A Literary Feast

How I Became A DIY Burnout

Posted on January 2nd, 2013

I have a brown thumb. I kill houseplants with 100% effectiveness. So I was thrilled when I was able to cultivate kombucha. Granted, it doesn’t need to be watered, or really tended in any way, but just the fact that I could take a half bottle of store-bought liquid and turn it into a thick, slimy culture that covered the whole surface of my bowl-full-of-tea seemed like a microbiological miracle.

Once my kombucha took off, there was no stopping me. I became a fermentation fiend. Jars and bottles covered every available surface. Yogurt, kefir, cheese, kimchi, sour pickles, apple cider vinegar, even lacto-fermented root and ginger beer. Time and again I was delighted by the magical transformation of raw materials into something richer and more flavorful.

My intentional-spoilage projects gave me confidence in the kitchen, and this late-onset foodie started making up for lost time. I sautéed, I simmered, I baked, I soaked and sprouted and milked and blended… Though I never mastered the nuances of fine cuisine, soon I had developed a handful of recipes that satisfied both my desire for delicious flavors and my growing compulsion to make for myself what others might buy.

I began to resent the people who bought conventional versions of all of the products I was creating. Who in their right mind would purchase those tiny plastic cups of yogurt? Didn’t they know they were made by machine?! I work in a grocery store, and it was a daily struggle to contain my snobbery. Ghee? Sure, I’ll show you where that is, and barely resist the urge to try to convince you to make it your damn self… Days when I would get to show off my knowledge were almost worse; I’d get a question about fermenting vegetables or making yogurt and I’d launch right in, only to watch the customer’s eyes glaze over after 20 seconds. I couldn’t figure out why everyone wanted everything to be so easy! Wasn’t working at it REALLY HARD the point? Didn’t that make it more satisfying?

Winter was coming on and I was sure that I was ready. I had my vitamin D supplement, I was sprouting all of my grains and beans for heightened vitamin and mineral availability, and consuming vast amounts of home cultured probiotic foods. So when I first started getting headaches, I was flummoxed. Days later I was felled by a sinus infection the likes of which I’d never seen. I made myself a complex herbal tea blend and tried to soldier on, but to no avail. All the neti pot in the world was no match for that wall of congestion, and I won’t even tell you about the colors of the snot.

I felt betrayed. What had I been doing wrong? Every day I had a smoothie that was packed with antioxidants, phytonutrients, and omegas. Surely my homemade almond breads and muffins provided plenty of protein and healthy fats. I was spending every waking, non-working moment stirring, chopping, grinding, straining, seasoning, and cleaning up. And still the colds and sinus infections continued, in wave after unceasing wave until I forgot what it was like to not have a raw nose.

Then, I called in sick one day (not my style) and spent the whole day in bed. I snuggled with my kitty, watched TV, surfed the net… it was beautiful. I was working 6, sometimes 7 days a week, so with all of my food projects, it was incredibly rare for me to spend hours at a time doing nothing. I LOVED it.

It was so much fun I started planning ahead for it. I’d schedule a ‘night off’, don my PJs, and watch stupid TV while chatting with some long-lost acquaintance on Facebook. I felt incredibly guilty about it, especially since I was slipping on the food front, and no longer had a constant supply of homemade healthy food. I even caught myself using coconut milk from the can to make curry instead of cracking the nut open myself! Then one day it dawned on me that I hadn’t been sick in a couple of months. What?! The key to good health was… sitting on my ASS? My inner Yankee was thoroughly offended, but the rest of me breathed a huge sigh of relief, and went out and bought a pint of almond milk ice cream, complete with carrageenan and xanthan gum, made by a machine. I enjoyed every bite.

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Comfort Me With Sharp Objects

Posted on November 24th, 2012

Some people are comforted by a cigarette. I’d heard the stories about the healing properties of warm milk. I was feeling sorry for myself, and I chose the headless duck.

 

Who knows what I was feeling sorry about—I was 23, and didn’t really need a reason. Maybe it was one of those days where I’d sat on the upturned milk crate behind the coffee shop that I was working at, furiously scribbling in my notebook about how undignified it was that I had to serve lattes to my former professors, when I was pretty sure I was supposed to be writing a novel instead. Maybe it was the time I’d had so many gallons of espresso that I’d sweated my way into heart palpitations and had all but vibrated my way home to the dark apartment. It was probably winter. Hormones might’ve been involved. What I do remember, quite clearly, is that all of these imagined ills were cured by knives.

 

Or, more specifically, by the knives wielded by the patriarch of the female nuclear family in “Eat, Drink, Man, Woman”. My roommate had recommended the film. I’d never seen it. How had she known? Known that, as I sat there alone in a darkened room, the precision of someone else turning mountains of raw ingredients into innumerable jewel-like dishes would be exactly what I needed to see?

