, "The law is not good on shells." Surely, I reasoned, the fine jurists of the seventh district could be persuaded that a fried oyster, golden brown on the outside and swooningly molten on the inside, when served at a fine-dining restaurant, cannot be reasonably expected to contain the very part of the oyster that would destroy the dish. The only reasonable expectation can be that it does NOT contain shell, otherwise it ceases to be a fried oyster that can be sold for $15. It would ruin the dish, not to mention the tooth. The cases big Stu cited for me (and there are several) are simply more reasons to be disenchanted with this country.
I've eaten at Masa in New York. This, though, will be at least five times what Masa cost, and will count as the most expensive of meal of my life.
And you know what's really galling? The chef charged me for the meal. Yes, he did take off the oysters, and the fancy pizza my wife had to carry home in a box because I was being a spoilsport and insisted on leaving early, but really, had I been in the chef's position? I'd have sent the guest home in a manner becoming an Oriental potentate. Havent heard from the guy since.
In today's LATimes article on boutique gins Charles Perry makes the interesting suggestion that America's martini fiasco -- namely that a martini made with vodka is still considered a martini -- began because of James Bond. I'm glad to see this issue raised. Martinis are made with gin, not vodka. If it's made with vodka it's not a martini. There's nothing wrong with vodka or the people who would order such a drink (nothing catastrophic anyway), but there is something wrong with the name. A Manhattan is made with bourbon; if you make it with scotch, it has a different name, a Rob Roy. The same distinction ought to hold for replacing gin with vodka in a martini preparation. Perhaps call it a James Bond. Or a Charles Perry. Even a VM. Or in keeping with a contemporary food issue, a Sea Bug. It makes me sad when I order a martini and the bartender asks "Gin or Vodka" as if all were right with the world. I would welcome suggestions for a proper name and if there is any clear consensus, I will do my part to spread the word.
I hope everyone saw Kim Severson's excellent article on organic hot dogs in last Wednesday's NYTimes. I'm all for anything that supports grass fed beef as these dogs do. And Ed Levine, one of the most knowledgeable writers on the food available in NYC, was moved to purchase and taste some of these dogs and reports the auspicious news.
I was especially interested by Severson's paragraph addressing an important change:
The key is that the curing code has recently been cracked. Instead of relying on sodium nitrates or the more common sodium nitrites for color, texture and shelf life, hot dog makers have found a magic solution of celery juice, lactic acid and sea salt that rescues the organic dog from its tough brown reputation and rockets it to pink juiciness. It also addresses the concern among some consumers and scientists that nitrites and nitrates might contribute to cancer.
Why would celery juice and lactic acid keep these dogs pink and juicy?
I don't know for sure but my guess is because the celery juice is loaded with nitrite. Nitrite is a chemical that is found in green leafy veg, such as spinach and celery. There's nothing wrong with celery juice in hot dogs--in fact it's probably important in addressing the botulism concern in any smoked sausage, the main reason for nitrites in hot dogs--but to claim that these hot dogs don't contain nitrites is likely misleading.
I am not an advocate for nitrites (or the different sodium nitrate which is used exclusively for long term dry-cured sausages), I don't think we should put it in our soups and stews and ice cream and coffee, but I am an advocate for accurate information. Information on nitrites and their effects on our health, how cancer-causing nitrosamines are formed in foods containing nitrites, and how dangerous they are is sketchy at best. I'd like to know more.
The food scientists I've spoken with say that companies promoting their food with "no nitrites" claims are doing so for one reason: marketing; once again, big business plays to an unwitting consumer.
In the meantime I will definitely be trying the organic dogs.
Diane St. Clair left a career in the New York municipal health system for a farm in Vermont where she now raises cows to make and sell butter. Some folks think its among the best butter in the country. I've been corresponding by email with her for about a year now about food and writing matters. She's a good writer and a smart farmer. She came across my rant and wrote me the following email, which I'm reprinting in full, the perspective of someone who makes her living from and coexists with animals:
Michael
Saw your food rant today on the small farms blog, which I came upon by accident when googling 'critique of organic farming.' It was quite entertaining, along with Bourdain's counter-rave (talk about someone who needs to be on lithium...but that's part of the entertainment). I saw no farmer perspectives on this issue. I saw the NYTimes article, lobster in coffin, etc. My immediate response was, another Whole Foods consumer gimmick to make liberal foodies feel ok about their food choices, of course, seen within the context of having just finished Pollan's book and seeing Whole Foods in a completely jaded way.
Is there a difference between cats, cows, lobsters, geese? I think a lot has to do with culture--we don't eat horses, they are our pets. Is there any difference in terms of animal behavior between a horse and a cow or a pig--absolutely not. As a former horse owner and a current dairy farmer, I believe they are absolutely the same beast in terms of trainability, personality (cows are nicer), attachment to humans. It's just that culturally, we accept the ingestion of cows, not horses, and thus treat the former as food animals, with all the bad stuff that implies.
