A Literary Feast

Music For Forks and Knives

Posted on September 17th, 2012

Food, while central to any dining experience, is not nearly the whole of it. Sure, it is a reason, a celebrity, the birthday boy at the birthday party, and one of several make-or-break factors of the evening, but there are other considerations that make our dinners a success (or a disappointment). The décor, staff, location, company, other diners/scene, silverware, and music all play an enormous role in how we perceive a given night’s culinary experience, and whether we may try to recreate it in the future.

That last one – music – may seem unimportant to a lot of people (you can’t taste it and it can’t spill Bordeaux on you), which may explain the indifferent Top 40 mixes blasting a bit too loudly over most sound systems in an overwhelming number of big city restaurants. However, the right music, played at optimal volume for the space, not only enhances your enjoyment of that space; it gives the establishment a sense of personality, and provides a glimpse into what the business aspires to be, whom it wants for its clientele, and who is running it. You can have a beautifully designed dining area with an interesting menu, a mahogany bar, and expert mixologists, but if you lazily pipe through an Usher / Bieber mix, beware: you are donning a brand new John Varvatos suit and matching that with torn, filthy Chuck Taylors, toes peeking out and all.

Similarly, your dinner party soundtrack will help to set the tone for the experience and for how your guests perceive your abode. I once attended a dinner party where a (virtually unknown, for a good reason) DJ was also a guest. The hostess allowed him to soundtrack the dinner, which resulted in several extended mixes of Cypress Hill’s “Jump Around” playing back to back. The guests seemed happy for the first five minutes, but then grew uncomfortable. After I loudly pointed out the issue, the DJ turned red with embarrassment and changed the music. (If you think I was being too forward, try sitting through this sort of thing yourself.)

 

Fail Safe Rules

 

Professional studies have been performed to determine the best soundtrack for dining out (and shopping and running and anything else you can do that will let someone else sell you product), but through personal experience I have found that the best music for social dining and cocktailing generally satisfies several rules:

 

  1. No instrument (including vocals) should stand out too much. If the music can function as a pleasant whole, it will provide a nice backdrop to the conversation. That means no shrill trumpet solos, no blazing electric guitar licks, and no vocal histrionics. The music’s goal is to complement, in this case, not pull the whole blanket to its side of the bed, like a frustrated guitarist trying to Van Halen his bass.
  2. Fast is bad. Too slow is generally bad. Mid-tempo to moderately slow music provides optimally pleasant rhythms for chewing and mingling.
  3. Certain instruments perform better than others. Cushy trip hop beats do better than pounding drums; distortion gets in the way of conversation; orchestral swells may make one hungry for the Titanic DVD, but never for crab cakes.

 

(All of the above does not mean, however, that you should be playing muzak at your dinner parties. Few things are less appetizing than canned, fatigue-inducing sounds that some corporation put together specifically to fit the average person’s soiree. And sure, those “jazz for every day of the week” and “electronica for every cocktail in the book” compilations may seem like an easy way out, but before giving up, at least try to put an original mix together – or ask a music-savvy guest.)

 

These rules make it hard to mess up, but if every establishment followed them, our dining experience would suffer. Restaurants and cafes have personalities, much like people, and like people they attract certain kinds of friends (or in this case, patrons). An organic café in Portland, with reclaimed wood furniture and bearded staff, may choose to play Woods or The Allman Brothers; a Chicago restaurant known to its creative professional clientele for its brunch may opt for a Death Cab for Cutie and The Shins mix; and a dark establishment in the trendy NYC neighborhood of Chelsea may choose current hip hop. The trick is to pick out the right songs or albums by the artists that your clientele would want to hear at dinner.

That said, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been disappointed with the musical offerings of restaurants. Steakhouses in New York have become regular offenders. When I order a medium-rare porterhouse and a classic Manhattan cocktail from a waiter in a white shirt, surrounded by stately furnishings, basking in the dim lighting, and preparing to leave a couple of hundred on the table, I want the full steakhouse experience, and that includes jazz – cool jazz, hard bop, standards, whatever. Instead, I am frequently pelted with gems of wisdom from the likes of Eminem and melisma of the Christina Aguilera School of Vocal Craft. That sort of soundtrack makes me want to call the waiter back, cancel the cut of meat, and just order a hot dog. (Then again, I just might be behind the times. I still enjoy dressing up for a nice steakhouse, and often find myself next to a table of people dressed head to toe in running gear.)

 

Rotten Fruit

 

To prevent complete anarchy from taking over your dinner parties, here are the types of music that probably won’t work.

 

  1. Opera. I am a big fan of classical music at dinner. Pop open a bottle of pinot noir, put on a chamber quartet recording, and you’ll feel like a thousand bucks even if your dinner consists of spaghetti and sausage. Opera, however, is a different animal, a powerful beast. Remember Lt. Colonel Kilgore’s helicopter armada in Apocalypse Now, blasting Wagner’s March of the Valkyries from mounted speakers as they shelled a Vietnamese village? At its best, opera has heft; it’s packed with highs, with emotion. If you understood the words, you would see that many of them amount to “Betrayal! O, I am slain!” Foie gras consumption may require a less intense backdrop.
  2. Gangsta Rap. The only appropriate dining venue for this music may be a backyard barbeque. Organic goat cheese on crispy French baguette does not pair well with f-bombs.
  3. Nu Metal. Does this really require explanation? If anyone knows what this music is good for, apart from soundtracking Ultimate Fighting promos or revisiting old MySpace profiles, please enlighten me.
  4. Death Metal. There is a particularly entertaining scene in Julie Taymore’s Titus, her brilliant, horrifying adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, where Anthony Hopkins’ antihero feeds the Goths a dinner prepared of their own children, unbeknownst to them; all hell then breaks loose as diners slaughter one another, in quick succession, to a soundtrack of thrash. Unless your goal is to reenact that scene, more serene music is recommended.
  5. Dance Music. Careful with this one. There is definitely a time and a place for it, but unless the food is so horrible that you’re hoping to immediately herd everyone onto the dance floor in the hopes they won’t notice the overcooked salmon and cut-rate spinach, let the DJ in after the last course has been taken away.