 

I’ve spoken about it before, but, to my mind, there are few things more pleasurable than watching someone skilled with knives cut things. Any old thing. Julienning, brunoise, dicing, de-boning a chicken, skinning a salmon—it doesn’t matter. The camera’s loving pass over each of these careful and simultaneously careless acts of culinary grace was like so much opium blown into my waiting face. It was an intimacy that titillated even as it soothed. What was I looking at? Was that pork belly? I didn’t even care. I only knew that I wanted to watch it assembled, slivered, and slid from a bowl over and over again, in an infinite loop of deft precision. The duck whose neck is blown into, as though the animal were an instrument, so that the skin can be rendered crisp by a following cascade of hot oil ladled across its goose-pimpled surface? Seductive magic. The large cleaver turned small and nimble in this man’s hand. I felt my hand clenching unconsciously, wondering how to mimic the motion that would separate the near-invisible sliver of skin from the flesh of a pepper in a fluid sideways stroke.

 

I’ve never been able to cotton to the schadenfreude that others find in films like “Meet The Parents”, where the hapless hero is always one ill-fitting Speedo away from public humiliation. I bury my head in a pillow, and wait for it to be over. There’s no charm for me in incompetence, captured forever on film, immortalized so as to make the rest of us feel a bit better about our own small spheres of capability. No. For me, the bone-deep satisfaction lies within the confines of the first five or ten minutes of this quiet film—one man’s hands, first tearing down, and then rebuilding, the whole animal, the entire daikon, the swimming fish, into more than the sum of their parts. I don’t want to be transported by a well-timed speech, or struck sideways by an apocalypse-honed muscle. I want to be wooed. One perfect slice at a time.

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With Nary A Banana

Posted on November 24th, 2012

I felt bad for my professor; he had a tough audience. No one, no matter how nerdy, should have to face sixty undergrads who haven’t done the reading before 10 a.m. Granted, he wasn’t doing himself any favors with his checked bowties, obscure literary allusions, and hours of monotone lectures. It would’ve taken a student with an unnatural interest in eighteenth century literary conventions and a superhuman ability to stay awake to be an active participant in this class, a student who would forgo several shorter essays in favor of a culminating 30 page research paper on the economic subtext in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa , a student like me – the only graduate student in ENG348: Rise of the English Novel. I got an A.

Despite my affinity for professorial types (heavy on the academia), I have to admit that this man made some spectacularly bad pedagogical choices. One clearly did not need to read any of the books to pass this class; I’m pretty sure I was the only student who ever asked a question, let alone raised my hand; and his particular brand of humor mostly left students wondering if they should report him to someone as he appeared to chuckle randomly throughout his lectures. I may have been the only one who realized that the sorry sophomores who’d dragged themselves out of their beer stained sheets that morning couldn’t tell that he’d made a joke at all, much less thought it was funny. And then we read Tom Jones.

My professor was not a stupid man; he knew that the subtle humor of eighteenth century literature went right over the heads of a generation raised on Beavis and Butthead. “Movies!” I could practically hear him think, “Showing them the movie will engage their interest and help them understand how witty and entertaining the book is!” What he actually said was, “We’re going to watch some clips from the film version.” Blank stares. “Because it was really famous and popular.” More blank stares. “It’s a comedy.” The girl next to me narrowed her eyes in disbelief. So he brought in the DVD.

The first few scenes went okay. I could see a few moments where 60’s British film style didn’t necessarily help economics majors born in the early 90’s access a 250 year old text, but hey, at least they were paying attention. A young Albert Finney gallivanted around the English countryside and our professor chuckled like a mad Urkel-Igor hybrid as he called our attention to plot points. Then I had my first stab of foreboding. “This next scene is the most famous scene in the movie,” he told us, his smile tight with excitement. No. No no no. “In fact, it’s probably the most famous meal on film!” I tried to head him off at the pass, frantically tapping out an SOS with my pencil. He was about to show us the part where Tom Jones rescues Mrs. Waters from a band of highwaymen and they head to the nearest inn to eat dinner before, ahem, ‘retiring to the bedchamber’. I hid my face in my hands.

The interest in the room rose palpably when Mrs. Waters has the whole top of her dress torn off in the struggle and leaves it hanging like the tease that she is. This was way more boob than anyone had expected to see before lunch. Whatever excitement had been rising in the room quickly turned bad, however, when the two characters started eating. Young men sank back in their chairs and expressions, first of disgust then of horror, flickered from face to face. This was no ordinary meal. This was no holds barred, down and dirty flirt-eating.