It is ironic to me that the animals we eat, we treat the worst--shouldn't we treat those animals with the utmost care--feeding them, as we do, to ourselves and our children? I love my baby calves--but if a bull is born, I raise him as humanely as I can--on green grass, in the sun, drinking lots of milk, I try to have him killed on farm (if I am eating him--if he is to be sold, he has to go to a slaughter house--makes no sense) and then I eat him for the next 6 months. The bottom line is that every species on the farm should have a chance to be what they are, do what they do--the cows to eat grass, the pigs to root around, the chickens to dig in the grass and run around, etc. Sure I'll milk the cows (PETA doesn't like this) and I'll eat the pigs and chickens. But they had a good life and did not suffer in the end. It's all any of us can ask for.
The foie gras thing--it's a tough one. Should crating veal be illegal? I think it should because you can raise veal that tastes better uncrated. How about chickens--shouldn't there be industry standards (laws?) about how many hens can be crammed in a cage? I think there should be because you can raise better chickens that way. You can't get foie gras any other way than it is currently done--that's the tough part. I guess the day that you eat foie gras you have to balance your karma out by sending a donation to Heifer International or something.
The good thing is that people are talking about food in a new way--thinking about where our food comes from; the fact that cheap food costs us down the line, in terms of the environment and our health; that just because something is labeled organic doesn't necessarily mean it's sustainably produced; and what do we do when our modern sense of ethics--all living things, including grass, have feelings--clashes with age old cultural traditions, ie. eating foie gras.
What did you have for dinner? I had a grass fed lamb chops, grilled, with a curry emulsion, over couscous and a salad from the garden. Couldn't be better--absolutely no guilt.
Diane
This continual talk about the ethics of eating creatures that were once living is starting to get on my nerves. It’s not enough that those knuckleheads in Chicago and those sensitivos in California want to waste their time on the foie issue and the Whole Foods people figured out a cool marketing tool in playing to our arrogant anthropomorphist inclinations—giving lobsters spa treatment so we feel better about driving a knife through their skull? Brilliant.
What’s next, no oysters? No sir—they’re alive! No more salmon roe—think of all those unborn salmon you're smearing on your toast and dotting on your blini! All the good salmon deeds that will remain undone! All that emotional life of the unborn chickens! Gone! Delicately poached and nestled on frissée! Clarence the Angel where are you?
What is going on here? Lobsters are insects! Ducks are not harmed by gavage! The real victims are the agribusiness chickens, cows and hogs, but the animal rights activists can’t touch the culprits responsible, true goliaths. So instead The People try to save the little animals. But I say such people are either motivated by self-interest or ignorance.
Beyond the fact that our current hand-wringing foreshadows an America that increasingly regulates how we live our lives (with a government attempting, via warfare, to regulate how other countries run their lives), which is scary enough, the more insidious danger to me is that we think clams and ducks and lobsters are people too. They’re not. But the flip side to this is that, in a way, we’re not all that far off when we believe such things. This is the height of human arrogance, to think that we’re somehow above the animal kingdom. We have one trait beyond our handy opposable thumb: we know we're conscious. Ducks are conscious, yes but do they know it? No. Perhaps some very advanced French duck is right now fitting a Gauloise into its cork-tipped filter and adjusting its existentialist beret, but not in America. They’re animals.
And so are we, but in our self-consciousness have become hubristic, and therefore harmful. Make no mistake: we are animals. I am no different from a salmon. Why else would I return to Cleveland!? Cleveland! I had to return. I returned by smell. I returned to spawn. I’m not kidding. There is no other logical justification for the apparently ludicrous decision to live in Cleveland when I don’t have to. I think if we acknowledged our place in the animal kingdom—happily at the top of the food chain—and stopped thinking we were so damned superior to animals, it would be a better earth all around. We are animals who eat other animals. There is nothing wrong with this. Has this country gone insane? Even the restaurant critic for the New York Times, former Italy bureau chief, a thoughtful and reasonable man with a powerful pen, he’s having a moral dilemma over his shrimp! This is crazy!