 

(Certain neighborhoods in Manhattan are overflowing with restaurants that double as clubs, and clubs that serve food. The dishes are mostly generic and overpriced, if inoffensive. Why anyone would want to have a real dining experience in a dance club is beyond me; it makes as much sense as putting a pool table and a jukebox in your bedroom. [Space-starved New Yorkers paying $2.5K/month for a studio may disregard this comparison.])

 

The One Sure Thing

 

For my money, the best album to play at any dinner party, front to back, is Kind of Blue, by Miles Davis. In fact, this is the perfect album for many occasions in life. Sure, it’s one of the most famous jazz records of all time, but for once, the hype is completely justified. Masterful musicianship, mostly downtempo rhythms, flawless recording; this music is sexy without actually screaming “sex,” and also just what your dinner party needs. (Own a record player? A bit of that vinyl hiss makes it all the better.) If you know of a steakhouse that is fond of playing this one, do drop me a line.

 

Categories: Uncategorized

The Sounds of Silence

Posted on September 17th, 2012

My first day on the job, when my boss handed me a pair of oversized plastic earmuffs, I didn’t think much of it. I wasn’t actually thinking much of anything at the time, mostly because it was five-thirty in the morning and I had already been up for an hour. That I had somehow managed to pilot my bike through the streets of Portland in the half-light of pre-dawn and arrived at the wharfs safely was a miracle. The asphalt was a conveyor belt, street signs and traffic lights a non-issue, and then there I was, looking down the sketchiest dock ladder ever into a waiting fiberglass skiff.

Earmuffs? They somehow made sense a half hour later at our destination, a floating tin shed housing what looked like World War II era anti-aircraft guns. These were to be the implements of my new profession, should I ever manage to achieve a level of mastery of it that might put me in rough proximity of the word “professional.” In short time, the sound of a gasoline-powered generator sputtering to life reminded me to actually put my new head gear on and I came to understand that the next ten hours of my life would be shrouded by the dull, heavy drone of small pistons firing, gears spinning and the non-stop banter of the associated exhaust.

I was out on the waters of Maine’s Casco Bay to pull mussels from the water, where they had unsuspectingly made their homes on lengths of rope provided by Bangs Island Mussels. For 18 months they basked in tranquility, eating their fill each day and getting it on like tiny bearded hedonists. Of course, what they didn’t know (because they don’t have brains) was a little secret regarding their own ever-increasing deliciousness. For the short timers we were about to harvest, I was Charon, boatman on the river Styx, middleman between the Atlantic Ocean and a Hades of simmering white wine, with sumptuous bits of shallot and garlic spiked with black pepper and chili flake.

The work itself was simple and well choreographed, requiring directions expressed with a few basic hand signals. That was good because even if either of the other two guys had tried to say anything to me, I wouldn’t have been able to hear a thing. The ear protection straddling my head was far from absolute, but did manage to reduce the entire soundscape surrounding the barge to a singular, mechanical roar. Mouths might move, a few nondescript sounds penetrating the din, but nothing of any value was going to get through those ear blinders. It was like being at a didjeridoo concert, minus the patchouli and the suicidal thoughts.

So we settled into the ritual that is good, dirty, hard work, partaking of the transcendent act that is moving 1000 pounds of mussels through three pieces of machinery, into individual two and 10 pounds bags and onto a boat. My back hurt, my lungs burned and I sweat like a lawn sprinkler in the hot summer sun, but strangely I didn’t notice, I think mostly because I couldn’t hear or talk. Gone was the natural human inclination for commiseration, a special language of grunts and sighs by which we indicate great exertion or hardship. Instead, the three of us acted out a silent movie that wasn’t quite silent, moving seamlessly from one task to another.

Relieved of the obligation for small talk, I found my world broken down into very basic terms. We harvested twelve ropes using a massive hydraulic winch and shoveled great clumps of ink black shells onto the wooden deck of the barge. When we were done, I was tasked with a feat that seemed kind of incomprehensible. Before me sat a pile of mussels five-feet high and probably six-feet in diameter, and I wasn’t going anywhere near dry land until they were clean, beardless and neatly packaged for the consideration of consumers. I progressed through the five stages of the Kübler-Ross model of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance — and still was only a quarter of the way done shoveling the pile through the first machine. Inside the tin shed, my boss and the first mate labored away with a kind of rhythmic deliberateness, moving back and forth from machine to machine like the shuttles on a giant loom. Soon, I too settled into the pace in my own state of muffled solitude: scoop, heave, dump, breathe, scoop, heave, dump, breathe.

I’m not saying that working in relative silence is the solution to all workplace ills, but there’s definitely something to it. Aside from the complete lack of bitching and moaning, there was no deliberation over some diplomatically-agreed-upon-but-generally-totally-unacceptable-for-10-hours-straight radio station. That’s not to say that things didn’t get a little weird inside the space between the muffs from time-to-time though. Somewhere around eleven o’clock on that first day, when I tired of narrating entire passages of the book I’m working on to myself, sounds and songs started to worm their way out of the gyrations of the generator. Robert Plant? Is that you? I don’t even like Led Zeppelin that much, but somehow he was in there, going “hoo hoo aayyy!” Jimmy Page followed with “bow bow bowna nownt! Bowna nownt bowna nownt, nownt na nownt na nownt!” “The Ocean”?! Fitting for sure, but that wasn’t all that emerged. There were some heavy Indian ragas in there, too, and sometimes some really spaced out dub (and no, I don’t go to work high despite what my subconscious’ taste in music says).