Tom and Mrs. Waters slurp soup through pursed lips. He cracks a lobster claw and pulls the meat slowly out of the shell. She nibbles the end of a drumstick. They slip their pinky fingers into the crotch of a wishbone and pull. Each throws back an oyster, leaving it on their tongues far longer than is seemly. And the pears; the poor, poor pears. There is no soundtrack other than the miked noises of their repast, and straight-on camera angles involve the viewer in a seriously uncomfortable amount of eye contact. Tom and Mrs. Waters head for the stairs after a very long 3 minutes, leaving the rest of us with the feeling that we may never be able to eat again.

Nervous laughter swirled around the classroom. As the professor paused the movie to wax eloquent on the merits of the scene and its place in the film cannon, I could see the class’s previous skepticism calcify into irreparable distrust. This man was clearly insane and yes, this lesson would unquestionably be talked about in dining halls across campus tonight, but probably not in the way he’d been hoping. I saw the silver lining, however. The one thing he definitely did teach those undergrads is a lesson that, if spread, will certainly advance the culture and society of all mankind: if there’s one thing less sexy than flirt-eating, it’s watching other people flirt-eat. Because I haven’t looked at a pear the same way since.

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Following Your Coffee Muse To A Better Bean

Posted on November 24th, 2012

Coffee is not just a drink. Those who are content with their one morning cup of Dunkin’ Donuts stuff, or whatever the corner coffee cart man is selling – nuked beyond recognition with milk and sugar – are missing the point. Sure, caffeine is a drug, and some will take one hit on the way to work so as not to fall asleep over a spreadsheet. But drinking coffee just to stay awake is like having sex only to procreate: it does the job, but where’s the fun?

 

Coffee is a lifestyle. It is the anticipation of a hot, delicious mug on a Saturday morning, brewing on the counter as you button your old flannel shirt and unroll your newspaper (or turn on your tablet, why not). It is the feeling of a small victory as you get away from the office for fifteen minutes, turn the corner, buy a cup to go at your local coffeehouse, and stand outside leaning on an iron gate and enjoying the sort of afternoon you almost forgot existed. It is the joy of sitting down at a small table of a European-style café, across from an old friend, two steaming cups set down before you, a wonderful conversation about to take place. Coffee fuels and enables all of this. If you love coffee, it becomes an integral part of your life.

 

Think that’s an overstatement? One only needs to turn to the movies to see how true that is. Think about Coffee and Cigarettes, a film by Jim Jarmusch. It consisted of a series of mostly improvised skits, each one featuring various celebrities like Bill Murray and Tom Waits, with the enjoyment of java and a smoke as the only real unifying theme. The guys in Swingers frequently ended up at a diner, where they discussed women and wild nights out while guzzling coffee. Sitcoms are also a good place to observe coffee addiction: classics like Seinfeld, Frasier and Friends all have either a diner or coffeehouse as the characters’ home base, and each one features either rampant consumption of coffee refills or the high-strung stirring of lattes.

 

Even the biggest coffee aficionado has to start somewhere, and that somewhere is usually humble. It may be Taster’s Choice Instant that the folks pick up at the supermarket every Tuesday night, or those k-cups that go into a Keurig machine, or a to-go cup of Tim Horton’s. While at the mall, or walking down a busy city street, one may get lured into a Starbucks by a green mermaid. This is all fine, but the truly curious will eventually follow their muse beyond the obvious sources and into more exciting – and more complex – territory.

 

Coffee is a complicated, sensitive crop. Think wine grapes or the cacao bean, but much more so, when it comes to the sheer variety of flavor notes it can contain. Many regions around the world, including Africa, India, and South and Central America have numerous coffee bean farms, and these vary in size. The crop is so sensitive that a large farm, where one side of the field may get more sunlight and have slightly different soil, will yield a different tasting bean, for better or worse.

 

A huge economy has developed around coffee, with the bigger purveyors buying in bulk (and therefore ultimately being unable to control the quality of every batch that goes into the final product – all the beans are shipped to huge roasting plants and dumped in together). The smaller coffee companies will receive small shipments, and since the roasting is often done in-house, will also have more control over providing you with the best cup.

 

We live in ethically-minded times: studies have shown that businesses trying to improve conditions for the poor, both domestically and abroad, are becoming increasingly attractive to young professionals and draw in prime talent. Similarly, entrepreneurs are now more likely to care about the ethical side of business. For the coffee industry, this means ensuring that the farmers stand to earn enough to rise above the poverty line. As a result, both the major coffee companies like Starbucks and the small coffee purveyors are looking to fair trade importing practices. Some of the purveyors will go so far as to eliminate, to the extent possible, the middlemen between the farmer and the roaster, resulting in bigger paychecks for the farmer and better prices for the importer. (It’s not just the java purveyors, either; chocolate artisans such as Brooklyn’s Raaka Chocolate try to do the same for cacao farmers.)

