Jollibee - Not - So - Lovely

 

I've never been a fast food person, nor a chain restaurant person. When there's nothing else they'll do, but I'm much more likely to try something singular and slightly suspicious, even in a far off place.

But the other day, someone asked me how to make a homemade version of the Jollibee spaghetti. My response was, of course, "...What." 

Now, I knew about it. Jollibee is a quick-service Filipino restaurant chain that's trying to be slightly upmarket while still bottom feeding. The spaghetti is what gets people looking because who the hell expects a fast food chain to have spaghetti- especially one from Southeast Asia. Now apparently there are locations that have palabok pancit, which is Actual Filipino Food, but they don't have that at the one closest to me so my hopes of something tasty mostly went out the window. They did have pies though, and so all hope was not lost.

I discovered there's a Jollibee location out on Alameda island, which is close enough for me to make the trip as an experiment. Unfortunately I had forgotten how absolutely foul it is to get out there. I want to grind that place to gravel so I can rebuild it properly. Ugh. But it's not about the journey to and from, as dreadful as it was.

This may not be the norm since the storefront is in a plaza where everything is very uniformly sculpted, but the appearance is fairly mundane, though the logo is distinct. Were it not for that (and the definitively different intended demographics), you'd have a hard time telling the difference between Jollibee and Popeyes or Chick Fil-a. The amount of sheer product I could see from the far side of the counter was absolutely wild to me. Alto-shaams FULL of cooked chicken ready to rock, dozens of possible orders of food awaiting boxing and bagging, with probably ten employees back there all busy at one thing or another. And one single solitary cashier. That I get, because half the counter was labeled Online Order Pickup and the entire time I was on premises there was a steady stream of people heading to and from. Probably 2/3 of the orders never saw a table, including mine since after the struggle to get there I wanted to go home rather badly.

"Have a Jolli day!" said the cashier as I took my blinking buzzer-to-be off to a corner to wait. Cute and inoffensive, at least. A good twenty minutes later (continuing the trend of 'Quick-service' being very much Not That) I had a bag full of food, and a half hour after that I was home to eat. Because of course getting back was even worse.

I didn't get the whole menu because I'm poor and prepared food is expensive no matter how lousy it is. However, I did get a solid sampler of what they're known for and what they're trying to push.

Chicken: Solid. Somewhere between Wendy's and Popeyes in crunch, with both the regular and spicy being suitably flavorful. Gave my poor beau some terrible heartburn though.

Spaghetti: What. Exceedingly sweet, sauced with what might as well be ketchup (probably banana ketchup and a handful of other things) with fragments of what might be ground meat, little coins of hotdog, and some sprinkled yellow cheese. It's the Filipino version of Chef Boyardee or Spaghetti-Os as we know them today. It's a nostalgic flavor for someone somewhere, probably a vast number of people. But definitely not me. Yech.

Adobo Rice: Sucked. Almost nothing to it but a whisper of soy sauce and vinegar to color and flavor it, with tiny flecks of chicken here and there. I'd made actual chicken adobo earlier this week, so I just put some of my leftovers on top to make it taste like Jollibee pretends it does.

Macaroni and Cheese: Quite nice! Pasta is thick and soft, sauce is rich. It's essentially Stouffer's, if you've ever had the occasion to try it.

Pies: Two! Peach/Mango and Ube. Both extremely delicious. Easily the standout items and I'd happily eat either of them any time. Remember when McDonalds pies were fried and delicious? These make the Golden Arches' golden era look tame.

Overall Verdict:  D I A B E E T U S

It's supposed to bring Filipino flavors of home, but if that's home I totally see why people would leave... if they can manage to walk after all that!

St. Patrick's Day- a Primer, Perhaps?

I'll be the first to admit I don't know much about Irish food. It's not a part of the world that's on my culinary radar. Fair bit of what I do know isn't about restaurants, hotels, or other such things. It's details about farms, ranches, orchards, distilleries- the places the food and drink come from.

Looking at it from the outside, it seems to me like most of the detail-oriented expertise in Irish food gets spent before it hits the kitchen. Whether properly true or not, it certainly isn't a bad thing- lets the resulting prepared food showcase itself, in a manner akin to what you might see in Japan. The cultural emphasis on starting from the best place possible seems to fit well enough- there's not a lot done to most of of the ingredients because there's no need to do anything. Season properly, cook till appropriately tender and flavorful, and that's it. Even humble vegetables like cabbage can be absolutely delicious. I actually used to serve cabbage quarters as a side dish, cooked in rendered lamb fat till browned all over, then steamed just long enough to bring out the sweetness of the deeper-set leaves. A real delight.

Now, tomorrow is different. Nobody celebrating over here across the pond will be a historian wearing blue. They're all going to be garbed in green, gilded, glittery, and Guinnessed to the gills. Going out to eat will be easy, because any holiday-specific menus you're likely to see are likely to focus on a handful of relatively simple, familiar things. 

Corned Beef and Cabbage (Many don't corn their own.)

Bangers and Mashed (Colcannon if they're feeling ambitious.)

Cottage Pie (Shepherd's Pie if you're lucky and find a place serving lamb.)

Guinness Stew (Beef, maybe lamb. Mirepoix, turnips, parsnips, potato, peas.) 

Beer and whisky will be all over the place. Guinness will show up at both ends of the meal. Expect to see a lot of Guinness chocolate cake with Baileys Irish Creme frosting), or served as an admittedly excellent float with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a drizzle of chocolate or coffee syrup. Whisk(e)y will also likely show up in whipped cream, caramel sauces, and anywhere else it can be shoehorned in. Not a bad thing. It's delicious. 

I suppose that's some of the idea why people get so enthused about it, but personally... I don't think the risk of going out is worth the bother. St. Patrick's Day is much like New Year's Eve, where everyone who doesn't normally party decides to give it a go. All too easily they party too hard, get careless, and then wake up somewhere they really shouldn't be. 

If you do go out, be careful, cautious, and be sure to shower before bed.

Sláinte!

Book Review: "Being Dead Is No Excuse: The official Southern Ladies guide to hosting the perfect funeral", by Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hayes

I’ll start by stating the obvious: This book is about a very different world from mine.  

But a world that is, in its own way, still familiar.

"Being Dead Is No Excuse: The official Southern Ladies guide to hosting the perfect funeral"

The title alone evokes a lot of things, centered around a tradition so insular and severe it borders on self-parody, and after reading... I'm not sure which side of the line it's on.

Now as someone who has been a chef, caterer, and many other things, event planning is not new to me. I’ve done weddings, birthdays, baby showers, book releases, orgies, and plenty of other interesting happenings- but funerals are one I haven't been tapped for. Now I’m not inexperienced with them by any means- I've been to… well, a lot. 

But there's a world of difference between going to one and handling one. You can in theory attend, grieve, and be gone, and think no more of it. However, not everyone does, or even can. To those who live in the Delta (shorthand for a sizeable chunk of the American Deep South), funerals are an experience like no other, one that's not unlike like surfing a wave, or carving down a slope of fresh powder. There's what's historically or traditionally expected, the variables and variations on the theme, and hidden under a thin veneer of Maybe lies the vast potential for comedic catastrophe.

