A Literary Feast

Just Like Mama Used To Make

Posted on May 13th, 2012

Is there a phrase more overused, more cliché, more pre-loaded with meaning, and ultimately more misleading than “just like mama used to make”? (“I need that report by five o’clock” comes close.) The phrase, when uttered, (usually in a booming, “here ya go” manner with an army of fat invisible exclamation marks following) brings to mind red-and-white checkered tablecloths, huge steaming pots of spaghetti, plates of mashed potatoes and creamy sauces and sweet/spicy sausage served by a larger than life individual who is either (your) mama or a generic version of Mario Batali, unto you – a rapt tween who has yet to experience heartbreak, unemployment and endless traffic jams. Mama cooked out of love, not duty (and through exhaustion and sleep deprivation). Chefs were kind kitchen Santas, not psychopaths yelling obscenities at line cooks. The good guys never lost. Everything was for you. You never thought that time would come again, until… you were served THIS DISH, which surprisingly, incredibly, tastes Just Like Mama Used to Make.

The Mama in question is, undoubtedly, your mama. The assumption is that your mama knew how to cook, and no one could ever cook better than her. (The logic instantly becomes flawed when you consider that if everyone’s mama was the best cook in the world, then no one’s mama was actually a better cook than the rest.) The assumption never goes: “And while mama slept on the couch, passed out and snoring from an evening of shooting smack into her big toe and drinking a bunch of 40s, and papa sat in the basement with the shotgun, contemplating ending it all because the hallucinations were too horrible to withstand, I would take little sis and off we’d go, into the freezing hell of Alaskan winter, not a car in sight, thin layers of ice covering potholes in neglected roads, until we reached Timmy’s house, and Timmy’s mom would heap our plates with roasted chicken and grilled veggies and for that, at least, we were grateful”. To this person, Timmy’s mama would be the Mama who made tasty things; thoughts of her own mama might bring about memories of salty mac and cheese from a can and a glass of Kool-Aid, on good days.

Furthermore, the phrase’s nostalgic nature carries with it a darker undercurrent. “Used to make” means that the Mama in question probably no longer makes it, whatever “it” is. Is she deceased, or did she simply figure that you are now old enough to cook for yourself and stop exploiting her, and papa can make himself a sandwich, thankyouverymuch? In either case, something happened – the line of goodness, of sustenance, of unrestrained gluttony has been irrevocably interrupted. Things will never be the same again. Good thing this plate of frozen, microwaveable slop is here to set the world right for you.

Let us suppose, for a second, that the diner in question did not grow up in a Harmony Korine movie and never went to the funeral of anyone more important than an ancient pet hamster. How often, really, does the food actually live up to the promise? When do those bowls of spaghetti taste divine, and not like something that emerges as an “entrée” from the back of a questionably clean local pizzeria? When is that filet of fish bursting with the flavor of the sea, instead of the fryer? How often does that chicken noodle soup need to be nuked into oblivion with salt and pepper in order to have any kind of flavor at all? Contents of the plate frequently appear better than they actually are.

Here’s a perfect example of how two people can have very different interpretations of the same phrase, ripped from my own family history. As a child, I sometimes stayed with my paternal grandparents for a week or two. Like any old school Eastern European grandma, mine fussed around the stove endlessly, cooking for gramps and me as she did for my father when he was a boy. I didn’t want to eat her food; I was spoiled. I should mention here that my mother is an amazing cook, and I never want to hear “just like mama used to make” because she always has, and still does, prepare perfect, simple comfort food when I am over, and while I have eaten food that was great in other ways, I have never been served something “like” it that was just as good. In other words, grandma didn’t stand a chance. It did not help matters that her food was genuinely subpar: heavy, oily, with the flavor just a little off from what you’d expect. (Good thing she doesn’t speak English well enough to read this.)

I was also already becoming a bit of a neat freak, and somehow, grandma’s kitchen didn’t come across as very sanitary, though it was not particularly filthy either. The problem was that her hair occasionally, i.e. about 40% of the time, made it into the dish. And as Lucinda Williams (or Eddie Vedder, depending on the version you hear) once sang, that which you fear the most will meet you halfway. And boy, did the hair meet me halfway. More often than not, I would be the only one at the table to find a fuzzy surprise in my dish. “What, not again?!” grandma would exclaim and clasp her hands in exasperation, and the family would laugh as I sat there coughing up a hairball.

My father was now used to finer things in life, too, but grandpa had no choice but to eat his wife’s masterpieces. One day, as I tried to hunt down yet another hair that was hiding behind a piece of chicken somewhere, he said, “You know, that’s nothing. When your grandmother’s mother was alive, we all lived in the same apartment and she was the one who cooked all the meals. That woman – she shed like a damn cocker spaniel.”

“What are you talking about?” grandma protested.

“Oh yeah, say, you’re eating soup. An innocent bowl of soup. You’d plunge the spoon in there, and come up with a spoonful of hair!”

“That’s not true! I never got any hair in my soup. He’s making it up.”

“Hair soup! Hair soup, that’s what we had every night!”

Somehow, this did not inspire me to keep eating my grandma’s dish. But whereas my grandmother enjoyed her mother’s cooking (or pretended to), grandpa had a very different opinion of his mother-in-law’s creations. When the phrase “just like mama used to make” is synonymous with “hair soup,” the frozen dinner doesn’t sound so bad. At least there’s quality control at the factory, and machines don’t shed hair.

In light of the aforementioned, I propose that we put the obnoxious phrase to bed. There are plenty of other clichés to be used, like “hearty Italian” and, you know, “artisanal.” The phrase has long ago lost all the meaning it was intended to carry. In fact, can you imagine someone cool – say, Paul Newman in his prime, or Clint Eastwood in the Sergio Leone trilogy – saying this to anyone? Exactly. Neither should you.