 

One such roaster is Toby’s Estate in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Even in a neighborhood filled with trendy cafes, Toby’s stands out. Its coffeehouse space is beautifully designed, with attractive wall displays of books, coffee accessories, and various vintage knick-knacks. There is plenty of communal seating, with both high and low tables available to its laptop-happy, bearded, floppy beanie-clad clientele. Strains of lo-fi folk and dream pop can be heard above the murmur of patrons and the roar of espresso machines. In the back, behind the barista counter, are offices, the roasting room, and the cupping room.

 

That last one I got to know pretty well: Toby’s holds free “public cuppings” – events whose name never ceases to elicit chuckles from my friends – which provide a chance for the public to see and partake in the painstaking steps professionals take to ensure that each cup of coffee they make is near perfect.

 

Toby’s Estate rotates its available varieties of coffee, as these depend on the amount of beans that were purchased at a given time from that season’s choice of farms. So this winter’s Guatemalan and Honduran coffee may be replaced in the summer by beans from Kenya and Ethiopia. Whatever the kind of bean, they are shipped to New York and roasted in-house; each batch is then “cupped.”

 

Using the pour-over method (more on that later), coffee from each roasted batch is poured into three cups. The number of cups is necessary for quality control, in case faulty beans end up making it into one of the cups. Using a spoon, the coffee is then slurped (air intake is an important part of the tasting process) from all three, at three different stages of cooling. The tasters usually spit out the coffee after they try it; over-caffeinating is an easy occupational hazard.

 

The taster is also provided with a grading sheet, where each coffee is judged on factors like acidity, and flavor notes are jotted down. These notes can be anything, from the edible (fruit, nuts) to sensory associations with things like flowers, leather and tobacco. At the end, everyone compares notes and tries to decide which coffee is better, and for what occasion. Usually, opinions at the table differ greatly.

 

The public cuppings, as well as all the other classes at Toby’s, are taught by Dan, one of the in-house coffee experts. Lanky and bespectacled, he is a treasure trove of information about the subject (much of the more technical stuff in this article comes from his lectures) and goes through all the procedures that he teaches when he works. When I found out he was heading the Pour Over Technique class, I signed up immediately.

 

The pour over method of brewing coffee is becoming increasingly popular with many of the finer independent coffee purveyors. Using Chemex (which is to pour over what Bodum is to French press) coffeemakers, the barista is able to get the most out of every ground bean in the filter by soaking them evenly and thoroughly. The class focused not just on the technique itself, however; Dan displayed just how much difference in taste even a half gram of coffee makes. Think it doesn’t matter if you’ve measured out 24 or 25 grams? Wrong – and chances are, 24.5 grams is the ideal amount anyway.

 

Not every palate is refined, and that is okay. If you can’t taste the difference between Krispy Kreme coffee and one of Toby’s Estate’s varieties, there’s no point spending twice as much on a cup. (If you’re taking it to stay, however, the latter will still make for a much better experience.) Should you find yourself drawn to the finer varieties of beans, though, there’s a lot to explore: Stumptown, Blue Bottle, and Irving Farms all have great varieties too, and sometimes a small café somewhere will have amazing goods. (My favorite beans are sold at Verb Café in Williamsburg, $11 for a sizable bag, and they give you a free cup of coffee with purchase.) Regardless of whether you use a French press, prefer the pour over, or have another method of preparing your perfect cup, keep trying different varieties to find the ones that match your coffee lifestyle.

 

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Season One, Episode Six

Posted on November 24th, 2012

Season one episode 6 of ” The Adventures of Pete and Pete” opens with Big Pete saying, more or less, “By the time you are fourteen years old you will have eaten over 14,000 meals and if you look back at all of your favorites not one of them began with a tray.” He was of course referring to school lunch. As he and his friend Teddy go through the lunch line and decide between the gray and uniform meatloaf – one of the various disguises given to mystery meat by the aging, hideous, underarm jiggling lunch ladies – and the previously-frozen fish-sticks, it becomes clear that Teddy in fact loves school lunch and Pete does not. Pete’s skepticism is vaguely confirmed when the one young attractive lunch lady Emma leans over and whispers to him to get the fish-sticks, and is promptly threatened with a spatula beating by one of the veterans. When they get to the dessert station and see plastic cups filled with red and green quivering masses, Pete says, “It’s like they’re not even trying,” while Teddy takes one of each exclaiming that red and green are his two favorite flavors.