It was a first for me, hearing electric guitars shred through a layer of sound that in any other situation would have been oppressive. Out there though, on the glassy waters of bay, the uniformity of the sound of the undertaking somehow made it easier — an auditory opiate that got me through that first pile of mussels and many more since.

Categories: Uncategorized

Knobs And Dials

Posted on September 17th, 2012

This is not an article about food—not really. I’m sorry. I know that you have your expectations and I’ve shattered them and I understand completely if you never want to speak with me again. But I hope, as the years pry us further and further apart, that you’ll at least remember that this was, after all, the Music Issue.

I have recently been dabbling in one of the Dark Arts, those obscure fields of human knowledge that defy rationality while offering extraordinary results to the prudent and utter disaster to the careless. No, not wine and cheese pairing, a rite so arcane and forbidding that I dare not even approach the temples in which it is practiced by well-coiffed persons wearing expensive pants. Not home brewing,i which I believe carries with it the very real threat of death by vinegar. Not hollandaise sauce, which I did attempt once—imagine salmon roe pulsed through a dying blender, but more lumpy and less pleasant.

No, the Art I’m talking about is music production, which involves manipulating sounds to make them sound more like the sounds you want them to sound like. This requires a lot of wires, microphones, boxes with switches and knobs and dials, and complex computer programs that look like they could also launch missiles from former Soviet republics. And I’m a total novice, a neophyte, a noob. I have yet to make any music that doesn’t sound like it was recorded by raccoons under a stack of moist pillows. But I have learned that audio production has a lot in common with a certain other Dark Art: cooking, which can end in abject tragedy (if you’re me) or inexplicable and irreproducible success (if you’re me on a good day). It all depends on what choices you make: which knobs you turn, which parameters you choose to alter.

Now when I say “cooking” I mean cooking the way I cook, which many agree is not such a good idea. Throw in a little of this and that. Try not to let it burn. Those things might be interesting together. Spices? Sniff and choose. Temperature? Just hot enough. See, this is why I will never write a cookbook. It works for me—sometimes—but it is hardly comforting to tell others “just make it taste good.” In music production, however, this is the right way to go about things.ii Trust your ear. Play around, tweak, listen closely. Cleanse your palate. Try again. Taste the soup repeatedly. There are no recipes.

Consider salt. You can’t imagine life without it, can you? It doesn’t exactly change flavors; it activates them, sets them kicking, shoves them to the center of the drooling chowhound’s senses. Without salt, the onions, the cumin, the ripe plum tomatoes are all there, they’re just not really . . . there. But how much should you use? Aye… there’s the… salt rub. (Sorry.) Audio production has its salt as well. It’s called “dynamic range compression.” Basically it squishes all those up-and-down squiggles (I’d draw you a picture, but I’m a writer) so that they’re more squat and punchy. Everything sounds louder, even if it isn’t. This can make vocals leap out in front of a twelve-piece bandiii or give a drum kit that extra kick. But add too much and you end up with an unpalatable sensory overload that no one really wants to listen to for more than a minute at a time. (Turned on the radio recently?) And though this hasn’t been scientifically tested (as far as I know), it can’t be all that good for your blood pressure.

Now consider onions sizzling in the pan until they begin to brown, or that eggplant you delicately perch above the fire on your stovetop until it’s ever so slightly charred. You can do this with sound as well. By the time you’re messing with it, “sound” has become electric current zipping around at a voltage that rises and falls. Years ago someone decided to see what happens when you drive the voltage up too high. The result was a slew of weird sounds ranging from warm to gritty, strange new overtones hovering around the old ones. They called it “distortion,” and it changed the flavor of popular music forever. And you can take it as far as you want, though caution is advised. Not everyone likes their steaks charred to a crisp—but then again, some people buy Slayer albums.

Moderation and prudence will get you far, but some things are better left untouched. We have all had the experience of innocently walking down a supermarket aisle and being accosted by what sounds like the product of an unnatural liaison between a sheep, a robot, and a set of panpipes. This may be the worst scourge of our musical age: “Auto-Tune.” I don’t know exactly how it works, but I am convinced that Auto-Tune is the MSG of audio production. It can overwhelm even the most mediocre vocal performance with a layer of computerized zing so thick that it almost sounds good until you notice that it has left a disgusting film inside your ears. It may induce severe allergic reactions. It may cause permanent damage to the nervous system. And in many cases, you don’t really want to know what it’s covering up.

Which brings us to the most important point of all: start with good ingredients. Always. If you sing like a raccoon under a stack of moist pillows, there’s no knob you can turn that will make you croon like crème brûlée or crow like coq au vin.iv Unless it’s a health hazard, taste it before you cook it. If the old can of tomatoes tastes like an old can, please don’t stew your wild boar in it. If the wine is truly undrinkable, maybe you shouldn’t cook with it either. If your whole wheat flour is stale and sour, your crusty loaf won’t be worth the time it takes to chew. Consider this an audition, and please, be ruthless. Success is hard to define. The Spice Girls made four platinum albums. P. F. Chang’s Home Menu topped $100 million in sales last year. But do you want to feature either at your next dinner party?

i This is a rare opportunity to use “zymurgy” in a sentence but I’ll refrain.

ii Maybe? Actually I have no idea.

iii Or in front of a bus.

iv Italics improve flavor.

 

Categories: Uncategorized

Everything’s Conventional

Posted on September 17th, 2012

Last night’s crowd at the reunion show of Vegan Options was small but fierce. Raging early into the evening, Jeff, Brian, and I drank seven dollar beers, debated whether unicorns would eat mayo or aioli, and screamed our protest of corporate takeover and profit off human suffering. We wrapped it up around ten-thirty; we had to work in the morning, after all, and that black eye-liner is a bitch to get off.