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Notable And Potable Vol. 19: A Rum For Dr. Jane

Posted on April 20th, 2012

The opening credits of “Jane’s Journey” show a nearly 80-year-old Dr. Jane Goodall first packing and then enjoying Johnnie Walker Red Label on a plane to Africa. She holds a Collins glass containing a generous pour of the whisky while reading an academic paper as the clouds rolls by. That’s how Dr. Jane rolls. Even if all you do is read the Wikipedia article on Dr. Jane, you’ll quickly realize you are learning a little bit about a genuine badass. She is the only human to have been accepted into chimpanzee society (she was kicked out in the end, which is badass in its own right). She earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge University without having a B.Sc. (her undergraduate education started with a self-funded boat ride to Tanganyika at age 23). She’s a humanitarian, a great orator, and just straight-up wise. Dr. Jane probably doesn’t have a lot of time to visit craft cocktail bars, but she would make a wonderful guest.

Her mentor, Louis Leakey, believed that women have superior observational skills and make for natural naturalists. Upon becoming the founding member of “Leakey’s Angels” Jane’s bravery and patience rewarded the world with intimate knowledge of our closest phylogenetic relative. Of course other (probably male) academics of our species criticized her observations as being less than scientific due to her personification of the chimps she studied. When you see the swollen genitals of, get punched in the head by, and are in turn studied by extremely intelligent animals, how can you not assign them names? It’s what humans do. But Dr. Jane’s critics have been stifled by her tremendous achievements, and really I’m just here to offer her a drink.

Agricultural rum, or rhum agricole is distilled from fermented fresh-pressed sugar cane juice instead of the molasses and syrups that lead to “industrial” rums. The resulting spirit is more complex, and when unaged its fumes are heavy with some of the most interesting molecules. Typically rhum agricole comes from Martinique, but I recently tasted the only stateside agricultural rum whose terroir is Southern California: Agua Libre from St. George Distillery. It is a primal rum. When I spotted a bottle of it high up on the shelves of a bar in San Francisco and asked the bartender if she’d ever had it, she said she had but her tasting notes caused my friends and I to furrow our collective brow. Instead of the typical pleasantries such as “floral,” herbal,” and “vanilla,” she ticked off “funky,” “dirt,” and “mushrooms.” Then she climbed up onto the backbar and nimbly edged along the ledge to retrieve the bottle (there was a library-style ladder nearby, but she didn’t use it). She poured a bit in a small glass and the smell of gently burning tires wafted up. The first sip was undeniably loamy. My friends added “burnt teeth” and “distilled mulch” to the tasting notes as I accepted the bartender’s offer of an Agua Libre Ti’ Punch.

It wasn’t the most pleasant drink at first, but with the the melting ice and sugar softening the spirit it became exciting and enjoyable. My friends still carried on finding “notes of burning hefty bags stuffed with bison hair,” but I was lovin’ it. Agua Libre really does taste like mushrooms and dirt, and that’s pretty special. Remarking on the sensory experiences triggered by congeners is probably as close as most people get to doing science on any given day, so why not be bold and really challenge yourself? You’ll end up tipsy after a typical Ti’ Punch no matter what crazy esters and aldehydes the rhum is bringing to the table.

From what I’ve come to learn about Dr. Jane, I would urge her to give Scotch a little break and commingle her adventurous spirit with another: agricultural rum. After tasting them straight, one should always ask for a Ti’ Punch if it hasn’t already been suggested. For a drink that is essentially three ounces of rhum, they go down smoothly indeed thanks to the sugar and touch of lime. These “condiment” ingredients can be added to taste to skew the balance whichever way you choose. Like an Old-Fashioned, the simplicity of Ti’ Punch allows the spirit to be softened and showcased for one’s consideration. And for Dr. Jane’s Punch, I would recommend the Agua Libre just to see if she is able to pick up any sweaty chimp notes. I mean that in the best way possible.

Ti’ Punch

A slug of your favorite agricultural rum (I prefer unaged)
Preferred amount of cane syrup (most places, like my apartment, use demerara simple syrup)
Preferred amount of lime
A big ice cube (preferred but optional if you’re going to shoot not sip)

Squeeze the lime, anywhere from a small disc to half the fruit, into the other ingredients assembled in an Old-Fashioned glass and mix to incorporate the syrup.

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No Booze For You, or Why Would a Craft Beer Bar Close Early Every Night?

Posted on April 19th, 2012

People who move to New York claim a variety of reasons for relocation; among them are culture, diversity, career opportunities, culinary adventures, the art scene, fashion forwardness and anonymity. All of these are, for the most part, lies to mask the real reason people come to live here: the 4am closing time. In London, you can cultivate a beer gut until only about midnight; in Boston, you can curse the Yankees over a pint until a more reasonable 2am; but for the unadulterated joy of entering any of the one trillion bars, lounges, pubs and dives scattered across the five boroughs and proceeding to pound your mind and body into alcoholic stupor until 4am – perhaps later, if the bar is off the beaten path and you are lucky enough to get lost among the regulars after the shutters are officially drawn – New York can hardly be topped.

 

So imagine my surprise when, while drinking craft beer at the cavernous, echoey, moderately full Boreum Hill establishment Local 61, I heard the bartender sound last call at 12:30am on a Friday night. I looked at my watch, just to make sure. Then I asked my friend if it was daylight savings time. This didn’t add up: Why would a busy bar, trendy in all the right ways, situated in one of Brooklyn’s top neighborhoods for going out (right off the terminally hip Smith Street) shut off its taps a full three hours before the law postulates it so? Don’t they want to make money? (Surely, rent in this area cannot be cheap?) Why would they potentially turn off their customers? Talk about a black sheep among the Brooklyn booze-slinging herd.

 

“A little early to be closing, isn’t it?” we asked one of the bartenders, of whom there are typically around three on weekends.

 

“Yeah, you know how the quality of the crowd gets after about 1am…” she trailed off. “But we’re one of the few bars with food around here that are open for lunch, so we do our time and make our money, you could say.”