 

When they return to their tables with what Pete calls “Trayload”, we get a glimpse of the other students’ lunches. The two boys have trays with plates full of crinkle-cut french fries and the girls have brown bag lunches containing sandwiches with the crusts cut off. All of them have the ubiquitous cardboard square half-pint container of milk, including whole milk. This episode aired nearly twenty years and two sets of federal regulations ago; I was still on the receiving end of trayload. It was a time when anyone who wasn’t creating or eating it paid little attention to school lunch. 

 

I am now a school lunch professional, to put it in basic terms, and these days it seems everyone from the elementary school music teacher to Jamie Oliver to the First Lady have opinions on school lunch, for better and for worse. The Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act passed by Congress last year went into effect this year and I can tell you that jello and whole milk have gone, to quote Miss Fingerwood from season two episode eight, “the way of a unified USSR.” Healthy Food Certification and the Healthy U.S. Schools Challenge each provide strict rules about all food available to students that go well beyond just what constitutes a federally defined lunch. The regulations are myriad and the resources slim.

 

All obstacles and challenges aside, I can say that school lunch has come a long way from Pete’s dreaded trayload. The variety goes far beyond chicken nuggets and fish-sticks: students in some schools have over fifteen entree options to choose from every day. School lunch doesn’t have to be some slop created by a hairnet-and-orthopedic-shoe-donning brute named Bertha, but it does still have to utilize various government commodities. In fact, more and more frequently some very talented chefs work hard to produce delicious and beautiful meals to fit very specific regulations that will be served off of an industrial food service line and put onto a compartmentalized tray. That is a labor of love, which frequently goes unrequited.

 

While every school has a few Teddys, many students will scoff at school lunch no matter how well-prepared or nicely presented it is.  Kids are kids; always have been and always will be. Lunch for them is more about free time to socialize and less about eating–school lunch is a universal adversary. Even the students who eat school lunch daily by choice and not out of necessity find something to gripe about; it’s the group mentality and lunch complaints that give them common ground. They can all collectively pick on it like a bully does a dweeb and no one gets hurt or in trouble. It is clear in “Pete & Pete” that he is dissatisfied with the quality of the meal, but I think today’s students make a ruckus about a lack of familiarity with what is offered. Students are being exposed to a wider variety of foods, especially vegetables, under the guidelines of the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act. Luckily the group mentality that can harbor dissent can also be instrumental in reversing their apparent displeasure: when an unfamiliar item is introduced to students, often several students in a row will try it once one of their friends takes it without grimacing.

 

In the first episode I mentioned, the young lunch lady Emma takes off her hairnet and escapes in her leather jacket (did I mention she was played by Juliana Hatfield?), promising to meet Pete in Iowa.

In today’s schools it is just the opposite as a new generation of school lunch providers stay put to slowly assume the responsibility of feeding students.  The trade-winds have shifted and school lunch is about nutrition, healthy students, AND good food. We aim to overcome all the preconceived notions and collective memories – accurate or not – about school lunch. Our goal is to entice the students to eat healthful foods by making them delicious; at least enough so that they pay any attention at all to what they are eating in spite of being much more focused on socializing. Our ultimate ambition is to influence their lifelong eating habits in favor of fruits, vegetables and whole grains regardless of what foods they are regularly exposed to outside of school. It may seem like we are tilting at windmills, but I don’t think our efforts are entirely in vain, because students are not above a particular brand of hypocrisy. Maybe no one’s favorite meal will ever start with a tray, but it sees to me no matter how awful they claim the lunch to be, they manage to do all of their grousing in between bites–leaving trays that once held a low fat whole grain entree, a fruit of their choice, some carrot sticks and a ubiquitous carton of chocolate skim milk, empty.

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Putting You Off Your Grub

Posted on November 24th, 2012

You probably don’t want to read this article. Publication has been considerately withheld until after Thanksgiving, presumably so that neither our editor nor I are held responsible for spoiling anyone’s gleaming turkey, perfectly candied yams, or goblets of rose red Beaujolais. In fact, wipe that image from your head entirely. You don’t want to associate it with any of the following. And if you’ve eaten in the last hour, or plan to eat in the next day, you might want to stop reading now.

 

I’m not here to talk about the heartwarming bites at the end of “Ratatouille” (the stuff of dreams), the five-dollar milkshake in “Pulp Fiction” (it was worth it), the two dozen pies from “Waitress” (that’s an estimate), or anything the camera touches in “Big Night” (watch it if you haven’t seen it—then weep). The movies want to make us salivate, and attractive food, seductive food, delicious food, is as sure a trick as any. But sometimes the movies decide we’ve salivated enough, and they’d rather see us clutch our guts, double over in our stadium seats, and turn away from our popcorn with a silent vow never to open our mouths again.

