Oh no, this could destroy my reputation

If Francois, my roomate in college, reads this he will gloat endlessly, but let me say that the French make the best sauerkraut dish. OK, technically the recipe is from the part of France that is really Germany, but it is now France and will be France for awhile. I am not given to posting recipes from books, as that is stealing from the author, so let me point you to Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 and tell you that you have never had the noble kraut until you have done it this way. I browned spareribs and buried them in the kraut during the braising, and the aroma still haunts me. What a thing to have in your kitchen on a Sunday afternoon!

More on Baroque Recipes

Another thing for converting a modernized haute cuisine recipe into its more archaic form is to substitute verjus for white wine. Verjus is the unfermented juice of young grapes, and was common in cooking until white wine replaced it (for a variety of reasons). It is an interesting flavor, but you might have trouble finding the stuff. Navarro Winery out of Mendocino used to bottle it, but I have not used it in awhile, so I don't know if they still do. I have wanted to make an almond and green grape gazpacho with it, but haven't been able to break myself of the tomato gazpacho, which is one of the great treats of late summer.

Baroque Recipes

People keep finding this site looking for "Baroque Recipes." Since I write about baroque music and baroque art and a whole lot of different types of recipes, my site comes up all the time. I am not a baroque cook, however. I find that era of food history fascinating, but I do not have the kitchen staff to pull it off. If you want baroque recipes, find a pre-Paul Bocuse classic French cookbook, and look for the recipes with the most elaborate presentation steps, and the chances are great that you are looking at a relic of the baroque. Also, look for a lot of aspics, as those were popular, as well as savory blancmange and recipes with more steps than you would think possible.

I would like to ask my visitors who come to the site this way "why?" Are you interested in trying to cook this way or is this purely for research? I am curious, as I have done meals that were based on an era or movement, and they can be very interesting if meticulously researched. They can also produce food that is nearly inedible to the modern palate, even if meticulously researched. Either way, this sort of cooking can be a whole lot of fun.

One of the best parties I ever did was an opening reception for an art show that used Futurist themes. We did recipes from and inspired by the Futurist Cookbook. It was a blast, and all but a couple of the dishes were quite tasty. One dish was horrid, though.

Food Prediction number two

I also predict that you will see lardo on restaurant menus with increasing frequency. Food writers and chefs have known about this stuff for a few years, but because of the fad for low-fat, it never has been an easy sell to the public. Now, with the tides turned against carbs, lardo will start to appear more and more frequently. Not everyone will relish slices of the stuff on toast, but it will make its way into more and more salads, entrees, sausages, etc.

If you want to taste for yourself, the only supplier that I know of in the United States is Niman Ranch, who make an excellent lardo at a reasonable price. Unfortunately they only sell it in large slabs (although I talked to them a few weeks ago and they were considering packing it in smaller packages), so you will want to freeze it or go in on a slab with others (for my Bay Area and Sacramento readers, let me know and I will be happy to give you a piece).

Food prediction for the upcoming year

I predict that the food world is going to turn against white truffle oil this year.

The main reason is that white truffle oil has a dirty little secret to it that more and more people are finding out. Of course if it has fooled the best noses for this long, perhaps it is time to recognize that the stuff represents one of the very few times when the artificial flavors actually get it completely right. In fact, they got it so right that people are complaining that the alba truffles of Piedmont are "not as strong as they used to be." Perhaps they really aren't as strong as they once were, but my guess is that our noses have gotten spoiled by the oil.

Since the aroma is correct, and really adds to food, I say, why not? I am only a purist when there is a qualitative difference. If the artificial really is as good and can be used without any compromise of quality, then I am all for it. White truffles (the Piedmont ones) are rare and priced accordingly. If more people can experience this great aroma, all the better.

The problem will be in overuse. I have already had the experience of being in a restaurant and being suffocated in the aroma of white truffle oil from a pizza two or three tables down. Of course that is the grown-up version of drowning in chocolate, so I really couldn't complain, but if it gets to a point where all one can smell in a restaurant is white truffle oil, I think diners will get turned off to the whole thing. White truffle is like Vanilla, in that we think we can't get enough of it, until we get to where we don't want the slightest whiff of it, and have to take a break from it. I already heard one food writer call it "ketchup of the foodies."