 

You could, but you probably wouldn’t. Smith Street does brisk business at night, but on weekday afternoons, diners are scarce. The Starbucks may be filled with stroller moms, high school kids and a few laptop-wielding freelancers, but even bars with low-priced food that would be mobbed in Union Square struggle to reel in the pre-duty bartenders and various independently wealthy types in Brooklyn. And even if Local 61 could get a chokehold on that market, there are very few businesses that would opt out of serving thirsty, paying customers into the night in exchange for a few spilled beers and perhaps an occasional call to the NYPD.

 

Local 61 almost looks like it doesn’t belong in New York; Portland is more like it, though Maine or Oregon is up for debate. The cavernous space is very stripped down, with large wooden communal tables arranged as if it were a picnic ground. The ceiling is high, and whatever art adorns the walls is sporadic and blends in rather than screams for attention. Browns and greys are the colors of choice; brick lines approximately half of the wall space. On one side, you can just make out the outline of what was once a chimney, starting mid-wall, just over the remnants of a platform pointing to the space’s more industrial past.

 

Heritage-clad locals wander in, sometimes with dogs, sometimes with strollers (this is Brooklyn 2012, after all) and sip on a stellar selection of East Coast microbrews; no large scale once-indies like Brooklyn Lager, no embarrassing grabs at local cred (ahem, Coney Island Lager). Instead, Portland ME’s excellent Allagash White and the always welcome Pleasantville, NY brew Captain Lawrence Liquid Gold hold up the lighter end of the beer spectrum while the rich burgundy of the surprisingly relatively light-bodied Bulkhead Red Amber Ale (Oceanside, NY) provides a darker alternative that is nevertheless appropriate for summer. That there is no Guinness on tap is no blasphemy either, not when Baltimore’s Existent Black Saison offers a sweeter, less creamy, more aromatic alternative. There are no spirits, but New York State wines – generally blends – nicely round out the drink menu.

 

Food at Local 61 echoes its drink selection: the ingredients are locally sourced, with delicious hard and soft cheese platters, two kinds of grilled cheese sandwiches (one vegetarian, one with ham), charcuterie, hummus, and sweet and spicy peanuts that will make you sweat like Rick Santorum at Rachel Maddow’s house party.

 

Along with the bar’s many charms, then, comes its one fault – its closing time, completely uncharacteristic of NYC. Sure, a barkeep in a pub on the outskirts of Staten Island may wish to shut down by 2am, when the customers have all gone home and the two old drunks left at the bar are nodding off, but there have been countless times when my friends and I wished for a craft beer spot late on a Saturday night, when the other bars in the neighborhood are still overcrowded and obnoxious. In that light, one can accuse Local 61 of being pretentious. But let’s look at it from a different angle.

 

The quality of the drinker after a certain late hour does, indeed, start to dwindle. There are always exceptions, of course, but almost anyone still chugging beer at 3am is not looking to go to bed sober. On weekends, Smith Street – like the rest of NYC – is overrun by the Bengal-stripe-shirted, greasy-haired set. One cannot sit at the bar and have a beer in peace without a guttural call for shots from right over your head thwarting any semblance of enjoyment. What ensues is a pickup scene, complete with occasional violence and frequent vomiting. Agitated bartenders clench their teeth and reconsider business school. In most cases, there is not much point in sticking around long enough to hit last call.

 

Local 61 clearly considers itself above the fray that most bars find themselves in at night, and sure, some will consider it a turnoff. But can you really blame a bar that wants to be known as a certain kind of establishment – one where relaxed locals can drink craft IPAs, the staff does not get agitated and there is never a need for a bouncer? Besides, as I am now firmly in my 30s and no longer have any days to waste on nursing hangovers, perhaps going home at a more civilized hour isn’t such a bad idea anyway.

 

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Cervo

Posted on April 19th, 2012

It’s so loud, the heat–the birds scream, sing. It should be summer, but it’s April. The sky is a violent pale blue from a star casting its hot light into our atmosphere. The wings of these birds – volatile dinosaur offspring – beat as they battle for gutter space. Their feathers and shrieks pierce the air, adding to the oppression of the day.

Last year, summer felt like spring: it rained, it was cool, and I was in the Italian Alps with the Chindemi family. If a better person than Gerard Depardieu could fill the shoes of comic character Obélix, Matteo Chindemi is that person. His presence, though physically imposing, is nothing if not kindness. Not a day went by that his eyes didn’t smile demurely. His stature, much like his dark beard, had an atmosphere of the apologetic about it. Yet for being only 29 years old, his knowledge of goats was profound. Matteo was the fastest milker I had ever seen. He milked each one of his 35 does personally, by hand. They came to him eager for relief, udders so full they squirted milk in every direction when they ran – a rustic breed of goat, black like Matteo’s wild Sicilian hair.

 

A stainless steel milk pail between his feet, Matteo sat on a mesh stool that had lost all but a few strands of weaving. The stool was comically small for this herdsman as he leaned forward, one teat in each hand, his forehead resting on the goat’s rump. The jets squirted from his fisted fingers with such intensity that the sparkling pail filled with fragrant foam. My beige plastic bucket matched my inadequacy and caught all the black goat hairs I was unable to avoid contributing to the milk. (Luckily for me, a massive steel filter saved my contribution, removing the contaminants.)

 

Seated on a stool of my own, the does approached me for relief as well. Donning a pair of latex gloves and calling “Vini, vini, vini!” a few does came near enough that I could spin them around and latch my fingers onto their udders.  After the first squirts of milk were stripped into a cup for quality, I subsequently attempted to imitate Matteo’s rhythm into my own pail. Perhaps my tempo was similar, but the sound of the milk hitting Matteo’s pail was strong like a bell.  Mine was a pathetic thud. I hoped the end of the month would see me achieve Matteo’s prowess, but it didn’t.

 

Late one evening the goats were unforgiving. Matteo could milk a doe out in under a minute. I was three or four times slower, and goats are not patient creatures. This milking was the final chapter of a diluvial day and the ladies were weary. Crammed into the barn when they normally strolled in the courtyard, the goats personified the weather of the night. Horns cracking, bodies butting, the herd was savage. One lady with a mild horn rip in her side – a tremendous milker – unwittingly found herself in my hands. I set out to milk her as fast as possible, but after many minutes of struggling with flies crawling on my skin and goat bodies pushing me from all sides, the tremendous milker actually sat on her udder in protest: “Stop touching me.”