Where is Bourdain? Tony, you’re an evil motherfucker, but I know you’re with me on this one. Help me. Where are you? Iran? Turkey? Put down that opium pipe and get your skinny ass back to your own country and do your show here, before we lose it. We need a full and clear view of how far off the track we’ve gone with our most common and basic pursuit, to nourish ourselves and our families. We need smart voices to get us out of these woods. Where is Steingarten? Jeffrey, you scaly curmudgeon, speak up! We can’t lay it all on Pollan—he did his part. What about someone with real power to sway the American masses. Rachael Ray! How about it? She affects the cutesy Suzie next door but I know for a fact she’s got a pair of brass knuckles in the pocket of those fat pants of hers. Emeril! Millions listen nightly to you! Put down that tube of Crest and teach people about the food we eat! Wake up! It’s not about the ducks and the lobsters. It’s about the corn and the oil. About big business and powerful lobbying in DC. They want your money and that’s all they want. They want your money and you can give it to them or withhold it. Make good choices about what you buy and what you eat and what you feed your kids.
All right, I’m done, I haven’t even started my work this morning and I’ve gone and shot 700 words on a rant. I’m going to go eat a hot dog, that’s always a good morning restorative…
Today two of my favorite subjects were combined by one of my favorite writers about food, Judy Rodgers Salt and Russ Parsons. Rodgers, chef and an owner of SF's Zuni Cafe, is one of the most observant cooks I’ve ever met. Repetition and paying attention: that’s the essence of becoming a good cook. Judy knows the how a leg of lamb that reaches an internal temp of 100 degrees an hour after it went into the oven will be different from one that took two hours to reach that temperature. The kind of deep lamb knowledge you only get from roasting a thousand legs. Here she discusses salt, not to season food before it goes into the pan, but to transform the food well before it’s cooked. We tend to take salt for granted but in fact the ability to use salt is THE most important skill a cook has. (Is full-disclosure necessary here? Judy blurbed my charcuterie book with uncommon generosity and eloquence. And for this reason I’ll never be able to write about her for a newspaper or magazine, which is a shame, because she’s one of the most interesting cooks in the country. And she really does cook in Zuni’s open kitchen, in corduroy skirts and vivid stockings, number 2 pencils holding her long hair in a bun!)
From the big daily on the other coast, I can’t resist trumpeting a fellow Cleveland boy’s two-star triumph. Way to go, Michael (and Jonathan Sawyer and the Parea staff). You do this beleagured town proud. Stay focused.
Apropos of knowing whats what on your processed-food ingredients list in addition to high fructose cs, dont forget MSG. I'm reminded of this as I perused the just arrived Art of Eating, Edward Behr's excellent and elegant quarterly in which Rowan Jacobsen discusses the issue of Umami, also the subject of a recent book called The Fifth Taste by Anna and David Kasabian. Umami can be described as a kind of deep savoryness that you get from tomatoes and fish sauce and mushrooms, and Jacobsen's article is the most lucid and concise discussion of umami I've read. (One great source of umami, Jacobsen tells us, is breast milk: add a little breast milk to your bechamel sauce for a je ne sais quoi that will have your guests clamoring for more!)
About MSG, the effective part of which is an amino acid called glutamate, he correctly writes: MSG has taken a bad rap. It's effective as a taste enhancer but by the 1970s many second-rate restaurants had a heavy hand with the MSG, and it was blamed for Chinese Restaurant Syndrome: symptoms of headaches, dizziness, and nausea after eating food to which large quantities of MSG have been added. Chinese Restaurant Syndrome has been debunked, and MSG now has a fairly clean bill of health, but it is still virtually synonymous with artificial food additive.
All true. Even in large quantities, MSG isn't apparently harmful and few people actually have an uncomfortable sensitivity to it. It was originally derived from seaweed, that is, it's natural. But in my opinion umami is best enlisted in your dishes via foods rather than MSG. Try adding a few drops of good fish sauce, nam pla or nouc mam, to your macaroni and cheese and see for yourself.
I loved Melanie Warner’s smart article on High Fructose Corn Syrup in today’s NYTimes business section not only because it explains a subject that is not very well understood by the public (what HFCS is and how it’s derived from corn), and suggests that HFCS, which has for several years been demonized as a cause of this country’s obesity crisis (and has recently obsessed the beloved megnut), is no worse for you than regular table sugar, which can be derived from sugar cane or beets. What the article points up for me is how badly we base our eating decisions, we who are trying to eat as well as we can.
The article leads with a woman-on-the-street comment—a Rhode Islander says she avoids foods containing HFCS because it’s been linked to obesity. But that’s as far as she goes. We have to stop to think if this makes sense, and if it does, why?
From a physical standpoint, I can’t imagine HFCS is worse than sugar for its being processed (enzymes break carbohydrates down into glucose then into fructose). It’s not bad for you pre se. But does that mean you should embrace it?
No: 1) If you’re eating something with HFCS this means likely that it’s got a lot of other crap in it that’s worse. 2) The cheapness of it has allowed soft drink companies, for instance, to produce bigger quantities of it, which we, like lab rats, consume in whatever quantities they give it to us in. 3) It perpetuates our reliance on agribusiness corn, which is just a couple steps away from perpetuating our reliance on oil. (As Pollan shows in his excellent book, Omnivore’s Dilemma—I’m halfway through, and so far it’s his best book.) These are the kinds of things we must know in order to make decent decisions about what we consume and why.