Spoiling the book would be difficult, because so much of it has eased into the cultural subconscious. But if I attempt to add much in the way of detail, the mood will be off and the impact will suffer, so I'll keep it short.

One key component of funerals like this is something the book's authors are very dedicated to: community. It may not be pretty, and it may not even be nice. But it's theirs, and so it's worth fighting for. Not everyone can, will, or even should find their own community in which to thrive. But once you've got one? People do tend to dig in- and this book makes much and more of that tendency to great effect.

Another key made clear this book is Food. Funereal tradition is absolutely awash in food, so there are a lot of recipes in this book- enough that there's an index in the back. While many of these use the term 'recipe' as loosely as has ever been allowed, and quite deliberately so, Being Dead Is No Excuse goes into painstaking detail about the minutiae of the food and drink of the Southern funeral tradition. In no small part this is a cookbook full of funereal foods that could easily lead to a follow-up death- and they won't deny it for a second. Bring on the mayo and the cream of mushroom soup.

What is perhaps the most interesting part of it all is the underlying Christian denominational turf war- but I'll leave it at that because the joy is truly in the telling.

If you want a good laugh in the manner of Noises Off or perhaps My Fair Lady, this will do you right. I had my eyes closed and my face in my hands at many a point. Sometimes from the stories, sometimes from the snacks, but always with a smile.

They took aim at a childhood treasure.

Someone reeeeally put their foot in it with this one.

Eater: Are Rice Krispie Treats Overrated?

First of all? No!

 

Second of all? What manner of imbecile in food media management tells someone whose whole shtick is Jewish food to give their opinion on something that uses gelatin? You, know, that thing they usually make out of pig's feet?

Immediate facepalm.

Now, a casual reader wouldn't have twigged to that so it's potentially forgivable. And the article starts with A fairly robust bit of background to give a viable shape to the tale. The author is, like myself, a product of the 80s and 90s, when the Rice Krispie Treat was as omnipresent as the Jell-O Jiggler (A different fad which, mercifully, passed), and makes a distinct mention of 1995, when Kellogg's first released the individually packaged version I personally abhor- far too expensive for what you get, even there at the start.

Similarly, when the first recipe showed up on the box in 1941 it was both different and objectively better tasting. The author correctly surmises that the (regrettable and immature) shift in dietary concerns has led to a lower-fat incarnation becoming the standard, which in turn aggressively and adversely affects the quality of the dessert.

But... so? Who actually follows the recipe on today's box? They don't even scale to the measurements of the packaging any more! Marshmallows are now sold in smaller bags, cereal in smaller boxes, and neither of them ratio properly. The first version of that recipe I remember- one I cut off the cereal box and put in my grandma's box of recipe cards when she wasn't looking- called for one bag of marshmallows (at the time 12 oz, now they're 10), half a box of Rice Krispies (you measure one time and then you just know), a third of a cup of melted butter (round it up to 6 tablespoons), and a splash of vanilla. Grandma, in a prescient move, added a pinch of salt. Delicious!

The "recipe" now? Half the butter, no vanilla, more cereal. Of course it doesn't taste as good! They want you to buy the packaged ones!

"So perhaps there’s nothing inherently wrong with Rice Krispies Treats after all. Maybe our moral panic over weight gain and heart disease simply ruined a good thing." she says. Way to walk back the clickbait, lady. You earned your ad revenue, have a cookie.

The article finishes with additional deflection, this time to something valid that I've spoken about in the past- adjustments. The humble Rice Krispie Treat is one of the desserts that I sometimes call Baselines. Perfectly good on its own, but also neutral enough to be highly flexible in terms of flavor combinations. Mentioned are some pedestrian tweaks (Browning the butter? Adding salt? How remarkably innovative...) as well as a more interesting one (a dash of sesame oil and some toasted black sesame seeds) all of which serve to make clear that making impactful changes doesn't require making the recipe any more difficult. 

For a dessert where everything about making it is designed to be simple, what higher compliment could there be?

Munchies: ViceTV Gives Retrospective Food-For-Thought

 

I've said this before- when you open a cookbook, you can gain an impression of the time, place, and circumstance from whence it came. Be it the photography (or lack thereof), the writing voice of the author, the people and establishments referenced, or any number of other things, almost any cookbook that's not actively trying to be a reference text (and most that are) can be dated to some greater or lesser degree. 

This is "Munchies:  Late-Night Meals From the World's Best Chefs". Sounds awesome, no? Now, this concept was a unexpectedly slow burn. Riffing on the rise of an open, honest, appreciative approach to food in entertainment media over the course of the mid-2000s, eventually VICE started leaning in with 'Chef's Night Out', a raucous mess following chefs and foodservice professionals of all sorts as they stumble through their after-work whatevers.  

It's full of the usual mix- people you might have heard of, people you'd rather never hear of again, rising stars, jaded pros, they're all here. But boy, does this incarnation read like they shanked it. Most of the stories and recipes in here are quite disjointed, as befits an attempt to turn a watched experience into a read one. They want to be interesting but often aren't articulated in ways that do them any favors. A fair number of the recipes are a long way from home kitchen friendly, and some of them seemed a rather far cry from delicious to boot. (Look. I'm not a serious cheese guy. But breading and deep-frying chunks of Camembert and drizzling them with maple syrup? I weep for that wasted syrup.)

But what Munchies does do, and rather well, is evoke a quite poignant and painful memory of a very specific period in the culinary industry's modern era- what it felt like to be a chef as the public was being made aware of / wrapping its head around the notion that working a blue-collar job might actually be okay. That it might not have to carry the social stigma that comes with long hours and inadequate pay. That maybe those things might even improve. An era of, if not comfort, at least confidence that the world might be willing to understand that the people who hold society up are the ones worth understanding and celebrating. A genuine time in food media where the concepts and attitudes that could have changed the world's perceptions of the industry essentially hit a concrete wall and vanished from the public eye what felt like overnight. 

Everything spoken of with such joy, such exuberance, is just... gone. That world has ended. Much of it died in 2016, not long before this book actually came out. It probably felt like an obituary on the New Releases shelf. What remained of the feeling this book fought for was dealt a crushing blow in 2018 with the death of Anthony Bourdain, and the plague cut down what felt like the last of it.

People are trying, here and there, but there really just isn't much to smile about in the world of food these days. Munchies tried to make it feel current with classic undertones, and frankly if the world weren't such a disaster it would be. As is though, it feels like a memorial to what could have been. A loss, and perhaps the end.

Chili crunch is older and better than David Chang.

 

That's all that needs to be said, really. Dude tried to claim "Chile Crunch", two words that describe a sizeable array of products with history in many parts of Asia, as a trademark of the Momofuku product line.

So, branding is a common horror, and taglines aren't new concepts either. The common pattern is a notion of "what it is, and what it does", whether the phrase is literal, figurative, or ironic. "Think Different", for example. That one from Apple got some serious mileage but also took no small amount of heat- particularly when Gandhi showed up as an example in their ad. Imagine the uproar if they'd also put in the Dalai Lama like they'd planned!

But how many things can you think of that use some variant of the word 'chili'? 

How many more that use 'crunch'?