 

 

I fought tears and screams of frustration. I was tired. I was dirty. But I had not spent a year learning about cheesemaking and farming, miles away from home, to be defeated by this feisty, uncooperative lady. I was going to finish her. I would get the milk. Because there would be uncountable days ahead on my own farm when I would not be able to hand over a goat bitch to someone else. Most days and nights would bring on one stress or another. Most of the time, a problem would need solving. Owning a farm would be all me all the time. So in wet socks and manure-caked garb, I took deep breaths, caressed my goat in question, and eased her back up to milk. I think I finished her. But I guess it doesn’t matter. I just know I didn’t walk away.

 

Later that month, on an evening milking following a more forgiving day, Matteo and I sat on our stools in the courtyard calling to the does. I sang “Cervo!” and the skinny lopsided one came and pressed her side into mine, telling me she was ready. Obligingly, I guided her forward until I could reach her teats from behind. As I milked, Cervo gradually leaned to one side before I could finish. While I admit I wasn’t milking as efficiently as Matteo, this tilt in her body was beyond Cervo’s control. “I shouldn’t be frustrated,” I thought to myself. “Cervo isn’t being fussy like ‘tremendous milker’ was the other night.” But no matter how many times I picked up Cervo’s hind legs to bring her udder back to me, she kept leaning away.

 

This skinny doe was simply being the best goat she could be. As my knees ached from holding the pail tightly at my feet, and as my body twisted into strange positions while attempting to retain my grasp on her udder, I remembered that Cervo was once an ordinary young goat with a straight spine. Matteo thought that she must have nibbled on grasses one day and ingested a parasite that attacked her spinal column and possibly also her brain, causing Cervo to look perpetually off balance. Naming each doe according to her personality, Matteo named this unfortunate creature, “Brain” or “Cervo” in Italian. He and his wife Gaia were surprised Cervo outlived her illness since a meningeal worm like Parelaphostrongylus tenius normally kills a goat.

 

But there she was, still kidding, still producing milk, still eating and getting knocked around by the others. Due to her physical impairment, Cervo could be culled – replaced by a healthier, stronger, more manageable doe. After all, efficiency is the highest aspiration of any business, and milking Cervo was not an efficient process. I suppose keeping Cervo in the herd is what makes the Chindemi farm and other family farms different from the industrial agriculture that feeds us. Whether it is the transparency of the business or whether it is the innate essence of small-scale agriculture, the family farm often appears to include an element of compassion.

Compassion that keeps a swaying goat, and a slower apprentice, as part of the flock.

 

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Suspicion Confirmed

Posted on April 19th, 2012

Around the time I came of legal drinking age I had acquired a very eclectic group of friends a handful of years of older than me. One of them waited tables at a very stylish “Irish Pub” in our pseudo-urban New England capitol. It was a dimly lit venue that always seemed a little hazy despite the lack of indoor smoking. The decor was big and dark: high ceilings; dark wood finishes; an antiqued mirror behind the bar. The proprietors did an excellent job of creating an atmosphere; however genuine I don’t know, because I have yet to go to an actual Irish-Pub-in-Ireland. But, at twenty-one in suburban New England, this seemed like a step above local college bars and dance clubs filled with the gratuitous drinking of cheap beer and well drinks, and was a fine place to frequent. Not to say people weren’t getting drunk – some certainly were – it just seemed a bit classier; people drinking black and tans and wines in actual wine glasses! It was here that I learned about Irish whiskeys other than my mother’s family standard (Jameson). Bushmills was good, but then there was Powers.

Not only was Powers whiskey a fine and delicious spirit, but it naturally lends itself to the world of pun humor: Drinking Powers, Drunk on Powers, Sharing Powers, Withholding Powers, Destroying the Powers that be, etc. I have always been and will always be a fan of puns, much to my husband’s chagrin. Puns, in fact, exacted their own special Power at this time and place when I was already drunk on my own self-perceived sophistication: puns brought me right back around to my true slightly-less than sophisticated self; at least momentarily. I would soon discover that puns weren’t the only thing that could undo my false sense of worldliness.

The menu followed the standard approach for a themed restaurant and was a mix of traditional Irish dishes – shepherd’s pie, bangers and mash, lamb stew – and good-but-standard items – the portobello sandwich, chicken tenders and Caesar salad. It provided Something Specifically Irish for those who sought it, and something undeniably familiar for those less inclined to culinary adventure. I am a mid-grade culinary adventurer: an enthusiastic eater of things I am familiar with as food, even if put together in ways I could never have guessed, but certainly not a fearless eater of any critter and all of its bits. With that said, I was in no way prepared for what was about to happen.

I was sitting at the bar with two other young lady friends of mine waiting for our friend’s shift to end so he could join us. There was a band playing so it was particularly loud and, as mentioned before, it was dark and a bit hazy in the bar. I was at the end of the bar and my two friends were at the next two consecutive seats. We were enjoying the music, the atmosphere, the drinks, and our own sophistication and ‘grown-up-ness’ quite nicely. Our friend came out of the kitchen eating something and holding three small pieces of what looked like a very dark chocolate brownie of some kind. Without a word he walked up to us and starting with me put a piece of the chocolate into each of our mouths. There was no time to protest, and why would I? I could only assume he was eating and enjoying the same victual, on top of the fact that I was not only a sophisticated lady, but also a known culinary adventurer among my companions. My mouth closed around it and it crackled under my teeth; it was a texture quite unfamiliar to me. The crisp shell that had parted under pressure was now stuck to the back of my teeth and the soft congealed mass under it was flooding my mouth with an earthy and metallic taste. I rolled it over my tongue and tried to gracefully scrape the film from the backsides of my front teeth. By now our friend had whisked off to some other restaurant task. I looked at my companions who looked as bamboozled as I felt. At the very least we all knew it wasn’t chocolate. I sipped my Harp lager and swallowed the lot. I took in the attempted Irish atmosphere and it all came together as I glanced around the room with new eyes to locate the “generous” giver of this gift. It was black pudding! – otherwise known as blood sausage, which is exactly what it sounds like: entrails stuffed with blood and filler.