Same with nitrites. People avoid them without knowing why, having only some vague notion that because it sounds like a harmful chemical additive it must be. The notion that nitrites are bad for you is underscored by bacon companies who have introduced non-nitrite bacon (both commercial companies and good companies such as Niman). In reporting a story on bacon and corned beef for The NYTimes last fall, I asked a food scientist if there were something I was missing here. He said, "No, it’s a marketing device." I wonder if the companies themselves even know why they’re doing it. Perhaps even they think they’re doing the consumer a great service.
The fact is nitrite, which I write about in Charcuterie, are naturally occurring chemicals (they’re in spinach and celery and other vegetables, for instance), and aren’t apparently harmful in and of themselves. They have been shown in certain situations (under very high heat for example) to produce nitrosamines which have been shown to cause cancer. So some caution is advisable. But there’s little evidence that shows nitrites (usually in the form of sodium nitrite, a curing salt used in bacon and sausages and corned beef) are harmful in the quantities that we eat them today. (For a definitive statement on cautions and facts, see Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking.) But how many know this?
I was grilling sausages and bacon yesterday at one of our growers markets here in Cleveland and a woman asked if the stuff on the grill had nitrites. I said the bacon did but the sausage didn’t. I tried to explain to her what I knew about nitrites, but she wrinkled her nose. Though she couldn’t explain why she thought it prudent to avoid nitrite, she wasn’t buying what I had to say. And I wasn’t even selling the bacon or wursts.
Even the most fundamental aspects of eating are misuderstood, and yet are acted upon. We think eating fat makes us fat. It doesn’t—eating more calories than we expend makes us fat. Eating cholesterol doesn’t raise our cholesterol; the food cholesterol in eggs doesn’t translate into blood cholesertol, but saturated animal fats can. This is the information that’s important.
When you avoid eating something, I hope you know why you are avoiding it. As a rule I avoid eating chemically processed food (though I have a weakness for Pringles); I avoid eating anything that comes out of a box or a cellophane or waxed-paper bag. But I adore good processed food, preferably food I’ve precessed myself, like pork belly, either cured into bacon, or poached in fat. That’s the best kind of processed food there is and should be consumed with gusto.
I’ve been teaching a writers’ workshop in Chautauqua all week, one of the most unusual and interesting spots of the country, a summer resort, an enclave of Victorian gingerbread cottages devoted to intellectual and spiritual pursuits (it has thus made anything good to eat, this many times daily pleasure of the flesh, really hard to come by).
But it’s given me a moment to do something I’ve wanted to address pretty much since I started publishing books. Respond to critics. This was one reason a non-fiction writer told me he blogged. What pleasure, what satisfaction! I thought. To answer the snarky and ham-handed journalistic rabble; until recently one could only sit there, wrists and ankles bound to the chair, mouth gagged, and absorb the mauling. It’s a double-edged sword though because one can easily come off sounding petulant and whiny, especially when the reviews are mainly favorable. But I have wanted to address a couple issues some reviews (and comments from a couple of journalists) have brought up: the notion of enthusiasm for one’s subject and conflict of interest issues for a writer who both works with and writes about chefs.
In his nytimes review of my book, John T. Edge calls me a gusher who's too cozy with his subjects and implies that I hid the fact that I’d worked with Thomas Keller on his books (he had to go to the PR material, he writes, to learn that I’d coauthored these books that I speak so highly of); in fact, I note numerous times in Reach of a Chef my part in these cookbooks and moreover they’re listed on the “other books by” page in the front of the book, and my association and friendship with Thomas Keller is spelled out in the opening pages of the book. But the implication that I’m shilling for my own work isn’t really what bothers me; it’s the slightly unctuous tone of the reviewer. Isn’t he really questioning the conflict of interest in writing about Keller? If he didn’t like the book, he should just say so. It reads as if the Times editors forced him into a positive slant at the end. I say all this, of course, with gratitude to the reviewer and to the book review editors for consideration at all, something not to be taken lightly.
A more generous review (but not without its criticisms) comes from Louisa Thomas in the NYObesrver. Identified as being on staff at The New Yorker, Ms Thomas seems to convey the spirit of my book as I intended it, but even her reading is perplexing. I make a hero out of Keller in the book, she says, adding that I believe chefs are the high priests of the food world. Edge, too, says Keller is my muse. This was more true of the last book, Soul of a Chef, in which I truly could seem to be gushing. In Reach of a Chef, I don’t gush, relative to what I’m capable of when I care about a subject. The opposite really—I’m the most skeptical person there is with regard to the contemporary chef. We are entering an unromantic era with regard to chefs and restaurants. In this new world, Keller has lost his shoes, is out of balance, and says he’s not a chef anymore. And I think this is something that people don’t want to hear. People still want to believe that chefs are artists, which they very rarely are.
