Tangerines

One of the cookbooks I picked up when I was looking for a recipe for pickled eggs was the 1941 Escoffier Cook Book - the American edition of Escoffier’s Guide Culinaire.

It is a daunting tome: all of the recipes are given in synopsis and assume that the cook has an extensive and practical ability to get by in the kitchen. After failing to locate anything as pedestrian as a pickled egg, the book fell open to a recipe for tangerines:

2687 – Almina Tangerines
Cut a slice of the peel from the stem-end of the tangerines by means of a round, even cutter, one inch in diameter. Then empty them, and fill the peels with a preparation of Bavarian cream with violets, combined with crumbled lady-fingers, sprinkled with Maraschino. Close the tangerines with the slice cut off at the start; let them set in a cool place, and, at the last moment, lay them on a dish covered with a folded napkin.

Besides the absolute poetry in the spare instructions of the recipe, I do so love that this recipe for tangerines uses no part of the tangerine but the peel. What does one do with the flesh?

The Cooking of Potatoes

Recently someone gave me a tattered paperback copy of Elizabeth David's French Country Cooking (first published in 1951). I read it in bed (yes, I read cookbooks in bed), on the subway, on the back deck. She was a glorious writer with a strong character and this passage on potatoes rather stopped me in my tracks - it's both imperious and practical, marks of a sure hand in the kitchen.

THE COOKING OF POTATOES

For sauté potatoes cook the potatoes in their skins; peel, slice and sauté them gently in dripping or butter, adding a little chopped onion and parsley at the end.
Potatoes for salad should also be cooked in their skins, peeled and mixed with the dressing or mayonnaise while still warm.
For Pommes Pailles, Allumettes and all variations of chips, the raw potatoes should be plunged into plenty of water to wash away the outer starch which otherwise makes them stick together in the cooking.
Put new potatoes into boiling water.
Go to the extra trouble of mashing potatoes through a sieve and adding warmed milk.
To keep boiled potatoes hot cover them with a clean tea-cloth instead of the lid of the serving dish. This absorbs the moisture and results in dry and floury, instead of sodden, potatoes.
Mashed fried potatoes should be done in bacon fat, very little of it, and watched constantly.
Rub the outside of potatoes for baking with a coating of salt.
Baked potatoes are delicious eaten with aïoli instead of butter.

My husband, who makes fine mashed potatoes, always does that trick with the dish towel over the pot, instead of a lid. I'm not quite sure where he picked it up, but he's in good company.

Restaurant Nostalgia

Recently I found an old restaurant guide at my mother's house: The New York Times Guide to Dining Out in New York, by Craig Claiborne (1968). I flipped through it, looking for restaurants that are still around, and departed ones that I remember eating at as a child. Though the prose isn't nearly as wonderful as in Kate Simon's New York Places & Pleasures, it did conjure up some memories.

On our first date, in 1986, W. took me to the Fontana di Trevi (on West 57th Street). It's still there, and gets decent notices. I remember the restaurant fondly, good food and gracious service, and it was a place we went back to a number of times. Clearly though, they'd hoisted themselved up by the bootstraps, because here's what Claiborne had to say 18 years earlier:

It might be charitable not to go into too much detail about the décor and food at the Fontana di Trevi. Suffice it to say that the décor is on the dark side and dusty, and there are plastic vegetables at eye level along the edge of the banquettes. The stuffed clams are humdrum, most of the antipasto was taken from a tin and the fettucini can be watery. The espresso at Fontana di Trevi is not too bad.

The crack about the coffee is a classic example of damning with faint praise.

When I was about 10, we went to Lüchow’s for my birthday dinner. My birthday is just after Christmas, and Lüchow’s was decorated to the hilt. I can't remember what we ate, but I do recall that it was boisterously good time.

Lüchow’s is a landmark of more than 80 years, and, as such it has a special eminence. It smells profoundly at times of red cabbage and sauerkraut, and it is one of the noisiest restaurants in the City. It is also one of the most colorful. At times there are German bands playing oom-pah-pah, and children love it. There are festivals galore, numbering among them the bock beer festival, the venison festival and the goose festival. The food at its best is excellent. One of the major faults is that the portions are enormous and sometimes arrive at the table lukewarm. Lüchow’s is schmaltzy enough to border on the sophisticated, and the beer is cold. There are few places in town where one can dine as well on a limited budget.