The gift-giver returned and confirmed my conclusion; he had charmingly just fed three unassuming lasses blood without warning or explanation. We came a little undone–at least our sophistication did: we made a few faces, sipped our beverages furiously, and scolded our friend for trickery. But ultimately we were about as miffed as we could be in that time and place, with such a handsome friend; which is to say were much less angry than we were banally grossed out, and even that disappeared when he bought us a round of Powers.

So I discovered for certain something I would have always guessed: I don’t like black pudding. I don’t know if thinking I was going to be eating chocolate detracted from the experience, though I am sure that eating black pudding you think is chocolate and knowingly eating black pudding are probably different experiences. As a mid-grade culinary adventurer there are plenty of items that I am personally wary of while understanding that people eat and enjoy them–most organs fall into this category. Blood, however, does not. While I can appreciate the concept of using ALL the parts, which surfaces in many cultures, I really can’t understand the desire to eat blood. In fact, after doing so by accident I have an even greater appreciation for Kosher and Halal meat guidelines. Draining all the blood out of an animal before dissecting it for consumption seems like a fine idea to me. Blood seems to lack the qualities that define food: it certainly doesn’t taste very good, and its low-cal nutritional value is limited to iron, which is available from plenty of other sources.

Not tasty; not really nutritious–so what’s the draw? I can’t tell you because as far as I am concerned it stands to reason that vampires are still really creepy, no matter how mysterious or intriguing or even sexed-up they are, singularly because they eat blood. Gross.

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How To Pound A Moose

Posted on April 19th, 2012

With a hammer – that’s how you pound a moose.

On the kitchen counter, on your bamboo cutting board that has heretofore never brushed its fine grains against red-blooded flank. A dead moose, to be precise, one that was butchered in your suburban cul-de-sac on a cool July afternoon on the back of your neighbor’s flatbed trailer. Sliced into thick steaks that went into another neighbor’s industrial freezer, packed in tight with two years’ worth of salmon and halibut. Then pulled out on a bitterly cold night six months later by the same neighbor as you sit in their driveway in front of a fire built in a sawed-off oil barrel, nursing a can of beer in your mittens, the moose steak pressed into your hands with urgency, because you have a visitor from out of town and it is imperative (so says the neighbor) that that visitor eat what true Alaskans eat.

But therein lies the problem: You are Alaskan (or, at least, you think you can finally call yourself that, with three winters under your belt and having seen the Bering Sea). And, yet, you don’t eat meat.

You are an anomaly in this land of delighted carnivores. You, shame-faced, pass on Dall sheep stew at dinner parties, the host proudly regaling the table with the story of how they took the game down themselves in some remote glacial cirque. Why the shame? Because you could eat it if you wanted to. You made the decision to stop eating meat long ago, in the haze of nascent, post-college freedom – a decision based not on ethics but on taste, a belated revolt against one too many grey steaks and flabby slabs of ham slapped down on cafeteria trays. But now, your vegetarian conviction declines in inverse proportion to the number of gray hairs you have, and you secretly sniff at plates of beef, yearning to taste it but too shy to re-enter the world of hooves, snouts, and offal lightly.

Enter the moose, king of the Alaskan tundra, handed reverently to you in a heavy package of butcher paper and plastic wrap one February night. How do you cook this? your baffled husband asks, knowing his spouse won’t handle food made of sinew, bone, or blood. In response, the neighbor produces a plastic bottle. Lemon pepper. To shake on the moose. That’s how you cook this.

Spices and moose in hand, you retreat to contemplate dinner. Your husband Googles “how to cook moose.” You heat a cast-iron pan. Your visitor babbles rapturously about the impending meal. You think about the moose that wandered into the backyard a few mornings ago and peered in your bedroom window at just the moment that you woke up. Can you eat this? You can eat this. Should you eat this? That’s debatable.

Your husband and visitor have their heads together, engaged in serious conversation. Apparently, the moose needs to be beaten into its full flavor, its flesh pummeled into tenderness, massaging out the miles it traveled through the tundra to your table. But what instrument to use? No mallets for flailing at cow steaks in this semi-vegetarian household. The husband has an idea, and vanishes to find his toolbox. He appears again with a hammer, one only used previously for nailing in the molding in the bathroom that you continually knock lose with the toe of your shoe, and starts pounding moose.

Moose is lean, all muscle and no fat. Your husband makes quick work of it, flattening out the connective tissues on this beautiful, thick, dark red slice of moose haunch. The crucial lemon pepper is sprinkled liberally on both sides, rubbed in with bare fingers. Your visitor crushes garlic, pours olive oil, and the moose, doctored and dressed, is slapped down onto the hot pan. You watch it cook, trying – and failing – to remember the taste of meat on your tongue.

When it is served, six minutes later, you ask only for a small slice. It seems fitting to approach the moose as something more than food. This moose was not meant to be devoured and consumed. This is moose that will transform and legitimize. You imagine that, when you eat it, the largeness of the land you live in – this rough, irrational, achingly beautiful state that throws you to your knees in the dark of every winter and moves you to tears during the endless summer days – will spread through you, your future expanding infinitely to hold steaks of caribou and mountain goat, maybe even black bear, braised in blueberries, Alaska-distilled gin, and spruce tips. You will, finally, taste what it really means to be Alaskan.

In reality, when you eat the moose, it tastes exactly how it should taste: gamey and a little bit sweet. Chewy. A bright iron tang of blood. It does not melt in your mouth, as your visitor claims, nor have the taste of wet willow your husband says it does. To you, it tastes just like the rangy beast it is, gnawer of birch trees, walker of Anchorage city streets and mountain valleys, moving slowly but with purpose on legs that seem impossibly thin to hold up such a large body. It tastes, simply, like meat, wild-caught and wild-raised. You neither swoon nor gag but chew slowly, thoughtfully, welcoming yourself back to the carnivores.