In the end, there are genuine reasons to be enthusiastic in today’s chef world (e.g. Melissa Kelly, Masa Takayama—if there’s a hero in my book, it’s him—Judy Rodgers and her smart words, what an observant cook and excellent writer she is)—but it’s more complex now, the chef is in transition, and I don’t know what the next phase will be. There’s simply too many alumni coming out of great kitchens; a finite number can fit into the always moving circle cast by the spotlight of public adoration; we can only have so many celebrity chefs. Those chefs who no longer cook have become in effect CEOs, and it’s hard to maintain celebrity when you’re a CEO, except by becoming a criminal.
About the gushing: I don’t gush indiscriminately (and I wouldn’t call it gushing; over-idealizing is more accurate). The people about whom I “gush” deserve it. And again, I do very little gushing in the new book, because I think a lot of what’s happening in the upper echelons of the chef world are confusing and sad. But I think that for journalists, especially those in the New York food media, being skeptical and snarky (which is the opposite of gushing) is somehow perceived as an asset and somehow beneficial to the reader. Only rarely is the snarky writer talented enough to deliver a truly great read, a really ugly, delightful evisceration. I’d go so far as to claim that snarkiness and talent are mutually exclusive for all but the rarest writer.
Two journalists have questioned how I could have written about someone formerly close with Keller, Adam Block, a businessman, for The Times magazine, which, given the aforementioned reviews deserves a response. It's important and interesting, and I intend to address it, but I’m late for my class...
So attention must be paid. Thursday night a group of about 50 friends and sinister types surprised Tony Bourdain in honor of his half-century on earth. Lured to Siberia on the pretext of an interview with Rolling Stone, Tony had little inkling of the party, judging from the unseemly blubbering that followed the revelation. The heroic drunkenness for which he is highly esteemed, however, was not long in waiting. He’d been out with Mario the night before until dawn; presumably Mario was sleeping it off, but Bourdain himself was as ever in fine form.
Laurent Gras showed and I learned the hopeful news that he’s close to signing on a Manhattan space where he can hang his own shingle. Those who ate at Fifth Floor in S.F. or at Peacock Alley in Manhattan know why this is good news. Gabrielle Hamilton appeared, babe attached like a lamprey the whole time and unfazed by the deafening jukebox. I’d been eager to meet her because she’s that rare creature, a genuine cook and chef who can really write. I love her restaurant Prune and am eager for her memoir. However, she was deeply skeptical of me when I introduced myself, and clearly could not be swayed even by enormous amounts of charm, so I cut my losses moved on to…Bigfoot. Bigfoot, the restaurant guy described in Kitchen Confidential, and Tony’s trauma scars remain raw and sizzling. “To this day I wake at 6 am because of this guy, no matter what country I’m in,” he repeated in front of the man. And Tony’s mom! His mom was there! Gladys. She’s a copy editor on the Metro desk at the Times, clearly suffers no fools, and was unabashedly proud of her son (and surely thrilled that he was here on his 50th rather than in jail, which is what she would have predicted twenty years ago). A delight, actually to speak with her, very elegant lady.
Lots of media folks, his publisher and publicists, his show’s production crew, zeropointzero, finer folks there never were, I worked with them on Tony’s Vegas show, they’re pros and bring some genuine originality to TV food and travel.
And a man named Bulldog had come up from Maryland. Bulldog has a talk radio show there from 6 to 10 am and was due back at what was now this morning. Before catching his limo south, Bourdain insisted on being on his show the following morning. Now Bourdain is a well-known media magnet and resists no opportunity to flog his books (he considers being on book tour to be like running for public office). So it surprised me little that he was angling, drunkenly, for more media even at his own party. And it is exactly at such a moment when I am most eager to loathe the scoundrel—our relationship has been schizophrenic from the beginning owing to the lies he has spread about me in public (people along my street here in Cleveland have actually whispered to my neighbor Betsy, “I didn’t know Michael had a drinking and gambling problem”; I’m totally serious, this is what I put up with)—he turns around and undoes me with an act of unabashed generosity. It wasn’t himself he wanted on the radio, he wanted both of us on and he wanted to extol the virtues of my book. As I learned later from Bulldog, Tony had privately insisted, insisted, that not a single mention of his book be made on the air. The call from Bulldog came at 9:45 the next morning, and so it was to be.