 

Let me start by hitting close to home. (’Tis the season.) Think back to your recent Thanksgiving dinner. Were there various tempting dishes set out on a table? Fruits, stews, nuts, perhaps a large roast bird? Hold that image in your head. Cherish it. Now imagine a long and greasy haired old man in a ragged fur robe sitting by himself and eating it all—with his bare hands. You can almost smell the basting juices, and you suspect that they are indistinguishable from Lord Denethor’s body odor. Peter Jackson outdid himself in this scene from “The Return of the King” (2003) and undid many dinner-and-a-movie evenings for moviegoers worldwide. The sound of lips moistly smacking is captured in excruciating detail, and the whole sequence is crowned by a close-up of a mouth and chin dripping with brownish juices that resemble a mélange of chocolate pudding and chewing tobacco.

 

I am inordinately fond of fried eggs, but I have the movies to blame if I ever shy away from ordering them in an English diner. “Withnail and I” (1987) features the most horrifying eggs ever captured on film. Visible only for one blessedly brief close-up, they bob limply in a skillet, riding a gentle swell of oil the color of Lord Denethor’s toenails. Their yolks are an unhealthy shade of yellow and their whites are anything but white. I have tried against my better judgment to imagine the physical sensation of eating them. I can only suspect it would feel like allowing an enormous half-spoiled oyster to slide down my throat on a moist luge of gear oil. But before you judge our heroes too harshly, remember they only went to the diner because of several large rodents living among their sinkful of dirty dishes. You would do the same. Wouldn’t you? (Our heroes later invade an upscale tearoom while impressively sloshed, demanding cake and “the finest wines available to humanity”. They receive nothing of the sort. Redemption isn’t easy.)

 

Since we’re on about eggs, you might already be thinking about “Cool Hand Luke” (1967). Yes, he can eat 50 eggs, and we’ll never forget watching him boast, and try, and inexplicably succeed. But admit it—you’ve conveniently forgotten some of the details, haven’t you? This is one of the more convincing instances of nausea-acting ever captured on film. I am ignorant of what cinematic magic was used to distend Paul Newman’s gut to the size and shape of a small basketball, but the sight of it, swollen, round, tense enough to pop from a pinprick, makes me lose interest in eating anything other than iceberg lettuce ever again. Eventually his jaw won’t even move on its own, and you can feel the near impossibility of swallowing, the complete and agonizing rebellion of a body pushed beyond its limits. In the climactic moment of the scene, Luke doesn’t vomit—but I wonder how many viewers have. Not a good film for Thanksgiving night.

 

And if I haven’t spoiled you holiday season yet, let me show you one shadow more. Imagine you live in an apocalyptically industrialized urban nightmare dreamscape where steam pipes spew filth into every grimy alley and hideously disfigured women dance inside radiators. (Got that?) Your ex-girlfriend invites you over to her parents’ house for dinner, and when you get there her father tells you what’s on the menu: “We’ve got chicken tonight. Strangest damn things, they’re man-made. Little damn things, smaller than my fist. But they’re new.” If there’s one lesson to learn from “Eraserhead” (1977), it’s this: if someone offers you the privilege of carving an uncanny artificial chicken, you say no. (Politely.) Because as soon as you touch that chicken with the carving fork, it will start writhing on its platter, agonized, twisting its legs pitifully in midair while dark fluids ooze from its cavity. Is it blood, sewage, or your grandmother’s gravy recipe? The sounds of dry creaking and wet gurgling make the scene hard to forget, and I for one know that when some aunt or uncle pulls the turkey from the oven this Thanksgiving, a small part of me will wonder if it’s about to start twitching.

Bon appétit.

 

 

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Big Night

Posted on November 24th, 2012

I once read a scathing restaurant review that began, “This is basically the bad Italian restaurant from Big Night.” I put the movie in my Netflix queue, where it sat for six months before I decided to watch it.

Big Night is an intimate film about food, art, family, and business told through the story of two restaurants: one good, one bad.

The good restaurant — aptly named the Paradise — is run by Primo and Secondo, Italian immigrant brothers. Primo is the (quintessential) chef’s chef: gifted, cantankerous, and obsessed. His younger brother, Secondo, handles the business side of running the restaurant.

The Paradise has just a few tiny tables and only one waiter. However, the food that appears on those tables is something special and rare — the kind that makes us ramble, rant, rave, and fall into a deep sleep, thinking, “How could someone make something so wonderful?”

Despite hard work and talent, they are struggling.