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What The Dickens

Posted on April 19th, 2012

It’s easy to tell that a tangelo is a hybrid of the tangerine and a pomelo. Like Brangelina, the title itself is sufficiently descriptive. What you may not know is that many of the ordinary varieties of citrus that we know, love, and slice up for breakfast are also hybrids — the unlikely kin of disparate citrus varieties.

The common grapefruit, it turns out, is actually the bastard child of a pomelo and a sweet orange. The versatile lemon? That’s (at least according to some recent studies) the result of the union of a sour orange and a citron. Even a regular old orange can trace its lineage to a pomelo and a mandarin — they think. Scientists are still a little fuzzy on the genetics of some of the more ancient hybrids.

(Cue comedic record scratch sound) What, what? Citrus parentage is still a work in progress? This fact alone gives the indignant guys on Maury Povich an eensy bit of credibility. I mean, if they can’t figure out an orange, can they really know with 99.9% accuracy that some guy is (or isn’t) the father?

Even in the sordid, cross-bred citrus family one fruit stands alone. Born as the result of a three-way between a grapefruit, an orange, and a tangerine, the Ugli fruit is a large tangy/sweet fruit native to Jamaica, where the locals pronounce it “Hoogli.” I know, I know — natural plant hybridization is more like a complicated genetic thing involving non-sexy terms like apomixis and ebryony. But I like my description better.

Like star fruit and kiwis before them, you can find Ugli fruits in the section for “unique items for white people dinner parties” in upwardly mobile supermarkets nationwide. Ugli isn’t just a silly name; lumpy, and with mottled greenish skin, this snack has an outward appearance that only a mother could love. That is, a mother who is particularly fond of half-rotted grapefruit.

Interestingly, the Ugli fruit is sometimes marketed under the name “Uniq fruit.” I know deep down that it’s probably just a sales gimmick, but I like to imagine that Ugli adopted the name while away at film school, along with a vintage tweed jacket, horn-rimmed glasses, and a dogeared copy of Camus’ The Stranger. Try as he might to get it to stick back home, we all know it’s not what gets yelled around the dinner table come Thanksgiving.

Maybe it’s all the Masterpiece Classics I’ve been watching, but the plight of the poor, misunderstood Ugli fruit reminds me of another (albeit more celebrated) misfit: Charles Dickens.

Like little Ugli, Charles Dickens was “Uniq” — the unlikely product of a dysfunctional, imperfect family. At just twelve years old, Dickens was sent by his parents to work in a shoe polish factory. “It is wonderful to me,” he later said diplomatically, “how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age.” From there it got even worse. His father’s gross overspending led to a stint in a debtor’s prison, with no one but Charles (who was, by most accounts, a nerdy bookish type) left to provide for the rest of the family. Even after the family climbed out of debt, Dickens’ peach of a mother fought to keep him at his terrible factory job (she eventually relented, but he never forgave her).

Fortunately for readers everywhere, Dickens understood the deep, deep well of inspiration that springs from an unhappy childhood. Out of his early alienation came a lifetime’s worth of raw material, replete with the vivid memories of poverty and strife that informed much of his literary work. The debtor’s prison that surrounded his father became the backdrop for Little Dorrit, and the factory work he loathed formed the basis for the workhouse in Oliver Twist. I could make a bad citrus joke about turning lemons into lemonade, but instead I’ll stick with the established truth that great art often comes from suffering.

Perhaps there’s hope for little Ugli yet.

3 Ugli fruits sit on my kitchen counter looking, as they do, like a putrefying Cezanne painting. I juice them, discarding their lumpy, imperfect exteriors. What is left is a perfect, pinkish nectar — a juice of great expectations.

And I drink it, marvelling at all it’s become.

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Meat Is Murder

Posted on April 19th, 2012

When most delinquent girls were practicing sneaking out in the middle of the night and stealthing liquor out of their parents’ stash, I was up to far worse. When I was 15 years old, I became a member of PETA.

This did not sit well with my father. Teenaged girls were already his worst nightmare. He grew up with four brothers, no sisters, and as far as he (and his traditional Volga German family) was concerned, there were two types of young women: good Christian girls and whores. I hadn’t been to church in years, but that wasn’t really the problem. The worst thing I could do (besides getting pregnant by a black guy) was to become a vegetarian. His deer tag and “I’m the NRA” bumper sticker couldn’t abide a traitor.

“God made animals for our use. It’s in Genesis, for fuck’s sake. Not eating meat is an abomination of God!” My father had a talent for the hyperbolic.

To punish me, my parents made me buy my own groceries and cook my own meals. They thought I would give up, that the burden would lead me back to the dark side. Boy, were they wrong. I quickly learned to prepare the staples of the vegetarian diet: bean burritos, supplemented with tofu-dogs on grainy buns and veggie burgers from bulk-bin mixes. I read the Moosewood Cookbook. Stir fries weren’t far behind.

Having already developed precocious control-freak tendencies, I loved shopping for my own food. I obsessively studied ingredient lists for anything “inhumane.” Rocky Road bars, a favorite way to blow my babysitting money, were now off-limits (cow hoofs in the marshmallows!). My beloved Ghardetto’s were off-limits for containing Worcestershire sauce (those poor, tiny anchovies!). Cheese was an iffy proposition, thanks to my new knowledge of something called rennet, which HOLY FUCKING SHIT, COMES FROM THE STOMACHS OF BABY COWS.

At Taco Bell, I demanded to see the package when they insisted the refried beans were vegetarian, and was doubly taken aback to see that a) they were indeed lard-free, and b) they were dehydrated. Thankfully, seven-layer burritos were safe.
The first Thanksgiving after my newfound vegetarianism was challenging, to say the least. What would I eat? Fortunately, it was the dawn of the golden age of processed vegetarian convenience foods, and Morningstar Farms had my back. My grandmother tried to understand why I wanted to eat a “chik” patty instead of real poultry. “What do you mean you don’t eat meat, dear? You always liked my turkey,” she’d say, with earnestly hurt feelings. I apologized, mumbling “thou shalt not kill,” and poured canned vegetarian mushroom gravy over my mashed potatoes instead of the Cruelty Sauce she’d prepared from scratch from the turkey drippings.