Another problem is that once more and more people learn the dirty little secret of the stuff, there is no way that they will pay $12 for a tiny bottle. Already Trader Joe's is selling larger bottles for $8. I predict that it will be down to $4. Of course a little goes a long way, so I never really had a problem paying $12 for the little bottle that wasn't exactly what it claimed to be (the labelling was always rather vague as to what was in it. If you knew about the nature of the volatile compounds that give truffles their aroma, you had to know that this was not really oil that had white truffles steeped in it. If you had worked in a food lab, you even knew how it was made). Of course, when it is down to $4, most people will be completely sick of it and it will be quite fashionable to sniff at the stuff with a look of disdain.

Too bad, as it really is a pleasant addition to food when used sparingly and infrequently. In many ways the manufacturers were doing us a favor in pricing it so high. One did not waste a precious commodity like that, but as it gets cheap, it will be slathered on so that all one tastes is white truffle. Oh well, as I said, drowning in chocolate...

Lardo

One last thing before finally getting to bed!

I tried that Niman Ranch lardo and it is as good as the stuff from Italy. The seasonings are perfect.

It is not for everybody, as the texture is one that many will find a bit alien, but it is also great for cooking, so it has uses beyond just slicing it and eating it on grilled focaccia. I have no regrets about buying the giant slab of it and recommend it heartily.

I took a good bit of it and chopped it coarsely and rendered it in olive oil. Then I tossed in some par-boiled cardoni and after they started to brown, a splash of white vermouth. Once it cooked down, I put it all in my serving dish and fried a mixture of bread crumbs, garlic, and anchovies until it started to change color. I sprinkled it on the cardoni and gave it a liberal sprinkling of chopped parsley.

It went very well with my mother's homemade ravioli.

Food item found!

I mentioned a while back that Niman Ranch sells lardo, that glorious cured lard that everyone should try at least once in their life. At the farmer's market on Saturday they were selling it at their booth. The first time we went by I noticed that they only had it in five and a half pound slabs. Could be dangerous. Walked by, bought vegetables, but could not get the thought out of my head.

We had tacos for lunch, and had to pass by the Niman Ranch booth again on our way to the table. I asked the fellow about preservation issues of a slab that size. He said, "well, it freezes well." That settled it, and I am now the proud owner of five and a half pounds of cured lard. Since that is a lot of lardo, I will be using it for cooking as well as for putting on toasted bread. I will report on the successes and failures, although I really don't anticipate failures, as this stuff is amazing.

I also picked up some lovely cardoni, so I think that tomorrow we will be having cardoni sauteed with lardo and topped with anchovies and garlic bread crumbs. This is sort of stolen from a dish I had at Tra Vigne, but the lardo is my own touch. Full report tomorrow or Tuesday.

I am also going to experiment with pumpkin panna cotta, which was going to happen earlier, but I have been busy with assignments from the paper (speaking of which, I really should be working on one now, rather than writing this, but you know how it goes). This is the plan: pumpkin puree with a cup of cream, sugar and gelatin, cooked together. Another cup of cream is whipped and folded into the mixture. It is allowed to set in a mold. I might add some spices, I might add some dark rum, I might add some marsala. I am not sure. I will probably serve it with toasted pecans and maybe poached quince.

Another food item for West Coast folks to be on the lookout for: Oregon white truffles. They are not as strong as the Italian ones, but at $6 for a large one, you can use a lot more. Italian white truffles keep getting more and more outrageously expensive, so it is good that folks are making serious efforts at raising them here in the States. If more people can have access to this wonderful flavor, so much the better.

Of course one could always get white truffle oil, but we all know the dark secret behind that stuff, don't we? Trader Joe's is selling some good white truffle oil that claims to be made by infusing the oil with actual white truffles. I am giving the the benefit of the doubt, but I am suspicious. It smells too strong and is too cheap. Good stuff, though. Use it to finish a funghi pizza or a risotto and you will be happy, but please use it sparingly. As hard as it is to believe, it actually can ruin a dish if used too liberally.

On other food matters we get to the subject of cassoulet. We added some grilled Mello Brothers linguica and some wood-fire cooked arista to the leftovers (we will be out of town from Tuesday night through Sunday, so all perishables must be consumed). It is an interesting addition, and makes me think that cassoulet could be the ideal large family dish. It is hearty, tasty, and can be doctored up with other meats to make it interesting on day three. Also, with each day, the beans break up more and more, making a different textured dish. For the first time I am not at all sick of cassoulet on the Sunday following Beaujolais Nouveau (there, Ryan, satisfied by the proper order?).