Alas, Lüchow’s is no longer, knocked down and replaced by an NYU dorm. Too bad, the NYU students probably appreciated the cold beer. I was too young to drink the cold beer when I was there.

Writing about Beans

This week's New Yorker has a piece by Adam Gopnik on "Real Food from Fictional Recipes". Lots of the "recipes" found in novels aren't really presented as such, but there's often enough there to figure out how to prepare the dish in question. But he turns the whole thing on its head in a beautiful passage on beans and writing, and the relationship therein.

The beans alone establish Spenser’s credibility as a cook. “I shelled the beans from their long, red-and-cream pods and dropped them in boiling water and turned down the heat and let them simmer,” he tells us. A devotion to shell beans, I have noticed, divides even amateur cooks from non-cooks more absolutely than any other food, and they are, into the bargain, a perfect model of writing. Like sentences, shell beans are a great deal more trouble to produce than anyone who isn’t producing them knows. You have to shell the beans, slipping open the pods with your thumbnail and then tugging the beautiful little prismatic buttons from their moorings—a process that, like writing, always takes much longer than you think it will. And then even the best shell beans, cleaned and simmered, are like sentences in that nobody actually appreciates them as much as they deserve to be appreciated. Shell beans are several steps more delicious, lighter and finer, than dried beans, much less canned beans; but the sad truth is that nobody really cares beans about beans, and not many eaters can tell the fresh kind from the dried, or even the canned.

And you know what? Gopnik's right. Writing is hard, and fresh shell beans are a great pleasure. Come August or September, chase some of those fresh cranberry beans down at your local farmer's market, shell them, boil them in a little water for about 10 minutes, drain, and toss with kosher salt and good olive oil. Sublime.

Poetry Friday

I saw this on the subway yesterday. It broke my heart a little; someday my daughter will grow up too.

A Little Tooth
by Thomas Lux

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.

From New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995, published by Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Copyright © 1990 by Thomas Lux. All rights reserved.

How to Cook Bacon

This looks like a third grade science essay - how matter changes with temperature. But bacon! Toast! Melted butter! Toast for breakfast was an illicit treat, at least on school days. Normally, we had cold cereal for breakfast, with brown sugar. We only got toast if everyone was running late.

The Good Grey Lady on Britney Spears

The Times had a paragraph about Britney entering rehab yesterday, as soberly written as the Times gets (that is, very).

Over the weekend she shaved her head and picked up a couple of tattoos, the latest public displays in a tumultuous year that has included mishandling her babies, parting from her club-hopping husband and appearing in public without underpants.

"Appearing in public without underpants." I snickered aloud on the train.

Cocktail Playdates

I'm not social enough to be much of a playdate mom, and I figure that Miss M. gets plenty of socializing being at daycare five full days a week. But, I do think that playdates with wine are a great idea - and birthday parties - and all of those slightly awkward get-togethers of parents and kids where the kids know one another well and the parents more en passant. It breaks the ice. And wine is good. I've been reading With Bold Knife and Fork by M.F.K. Fisher; here is what she has to say about wine:

As for wines, they are for me. I like honest wines as such, all of them and always. Of course some are better than others, and I like the best ones the most. But I could and would forgo any other liquid forever, as long as I might drink one humble wine with my daily bread. I like wine before, during, after, and in between meals, if things point that way. I like to know, and to use, local wines, which is probably why I have managed to live near the grapevines since I was four. If I were told today that even one more sip of wine would kill me, I might believe it, but I know that I would also investigate the prognosis, weigh its validity, and then decide for myself. If I agreed to abstain for survival's dubious benefits, I could at least taste vicariously by continuing to serve wine to my friends and, like old George Saintsbury in his Cellar Book, grow mellow on memory.

Dead Nut Expert

Sunday brought another wonderful obit from Douglas Martin of the New York Times - that of Elizabeth Tashjian.

Her father was a prosperous rug trader, and her mother came from an aristocratic family with a castle.