Momofuku inexplicably owns the rights to the term “chile crunch” (spelled with an “e”, you know, like the country), as noted in a 2023 trademark from the US Patent and Trademark Office. This, to my mind, is a staggeringly unethical breach of linguistic protocol, using technicalities and semantics to put a thumb in the eye of 'truth in advertising' law and open up a massive profiteering exploit, made abundantly clear as Momofuku started selling licenses to others. They created an artificial chokepoint! 

Recently, Momofuku also filed for another trademark, this time to 'protect' chile crunch on a broader scale, expanding its territory to chili oils and seasonings, as well as taking swings at alternative spellings. Chile? Chili? Chilli? Talk about overreach.

I can't imagine how they managed to get such a thing approved in the first place. Did they want a brand identifier? Just add the notorious Momofuku name in front and I doubt anywhere near as many people would be complaining- but to keep it deliberately vague, using common descriptors that have decades of history on supermarket shelves? And then take swings at other businesses via Cease and Desist orders? It's clearly an attempt to cut off competitors' ability to openly access, use, and riff on an extremely common product.

Whose palms got greased to make this nonsense happen? I'd love to know.

This ham-handed shot at creating a rigidly defined proprietary product for the Momofuku brand -while deliberately avoiding the name or adding anything distinctive- has managed to aggressively highlight it anyway- and then drag that name straight into the mud where it belongs.

This probably won't sink Momofuku, but it's a solid hit that hopefully does some lasting damage.

Recipe Affordability- or 'Screw You, Short Ribs'

Groceries are crazy expensive for no valid reason, so a decently nourishing meal grows harder to manage almost by the day. Likewise, most food media paints elaborate pictures that will never pan out properly. Even the simple stuff gets dressed up with gratuitous expense, so the plan becomes looking at a recipe and toning it down to keep it on a budget without losing impact.

Here's an example for you. Simple recipe that supposedly makes 8 servings but could conceivably run you seventy bucks to make depending on where you're buying: Food and Wine Magazine- Sunday Sauce

Don't believe me? I normally shop at what most would call the poor-people supermarkets, and if I see bone-in short ribs, they're all sorts of expensive- never less than double what I'd comfortably pay for them. They average 13-16 usd / #. So you're already around the fifty dollar mark, and you haven't done any other shopping.

Two 28oz cans of whole tomatoes could run you another ten bucks. (Apparently you're supposed to pop them all by hand? That's silly, and an extra potential mess. Use crushed.)

Two pounds of spaghetti could well be another ten bucks (I wish I were joking, but even the cheapest generic stuff around here is near 3.00/#. Lunacy.)

Yes, these are nice round numbers for simplicity. To compensate for any rounding up, I'll stop there, and just skip pricing out all the other ingredients. I won't even talk about how onions can be upward of 1.99/# because it hardly matters,

Look at the principles of the dish. It's a braise, designed to tenderize tough cuts of meat over a long period of slow cooking. This sort of recipe started a long time ago as a way to effectively use off-cuts, cheap stuff, and leftovers. These days, there is no cheap stuff, and the same resulting product is marketed and treated like a premium item. Madness.

I'm going to make something like this later, spending the same amount of time and effort, but for a quarter of the price. How? Magic.

My local Asian market does a lot of its own butchering in-house. It lets them keep some prices a little lower than you might see elsewhere. That also lets them offer useful things you might have to dig around for in most western-style markets. My 'Sunday Sauce' (or 'gravy', as my grandma would have said) is made with pork instead of beef because it's cheaper, and with neck bones instead of those staggeringly expensive short ribs.

Now, you might think "Neck bones? What?" 

Well, let me break it down.

One point of the original recipe's use of ribs is to enrich the sauce with the marrow and other flavor drawn from the bones, the same as you might when making stocks. Getting more out of less. 

Another point is to use heavily worked, tough muscles since they take more time to cook and historically less expensive as a result. Every single breath you take, every time you turn your head, the exercise never stops. 

Lastly, both cuts of meat also tenderize by the collagen/gelatin conversion process, so the enrichment process from the meat itself is identical.

The recipe says to remove the ribs after several hours of cooking, get the meat off, and toss it back in without the bones. That's still happening, and it's smart. Eventually the bones have given everything they have to give, so they're just dead weight. You could conceivably just eat around them, but it's much friendlier to remove what you can't eat and might accidentally bite down on.  The neck will take a few more minutes of work than the ribs since there are more cracks and crevices for meat to hide in, but it's not so long as to be significant.

I didn't really change the recipe. I simply returned it to its natural state- a pursuit of affordable deliciousness. 

In the end, it's all about finding alternatives you can live with, and live on. 

Book Review: "Invitation to a Banquet", by Fuchsia Dunlop

I've mentioned before that in the pursuit of knowledge, prejudice goes in all directions. Now as then as always, the notion of 'authenticity' has done great and lasting harm to earnest effort and serious scholarship for no other reason than look, mien, or pedigree. It takes some aggressively enthusiastic commitment and dedication to aspiring scholarship and understanding to adequately deflect or overwhelm those biases- coming from those one might seek to teach as much or more as from those one might seek to learn from.

Which is where we run into people like me, who hunker down and do the work while being too poor to go anywhere or do anything but read and research. We also run into people like Fuchsia Dunlop, who dived into the deep end of the practical application side. Her work and efforts are quite familiar to me, and have been for many years- just a day or two ago I put up a review of her 2009 memoir to prime the pump, as it were, for this. 

As a writer, her style is shaped by her study- deeply layered with information in a manner like unto poetry, and very much designed to be as informative as possible in accordance with the level of understanding possessed by the reader. A (non-Chinese) layperson would read this book and learn vast amounts; a mainland Chinese citizen layperson would read it and learn no less, but different things at different levels due to cultural background osmosis; I myself smiled as I turned the pages, knowing full well many of the potential battles involved in being the Token White Person trying to be taken seriously as a well-informed professional in certain matters of Asia. 

The sections of the book are simple enough, with a Prologue, Origins, Ingredients, Techniques, Ideas, and an Epilogue. Clever structuring of subsections, however, is what places Invitation to a Banquet on a pedestal of excellence. Each one uses as its framing structure a different given dish from Chinese culinary history. This in itself is a cleverly complex decision, emphasizing the notion of layered levels of understanding. Whether it's simply recipes, or branching out to histories, art and culture, agriculture, or more notions besides, the chapters do a fantastic job of sharing the essential while opening many diverse windows of opportunity to explore further, and it does so with fluidity and grace. 

While that was a fine self-evident success, a historical analysis also came to mind, and I considered how component parts of the manuscript might have worked as examples of the classical Chinese 'Eight-Legged Essay' format. (I cannot see those words without recalling the class I first learned the term in, and a friend's idle drawing of a pile of grouchy looking pages with spider legs.) I'm still thinking about it, and may yet have thoughts on it, but that's too much for now- that will come in a more in-depth analysis at a later date.

Not only is the manuscript extraordinary, but her bibliography and acknowledgement sections are similarly stellar. Scads of sources in both English and Chinese, historical translations, modern works, familiar and uncommon alike. Then comes the massive list of persons from all parts of the world and all walks of life that helped make her, and thence this book, more clever and comprehensively complete.

Of all Fuchsia's books, this serves best of them all as either an introduction or a capstone. 

Read it with relish. Then read it again, and see how much more you learn!