The best basic cassoulet recipe out there is Julia Child's, and I recommend making it once exactly as she suggests, although it is time consuming. Once you have done that, you can experiment with short cuts and other meats (this year I used goat instead of lamb and boudin blanc for the sausage). I think that next time I am going to try to do it in a crock-pot.

Just Got Back

We just got back from a long-needed mini-vacation to the Napa Valley. No great spriritual or culinary insights, although we saw nature in all her splendor, viewed as the Creator wanted it to be viewed: from a hot air balloon, and we ate some very good food and had some very good wine.

The food at Mustards and Tra Vigne was fantastic, but was basically in the same school of cuisine that I normally write about. You know the rule: good ingredients cooked as simply as possible to bring out their basic flavors. The best dish was the bollito misto at Tra Vigne. I give them bonus points for including tripe and tongue in it.

One thing that really got my goat was the listing at Tra Vigne's casual cafe for "biscottis."

Look, I am semi-literate in the Italian language, but that is just plain sloppy. If they don't know that biscotti is already in the plural, can they be counted on to make them properly? Well, probably, but it still irks me.

Another observation on the "art" galleries that dot the valley is that they are dominated by a lot of really bad landscapes. There is clearly a strong demand for rural landscapes out there, but is the audience simply tolerating those wretched colors, banal compositions, lousy draftsmanship, poor paint handling and other abuses or do they in fact like those things?

If they were able to get their hands on the same subject matter painted properly, would they jump on them? I suspect it is like the situation with Marc Chagall in that there is a yearning for something, and the people will gravitate towards anything that partially fulfills that yearning, even when it is technically and aesthetically deficient.

Sometimes I think that the excesses of 1960's, 1970's, 1980's, 1990's "avant-gardes" (a completely useless term since the mid-1950's at least) are finally going to implode in a black hole of irrelevance. In many ways they already have: the artists who think that conceptual art is not a contradiction in terms are pretty much going only by the support of a very small and insignificant population of art theory fanatics.

I am no populist, but there is a need for comment when the supposed brave fighters against stodgy traditionalism are looking entirely like the dessicated academic painters of the past. Obviously, the art is different, as those old academic painters at least mastered their craft, but the incestuous circles of artists, critics and (very few) patrons, with the art completely failing to capture the imagination of anyone outside the circle rings a familiar bell.

One of the paintings that I noticed really borrowed heavily from Bonnard, who is one of my all-time favorite painters. It fell short, in that it was a compositional mess, with the background done as an afterthought, completely killing the potentially interesting space that the foreground suggested.

This painting, as awful as it was, gave me hope that there is some part of the brain of most people that responds to Bonnard's approach. I think there is, and that the French Symbolist, fauvist and assorted post-Impressionists present tremendous ideas worth mining.

There is this little voice in the back of my head that keeps saying, "the paint handling of Thiebaud, with the composition of Bonnard. Just do it. Just do it." But then there is that other voice that says, "no, late Diebenkorn. He was on to something that needs further exploration."

We shall see. I am working on a small nightscape, and it has been leaning more towards the former than the latter.

But, it will have to wait, as will more blogging. Tomorrow is the third Thursday of November, when we have the first opportunity to drink the wine of 2003. Get it while it's fresh! Cassoulet must be made (as well as a vegetarian entree for those with that disorder). The fun starts at 7. If you are on the East Coast, you can catch a morning flight and be here in time. Otherwise, next year. Same time (and there is always my variety meats festival in February for the brave).

Farewell tomatoes

A foodie friend of mine mentioned that he bought a hot-house tomato this weekend. I looked at him with a mixture of pity and contempt. The poor fool is desperately trying to extend the season. I suppose he is one of those guys who hands around the ballpark all winter trying to soak up the atmosphere.

One of the farmers at the market yesterday had a crate of tomatoes, which were OK looking if you overlooked the fact that they were not vine-ripened and had more of the smell of foliage than fruit. I suppose if you were looking for tomatoes to embalm or photograph, then they would be OK.

I refuse to eat an out of season tomato. OK, not true. I refuse to buy an out of season tomato. If someone serves me one, fine, I'll eat it, but I do not see the point in paying outrageous prices for the flavorless ball of fiber that pretends to be a tomato. Not when I have been eating perfect ones for 50 cents a pound.