Ms. Tashjian had a museum of nuts, in Connecticut. The 48 word first paragraph contains the word "nut" five times.

According to the obit, she had a late life career as a guest on TV and radio. For those appearances "she often took along her huge, disturbingly suggestive Coco de mer nut" which weighs 35 pounds and "resembles buttocks".

I could keep quoting, but maybe you should just go read it and raise a cocktail peanut to Ms. Tashjian.

Frisky Chimps

Sometimes the best reads in the Times are the little AP stories that run under the heading “National Briefing”. By best, I mean the kind that cry out to be read aloud or otherwise shared. Here’s one from today:

Who’s Your Daddy?
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 18, 2007

A female chimpanzee at a sanctuary has given birth, despite the fact that the facility’s entire male chimp population has had vasectomies. Now managers at the sanctuary, Chimp Haven, are planning a paternity test for the seven males who lived in a group with the female, Teresa, a chimpanzee in her late 40s who had a baby girl last week. Once they identify the father, it is back to the operating room for him...

This begged a few questions for me. Did anyone know she was pregnant? Do chimps have the same propensity towards genetic abnormalities in the babies born to older moms that humans do? Did she have any prenatal testing (amnio, CVS) given that she's of advanced maternal age? Or is that not advanced maternal age for a chimp? And if they did do genetic testing, and did find an abnormality (is there a chimp equivalent of a trisomy?), would they have done anything about it? The mind reels.

Spam Poetry

This was in the dummy type in a spam email this morning. I think it's like Seussian poetry. [I put the line breaks and initial caps in; the question mark was there.]

Sithstar
Warsstar
Warsthe
Star wars?

Snips From My Diary

Months ago, I cleaned out a dresser at my mother's house, and found a trove of diaries and journals and notes from junior high school. Notes meaning: little tiny scraps of paper in handmade envelopes, all from one friend of mine, named Ann. We passed these back and forth with great regularity, discussing friends, boys, teachers. Last night, I sat in front of the fireplace, reading them whilst drinking wine, and burning as I went. I saved some of the best of them, and there's one journal that I didn't get to.

Here are some choice bits from a diary, from the spring of 1974, when I was 13:

Today I learned how to convert from F° to C°.

I didn’t write the past two days because I was busy but Friday I did relatively nothing and Saturday I went to Gigi’s*. We went to the park to have Gigi’s picture taken. Some dumb lady thought I was her kid. She’s 63 and I’m 13. God, some weird lady.

Saturday night, Mom and Pop had a party. Boring.

Nothing, literally, happened on Tuesday!

The oh-so-scintillating inner life of a 13 year old.



* Gigi was my grandmother. She lived nearby, close enough that we could bicycle over to her house for root beer floats and the cookies that were always in the pantry.

A Paean to Ramen

Today's Times had both an editorial and an obituary of Momofuku Ando, the guy that invented ramen noodles. Although I've eaten them on occasion, they were never a staple for me (but I'm almost tempted to go get some for lunch). The editorial was wonderful. Here's a lovely snip, lovely even as it focuses on the noodle's flaws:

There are some imperfections. The fragile cellophane around the ramen brick tends to open in a rush, spilling broken noodle bits around. The silver seasoning packet does not always tear open evenly, and bits of sodium essence can be trapped in the foil hollows, leaving you always to wonder whether the broth, rich and salty as it is, is as rich and salty as it could have been. The aggressively kinked noodles form an aesthetically pleasing nest in cup or bowl, but when slurped, their sharp bends spray droplets of broth that settle uncomfortably about the lips and leave dots on your computer screen.

The letter M

The graphic design firm that does the work for my office sends out eccentric holiday "cards" each year. This year's was a little bound book, "The Alphabet: A Critical Assessment". Its contents were originally on a blog called Speak Up - here is an excerpt for your reading pleasure:

Speaking of my name, check these out. now those are 2 sweet letterforms. Is it any wonder that a line of “m”s denotes “yummy”? Mmmmm. The cap is unique and strong; balanced, and open in a way that doesn’t interfere with other letterforms. The lower case echoes the sturdiness of the cap, with all feet firmly on the ground, but with those 2 nice curves. I’m so glad my name begins with M!

Thank you Marian Bantjes! I like M too!