Lisbon, Part 1

 So, I recently spent a week or so in Lisbon.

I should open by noting I don’t speak a word of viable Portuguese. My Spanish has a fair bit of utilitarian vocabulary due to my many years in kitchens, and my French is at least sufficient for bakeries and pastry shops, but I admit to a great deal of trouble with the native tongue. The fluidity of it coupled with the Ss and elongated Js made it parse like mingled Russian and Spanish in my head- thus utterly incomprehensible to someone unfamiliar with the phraseology and diction. I found it much easier to work in English or Spanish- both quite commonly used. Got a little lucky there.

The flight safety video for air Portugal clued me in on that before my arrival, and also gave me a perfect followup at about the 1:40 mark. “In Portugal it’s not always easy to keep your belt fastened- the food is just too good!” Weeeeeell... airplane seat belt safety aside, let's just say I’ve crossed off a lot of possible places where people might have gotten that notion about the food. 

One of their best-known signature dishes / traditional specialties, the croqueta bacalhau, is a stellar example of things that, to my mind, might be better off left to history rather than remain a component of the everyday, even for the tourists.
For those not familiar, it's an offshoot of a once-necessary method for preservation- You take a fish (in this case cod, which is essentially all bacalhau refers to in Portugal) and unleash a combination of drying and salting on it. It's an extremely aggressive method, to the point that to render the fish edible again after the process is complete, it must be soaked for multiple days in multiple changes of water to leech out the salt and rehydrate it. While the technique itself is supposedly Basque, it has the feel of a method you'd see in Scandinavia, land of vaguely terrifying preservation methods.

Once you have your mummified-and-then-reconstituted fish, you then flake it like pork sung, mix it with a bit of binder, wrap it around something, and fry it till it's crispy. The filling that got the most play in the many places offering them as I passed by was a type of cheese (which I'm reasonably sure was Serra de Estrela), and as someone who loves Scotch Eggs, it tempted me enough to try. The result was basically the worst variation on a mozzarella stick that I've ever even conceptualized, let alone tasted. Not going for those again, thanks.

The most unexpectedly delicious piece of seafood I ate was simple deep-fried cuttlefish(?). But it was the underlying preparation that truly let it shine. Uncertain exactly what that was, but I suspect vigorous marination, perhaps even a quick-pickle, and pressure cooked to tenderness long ahead of time before being ordered, battered, and fried. The vigorous, salty twang struck more of a chord than almost anything that day or a few around it. Most else I ate seemed to suffer from serious flavor anemia by comparison.

The Itis: The Sandwich

Another dish where I noticed that more was in the Francesinha, a modernish, localized variant on the French classic Croque-Monsieur. On paper, this thing is a dream. Dude food, hangover food, drunk food, it ticks every box for me. It's an afternoon nap on a high-sided plate.

Many sorts of meat- marinated grilled or seared beef (of uncertain cut but with the loose grain of skirt or flank), along with linguiça, coppa or chorizo, and some sort of deli ham, all tucked in a sandwich, crisped like a grilled cheese, topped with lots of cheese and broiled, then drowned in a rich and spicy sauce of what was probably onion, garlic, madeira, tomato, and beer. And a fried egg on top, because sure, why not, we'll go full Croque-Madame with it.

I could eat one of those every day. I might die of it, but I also wouldn't really mind. So rarely have I the freedom to pursue the privilege of pleasure I qualify for, it might well serve as a common earned indulgence.

Alongside, one cannot talk food there without talking wine. Whoof. It’s everywhere, it's all sorts of affordable, and, by and large, it's very much not to my tastes. I didn’t pay more than a fiver for a bottle of wine all week… and given how they tasted I certainly wouldn’t have. I am not a regular wine drinker, even if I am conversant in how to, but the general willingness to kick back with a bottle of quaffable vinho over lunch had me a little impressed. Despite deflecting proffered pours as readily and often as able, I still drank more wine that week than in probably the previous five years.

At a very enthusiastic and informative wine tasting in a Lisbon museum, I found that it’s not uncommon to ignore the norm about blending grape varietals. In brief: The requirement to label a bottle as say, ‘Merlot’ requires a guaranteed minimum percentage of that grape to be used. While the required number varies from place to place, 75% is the minimum here in California, so I'm sure the EU has stricter standards for it.

The interesting approach I was talked through forsakes that opportunity to blend, and so I thought it worth a mention. Using blending grapes is more or less standard viticultural practice- it aids in more consistent, readily replicable product from year to year, but it does so at a potential cost. Using 100% of a given grape varietal ensures the distinct characteristics of it are in no way altered, muddled or smoothed out. I say it thus because some of those characteristics are potentially quite objectionable to the untrained palate, far more so than I might have considered to ensure them marketable.

Eating and drinking in Portugal is not for the faint of heart or flimsy of constitution.
More to come soon!

Absurdity in Eater, yet again.

I swear, it's like every time I look at a food related publication I see another mess to get annoyed about. This is about an blurb of someone's trick for finding solid takeout sushi. That tells you plenty about what you're dealing with.

 I'll link the article, but here are the highlowlights.

"While in a different place, I can’t be certain that their go-to order isn’t priced to scam tourists or being sourced from a sketchy ghost kitchen."

First off, who orders takeout sushi? Next- if you're worried about being scammed? Too late. If you're worried about a ghost kitchen? Probably didn't plan your travel well. Unwilling to extend a measure of trust to something you're putting into your body? Well... assumption of risk is a legal mess for lots of reasons.

"But I’ve perfected my method of seeking out a great takeout sushi restaurant by looking at the one menu item I will never actually order: the California roll."

Ugh. This is followed by comparing the California Roll discrepancies to the Big Mac Index, which I also take somewhat significant issue with, but don't want to dive into without more time to get some notes in order.

Yes, if you find a California Roll on a sushi menu, I wouldn't recommend ordering it- but that's because it's not real. The original California Roll used crab and fatty tuna. The reasons its current incarnation exists are that Uramaki (the inside-out roll) was developed to hide the presence of nori that was throwing off Western palates/dining sensibilities, and so that it could help ensure more consistent availability of ingredients, since surimi and avocado have less of a 'season'. In times past, that worked quite well, but massive lateral worldwide demand for avocado in the subsequent decades has caused prices to jump, transport to be less consistent, and quality to suffer. That's why the Cali Roll is looked at as naught worth noting, and also part of why it still exists in prominence- it's too culturally familiar to fade away uncontested, and lingers like a bad smell on a hot day.

"But to the owners of the everyday, common takeout spots: What is going through your minds when charging 10 whole, crisp American dollars for a single California roll? The star ingredient of this roll is imitation crab meat, for crying out loud. It’s not exactly a shining beacon of quality and taste"

The surimi industry is surprisingly dedicated to disproving that. If somebody hasn't had the good stuff, that's a them problem, not an us problem. If they want to get better informed, they'll get better informed- so they probably won't. Yes, a nontrivial amount of the stuff isn't super great, but if a sushi joint is worth its vinegar, you'll never notice. This sort of inflammatory blather is why there's cheap stuff in the first place! If the uninformed would just stop talking, the need to placate them would disappear, and so would most all of the lower quality product!