Vegan Options, active during the winter of aught nine, was born in the cubby between registers five and six at an organic grocery store somewhere in the continental United States. As cashiers, Jeff, Brian, and I bonded over our shared struggle with working for a huge, corporate box store – especially one that tried so hard to hide that part of its identity. We all cared deeply about good food and good people and though both were to be found at our place of employment, the overarching corporate structure ultimately squandered both. Cashiering – one of the most repetitive and dehumanizing jobs in retail – weighed on our souls. Compounding the issue was our new boss, a woman unanimously agreed to be the illegitimate
offspring of Professor Umbridge and Beaker. We were disillusioned, we were bored, and we were really tired of asking customers to push the green button on the credit card machine. So we did the only thing we could do: we formed a punk band.

Joining the ranks of many a theoretical band gone before, Vegan Options never played a show, never even had a practice, but was discussed in enough detail to take on a life of its own. Jeff shredded on the mandolin; Brian was our lead singer and carried the show on guitar, while I was the not-very-good-but-hot girl drummer à la Meg White. We wore work aprons that had been ripped up and sewn back together with dental floss. Just aprons. Punk isn’t punk if you don’t violate dress code. We started conflicting rumors about shows. I told someone from the bakery that we’d played at a local bar the night before while Brian invited the cheese counter to the house party tomorrow where we were definitely going to
debut. We planned to all show up at a party and keep promising that we were going to start in just a few minutes until, hours later, we’d quietly depart, then tell people the next day that they must have missed our set. The legend of Vegan Options simmered quietly under the smell of rotisserie chickens just out of the oven in prepared foods.

At last night’s reunion, Brian dug our old set list out of his wallet. Scrawled on a torn off strip of thermal receipt paper, the list of song titles read like exactly what it was – the attempt of educated, passionate minds to anchor themselves within the numbing chrysalis of corporate speak and health food propaganda. Heading up the list was our hit single and the title of our LP, *Everything’s Conventional*. Following this were the classics, *Gluten Free or Die! * and, *Macrobiotic Diet*. Lesser known but worth a listen were tracks four through six: *10 Foot Rule; Mac’s Mustache; *and *Down Time, Clean It.* Track seven was our ballad, *4-Pack of My Soul*, while track eight was the sleeper hit, *Tare It Up*. Rounding out the list were *Ancient Grains* and *Buycott*, leading up to the last track on the album, *Hungry for Change*, a rousing anthem that called a generation to action. If you can get your hands on a copy of the limited UK
release, you’ll get the bonus track, *Your Mom’s a Whole Paycheck*.

Vegan Options ultimately dissolved; I started grad school, Brian disappeared for a while – his only communication to me a three sentence postcard from some tourist trap in Appalachia, and Jeff quit the company in true punk style, submitting his letter of resignation – a manifesto decrying the company’s hypocritical labor practices written on the inside of a brown paper bag and signed in blood – then walking off the job to go work as a cook at a locally owned restaurant. The band was bigger than just the idle shenanigans of some disgruntled employees, though. It was an outlet for all the things that we saw wrong with the world yet found ourselves complicit in. Brian did keep that list in his wallet for three years, after all, and as I watched him refold and tuck it gently back in last night, it struck me that Vegan Options is alive and well. We may never have touched an instrument in the fight, but all of us are still raging. We call things like we see them, we try to live by our principles, and we believe in the possibility of simultaneously paying rent and creating a better world. And we have fun doing it. So next time you find yourselves in line at that certain store – because hey, we all need organic quinoa sometimes – remember Brian, Jeff, and I. Remember to rage. And keep an eye out for Vegan Options: coming to a farmer’s market near you.

Categories: Uncategorized

With My Mind On My Oven, And My Oven On My Mind

Posted on September 17th, 2012

When I was teaching cooking classes I’d strongly suggest that people listen to music when they cook, as one of a number of things they could do to help themselves relax in the kitchen and get themselves excited about whatever it was they were going to cook. (Relaxation and excitement being two very powerful elements in the molding of a good cook.) “Pick something related to your menu,” I’d suggest. “Flamenco for tapas, Bollywood soundtracks for Indian food, Edith Piaf for French food. This will help you set the scene for your culinary masterpiece!” (People love being told they’re going to create a masterpiece.) But it really is true – appropriate music can put you in the right mood, and in the kitchen the right mood can be the difference between a killer dinner party and a dud of a meal.

But what’s appropriate for one person is very different from what’s appropriate for another. Sure, when I’m cooking chicken piccata I like some “Dean Martin Sings Italian Favorites” as much as the next person, but my favorite food and music pairing is a little more complex. I’m a baker more than I am anything else, and what I want more than anything else when I’m baking is hip hop. I want hip hop, I want it loud, and I want it pumped directly into my eardrums via a set of close-fitting headphones, iPhone hanging out of my apron pocket or tucked in my waistband. Flamenco might make you feel romantic and exotic while you’re expertly flipping that tortilla Española, but when I’m in my own little technical world of doughs and batters and leavening, with all of its precise measurements and on-the-spot troubleshooting and instinctual decision-making, I need the intensity and the in-your-face bravado of some old school Notorious B.I.G.. Your terrine sauvage might have been lovingly crafted in the breathy setting of a Carla Bruni album, but my triple layer polenta cake with crème fraîche buttercream has a terroir of badass and I feel fantastic about it.