And I didn’t even bring the guy a present. It was very late when I had the good sense to zigzag toward Ninth Avenue and raise my arm for a taxi, leaving Tony, the formidable Grillbitch who’d organized the night’s festivities, and Tony’s Noam-Chomsky-quoting fascist Milan consort, in a giddy haze of cigarette smoke and garbage fumes…. Ah, to be Bourdain at 50…seems he’s having quite a time of it, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
Steve Sando emailed to make two things clear that aren't either in my post or Bittman's article—that there's a difference between dried corn and dried corn that has had its skin removed (which is called hominy).
"The Mexicans exclusively use dried corn that hasn't been prepared and it's a lot of work and that's why they compromise and use the yucky canned. My posole/hominy has had the skin removed by being soaked in CaL. It's been done already so it's kind of more than just dried corn.
"And this is the real confusing thing: Posole with an S is American/Southwestern/Indian and refers to the grain and the dish. Pozole with a Z is always Mexican and referes only to the dish.
"There was a study done on why heavy polenta (ground whole cornmeal) eaters in Italy were having bad gastro problems while the Mexicans, who consume much more corn, were not. It was the skin. And it turns out soaking in lime (CaL) adds a major nutrional boost so it's really an example of a processsed food that's better than the whole grain."
Steve also said you could use a food processor to make grits, but that seems like a blade destroying idea. I think a coffee grinder would do the trick.
In the course of reporting a story for one of our finer food publications, I learned something so revolting it had no place in the article. I was talking with a leading sausage maker, both of us extolling the wonders of beef and pork and fat, and I asked him what were some of the things that make an inferior sausage. He listed a number of factors and then said, "But the really disgusting stuff is mechanically separated meat." What…exactly…is mechanically separated meat, says I. He explained that animal carcasses from which the main muscles have been removed, that is everything good to eat, are dumped into some sort of industrial strength salad spinner, called a beehive, and whipped around so hard that all the scraps of meat still clinging to bone and cartilage fly off and through a sieve, and are collected as a kind of pink paste and used to pad out any number of meat products.
I said, So that means all kinds of other "material" could possibly be included? He said yes. I said, Like nerves and glands and cartilage and minute bone fragments. Yes, it’s measured for “calcium content” (aka pulverized bone), can only have a certain percentage by weight. The pink came from bone marrow. Spinal tissue? Apparently this is why you can get mechanically separated bovine dirt cheap these days.
I'm not going to judge anyone for choosing an agribusiness processed wurst over an actual pork sausage with the recommended 30% percent pork fat and delectible seasonings, but if you're feeling particularly proud of yourself for opting for that Healthy Choice turkey sausage, check the label for mechanically separated....
And remember, as always, the advice of the great cartoonist B. Kliban: never eat anything bigger than your head.
for all those welcomes. I'm grateful and appreciate the comments. I'll try to be spontaneous—which is not a part of my character (glacial is an accurate term)—because that really does seem somehow to be fruitful in this medium. Writing though is a funny business. It's very difficult to "see" what you write when it's still hot on the page. Somehow all the thoughts that lead to one sentence are still connected in your mind to that sentence when you read it. When you come back later, the sentence can seem completely different because all those other thoughts are gone and all that remains is the cold hard sentence. Then you can "see" it. Also—who said this, Dorothy Parker?—how do I know what I think till I read what I write? A fact of writing: the very act itself helps to generate and determine the ideas. once I read what I write, only then can I begin to do the real writing, which is of course re-writing. That's why this blogging is simultaneously scary and thrilling.
And yes I would and will set down some thoughts about kitchen ratios, which is to the cook what the chart of chemical elements is to the chemist.
And my wife Donna, a saint in too many ways to count, points out that maybe, just maybe, there are a few people who don't know who I am, what my books are, or what on earth I'm doing on the faithful Meg's blog. For those people, here is a link to my web site, which has information on my food and non-food books as well as a current bio.
I was delighted to read Mark Bittman's column in The Times dining pages today because dried corn is such an underused but fantastic ingredient. Bittman's columns are one of the few recipe columns I read regularly—they have no frills, just practical information cleanly and straightforwardly written.
I started buying dried corn from Rancho Gordo, Steve Sando's Napa business that also sells extraordinary dried beans and a few other choice goods (like the dried Mexican oregano).
Bittman fries his corn. Dried corn, soaked then cooked like a dried legume, is the backbone of pesole, but it's also good just boiled and tossed with butter, lime and salt. If you have some sort of mill, you could turn it into grits. A great product I wish more people used.
Molly O'Neill came to Cleveland for dinner. She and a friend showed up at my house looking like refugees from a Dead tour—furniture and overflowing clothes stuffed into the back of the car. She was slightly giddy it seemed, manic from the starbucks and too much time on the road. We'd never met; I'd only known her as a byline in the NYTimes where she worked for many years before leaving to work on books.