The bad Italian restaurant in Big Night — the one the review mentioned — is Pascal’s. Think: red and white checked tablecloths, flashy neon signs, and plentiful cheap wine. They serve the type of Italian food you find in banquet halls and Olive Gardens (the phrase “Would you like french fries or mashed potatoes?” comes to mind). Pascal’s does, however, make money. When Secondo expresses frustration with his customers’ philistine tastes, Pascal replies: “A guy works all day, he don’t want to look at his plate and ask, ‘What the fuck is this? He wants to look at his plate, see a steak, and say ‘I like steak!’”

Pascal and Primo represent the two ends of the restaurateur spectrum: the ruthless businessman (for whom food is a medium for making a living) and the virtuous artist (who refuses to compromise his gift).

Secondo begs Pascal for a loan to cover their debts until the restaurant takes off. Pascal refuses, but offers to convince a friend of his — Louis Prima, a famous jazz musician — to have dinner at the Paradise. Secondo knows this PR stunt is his last chance to save the restaurant from foreclosure.

The brothers scrape together the very last of their borrowed money and throw a lavish feast for their special guest. Primo prepares the dinner’s centerpiece (a fancy baked timballo) with keen focus and unmatched skill. The result is spectacular — a meal-to-end-all-meals — but Louis Prima never shows.

As the evening comes to a close, Pascal coldly asserts that the whole scheme was a lie designed to bankrupt the Paradise and force the brothers to work for him or return to Italy. Betrayed and despondent, the brothers explode in anger at each other. Secondo shouts into the air, “This place is eating us alive! This place is eating us alive!”

There’s no eleventh-hour rescue for the brothers; this is a real-deal downer ending. As the film comes to a close, the brothers silently cook an omelet, sharing it between each other and the lone waiter.

Perhaps we’re left to wonder why Primo bothers with crafting the perfect risotto when it can’t guarantee subsistence, much less success.

But we already know the answer. Primo does it for the same reason as any artist: because life is cruel and hard, full of betrayal and unfairness. And when you can make something — a story, a song, or even just a bite of heaven — that’s better than the world we live in, you have to do it.

If even to tip the balance from bad to good for just a single, perfect moment.

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Responses to the Curious Reader Who May Not Yet Have Watched Babette’s Feast

Posted on November 24th, 2012

Yes, I was raised Lutheran. Despite our church’s cushioned pews and climate control, we shared a certain earnestness with this film’s “little flock.” Worship, like life, was to be taken very seriously: grace may have saved, but actions mattered. It’s not surprising that our congregation, like the film’s, at times became “testy and querulous….Little schisms erupted.” In 2009, our denomination began allowing gay, partnered clergy to serve. Some indignant parishioners promptly started their own congregation, joining a ramshackle Lutheran body that was liberal enough to ordain women, but conservative enough to exclude gays.

No, my family never hired a French servant—probably because no French servant ever came to our door seeking asylum. If one had, and if after fourteen years she prepared a feast for us, I’d like to think I’d have enjoyed it with gratitude. But if I had seen a giant tortoise, a calf’s head, and a cage full of live fowl in my kitchen, I too might have been tempted to cry sorcery. The sheer otherness of the sight might have appalled me.

Yes, Jutland calls to me. My ancestors moved from the seacoast of Pomerania to the flat scape of vast Lake Erie. My grandmother’s grandfather worked as a teamster, driving horses along the Miami and Erie Canal. The social and physical landscapes of Babette’s Feast resemble the lands my ancestors inhabited. A simple life of sand and water spirals inside my DNA.

No, I will not have gone home this Thanksgiving, though my boyfriend and I would have been welcome there. Instead, I will have spent the day with his family on Cape Cod. I resolve right now to keep my senses open during the festivities. There will be so much before me to feel grateful for: this man who loves me; his family who welcomes me; the food on the table; the warmth of the wood stove.

Yes, we can pretend that our days are tasteless. We can choose to be “testy and querulous,” refusing to enjoy this constant, communal banquet. But what happened to Babette’s guests will happen to us. In time, we’ll find ourselves strangely contented by unimaginable delicacies. Despite our best efforts to remain self-absorbed, the stuff we’re offered will itself transform us.

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The Customer Is Always Wrong: Restaurant Breakfasts In Film

Posted on November 24th, 2012

(Excerpted from AltaMira’s upcoming BREAKFAST: A HISTORY, to be published in the first half of 2013)

Everyone who has eaten at a restaurant has experienced the annoyance of being told that some desired item is unavailable, but never is this more unbearable than first thing in the morning. Restaurant breakfasts can make or break one’s day, and they can make or break a film.