So it is now the canned tomato season in California, which is fine. You ought to see the cans shimmering on the vine. Lovely sight!

It makes August all the better (I decided this year that I will resist the temptation to buy early crop tomatoes, as they are always a disappointment). So now I turn my gaze to fennel, truffles, mushrooms, roots, winter pears, apples, pumpkin, and I start to think about game.

This year I have decided to extend my pumpkin repertoire. I have always done pumpkin ravioli and pumpkin pie, but this year I want to explore the range of the pumpkin. Pumpkin panna cotta with acorn brittle crust and nutmeg whipped cream. Pumpkin fritters. Foie gras with pumpkin confit (if I can come up with some flimsy excuse to spend that much for foie gras, then to have the guts to experiment with it instead of just doing a known dish). Perhaps I will try some form of autumnal ratatouille.

I always like autumn, even though my favorite season is late summer. Autumn is a good time for reflection, for observation, for hiking and probably for baking, if that were my thing (Melanie is the family baker).

I will try to give recipes of my experiments, and will certainly post reports of the successes and failures.

The food debate continues

I see that Mrs. Dashwood has responded to my post about the importance of good food. She has delivered a scattering of arguments, so I will take them on one by one and try to hammer a unifying factor out of them.

First she accuses me of finding evil in those food articles that I do not like. If I were to call hard-cooked eggs evil, she would have a point (although they do smell closer to fire and brimstone than anything I care to encounter on my table). However, my attack is on a whole philosophy of food that supplants quality with uniform banality. Satanway does not exist in a vacuum, rather it is part of a whole factory food marketing phenomenon that is dependent on government subsides and low wages at every step: from the field workers, to the grocery workers, and increasingly to the consumers, who have been conditioned by a half century of intensive marketing to buy increasingly processed food from the likes of ADM (remember them? Supermarket to the world, makers of high fructose corn syrup and the like, providing completely empty calories that are as much a product of the factory as the land). But that will get addressed further down, when we discuss “small is better.”

In her first red herring, she throws in a little jab at la fiesta brava, so let us begin by addressing the treatment of animals caused by the factory farming that produces pork so bland it has to be brined to be acceptable. A pig is raised in deplorable conditions for its entire life. It is bred and fed to produce lean meat at a rapid rate. Its movements are restricted, especially if it is a breeding sow, which is rendered almost completely immobile, so that its piglets can suckle non-stop. The only humane thing about the process is the killing itself.

Contrast this with the four to six years of a fighting bull. The toro bravo lives on the range, with ample opportunities for movement, eats grass, which is natural to a ruminant, has a lot of social interaction with the herd, and has a life closer to a wild animal than any other product of breeding. Until one week before its final moments it probably never has been inside a box car or a trailer. When it enters the ring for its last half hour, it is full of adrenaline. It gets some fairly superficial wounds, which, in its state simply do not cause a lot of pain (if you watch a particularly good bull take the pic, it will return for more several times, until the final quite is performed). A good half hour before it would really start to feel pain the bull is dead of a sword thrust (a remarkably efficient way of killing). Note that it is not “tortured to death.” It does not die of the pic or the banderillas (which barely prick the skin, considering that a bull’s hide is leather).

In terms of dignity (although I hate using that word to describe a lower animal), the bull dies a fighting death. It is not loaded into trains and transferred to a feedlot to wallow in its own excrement until it is led into a factory for a killing that is fairly close to the sword. If a bull (or any other mammal) were left in nature, it would get old, arthritic, and succumb to cold, disease or predation. There are cases when an incompetent matador botches the job (although the bull will still be finished off before those wounds start to ache), but mistakes happen in slaughterhouses as well, like the case a few years back when a factory slaughterhouse was videotaped flaying live cattle because the killing mechanism did not work effectively enough, and no one on the assembly line seemed to care.

Mrs. Dashwood’s second red herring is about the folly of her possibly learning anything from me. Well, she is the one who is “tired of cooking,” not me. She has been cooking for about twenty years, and so have I (we start young in fiercely competitive Italian food families). We start with making pasta then move to soup and sautéing, finally being allowed to make the ragù. We all have calluses on the index finger of our knife hands. I had one period of nine months in the last twenty years that I was not cooking pretty close to daily, and that was when I had dining commons food inflicted on me. It was such an awful experience that to this day I shudder to think of the undercooked chicken and overcooked beef that was passed off as food.