What's happening here is the mistaken assumption that something like this should be affordable, but not "~~cheap~~". The correct response is simple and universal: Irrespective of quality, prepared food is a luxury item- behave (and be willing to spend) accordingly.

Apples Aplenty

 
Apples are probably my personal favorite fruit. While nowhere near as many as a century or two ago, there's still a halfway decent variety available for purchase, and more still that can elsewhere be found. There's actually an apple orchard down the road from where I grew up, but it's been so long that I hardly recall the many different sorts. 

Whether tartness, sweetness, body, crispness, all manner of varieties and characteristics still exist. In truth, there may still exist a perfect apple for every potential purpose... except for whatever happened to the Red Delicious. That poor thing is a mess- they bred for uniform coloration, and in doing so removed a gene that added stripes... but also the majority of the flavor. Poor thing.

While I am likely to adore most any apple dessert (give me a Granny Smith apple Tarte Tatin with some vanilla ice cream and I will make it vanish), they have vast utility in savory applications as well. While apple sees a lot of play in stuffing whole roasted fowl (apple and sage, anyone?), there are also many preparations that combine apple and game animals, most notably of the porcine variety. Applewood smoked bacon, pork chops with applesauce, porchetta, all manner of stews, braises, and a great many sauces, marinades, and glazes that rely on apple for sweetness, acidity, and texture. The majority of commercial Asian 'barbecue' sauces have apple (or pear), and my own North Carolina pulled pork recipe uses both apples and apple cider vinegar.

On the science side, the pectin in apples adds viscosity while also acting in some capacity as a protein binding agent, which is why I often add grated apple to meatball and meatloaf mixtures- flavor, moisture, and structure/stability all in one.

I actually braised some pork belly in apple cider earlier this morning! Added some ginger and chipotle, got tons of flavor from the simplest of preparations. A fine lunch. 

Cookbook Review: 'Indian-Ish', by Priya Krishna

When looking at cookbooks, there are tons of things to consider- recipe count, accessibility, complexity, theme, time, place, readability, and more besides. Here's a subtle thing to check: "Who's the author? Who wrote the recipes?" If those names aren't the same, you might have a problem. This one, Indian-Ish? Bit of a problem. In rather smaller font behind Priya Krishna's name is the actual writer of the recipes. (Surprise! It's her mom!) While the book's tagline is 'Recipes and antics from a modern American family', that kind of subtle marginalizing of the primary source is upsetting. Culturally, historically, even practically, I get it. But that still doesn't make it correct.

The early pages have basics like spices, rice, quinoa, and potatoes- not uncommon for some styles of cookbook, and it doesn't hurt to have them here, even if it might feel a little patronizing. There's an interesting one on the technique of tempering spices and aromatics in oil (used as a finisher for many dishes), commonly known by its Punjab name of tadka/tarka/तङका here in the West. In this book it's referred to by the Hindi 'chhonk/छौंक', most likely to draw attention. Now this, I understand- it's a word that sounds funny to English speakers. It's more memorable, but it's also a somewhat different thing. Chhonk typically focuses less on dried whole spices, also including aromatics like chili, onion, curry leaf, even tomato (watery things!) in hot fat alongside spices, making a more complex, textural sort of finishing splash. The method and intent, though, are the same- creating a last-minute fresh, powerful flavor and aroma enhancer. In French cuisine it might be called a liaison finale.

Just save this, honestly.

Right after that comes a variation on something I made myself a long time ago- an ingredient flowchart for shortcutting Indian food. A clever quick-reference guide like this can be quite handy for the unfamiliar, even if the concept is as old as dirt. The notion of using certain static ingredients as 'building blocks' for delicious food is no stranger to a thinking cook, even if those ingredients vary widely all across the world. Given the book's likely audience, it's a wise inclusion of Mama Krishna's.

Now this book is here to tell a story just as much as it is to share culinary information, and the brilliantly colorful and stylized photographs couple delightfully with many of the shorter, simpler recipes to reflect that. Together they paint a picture of a family home rich in experiences and creativity, with just enough chaos to keep things inspired. Many of the recipes are beginner friendly dress-ups or simple tweaks in existing concepts, like the Lima Bean and Basil Dip (p.52) that's just 'hummus' via a different bean with some basil and lime instead of tahini and lemon. Building block concept, comparable substitute for the primary ingredient, simple flavor change. A well executed fundamental. A few seem to miss the mark- I don't recommend trying the Saag Paneer (p.83) without thinking carefully about seasoning first. Swapping the standard paneer for feta without a mention of the vast difference in salt content could easily lead to an inedible dinner. Keep that in mind and look closely at any recipes you want to try so you're not caught off guard.

Obnoxious on one side.
Uninformed on the other.
Everyone loses.

The flavor text, as it were, wanders widely. Topics vary, with things like fasting (Red Chile Potatoes, p.114), or traveling (Roti Roli Poli, p.135), and they often offer a good bit of color and context to flesh out what might seem like unexpectedly simple notions. A few, though, are heavy with gotchas likely to grate, like this one for Kichdi (p.158): 

"...But like many things in India consumed by small infants and ailing patients... white people in wellness circles have managed to co-opt the dish, acting as if they have unearthed this monumentous discovery... do all us brown people a favor and remember that kichdi was invented by Indians, not L.A. yoga instructors.". 

To give that kind of dismissive grief -particularly since it's hitting a sizable chunk of the book's probable audience- seems strongly self-sabotaging. I'm as guilty of the occasional White People Facepalm as any restaurant professional, but this book sometimes reads like it's trying to make a sale while giving prospective buyers the finger.

All the important fundamentals of a quality cookbook are here: the food's good, the recipes are relatively easy to execute, and there are how-tos for the entry-level stuff to take the fear away. Based strictly on the recipes and their photographs, it's a rock-solid read for all skill levels. As a whole though, it has a more dissonant feel. Food meant to bring comfort and happiness, shared by a voice that tries and fails to hide its insecurities behind eyerolls.

Cookbook Review: 'Madhur Jaffrey's Instantly Indian Cookbook'

 

Missed the subheading, but it all worked out.

While browsing at the library, a cookbook I'd not yet read caught my eye. Nothing new exactly, but because I know Madhur Jaffrey's quite good at creating them, I took a second look. Her work typically offers informative expertise and thoughtful perspective from a voice in which you can hear the smile. Brevity, however, does not typically make the list, so I checked the unexpectedly slender volume out and brought it home to satisfy my curiosity. Upon closer examination, I realized it was by design. While the title has some ambiguity, the caption beneath marks it as meant for a very targeted audience: it's a 2019 Instant Pot cookbook. At which point I went "Whoops. Hmm..."

Throughout the course of her decades in food, Madhur Jaffrey has remained fairly constant in her message and her method, so this deviation toward a niche, nontraditional (if very useful) tool struck me as a trifle odd and very interesting. While I don't own an Instant Pot myself, I have lived and worked for many years alongside people who do, and was very much intrigued at how a food culture that so enthusiastically embraces the pressure cooker might make a more comprehensive use of what's touted as an all-purpose tool but often relegated to pressing one or two buttons and walking away. 

Amusingly, the book's introduction starts with what's essentially "RTFM"- a person can do so much more when they're using a piece of equipment they actually take the time to understand, and the Instant Pot is no exception. The intro ends with her trademark disarming charm. "Feel easy with the recipes and incorporate them into your lives in ways that best suit you. The foods in this book are very Indian. But you may eat them in as American a way as you like."