Due to the urgency of the morning, or perhaps that one does not always present one’s most polite, patient self in the morning, frustration is a recurring theme in theatrical breakfast scenes. In the diner scene of the 1970 classic Five Easy Pieces, a frustrated Bobby (played eloquently by a young Jack Nicholson) orders a “plain omelet, no potatoes – tomatoes instead, a cup of coffee and wheat toast.” Stymied by the restaurant’s “no substitutions” policy, he is forced to engage in a battle of wits with the waitress to attempt to get exactly what he wants on his plate. Desperate to get wheat toast (not available as a side order), Bobby thinks he has delivered his coup de grace by ordering a chicken salad sandwich, but asking the waitress to hold the mayo, the lettuce and the chicken. “Hold the chicken?” The waitress is incredulous. With a steely gaze, Bobby utters the famous line from the film: “I want you to hold it between your knees.” Needless to say, he did not get his toast; he is instead asked to leave the establishment. The scene powerfully illustrates the generational conflict that characterized the late 1960s while humorously demonstrating the daily, minor irritations one may experience over breakfast.

Another movie took the frustration with customer service during breakfast a step further. In the famous “Whammy Burger” scene in Falling Down (1993), William ‘D-Fens’ Foster, played by actor Michael Douglas, experiences the crushing disappointment of coming to the fast food restaurant for a ham and cheese ‘womlet,’ only to find that the restaurant had stopped serving breakfast a mere four minutes earlier. The scene, in which a frustrated D-Fens says “I want breakfast,” only to be told that they were no longer serving it, is the breaking point in D-Fens’ psyche; he calmly reaches into his bag and pulls out a semi-automatic handgun, fires shots into the ceiling and proceeds to hold the patrons of the restaurant hostage while he waits for his food. This scene provides a fascinating social commentary on whether or not the customer truly is always right, while, again, illustrating the tenuous thread that holds a person together before they have had something to eat in the morning.

Writer and director Quentin Tarantino seems to have a keen interest in breakfast. Several of his films use breakfast scenes to mark pivotal moments. Tarantino’s 1994 Pulp Fiction has multiple scenes that take place at breakfast; the film is bookended with the same breakfast diner scene. The second, known as ‘The Big Kahuna Burger Scene’ is the audience’s first exposure to the wry Old Testament sensibility of Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson), who declares “hamburgers: the cornerstone of any nutritional breakfast!” before reciting Ezekiel 25:17 and unloading the clip of his 9mm into the recipient of his sermon. The film’s epilogue takes place in the breakfast diner where Winnfield, having experienced an epiphany, reveals his career change and his greater destiny. Tarantino staged this significant moment of character development at breakfast, just as director Joel Schumacher did with D-Fens in Falling Down.

Breakfast scenes in movies establish normalcy from which to deviate; they celebrate life’s calm, quotidian moments; they demonstrate a character’s true colors. To say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day may be trite, but its role in film is grossly underestimated.

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Pamela Puts Her Nose In: Three Beers For The Autumnal Imbiber

Posted on October 22nd, 2012

Oh, dear reader, October is a fickle mistress.  Bright and blowing one minute, and verily the next minute, yielding a note from one’s local refuse disposal company instructing one to ‘try keeping your cardboard out of the rain’ because then it will invariably a) weigh less and b) not smell like a thousand compressed jock straps laden with kimchi.  But, I digress.  As the weather begins to pull fewer punches, we advocate pulling more pints.  Here are three of our favorites from the World’s Almost But Not Quite End Kitchen and Bar, here on the shores of Lake Bedswette.

 

Monkey’s Uncle IPA:  Did you know that monkeys are fond of consuming their own ejaculate?  Neither did we!  But, the brewmaster of Morosely Moroccan Beverage Co. certainly did.  Tangy.  Piquant.  Musky.  Rather like that bonobo centerfold on page 22.  (Morosely Moroccan Beverage Ltd, Marrakech)

 

Bump in the Night Brown Ale:  The bump, in the case of Sarah Jean Anderson, turned out to be Rodney’s when it was delivered.  The ABV on this makes no promises.  (Bottom Bunk Brewery, West Boylston, MA)

 

Behind The Binder Imperial Porter:  It’s election season.  For every binder full of able-bodied women, there must be a ringmaster.  Consuming enough of this beverage will induce delusions of grandeur strong enough to hold your hair in place without any Brylcreem whatsoever–what it won’t do, sadly, is erase the drivel that  you’ll be spouting in the meantime.  Thankfully, 47% of you won’t notice, and the other 53% will decide that it’s PeeWee Herman, and dance accordingly.  (Home By Five Brewing Company, Pensionne, Grand Caymans)

 

And there you have it, gentle reader.  Don’t be caught, as so many squirrels are at this time of year, without a nut in your mouth, so to speak–be sure to savor the delights of the season.  Properly.  Fully.  Deeply.  Perhaps several times more than is prudent.  I hear they make a cream for that.

 

 

 

 

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