I’m not entirely sure why I’m so drawn to this combination, actually. Perhaps it has something to do with how baking still makes me a little nervous, even though it’s what I do in the kitchen more than anything else. I can braise and roast and grill and chop my way through almost anything with a reasonable amount of skill, but even though my kitchen produces a somewhat shocking volume of baked goods I still get a little nervous once something goes into the oven, left to my decisions about timing and to the fates of heat and leavening. Listening to hip hop while I’m baking makes me feel confident – like the one and only baller and shot caller of my own kitchen – and I know from teaching classes that confidence in the kitchen can make a big difference in the final product. Or maybe it’s like how in college I used to like writing papers in the loudest and most chaotic of environments, because it helped me create my own little very focused world while everything else swirled around me. Maybe it provides a rhythm that soothes me into steady kneading, or mixing, or scooping. Or maybe there’s just something weirdly satisfying about rolling out delicate sheets of homemade puff pastry while Missy encourages me to “work it.”

Important to note here is that I didn’t come up with this pairing out of nowhere. Hip hop artists have been referencing food in their lyrics since way back to The Sugarhill Gang, basically at the start of it all, and since then basically everyone’s been rapping about everything from the best to the worst in the food world. (Drake fairly recently released a song that references The French Laundry, for instance, and if you have not heard Das Racist’s passionate ode to a certain combination fast food restaurant, consider your life unlived.) Sure, there might be product placements and complicated publicity agreements behind some of it, but I doubt the Beastie Boys received kickbacks for rapping about challah and matzoh, and the brilliant media moment of Snoop Dogg baking brownies on the Martha Stewart show cannot be tainted in my heart of hearts. Should you find yourself in front of a computer (hey, I bet you are right now) wishing you had a few more of these hilarious pieces of evidence, immediately google the following: “Cookin’ with Coolio,” and “Bon Rappetit” (the latter of which turns out to be an elaborate joke, sadly, but Ol’ Dirty Custard is still the most brilliant fake menu item ever created).

But with a plethora of options to choose from, my preferred audio-culinary pairing does not come without a certain amount of deliberate consideration. The music and the food item must still be carefully paired, calibrated appropriately for the effort, detail, and intricacy required by the recipes and techniques in question. A batch of chocolate chip cookies work particularly well with a bit of vintage Lauryn Hill, I have found, but something like genoise or puff pastry requires something far more potent, like Talib Kweli, or some of the more intense Beastie Boys albums. I’m not always particularly aware of exactly what’s playing once I’m in the zone, but it’s always there, pushing me further into a zone in which I am the most awesome and in which everything is kicking ass. One time I was focusing on a particularly high-pressure baking job and didn’t even realize I’d been listening to Gangsta’s Paradise on repeat for 15 minutes, rapping along all the while in my awkwardly-melodic Midwestern white girl way. But those Thai iced tea cakes turned out perfectly, and I have Coolio partially to thank for that.

My baked goods are produced by a powerful combination of sugar, perfectionism, inappropriate lyrics, and pumping beats, and if that’s what makes people enjoy them (and sometimes even want to pay me for them), then I’m happy to give credit where credit is due. So I’ll state it on the record: that birthday cake I made for you was fueled by Big Pun as much as it was by cake flour, and those delicate lavender madeleines had as much to do with my dedication to The Roots as they did with my dedication to my oven thermometer.

Categories: Uncategorized

Stone Avenue

Posted on September 17th, 2012

Boston, a decade ago. Dark, cold nights wandering the streets of Somerville, getting drunk on Guinness and scotch, trying to one-up each other to find the dankest, divey-est bar where one of us will win the party. Inevitably, though, we end up back in the boys’ kitchen in Union Square, yellow cans of Café Bustelo along the walls. We play records loud, talk louder, and never stop cooking. Classic Tina and Ike goes with beer-can chicken, “Pet Sounds” with coconut curry, early Springsteen with spinach dumplings from the hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant in Winter Hill, where you can see the old ladies making them in the back through an open door, standing at a long table, pinching dough between their fingers. I eat kalamata olives for the first time here in this kitchen, listening to one of the boys give a discourse on Etta James. Another night, a different boy teaches me to make lentils the Madhur Jaffrey way and to love the Pixies. And I learn here too that crusty bread dipped in olive oil and balsamic vinegar isn’t just a thing to eat at fancy restaurants but also seated at a beaten-up wooden table under a stained map of the city in a kitchen that smells like cigarettes and PBR and sounds like a college radio station.

The boys, some who live there and some who don’t, come in and out the door, bringing fresh-made pasta from the Italian deli, glass growlers of Ipswich Ale, spices from the Bombay Market, and runny cheeses cut minutes before at the late-night wine store on Washington Street. We are all so young and so broke, but we don’t know it here. Often, I am the only girl, stretching my legs out from my kitchen chair, watching my brilliant, wild brothers of the night stirring a pot on the stove and telling rambling stories that always seem to end in someone turning up the volume on The Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner” and standing on the arm of the sofa to play air guitar: “I’m in love with Massachusetts, I’m in love with the radio on…” I am in love with all of them.

We eat, we sing, we argue with our mouths full, we make flat-bread pizza with homemade dough, tomato sauce that doesn’t come from a can, roast vegetables with sea salt and herbs. There is always more beer and more music. Other friends show up, sit in doorways, lie down on the floor to eat and keep the conversation going past the point where any of us can stand up anymore. I have never known before that food could be eaten this way or that music could sound like this, every bite and every note dissected and rebuilt from scratch – this is why this olive oil tastes so good, this is why punk needs to be shouted, this is what Brian Wilson must have been eating when he wrote “Vegetables.”

Every weekend and most week-nights, we’re all there on Stone Avenue, listening to The Walkmen on repeat and making penne with vodka sauce in the kitchen of an ancient triple-decker that will, one year later, when most of the boys have left, release sewage from its bowels in one sigh of relief and flood the entire first floor. The boys are my kingdom, the kitchen our fortress, and they have my back: when I meet a guy I want to cook for, they write me recipes for tahini dipping sauce that end with instructions to pour it over his naked body, then, weeks later, drag me out to do donuts in a frozen parking lot while blasting Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” when it becomes clear that the only thing I’d dipped into was a fresh batch of heartache.