That spring, the circus came to town. I knew I had to put a stop to it. I hadn’t yet learned that it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission, and although I wasn’t really surprised when my dad forbade me from joining PETA in protesting The Three Rings of Abuse, I was still teenage-level indignant about it.

Predictably, I skipped class that sunny Friday. Wearing a Meat is Murder t-shirt that I silk-screened in art class, I held up signs showing sad elephants and humiliated bears. I tried my hardest to look sufficiently militant. Carload after carload of blithe families entered the gravel parking lot, undeterred by my exposure of “the saddest show on Earth.”
When I got home that afternoon, my father was waiting for me. One of his coworkers had driven by that day, had seen me in that parking lot, had recognized the 12 year-old version of me perched on my father’s desk.

My father was incensed at my defiance, which was exacerbated by the fact that there had been witnesses. He grounded me for a month. A whole month! For civil disobedience! (My 13 year-old brother had, meanwhile, begun experimenting with marijuana, which went unpunished.) A nuclear family blowout ensued, and in anger, I screamed at my parents that I hoped eating animals made their asses rot out. I ran to my room and played Rage Against the Machine’s anthemic Killing in the Name, turning the volume up as loud as my boom-box would go. (This song would prove a fitting soundtrack to most of my teen angst, but was strikingly appropriate in this particular instance.)

In my career as a teenaged animal rights activist, there would be other, quieter acts of disobedience. Once I put stickers about lobster feelings on the crustacean tank at Safeway; another time I super-glued the locks of a neighborhood taxidermist shut, macing the doorknobs for added effect.

I started eating meat again ten year later. Five years after that, my mother died of colon cancer.

I haven’t spoken to my father in a very long time.

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In Between

Posted on April 19th, 2012

I have been the black sheep. Welcome neither in the front nor the back of the house. Exiled to a purgatory between the kitchen and the dining room, in limbo on 18-stairs covered in industrial carpet.

For one short summer I was persona non grata within the social strata of a restaurant in Vail, Colorado. It was Sysco Italian — no more, no less — my first restaurant job, running food from the basement kitchen up to hungry Texans in the dining room above. With a too-small black polo shirt stretched across my back, I was led out into the weeds by a manager with a homespun pot leaf tattoo; unknowing and untouchable.

“Trays are over here, tickets come out here, it’s on you to know what’s going out. Make sure you’ve got everything you need on every order,” the newly promoted night runner told me told me on my first morning. “Keep an eye out for your own tickets, too,” he said, gesturing with his chin to the four-foot by four-foot soup and salad crypt. “‘PASTA FAG’ is Pasta Fagioli, on the right. ‘MINESTRO’ is Minestrone, on the left — but the soups change, so ask the kitchen if you’re not sure. House salads, you make: there’s only one. Subs are listed below, same with the dressing.”

I blinked and nodded simultaneously, expertly betraying my lack of confidence. Barely listening, I wondered how someone just a year or two older than me could exude such authority. This guy, whose name I don’t remember, was all business — the battle-scarred veteran to my quaking-in-the-trenches wimp. I swallowed hard and shouldered a tray, trying not to make eye contact with the cooks. The gesture was wasted: these people wanted nothing to do with me. Neither, I would find out, did the servers waiting for me at the threshold of the dining room, two flights up.

What I didn’t understand was that it was my job serve as the bridge spanning the creek between the Hatfields and the McCoys that summer. Or maybe I was just supposed to be a string with a can on each end, the conduit in a device that only transmitted expletives. I had one foot in the kitchen, the domain of a wiry, bald-headed stereotype of a chef, prone to short but spectacular fits of rage. He was flanked by an unsavory crew of hardcore locals, each possessing the kind of ski town nickname that only thinly veils a horrible truth or shameful habit — the brand of many, many nights gone terribly awry. My other foot was on even shakier ground in the dining room with the servers. Minus the manager and his pot leaf, they were all women in their late 20s-to-early-30s, a Jäger bomb or two past the crest of the hill, picking up speed toward a raspy-voiced future in an overpriced condo unit with an ex-pro skier who answers to “Toast.”

“Get down there and ask chef why 13 is still waiting for that fucking lasagna!” I would hear through clenched teeth, close to my ear as I hefted a tray of dirty dishes. “Go explain to Ashley that I don’t give a shit what she says, she never fired four” was the next, totally unrelated volley waiting for me at the other end of the quick trip downstairs. I learned to never, ever do either. I wasn’t crazy and didn’t want to get stabbed, either quite literally down in the kitchen or more figuratively upstairs by dagger eyes. This was simple restaurant polemics — new to me, but probably ancient. To each faction I represented the other.

In truth I was neither, but they all hated me just the same. My job was up, down, up, down: expo, door, left, right, stairs, 180, stairs, food tray down, bus tray up, stairs down, 180, stairs down, left, right, door, dishwasher, soup, salad, expo, repeat. Fast. There was no beer waiting for me in the walk-in at the end of the night, no shot at the end of the bar. I did get to eat the leftover osso bucco once, but that was about it. In the end I was just another short-stay automaton, a summer’s worth of strong back, an apparition that had to be tipped out — at least until I was gone, when a new me would come along like I had.

Categories: Uncategorized

Please Pass The Euphemism

Posted on March 16th, 2012

Raise a chicken – eat a chicken; catch a fish – eat a fish; culinary terminology seems simple enough, right? Kill the animal, eat the animal. Things get more complicated as the animals get larger. Raise a cow-eat a cow? Hunt a deer-eat a deer? Raise a pig-eat a pig? Concretely, the answer to the previous three questions is yes-but according to well-established vernacular the answer to each is no and beef, venison, and pork, respectively. It seems we frequently kill an animal and eat something else – linguistically, at least. Our culture disconnects the meat we eat from the actuality of the carcass it came from in many ways, and language plays an important role in that process.