Recipes go into exacting but never superfluous detail about Instant Pot minutiae, including settings to use, cooking times, and whether to release pressure naturally or manually- even how long to wait before manually releasing, in some cases. Such fine-tuning tells me a significant amount of work and testing went into the recipes, making me more likely to trust them as written. I particularly like the Rajasthani Gosht (p.104) and the Saag Wali Moong (p.18). Most of the book seems covertly designed for low-budget and batch cooking as well, making the book more more of a draw for its intended audience. In addition, there are a few all-purpose techniques for using the Instant Pot such as boiling eggs, as well as some non-recipes like Rice Noodles (steaming and sautéing store bought Bánh Phở), but the latter feel more like just-in-case measures, and fit in with no fuss.

Most of the proper recipes themselves are both familiar and interesting, and there are a double handful of no-cook salads and chutneys to round things out, accented with pictures that are appetizing and unpretentious. However, the amount of the book that can be readily cooked in a single pan with naught but a little more time had me wondering about their provenance. Is this cookbook merely stocked with recipes taken from others and reworked to fit the mold? Probably. Does it matter? Not really. This book is about delicious food prepared with a specific product, and it delivers as promised. If you want to work backwards and convert the recipes in this book to fit conventional kitchen equipment though, there's nothing difficult about most of the transposing beyond adjusting the cooking times.

Overall, while Instantly Indian feels gimmicky, it does so with clearly defined purpose. It's neatly put together, well researched, and proffers exactly what it claims with enviably detailed precision. While not a book I'd use for its methods, several of its preparations are going to stick around in my head for regular eating. I couldn't ask for anything more from a functional cookbook.

New Look at an Old Friend: Medium Raw

Very little food media has the knack of true timelessness. More than almost any other field, its styles and methods are transient, mutable, and very much identifiable. Author, origin, and year go a very long way, but then comes the style- be it of page layout, recipe choice, prose, or photography, so many cookbooks and memoirs read as though they were carved from the stone of their era in the business. Sometimes those are shining crystal, others polished marble, and still more might as well be kidney or gallstones. They all leave their marks.

I decided to take a look at an Anthony Bourdain book today. If anyone in living memory served to define a generation's perspective on the restaurant business and serve as its face, it would probably have been him. Five years dead now, he left behind two wives and many lovers, a daughter (who manages quite well to stay out of the spotlight), and a massive legacy as messy and fraught with conflict as his career.

Kitchen Confidential was one of those rare volumes that mixed knowledge with candor and pain in a manner that not only spoke to people, but enticed them to more. To sit down, shut up, and listen- and then think about what was said. About who said it, how they said it, and why. It was a story of a life indulged, squandered, wasted almost in its entirety, and then through blind luck and happenstance, unleashed upon us all.

But that tale of frustration, anger, and war stories from the culinary underbelly isn't the book I'm looking at here. It is instead the ten-years-on incarnation, Medium Raw.

Straight out of the gate, to set the mood, there's a lengthy bit on the notion of 'selling out', wherein Bourdain admits to having tried to uphold some fabricated sense of principles, of integrity. Aghast that people he thought of as heroes were willing to shill for nonsense, he listened to them. He learned perspective. For the big names, the empire builders, it's no longer personal. It's about those that depend on them- the staff of the restaurants and operations bearing a larger-than-life name. The beast must be fed, and it can't afford to be a picky eater. Perhaps out of sheer stubbornness, remembering how many years he spent bereft of anything remotely resembling principles, Bourdain still clung to those supposed notions, resisting the offers of endorsing things or people that would stick in his craw... until he had a daughter.

Almost everyone has a price- though in fairness, I've yet to find mine. My principles have kept me warm when I was cold, and assuaged the hunger when I was starving. But it's tireless work and constant suffering for no tangible reward, and it really shouldn't be.

There's a broad section on heroes and villains, which is always interesting when it comes from the heart and mind of someone so awash in the potential for vitriol. Some real surprises in this section for most people, I'd say, but the neat bit is that it sets the stage for the rest of the book, which does a superb job riffing on that theme. Bourdain offers a much more comprehensive perspective than would have been penned ten years past, rich in tone and robust in descriptives as he moves from food writing and food media to squabbles between industry titans, a deeply personal look at the most important invisible man in one of the greatest restaurants in the world, and then finishing out with a thoughtful, uncompromisingly harsh look at himself, his attitudes, and his future.

In one last nod to Kitchen Confidential, the final bit 'Still Here' gives briefs of some names and faces of his own checkered career. It reads quietly, apologetically, even mournfully, as it all slowly fades to black.

At the end of the day, Anthony Bourdain knew he was on borrowed time. Never once even dreaming that he could have met the requirements for the life his lightning-in-a-bottle book gave him, he merely did his best to do it justice. Sometimes he failed, and he never shied away from saying so. In spite of that, he kept at it, seeking the deeper, more personal feelings behind everywhere he went and everyone he met; an explorer knowing full well he was on a one-way trip, but determined to make the world a more informed, aware place in that familiar coarse way he'd always had.

We should be grateful. But we must also be worthy. He wasn't. But he knew that he wasn't, right down to the core of his being, and his work has always made that hard truth quite clear. In that regard at least, his integrity was beyond reproach. That, above all else, is what will always make him memorable.

Anthony Bourdain: 1956-2018.

"Cookbook" Review: 'Japanese Women Don't Get Old Or Fat', by Naomi Moriyama

 

Every so often, and more often than it ought, the world handles surges of interest in fad diets. From Atkins to grapefruit to paleo, GF, or whatever else, there always seems to be something new and kitschy to try in the search for a foolproof weight loss technique. This one's got a good tagline with a faint ring of truth. It's “Japanese Women Don't Get Old Or Fat”, by Naomi Moriyama.

This is the tale of the author, her husband, and their joint desire to share their experiences with Japanese home cooking. It made them feel healthier, happier, and more energetic, as well as giving them something to research- the reasons why it might have done so, and the history behind its development.

Opening with a wave of statistics about the Japanese lifestyle, the book touts their long lifespan, low rates of obesity and heart disease, low healthcare spending, and many other things. Always be suspicious when statistics are used as primers, because you can use said statistics to say virtually anything you want. 78% of statistics are made up on the spot because they sound so effective!

Obligatory attempt at Logos aside, the next pages turn to Pathos. First comes a dramatic monologue in honor of the culinary skill, creativity, and devotion of the author's mother. As any mother should, she gives all for her children, even if they don't always appreciate it at the time. After that comes a stern diatribe centering on how devoted the Japanese are to freshness- foods not only dated, but *timed* at the supermarkets, and even 7-11s stocking tasty, nutritious composed bento instead of prefab salads and suspect sandwiches. Then came a detour to detail the lifestyle of the glorious and rustic countryside, how everything is so vibrantly flavored, fresh, and full of life!

It all felt so transparent, so obviously fabricated- but I couldn't put my finger on why. Understanding came later.