We are our own revolution, and our anthem is food, feeding each other in their kitchen with stories and music and stories about music. Years later, we will all become writers, musicians, lovers of people and the noise they create. In the meantime, we invent ourselves nightly as Capote or Kerouac, Iggy Pop or Bowie, Alice Waters or Julia Child. We have all just learned how to brew Turkish coffee that tastes like chocolate, slam-dance until someone collapses laughing, pick out recipes from stained and dog-eared cookbooks, and do it all over again the next night, when we’ll tell the story of the night before like an epic drama, going for laughs. Only by luck – a chance meeting, a bluegrass show, my embarrassing habit of quoting Robert Frost when I am most uncomfortable – am I a minor character in this plot and at this table, and I am grateful for it. We eat and we talk and we eat again and there is always one last beer.

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Little Green Knife

Posted on August 16th, 2012

Stockings have always been my favorite part of Christmas. No matter what grandiose lumpy mystery package awaited me beneath the tree, the real prize that hauled me out of my bed in the pre-dawn of Christmas morning was the knitted bulky oversized sock that hung by the fireplace (with or without care).

When I was younger, it was an endless stream of trinkets, (anchored down at the toe by a corpulent orange), whose number seemed to approach the infinite. How many tubes of sparkling lip balm can this stocking hold? A billion. That’s how many.

When I graduated to the realm of more sedate adult gifts, including genuine enthusiasm for woolly socks, the plump, swaying, charcuterie-esque bulge of my Yuletide stocking still held sway over my desires. Only now, this stocking came equipped for Grownup Needs. This stocking, during my first Christmas as a prep cook, came armed to the teeth. It came with Little Green Knife.

From the first moment that a brand new chef’s knife had silently crimsoned my startled thumb in the walk-in at work, I had fallen hard for knives. I had been nervous then, that first morning, minutes after learning how to hold one properly for the first time in my cooking life. By the time December rolled around, however, I was hundreds of cases of vegetables in to a serious burning crush on all things sharp, shiny, and steel. There were three knives in the rotation at work that were a little shorter, a little heftier, than their ten inch counterparts, and I hoarded their attentions jealously, as a lover might. Their weight felt like an extension of my arm. Their movements through lettuce, peppers, cucumbers, mushrooms, were things that I didn’t have to think about, the way you absently go about the business of breathing. When I thought about graduate school, which I still thought that I would attend at that point in time, I also thought “but what will happen to my hands and these knives?” There was knowledge locked away in my forearms. I didn’t want to lose it.

Months later, I’d made a series of decisions. The first was to abandon my fledgling career as a future social worker in favor of professional cookery school. The second was to choose pastry over the savory. And the third was to move to the other side of the country to pursue it. In amongst the pots and pans, a slender vestige of my vegetable dismembering past, I slipped the little green knife, and drove hell for leather across the country to Portland, Oregon.

There are people who experience geographical certainty upon arriving in new locations. Everything in their blood says ‘here we stay’ or ‘yes, this place’. Mine, upon arriving in Portland, didn’t. Pastry school didn’t start until December. The city’s contours wouldn’t stay put in my head, and I drove around in a daze, looking for anything familiar. I had a day job working in a produce department chopping up fruits and vegetables, but, the knives were all the wrong size, and I worked alone, far from the caffeinated hum of a kitchen. When school started at long last, it brought more displacement—gone were the last minute additions of salt, the sudden need for rosemary, the secret ingredients. Pastry was precision. Pastry was having hands that didn’t get too hot (mine always did). Pastry was a soft touch, a deft hand, and exact weights. My hands knew nothing. And my knives were gone.

Slowly, however, my hands became less useless. And amidst the delicate heaps of flour, the downy drifts of almond meal, and the deepening dough, the need for a sharp edge crept back in to our daily work. There were oranges that needed to be severed into supremes. Peels needed to be pared into future orangettes. Like the refrain of a familiar song, linking me to home and to the secret savory heart of my culinary organs, the little green knife found itself in my hand, time after time. Riding shotgun next to my thermometer, pens, and butter-stained notebook, it was equal parts talisman and classroom joke, each time it appeared to trim candy, pare fruit, or pull raspberry puree through a pale sea of crème anglaise. I decorated nearly the entirety of my first wedding cake armed solely with its ever-sharp charms, determined to keep this slim link to my shadow self, the east coast vegetable wench who dreamt in brunoise.

It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t expensive. It came at the tail end of a Christmas stocking, one of a number of dangling enticements on the darkest day of winter. But it stayed sharp. It stayed true. It reminded my hands of what they’d been, and what they might someday be, again. It was a scant five inches long. But deep in my pocket, its small weight contained multitudes, and sang its own sweet song—the one that said ‘here we stay’. The one that said ‘yes, this place’.

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The Incredible High-End Bird Crap Scooping Jar Opener

Posted on August 16th, 2012

In the winter of 2000 A.D., I was a penniless Psychology major with aspirational living fantasies. Wrapped in a navy pea coat, I would wander the icy streets of Manhattan, gazing with lust at the brownstones of Gramercy, dreaming of the day when I would causally look through an issue of Home & Garden magazine and flippantly say, “Well doesn’t that look nice? Perhaps we’ll buy it tomorrow.” (I still dream of that day, 12 years later, even as living in Manhattan stopped being my aspirational anything.)

Christmas was approaching. I thought of my mother complaining about a jar of something or other, how it was impossible to open, how if she had a jar opener, a lot of frustration might be avoided. I stumbled into a Restoration Hardware store in the Flatiron District, mostly hoping to feed my brain more aspirational crap. For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, Restoration Hardware is a beautifully arranged store that sells vintage-looking industrial design items and various other home goods at the sort of markup that would chase any reasonable person back to Bed Bath & Beyond, were the things not displayed in such a stately, bourgeois-baiting manner. As I roamed the retail space, wondering if selling an eyeball on the black market might allow me to purchase a tin bowl, (who needs two eyeballs, anyway?) I saw the perfect thing at an affordable price point: a Good Grip jar opener, which I instantly purchased.