Let’s start at the beginning: Anglo-Saxon England. It was at this time and place that the dissonance began, thanks entirely to an iron-clad class system that used even language to distinguish the privileged from the peasants. The poor working class raised and killed the animals and called them by their Germanic-influenced early Middle English names, which have evolved into the Modern English names: chicken, pig, lamb, cow. The nobility – who had the pleasure of eating the meat and naming the dishes without having to handle any livestock – spoke French. So it has evolved that many names for meat in English actually have romantic – rather than Germanic – roots: beef/boeuf, mutton/mouton, poultry/poulet, pork/porc. While the history and etymology isn’t riveting, it does give insight into the early development of the divergence between animal and food in our culture.

For centuries, this dichotomy went on eliciting slight, but ever-present, dissonance in our relationship with game animals. Feudalism eventually evolved into agrarian societies which flourished throughout the Western hemisphere and the majority of people lived on subsistence farms; it became impossible for most to avoid familiarity with the connection between carcass and dinner no matter what you called them. That all changed when the industrial revolution brought with it all the tools to take animal versus food from a simple, quiet dichotomy to full-fledged cognitive dissonance. Meat came in all shapes and sizes, including sausages and loaves. It came from a butcher, neatly packaged for cooking and consumption – not the back yard or town paddock – making the animal/food split a little more dissonant. Next, cooked and canned meat, poultry and fish hit the market. While they usually required some kind of additional preparation, the need to handle any raw flesh was eliminated – thereby further separating food from animal. Frozen dinners followed, and the meat was not only fully cooked, but entirely prepared. Just heat and eat, no contact necessary before fork and knife. By now, any link from farm-to-table was clearly buried deep in marketing about quality and convenience.

With a culture focused on convenience and the farm-to-table link all but forgotten, the marvel of modern food science rushed out of the gate. Fish sticks, chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs, chicken patties, pre-made hamburgers already on buns, little smokies, skinless sausage; anything is now possible, and none of it resembles anything on the dinner tables of the French nobility of Anglo-Saxon England or our agrarian colonial forebears. Meat products have become a commodity; an industry predicated on marketing that’s about everything except the animal. Though animal welfare has found a niche in food marketing and can be a hot-button topic, that is not what this article is concerned with. No matter how well-cared-for the chicken in my patty was, it still isn’t recognizable as any part of a chicken.

In its purest form, food science is striving to use all the parts and feed the masses, and that is commendable. Its inventions wouldn’t succeed if they weren’t being purchased, so I’m not here to pass judgment; merely to make an observation. Transforming the animals we kill into the sanitized meals we consume has been a slow collective decision in a world where instant gratification is becoming the ultimate goal. Do people really need to take the time to think about the humble origins of a delicious salami? I don’t know. What I do know is that we have (for better or for worse) chosen to remove the animal from the table, and it seems to me the larger the animal the further away we would like it to be.

Regardless of how chicken meat is shaped and formed, it is always preceded by the word chicken: chicken nuggets, chicken fingers, chicken sausage, chicken patty. When is the last time you elected to eat a cow patty or pig nuggets? Not quite as enticing as a burger or sausage and peppers, right? Even big game meats have a lovely euphemism– “Would you like some of the deer I killed last weekend?” versus “I have some venison if you’re interested.” I like to think this is because we know we could take on a chicken without considerable effort, but faced with the enormity of a cow or bluntness of a pig, we would rather not imagine how in fact it got from there to here.

Some folks today do want to think about how each animal gets from pasture to plate. Ironically, it’s the very same class of people who had the privilege of not confronting it in Anglo-Saxon England. While the wealthy today can certainly afford to not recognize the link between farm and table, a growing number of them are choosing to do exactly that. The ‘foodie’ culture is one born out of privilege that is seeping into the mainstream of high-class culture. I don’t think that everyone with a more than comfortable income is opting to take a farm-to-table experience vacation, but I would bet that they have all been to a trendy white table cloth restaurant that lists all the farms that supply each menu item. Or at least a restaurant that offers entrees that are inescapably derived from a carcass: veal sweetbreads, half roast duck, Cornish game hen. At the same time, people who are struggling to cover their basic expenses, those historically associated with farm labor, are becoming more and more removed from the reality of where food comes from. They are much more likely to frequent quick-service restaurants offering patties and nuggets of various sizes and origins. Farm-to-table acknowledgment has gone from a reality the poor couldn’t ignore to a luxury they can’t afford.

Most of us though, sit somewhere in between the thirty-five dollar locally raised chicken entree and a daily dose of nuggets. We are part of a culture that may universally give a chicken the same name at the farm and on the plate, but still does not fully confront the reality of the nuggets. The agrarian school year may still be with us, but farm-to-table education has gone the way of the horse-drawn plow. Just imagine if “Old MacDonald” was about the purpose of each animal on a farm instead of the sounds they make: “…and on his farm he had a pig, made some pork chops here, and a little bacon there… E-I-E-I-O.” What if you took your child to a small petting zoo and pointed out that the chicken walking around is where eggs and dino nuggets come from? It seems fundamentally wrong, like telling them that Santa isn’t real; but there was a time before Santa when all children knew where dinner came from, if only because their favorite pet wasn’t out in the pasture anymore. The decision to leave ‘animals’ at the farm and eat ‘meats’ began long ago and has evolved with society the same as anything else. And as with anything else, each must choose if the decision made collectively is the correct decision for him. I am not suggesting you start inviting friends over for barbequed cow patties or creeping out your waiter by ordering the pig loin when dining out…or even that you forgo the wonder that is the dino nugget. I am merely asking you to take a moment to recognize the disconnect; then make a conscious choice whether you will accept the dissonance or be more cognizant that what’s on your plate was once walking, clucking, and flapping…though it may now take the shape of a T-Rex menacing your French fries.

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