While the “How to Start Your Tokyo Kitchen” chapter is potentially handy for the novice, the truth is that a good cook already knows what equipment they need to cook dinner, and if they don't have it, improvising isn't hard. Some of the later recipes call for Japanese-exclusive cooking gear, and the author tells you how to jury-rig one. Why not add those to the starting list of equipment in the early chapter- perhaps as a closer? That's a much more suitable time to detail where to get things a bit tougher to find.

Time and pages aplenty are spent emphasizing the importance of at-table garnishes and individual seasoning, in accordance with the Japanese tendency not to individually plate, but rather allow self-service from platters- a technique borrowed from China, just one of many.

It grows quite tedious when a portion of every recipe's ingredient list has 'to use at the table' as a caveat. Such a concept needs explaining one time. After that's done, make a separate section within the recipe for the garnishes and table condiments. It's entirely too easy to confuse an inexperienced cook by piling all the ingredients in one column without adequate direction. Considering the prospective readership, I find this to be a massive, glaring error.

A full third of the book is devoted to what's termed “The Seven Pillars of Japanese Home Cooking”. Fish, Vegetables, Rice, Soy, Noodles, Tea, and Fruit are the vaunted pillars, and while each subsection has several anecdotes and a handful of recipes, most of them are rather banal. For a book that centers around what they term 'healthy eating', the number of recipes that use, say, refined sugar as a fairly prominent ingredient is more than a little bothersome when looked at with a more professional eye.

To counteract that, there are stories aplenty that seek to emphasize the healthy, life-giving qualities of the other ingredients. There's an entire tale that centers around brown rice- the barest film of historical reference is given to the fantastic tale of Tomoe Gozen, then used to create a veneer of confidence in the nutritional superiority of brown rice. I agree with the sentiment entirely, but the method is shifty at best. Fiber isn't a miracle cure.

I admit, I wanted to like this book, but I just can't bring myself to. It's trying to be a cookbook and reference text, but it doesn't have enough recipes to be reasonable as the former, or enough hard nutrition facts to shore up the latter. Mostly it reads like a slapdash memoir, bereft of the aura of legitimacy and believability that often feels so necessary when creating a suitable referential work. It's a collection of vignettes, loosely tied together around the common theme of Japanese home cooking being healthy and happiness inducing. Likewise, the book seems to hedge its bet, making the premise sound like something a person has to try for themselves to see if it works as advertised, rather than to try it and expect results.

If you're willing to trust the book and the author's message, feel free to trust the recipes. Some of the 40-odd recipes sprinkled throughout the book might serve you well, and there is a recipe index in the back. I will not, however, offer any recommendations on which ones are worth trying. 

As for me though, I'm not going to bother. This goes straight back to the library- ideally in the fiction section where it belongs.

Stop Asking For The Cheap Stuff- and No Billionaire Earned All That Money.

Courtesy of Eater SF- We've got a scoop on some local pasta supply companies trying to spin pedestrian product as affordable rather than simply... uninspiring? I don't want to say their product is bad, because I've eaten it and it's not. A major part of what makes restaurants appealing is scale- the ability to make more flavor than a home kitchen because more time and resources are devoted. These pasta joints just aren't very interesting. The pasta they sell is solid, but the composed dishes are no trick to replicate in part or in full, even with standard grocery store items.

But that's not the issue, not to me. What upsets me most is the approach and the mindset behind the concept.

"...the hospitality industry needs to figure out how to provide an inexpensive restaurant experience for customers since there’s certainly an audience for it. 'With the approachable, priced-less restaurant experience, there’s just an opportunity there that’s unserved'..."

Utterly absurd. There's such blatant desperation from struggling industries to reestablish the mindset of pre-pandemic ‘normalcy’. They aim to distract the general public from the fact that everything was already terrible- and that 'affordability' was treated as a selling point instead of more rightly as a warning sign.

'An inexpensive restaurant experience' is, to my mind, a cultural hazard. People get the idea that X or Y should be cheap, and then have the temerity to act surprised when things become popular, prices go up, and quality goes down. 

In short: Prepared food is a luxury item. Behave accordingly.

However, the notion of prohibitive expense is also deliberately engineered. The inability to have sufficient free time for one’s own cooking (or to garner the funds to properly compensate hugely underappreciated food industry staff) is almost entirely the fault of universally inadequate, deliberately hamstrung wages, salaries, and other compensation.

Such overarching systemic flaws come from the efforts of those who possess gratuitous, superfluous wealth and entirely undue influence. Too much hoarded at the top, too much attention aimed at the bottom, and too little attention to the social and cultural obligation to provide a given quality of life.

Fixing all of this is easy. It just requires the willingness to actually commit. It means making some very wealthy people very unhappy and less wealthy, but that's worth doing any day that ends in 曜日.

Cookbook Review: Madam Wong's Long-Life Chinese Cookbook

 

Very 70s, very simple and direct.

I often like to research old cookbooks. From an academic standpoint, it allows me to trace the history of food and cooking in a particular part of the world, and put various discovered works together to chronicle the gradual evolution of the culinary perspective. One of my other cookbook reviews (to be republished soon) dealt with the emergence of Chinese cooking in early 1960s America. I've discovered another volume, from the late 70s (1977, specifically), that both shows how far Asian influence had come, and also how far it had yet to go.

The book in question is "Madame Wong's Long-life Chinese Cookbook", and the huge societal change is clearly visible right under that title- "Recipes specifically designed for the West Bend Electric Wok". Fifteen years before, such a thing didn't exist anywhere in America, let alone in an English-language printed cookbook. Since many households had electric ranges that would make a wok a less than viable option, a simple and versatile tool that plugs into an outlet seems like it would have sold readily. (The fact that this book is still fairly easy to find also speaks to the popularity) On top of that, the draw of simple and exotic meals is strong- particularly those that could be prepared with only one vessel.

The author was a delightful old Szechuan lady who taught Chinese cooking in Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York, and California, even heading the department at UCLA at the time this book came out. A sprightly 71 at the time, she attributed her good health and long life to following Chinese cooking principles. And judging by her thousands of students over her forty years of teaching, and the fact that she herself lived to be 103, I suspected her skills and understanding might have held water. My reading and recipe testing within her book proved me very much right, and I hold this woman in highest regard.

Regarding the recipes, they're divided into sections by type and/or major ingredient. For example, there is a section 'Soups', but there are also sections such as 'Eggs', 'Pork and Lamb', and 'Sauces and Dips'. Each is full to the brim with recipes of varying types and difficulties, and many are found in some form on Chinese-American restaurant menus today. I noticed many duplicates from earlier Chinese cookbooks as well, and after a little recipe comparison, I found very little change. Some ingredients were altered as more authentic items became available in American supermarkets, but for the most part the dishes remained the same over the fifteen-odd years between the last major publication I have in my library.

Some of the directions in the recipes that may have been perfectly adequate at the time come across as vague. On a similar note, a number of the ingredients have the same problem: "Szechuan Preserved Vegetable"? "Soybean Pudding"? Even I was a little lost trying to figure out what some of the dishes had in mind. I thought I might have to knock this book a few steps down for being out of date and confusing, even to someone of my relatively high level of relevant skills.