On the train ride to my parents’ house, I fantasized about jars, evil jars whose lids heaven itself could not pry off, my mother pointing – “That one! Now, that one!” – and me, with our new shiny black jar opener, running around the kitchen, popping off lids as if they were beer bottle caps, the freed pickles and jam and whatnot dancing out of defeated jars into the open. (Perhaps that was a good time to start diagnosing myself.)

My mother was grateful for the gift. She took out a jar of pickled cabbage she’d been having trouble with and said, “How would you use that again?” I examined the lid. It was not a flat type of lid that sealed so many jars I had seen in Eastern Europe as a child, the lid this little tool was obviously made for. It was a very modern lid you had to grip hard and just twist. Unwilling to admit that I might have bought the wrong tool, I tried to use it anyway. The jar opener slid all around the lid, obviously incapable of that which it was not made for.

“What are you doing?” said mom.

“Gimme a sec,” I mumbled, and proceeded to bang the lid with the jar opener.

My mother came over, twisted off the lid, picked up the jar opener and said, “It’s okay, I’m sure we’ll use it for something.”

Fast-forward 12 years. My parents bought an apartment with a balcony that faces a quiet street. Perfection – except for the vile pigeons, who land on the balcony occasionally and treat it as their bathroom. Given the city’s ridiculous assertion that pigeons are not disease-ridden vermin and therefore may not be exterminated, my parents had to find other ways to keep them off the balcony, including spikes, wire, contraptions that flutter in the wind, and when appropriate, the broom. Still, the parasitic creatures would occasionally find a way to crap on all that is good, including the balcony.

As my mother and I walked out on the balcony a couple of months ago to enjoy the warm weather, we saw a little pile of bird excrement on the railing. “Damn things, just can’t keep them off the property,” said mom and picked up – wait for it – the Good Grip jar opener. She scooped up the excrement, tossed it on the patch of grass beneath the window, and wiped the edge clean with a piece of paper towel, which she then tossed in a garbage pail. She put the jar opener in the corner to await its next unenviable mission.

“That thing!” I guffawed. “It’s perfect!”

“I told you we’d find use for it someday,” said mom, taking a sip of her tea, the evening slowly descending around us.

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Spoon, Man

Posted on August 16th, 2012

“Say man, where’d you get that spoon?” As much as that could be the beginning of William Burroughs book, it’s not, and I wasn’t talking about smack when I uttered it. Instead I was in the kitchen of a beautifully restored late-17th century home here in Portland (Maine!) helping my friend Chad out with a pop up dinner.

The guy is easily 6’3” but this spoon, which he was using to lovingly baste duck breasts in their own fat, dwarfed even his massive paws. It had a handle like a serving spoon but the head was almost as big as a gardening trowel, with what looked like a unique depth-to-width ratio. In a single, deft little stroke — a flick of the wrist really — he retrieved almost all of the liquid in the pan and ladled it back over the crisp, fatty skin on top of the breast. The economy of movement was remarkable. It was like watching a pelican catch a fish, or seeing one of those forest fire waterbomber planes dip into a lake and then drop its payload — up close. Except, instead of squelching flames and saving the homes of furry woodland creatures, he was inciting a riot of flavor within what had very recently been a living, quacking duck.

In an instant I remembered an Apocalypse Now moment in one of the kitchens of my past. There, in the flickering, red-orange light of the Tuscan grille a sous chef had leaned his sweaty mug close to mine, his eyes blazing. I could smell the PBRs from last night’s walk-in stash on his skin and what I guessed to be American Spirits (this was Portland, Oregon after all) on his breath as he spat his diatribe in my face. His delivery was spot on, imbued with the kind of machismo that makes a certain type of chef both the coolest dude in any bar and the biggest dick to work for… ever. “A good cook… a real cook,” he began, “needs only three things to do his job.” (I remember an emphasis on the ‘his’ that might have been more of a derision of my wilting FOH nature than of women in the kitchen at large.) “Knife!” he shouted over the din, raising his eight-inch chef’s knife up as if he had just retrieved it from some sacred stone. “Tongs!” came next, a bark issued from the back of his throat. “And spoon!” which upon hefting, he spun in his fingers like a drum stick and then held to his chest, shredding an air (or spoon?) guitar solo a la “Use Your Illusion” era G-and-effing-R — I think just to fuck with me.

This guy was obviously a complete madman, but at least I finally understood why I had witnessed a few near fistfights over said spoons in the kitchen at the end of long nights. The guys on the line were mostly well-behaved but didn’t necessarily need much of an excuse to get into it with each other, and the spoons — of which each guy had a couple, usually with a band of colored tape wrapped around the handle — seemed like something someone might get stuck over. It was best just to stand back as they packed up their knife rolls and scatter if the f-bombs started flying.

At that point, I thought that all such talismans of the behind-the-scenes restaurant experience were pure black magic. A spoon? Who cares about a spoon? Sure, they looked a little bigger than the average soup spoon, but it took seeing one in action up close for it all to come together for me. In a well-worn kitchen on the opposite side of the country, I got it.

I’m not sure, but I think Chad’s knuckles might have whitened a bit when I made my inquiry that night. He’s a veteran of many kitchens and I guess he’s seen his fare share of good spoons come and go. His answer was something akin to, “You just know a good one when you see it,” meaning of course that they aren’t something you can just go out and buy. Good spoons are born of the weird mix of silverware that passes through kitchens — odd vintages lingering in the backs of drawers, partial sets ordered by managers past, relics dislodged from any real, discernable place or time in the history of the restaurant. No one really knows where they came from, they just know when they’re there: maybe at a thrift store (if you’re lucky), in the hands of the unsuspecting FNG, or sticking out of the potato salad a your friend’s parents’ house.