Last winter an editor at Scribner I'd recently met sent me O'Neill's book called Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food and Baseball asking for a blurb. (See more on blurbs below.) I loved it. She's a cornfed Ohio girl, so I've always felt a sympathy with her, and the memoir, which mainly focuses on her family (she's the oldest of six kids, her youngest brother being Paul, who played for the Yankees) and her work, but food is in the background, appropriately so, given the nature of this memoir.
This was a week and a half ago, she was in downstate Ohio flogging her book, and had wanted to see Farmer Jones—she'd been meaning to write about it, this unique grower, for ages, a great story in her home state, and then, lo, a story by Amanda H appeared in the daily Times, which pissed her off—and the amazing produce at the Jones family's Chefs Garden near the lake coast. (My first time there had been a few months earlier, joining a group led by Charlie Trotter who wanted Ferran Adria to see it—I tasted, among other things, garlic roots, and they were fantastic.) Flattered by my blurb, no doubt, and aware of my work, O'Neill had called wanting to meet and suggested we somehow get together since she'd be less than an hour away.
So that's how Molly O'Neill came to be standing in my kitchen.
And I'm writing about it here because it was an amazing thing for me, personally. I had begun to write about food, in an amateurish way (as food writers almost invariably begin) at exactly the time she'd begun writing her column in The NYTimes magazine, early 1990s. I loved her style, her interests, her generosity. I was at the time, an anonymous schmo in Cleveland Heights who only wanted to write books (food was one of numerous subjects I wrote about then). Molly somehow seemed beyond the august Times, seemed to write ultimately out of a personal love of her subject; this quality describes the overarching spirit of her work; for her, food was a way to get at the bigger things, and that ultimately was why writing about food mattered to me too.
It was exactly at that time that I began writing about food and cooking, cooking with chefs, who on a national level were just beginning to get famous in larger numbers (Emeril Live was still a few years off, Thomas Keller was out of work and broke), and reading Molly O'Neill's columns—even doing some of the recipes: I still remember rolling chicken breasts around prosciutto and poaching them in tomato water (excellent), and artichoke gnocchi (an epic disaster in my cooking-from-recipes experience, a waste of artichokes a waste of time, an abomination of my own making...I forgot to ask her about this). At any rate, I was imprinted, if thats how you say it, in the early 1990s on Molly ONeill. And now, fifteen years later, I was like a chick following around a completely different species in my own kitchen absolutely convinced we were related.
Molly turned out to be funny and smart, and she struck me also as mischievous. She was quick on her feet and I could see that she could be an operator in nyc (in a positive networking shrewd and savvy way), but there was also this huge sweetness and generosity about her, which no doubt comes from the same place that informs her best writing.
We went out to dinner and talked shop, mainly, about our books, about how we make our living, about our annoyance with Bill Buford's book Heat (not the book itself, I hear it's terrific; Molly's gripes were political/feminist, mine were and are simply focused on how well it seems to be selling relative to mine, in other words the abject jealousy attending another writer's fame and money ((I cant bring myself to read the book just yet—a writer impersonating a line cook, that's my territory! (((honestly, I froth at the mouth when I see it ((((how the hell is he getting all that press, the bastard!)))))))))), and about the difference between professional cheffing and amateur cooking and how vastly more important amateur cooking is. She was adamant about this point and I know she's right.
Molly is involved in a colossal project called One Big Table, a gigantic cookbook of American pot luck cooking that is also an event. "I've been collecting recipes and food stories for nearly a decade," she wrote this morning from home when I asked for a clarification on a few points of this unusual deal, "and in addition to culling them from my foodie pals, I have for the past couple years been giving potlucks across America to collect recipes for my project—and raise money for America's Second Harvest, the nation's food bank network. I'm currently gearing up to take to the road in an Airstream that, in my mind, resembles a covered dish. So I can drive it to any potluck anywhere." This book to be published next year will have 750 recipes (a huge number, btw, for a cookbook), but will be more than just food and recipes; I imagine it will be a kind of American self-portrait.
She and her friend had to head back immediately after dinner to Columbus because her dog was on death's doorstep down there. But I felt really happy and really lucky that night, and I began hatching a plan to visit her at her home in upstate new york. Often you meet someone who was hero to you at an important time and they turn out to be an asshole. But Molly exceeded even what I'd hoped for, what I'd thought in my best-case scenario. But her columns always had that effect, too.