Fortunately, that worry is deftly remedied in Chapter 16: Pantry Shelf and Storing Information. All the nonstandard ingredients are listed alphabetically in English, alongside the matching Chinese characters. After each name comes a thorough description, often including places they can be found and what the containers might look like when put up for sale, as well as an estimated shelf life. For those buying an exotic ingredient for a first time, this is an exceedingly valuable bit of information.

I can comfortably endorse this volume- and while I may not use the West Bend Electric Wok, I'll happily reference Madam Wong for as long as her pages hold together.

Cookbook Review: "Flavors of Oakland", by Anya Ku and Elazar Sontag

One of the interesting things about living in the East Bay is how much local history can be found preserved in some crack or crevice. In a larger city, such places are much more transient, and thus harder to define. Oakland being smaller and more close-knit than, say, San Francisco, has a deep-set community with all sorts of intriguing checkered history, with many stories shared by longtime residents to any who will hear them. Thus, we have 'Flavors of Oakland'.

      

This oddly shaped volume is penned and put together by Anya and Elazar, a pair of (at the time) high schoolers steeped in that rich, communal, multicultural environment. It appears an earnest effort to take those stories straight from the mouths of the community, and offer them up alongside recipes- whether of their experience, their heritage, or even their church potluck. Given that the book was crowdfunded, clearly the people being represented very much liked what what was being done, so that's a strong positive right at the start.

The locals highlighted in this book come from what seems like everywhere (Oaxaca, Eritrea, Venezuela, Vietnam, Goa, and more beyond). To call such varied backgrounds 'local' sounds odd at first, but that's part of why it's so important to do it. When you take the time to make a neighborhood your home, the give and take helps build a community full of diverse experiences and insights that meld to become a still-greater whole.

Whether from a casual glance or a thorough, dedicated read, that ethos comes through in spades as one turns the pages. Every face within the book seems to shine with the earnestness that comes when someone really cares about what they're doing and why they're doing it. They all want to be there, to share their food and tell their story. 

Just as important is the feel that that's where their ambitions end- a welcome and refreshing feeling in the age of the aspiring short-term celebrity. It's not just about the individuals, but the many differences between them, and the shared desire to express a special something about the place they all call home.

As far as the recipes go, they're as diverse as they come, but each still has that home-cooked comfort food vibe. None are wholly alien to me, though a few I haven't yet eaten in some form or other. The recipes use home kitchen notions, and measures rather than weights- which in this case is a deliberate stylistic choice rather than a black mark, noted in a 'How To Read This Book' page. The only issue I have with that is the vagueness that can come with measuring flour, but it's no big deal here.

While a few of the recipes benefit from a stand mixer or food processor, most people will have little trouble preparing any recipe they take a liking to in this volume as long as they can get the ingredients. The recipes don't mention cleanup though, and a few of them are likely to have you lamenting the state of your kitchen afterward, so be sure to read them through and think about them before going shopping. I'm not spoiling that for you though!

Now we get to the interesting bit.

The locals' stories shown here are supposed to feel familiar, like everyday people. The writing style helps sell that feel to some degree- the prose is simple and repetitive, but surprisingly well edited to maintain brevity without loss of impact or purpose. 

When it comes to 'home cooks in home kitchens' though, the story changes. Most of them are- but looking a little deeper, enough are caterers, chefs, or parts of restaurant families that one has to wonder at who knew who to help make this book happen. Compounding that, the preface was penned by Oakland's then-mayor, and the foreword by Charlie Hallowell of Pizzaiolo. No small ask, to have them step in and cosign. And given what's happened for the authors since, I suspect their careers got one hell of a push.

Still. While the hometown pride aspect may have been punched up a little to better camouflage the professionals mingling among them, that doesn't make it less effective or lower quality, and in fact does a fine job at telling the story of Oakland while sharing its salt, smoke, spice, and special sense of self. As someone who lives walking distance from a number of the restauants and places mentioned, I very much respect their attention to detail and absolute fidelity to the neighborhood. 

For the east coasters (New Yorkers in particular), it's reminiscent of the vaguely lauded Red Rooster in Harlem, where Marcus Samuelsson works to prop up a community by creating a space for its history, food, and culture... except Oakland is being much more subtle about it.

This is a difficult concept to frame and express. 'Flavors of Oakland' does an excellent job.

Got a few more local restaurants for my list to go have a taste of too. Perhaps reviews of those are soon to come- let's go exploring!

Cookbook Review: "I Dream of Dinner (so you don't have to)", by Ali Slagle

 

This was a random snag at the local library in the New Releases section. Beneath the title says 'low-effort, high-reward recipes', and I'm always curious about that, since food media treats that concept quite variably over time, and quite rarely with any sort of honesty about the preparations. Given that this book was apparently start-to-finish mid pandemic, it offers a very interesting sociological microclimate to analyze. 

Much of what this book seems to focus on is, paradoxically, not focusing on specifics. It emphasizes the notion of being flexible with ingredients while developing an understanding of versatile recipe concepts rather than fixed recipes. That's a laudable notion, and one I regularly espouse on my Twitch channel while educating my viewers towards it, so I had my hopes up to some degree.

This book is packed to the gills with both recipes and recipe concepts that are fairly quick and easy, which is great. But the vast number of ingredients that show up throughout it make me think that in its execution, the book forgets its goal. There are massive numbers of secondary and tertiary ingredients that are either aggressively seasonal, uncommon, expensive, or just unlikely to be used up before they spoil. This cookbook talks about quick and easy but it builds ideas that cry out for a massive pantry, fridge and perhaps a nearby bakery. 

Being geared for a busy life would be just fine if it had any sort of consistency in that regard. The amount of potential ingredients mentioned (and then frequently glossed over) in this book does the concept no favors. If you want to focus on the methodology, don't bury it in excess superflous possibilities. 

I understand the notion- offering large numbers of potential ingredients sounds like a great idea for inspiring people to try new things or get creative with what's on hand. Unfortunately, when your concept is largely geared toward people in a distracted or overworked hurry, the reader is more likely to be mildly overwhelmed by decision paralysis, preventing them from doing the sort of riffing the book wants them to. 

Including a 'tech tree' or flowchart page for each concept or major section with a few nonspecific examples would have been far simpler and more effective at getting the point across for most of the book, and cut a hundred pages out to boot.

Now some other good parts of this book, to my mind, are the visuals. There are tons of pictures, and they do a fine job of making the food look delicious. 

Thing is, most of them are fancy plate-ups that thumb their nose at 'low-effort'. I know full well the time and attention it takes to make simple food look that good, and the average home cook doesn't have it. It's understandable, but disingenuous and not really fair. For a cookbook that's meant to build confidence in a person's capabilities and creativity, it does a great job of setting them up for the "ehh, close enough" sadness when their dinner looks little indeed like the pictures implied. Instagram Inadequacy is a large and still growing problem in food media, and books like this don't help.

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I do. It has a handful of recipe ideas I'll probably use, and it has endorsements from people I would trust. But everyone whiffs sometimes, and this is one of them. I Dream of Dinner takes the best notions from scores of other cooks and mashes them together into a book that won't intrigue or inspire unless you already know how to read it- and the intended audience is supposed to be people who don't. This is a concept that doesn't feel like it's been field-tested properly. Given the circumstances of its creation, that's not a surprise, but it's really concerning that there's so much tunnel vision here. This one goes back to the library as a disappointment.