When you see one, you’ll know. Grab it.

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Coffee Chronicles: When Things Go Wrong

Posted on August 16th, 2012

Tools are overrated. Human civilization, or at least human cooking (you’re reading this—don’t tell me you believe there’s a difference), began when Thogiz or maybe Dal-Tor put one thing into another thing and then consumed it. Ate it or drank it. Hot or cold, stiff or runny, tough on the teeth or slippery down the throat. Can we agree on that much?

Coffee—the cornerstone of the modern world?—is little different than our troglodyte forbearers’ meal of, say, leaves and goat bits. We take seeds. We roast and grind them. We soak them in water. Sometimes we don’t really roast them. Sometimes we don’t really grind them. We soak seeds in water and then we drink it. The technology, fire and bludgeon, has been widely and freely available since the Stone Age.

Then why haven’t we figured out how to make the perfect cup of coffee? Maybe we have. I’ve tasted a few that might qualify. What we have not learned, however, is how to avoid making the perfect cup of coffee’s evil twin, the Brown Horror, the Abysmal Mug—the utterly imperfect cup of coffee.

I am not talking about the unobtrusive stuff they serve at the diner down the road. Leave well enough alone. I am talking about the despondence of a really good cup gone horribly bad. Maybe this has happened to you. Maybe this very morning your favorite barista handed you something that tasted like a schnauzer cremated into a demitasse. It isn’t fun.

But these people are professionals, you tell yourself. They do this for a living. They are the coffee gods. What have I done to offend them? Maybe I didn’t tip enough? Maybe the awkward eye contact got out of hand? Did I say “grande” instead of “medium”?

Believe me: it’s not personal. When things go wrong with coffee—and by coffee here I mostly mean espresso, which is nothing fancy but just what happens when you squeeze a small amount of water through finely-ground, tightly-packed beans—the cause is almost always mechanical. Sure, the perfect barista could save your beverage. The perfect pilot can land a disabled airplane safely in the Hudson. That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen every time. (Sorry.)

A quality espresso machine costs roughly the same as a motorcycle and requires significantly more maintenance. This is why you will probably be disappointed if you purchase a similar-looking object from a department store. The beans must be ground neither too fine nor too coarse or the water will come in a pitiful trickle or a torrent. The water must be neither too hot not too cold or your coffee will taste like the bottom of an ash tray or like an unripe grapefruit. Let it flow for too long and the brew will be thin and bitter; not long enough and it will cling to the tongue like an upsettingly stimulating and somewhat metallic syrup. If the water pressure is not just right—and don’t try to adjust it without an intimate knowledge of classical and possibly quantum mechanics—then all other bets are off.

There is no correct value for any of these variables, and they might change not only day to day but minute to minute. A machine that sits unused for even a half hour can grow lonely, its metal parts cold, and spit out something unexpected next time it’s needed. A slight change in humidity or atmospheric pressure, a weather front or a customer leaving the door open, can turn the perfect grind into a useless wad of oil or a bed of burning sand. And, of course, sometimes machines just break, and unlike the aforementioned motorcycle, which will probably stop moving or start smoking, the espresso machine will quietly and humbly continue to produce what appears to be perfectly respectable coffee but in fact tastes like last year’s apple cores roasted over a heap of burning tires.

So am I trying to tell you Don’t try this at home? Believe me, I wouldn’t dream of it. Good coffee is a great thing, and there is no reason why anyone with some reasonably fresh beans and some reasonably hot water shouldn’t be able to enjoy perfection at home. But beware the lure of complicated tools, machines, and implements, auto-tamping pump-action steam-powered quad-core nickel-cadmium fully-automatic hands-free low-sodium solid-state tabletop espresso machines in particular. If you absolutely need to have “espresso” at home, something with little pods will produce a uniformly inoffensive beverage every time, while a tiny stovetop pot will make something distinctly espresso-like and usually pleasing through slightly more natural means.

But if you don’t need to have espresso at home—if you need the juice of the bean, hot, a little sweet, as caffeinated as you could ever want—then do I have some news for you. Forget melittas, percolators, French presses, drip brewers. The key to the perfect cup of brewed coffee is also mechanical, but rest assured that the mechanics are somewhat simpler.

Take some coffee beans. Good ones. How do you know if they’re good ones? Smell them. Touch them. Maybe eat one. Are they slightly stale and rancid? Unpleasantly dry and grainy? Do you like them? If you like them then you’re in the clear. Trust yourself.

Take a blunt object. Choose wisely. I like a hammer but a rolling pin is fun too. A lot depends on the quality of your repressed aggressive impulses. I haven’t tried a baseball bat but a nice wooden one would probably work wonders. Anyway, bludgeon the beans. Bludgeon them. Stop when they look smashed to bits. This doesn’t take long.

Put them in some hot water. I mean it. Just gather them up and put them in. Then wait a bit. Don’t time it. Watch. Smell. Taste. This is fun and the stakes are low. You aren’t going to ruin anyone’s life (unless maybe you spill the hot water on a friend. Don’t do that). Eventually, strain the water. I like to hold the same blunt object up to the lip of the water vessel and decant it into something else, but then I like the authenticity of some bean shards flailing in my cup. Your sensibilities might be more delicate than mine.

I’m not saying this will produce the perfect cup of coffee, but I’m convinced that it is the very best you can do with Paleolithic technology. I’ve survived entire summers smashing my beans with a hammer and sipping from a Pyrex measuring cup. I welcome improvements to my method. And if you discover a way to coax overtones of citrus and marshmallow and a pleasantly effervescent crema out of coffee beans using only a small boulder, then please let me know and together we will change the world.

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