Motherhood

I have a subscription to Brain Child - it was originally a gift from my sister, the first Christmas after Miss M. was born, and I've continued to renew it because it's good provocative germane writing.

The Winter 2007 arrived in the mailbox last week and was promptly devoured. Well, no I didn't eat it. But I did read it cover to cover.

I frequently feel like some kind of mother imposter - just flying by the seat of my pants, trying to keep Miss M. on an even keel. And that pretending-to-be-someone's-mother feeling is often exacerbated in the presence of other mothers (unless they're clearly slacker moms, too!). So while reading an essay* in Brain Child about a woman and her adopted Chinese daughter, I was struck by this passage excerpt:

I had to develop an expression which showed slight embarrassment and wry amusement along with great fondness...

She goes on about her kid's exploits in the grocery store (watching the lobsters! singing "Old MacDonald" in the meat department!), but that description floored me - I know it so well - slight embarrassment, wry amusement, great fondness - oh yes, daily.

* The essay is My Girl: Made in China, raised in Illinois, by Gale Renee Walden.

Disney Cheese

Last week's New Yorker had a piece by Anthony Lane about Walt Disney - a book review, mostly, but broader and more rambling than just a book review. Disney, blah blah blah, more Disney, more blah blah blah. Then this:

To understand Disney's advance, you need to go to Paris. In particular, you need to go to Paris before January 15th, to the Grand Palais, which is home to an exhibit of Disney's art. This in itself is astounding. To the French mind, Disney represents the arrowhead of American cultural assault, and if America were to return the favor it would need to mount a major retrospective of soft, unpasteurized French cheese at the Metropolitan Museum.

This stopped me in my tracks (on the tracks; I was on the train). What would a cheese retrospective look like? Would tasting be involved? Soft cheeses are usually young - can you have a retrospective of young cheese? Would there be cave replicas? Affineurs on display? A didactic interactive display of pasteurization and why it knocks the character out of cheese? Don't get me wrong - I love cheese. I just thought the idea of a cheese retrospective was something else.

Taking the Westbound

I think that reading the Douglas Martin's Times obits should be mandatory for all for the rich glance into the obscure that they offer. Today's gem was the obituary of one Steam Train Maury, also known as the Grand Patriarch of the Hobos, and the Life King of the Hobos East of the Mississippi, dead at 89. More than a mere obit, the piece is a tiny history of hobos in America.

When The Washington Times asked Mr. Graham in 1989 whether it was true that some hobos used deodorant, he answered: “It’s a shame, but I don’t know what we can do about it.”

I could quote endlessly, or you could go read the elegant obit. I do wonder though, is/was there a Life King of the Hobos West of the Mississippi?

RIP, Steam Train Maury.

Democrats

Fascinating stats on last week's election, courtesy of Rick Hertzberg in the New Yorker:

In 2000, the last time this year’s thirty-three Senate seats were up for grabs, the popular-vote totals in those races, like the popular-vote totals for President, were essentially a tie. Democrats got forty-eight per cent of the vote, Republicans slightly more than forty-seven per cent. This time, in those same thirty-three states, Democrats got fifty-five per cent of the vote, Republicans not quite forty-three per cent. In raw numbers, the national Democratic plurality in the 2000 senatorial races was the same as Al Gore’s: around half a million. This time, despite the inevitably smaller off-year turnout and the fact that there were Senate races in only two-thirds of the states, it was more than seven million.

Spam humor

Mostly the spam just annoys the hell out of me, like this morning when there were almost 300 new messages and only 15 or so were legit.

But this header made me laugh.

Subject: [SPAM] Re: Turd Ferguson pakmansc

I think it's a character in a Carl Hiaasen novel - Turd Ferguson. Has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

Biblical Animals

And for today's Times chuckle:

Yesterday, for example, Eliot Spitzer was scheduled to vote on the Upper East Side at 7 a.m., Andrew Cuomo was scheduled to vote in Lower Manhattan at 10 a.m., and camels, sheep and a donkey were scheduled to arrive at Radio City Music Hall for its Christmas Spectacular at 1:15 p.m. — which has nothing to do with Election Day but seemed important enough to share.

Thanks, Dan Barry.