People not in publishing wonder about the quotes on the back books (especially recently when a couple retracted their blurbs). No one in publishing really knows how effective they are, but they evidently can’t come up with better idea of what to put on the back of a book before it’s reviewed, so there it is. I’m not a fan of them, mainly because they’re boring. Though check out frank mccourt’s almost tipsy-sounding rhapsody to Molly O’Neill, we need more like that; actually all those blurbs are unusually candid and interesting; reading most blurbs you’d think writers who penned them were high school math teachers (that's not a judgment on the later, the best of whom I have more respect for than I do for most of the former). The best chefs are generous with their food and likewise with their words; they gladly blurb their colleagues' books through an assistant, and I don’t criticize them for this. I have met only one chef who I know actually reads the galleys and comments in her own words; she is a great writer herself: Judy Rodgers, about whom I have much to say, but later. My personal blurb rules are basic and seem pretty obvious: only blurb a book you’ve read and only blurb a book you would recommend without reservation. That these obvious rules are not always followed is why, as far as I’m concerned, blurbs don’t mean what they might.
An electronic encounter with a woman named Tana who professed to be a fan began this guest blog; Tana was quirky and engaging with a really genuine e-voice. After a while she told me I should be blogging (she has a blog I admire on a subject that I care a lot about). I’ve got enough to write as it is, I said, it’s my family’s main source of income, I don’t need extra writing. Tana didn’t actually call me a loser, I think she was just quiet. Simultaneously, Meg Hourihan emailed asking if she could get a press copy of my new book The Reach of a Chef. I mentioned Tana’s suggestion and Meg laid out the pros and cons and gave me the names of a couple emblematic blogs by non-fiction writers (stevenberlinjohnson, for example). Then she suggested I guest blog right here to see how I liked it. I’ve long known about her blog, liked it, liked that she’d gone over to food absolutely, and I respected the fact that she’d actually done time in kitchens. That’s not a vanity shot she put on her about page. I also like her straightforward and clearheaded writing. So here I am, and happy to be so.
What’s in it for you, reader, remains to be seen. What’s in it for me, though, I've thought a lot about.
First, I get to write about whatever I want in the way that I want to, immediately. When I write for magazines such as gourmet or most recently the NYTimes, the copy gets heavily worked over. It feels kind of like getting beaten up, and you have to stand there and take it. When it’s over I sometimes feel it’s not a better story, it’s just a different story. I’m sure it’s a better story when the mauling is over, and the editors I’ve worked with have been without exception excellent—I would even go so far as to say they’re necessary! I’m speaking only of my bruised viscera. (My editor at Gourmet just last week emailed a comment from another of her writers, a gentler version and just as true: “My copy is the cat toy of the masthead.”) While we need the many-chefs-stirring-the-soup, heavily worked over, highly compressed newspaper and magazine story, I also have liked the unfinished, untucked nature of the blog. I like people unadorned and in their natural state, too. There’s a credibility to an encounter when the person you’re talking with has bed head and a mug of coffee that simply isn’t there in the more formal circumstance of a job interview, say, or cocktail party.
Blogs also have a thrilling immediacy. I write books. I spend months gathering material and organizing it and structuring a narrative on which to hang all the stuff I’ve gathered, and then more months to do the writing work, which is the work I love best. But to write something and publish it instantly is still a novelty to me. There are dangers inherent in this ability, but also great energy and possibility.
Third, I get to see if blogging suits my writing life. I was a copyboy at The New York Times from 1985-87. Of the many important things I learned there was a reporter’s absolute obedience to balance, to giving all parties their own voice, the fairness essential to anything as powerful as The Times. This checks-and-balance ethic of journalistic integrity has arguably never been stronger there since the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller catastrophes. The other thing I learned there was that I was not a newspaperman, I was physically unsuited to writing daily on deadline for tomorrow’s paper. People who don’t write daily for a living rarely realize how physical the work of writing every day is. Blogging in this respect is an unknown to me.
Fourth, as Meg argued to me, it could be a way of amplifying my other writing, perhaps developing new readers and engaging more immediately with those already out there. Am I doing it to promote my new book? Not really, the timing is coincidental. I don’t expect to sell a bundle of books by blogging (no matter how much I’d LIKE to, but that’s another topic). If I could just let others who didn’t know about my work know about it through this very high-persona form of writing, blogging, that would make it worthwhile. Also, engaging with readers about my books is important to me.
Fifth, there’s so much fun stuff I encounter that could just never fit in an article or a book (a surprise dinner with the writer Molly O’Neill or some really disgusting information about agribusiness sausages). Maybe there’s a reason for that, maybe this stuff shouldn’t be written at all--but you don’t have to read it and you don’t have to pay for it.
In this blog I imagine I will want to discuss food, food writing, books, issues in my new book about the world of restaurants and chefs and about writing about them, not to mention general issues of a writing life. And anything else readers out there might be curious about. I’ll leave the comments on.
With thanks to Meg,
Michael Ruhlman