In my family we cook well into our eighties, usually for small armies. It is not enough to feed our families and friends, but we take charge of the parish’s feasts, the ICF dinners, the Sons of Italy celebrations, etc. A very few even ended up in the restaurant business. There is a pecking order, and everyone knows what it is (and which generation slacked off – they are the ones who also are tired of cooking, but my generation has returned to our traditions with full fury). Are we superhuman? No. We keep at it because we don’t see cooking as a chore.

As far as our way of applying small is better, we live it. In the days before regular good farmers’ markets we traded with each other the fruits of our gardens (one of the drawbacks of Italian culture is that we almost completely misunderstand the notion of an ornamental garden – even in the smallest of spaces we raise some food. Note that I stopped doing this only because I could finally get superior produce on a daily basis in the Bay Area and I want to learn how to treat a garden as an ornamental space, not just my fattoria). For those ingredients we could not grow, we imported them (back before the rest of the world discovered our food things like dried porcini were cheap) from small producers via small importers (generally family, because they could be trusted better). We are talking about strictly blue collar Italians here. My parents’ generation was the first to go beyond high school (or even to complete high school in some cases).

The key to cooking this way is to buy strictly seasonally. If something is too early or too late, it is better to skip it altogether. When things are good and cheap in season, we buy a ton and preserve them for the rest of the year. That is why I pay an average of $1.50 a pound for organic, heirloom tomatoes (a brief note about organic here – I have absolutely no worries about the health effects of pesticide residue, a bunch of baloney for the most part (although there are environmental issues that are real). The advantage to organic is the methods of farming tend to yield produce that is bred and picked for flavor over appearance and transportability). If I had more patience and held out another three weeks each year, that would drop to about $1. A bit more than the $.69 cents a pound that I could pay for the bland red mushballs that are sold at the Satanway, but how many pounds do I need to go through to make that an issue? Also, with better flavored produce, I don’t need to use as many enhancements.

Now we can get to the meat of all of this, which is Mrs. Dashwood’s argument, which is a tired out populism that sees Small is Good as elitist. Do I want the poor to have chevre instead of Velveeta? Absolutely. It was good enough for my peasant ancestors for centuries (in our case it was pecorino – more sheep than goats in Tuscany). Why would anyone prefer Velveeta? It provides nothing that heated corn starch, milk and salt cannot provide (seriously, heat cornstarch in water to gelatinization point, add a splash of milk, and salt it, not much difference and a lot cheaper). Velveeta has little useful nutrition, offers nothing in the way of experiencing a connection with the land, with the bounty that God has provided us. It exists solely to replace food at profit to the Kraft company. To help with that noble endeavor, Kraft keeps coming up with fun and exciting packaging for Velveeta including unconscionable pre-made box lunches for children (and I say that if you can afford those nutritional wastebins, you can afford a good local cheese).

How did this become the status quo in a few decades, in startling contrast to thousands of years of Judeo-Christian emphasis on connecting our food with the seasons (so strong that the language of much of our liturgy is based on it)?

First let’s look at the way agriculture works in this country. The supply and demand issue is completely blurred by subsides and advertising. Factory farming is dependent upon a subsidy structure that favors large scale farming. Small farms cannot make it on set aside land payments, simply because they do not have enough land to put into set aside. Since the major agribusiness concerns have used advertising to create demand for an increasingly narrow range of raw materials, which are used in an increasingly wide array of substitute food products, the small farmers have had to sell out to agribusiness. As a result the status quo rolls on, making it easier to make a profit as a large agribusiness, but not as a small farmer.

In post-war America, the entire cultural emphasis has been on assimilation. Wonderful variety meats like tripe, pork liver, oxtails, lamb tongue, etc., were marginalized as ethnic or rural. If one was a real American, one ate steak (prime cuts only) and potatoes. We just beat Hitler so we wouldn’t have to eat tripe anymore, dadnabbit! And to make it all easier, the intensive sales pitch was on convenience. Cake mix, margarine (talk about fraud in a tub – ersatz butter sold as tasting “just like the real thing”), TV dinners, the list of offenders is endless. Obviously cattle still have stomachs, so what happened to them? Processed into meat food products, bearing only a passing resemblance to the food they replaced.

Fortunately Julia Child introduced Americans to real cooking and that led to Alice Waters and the tide is slowly changing. We now have small farms that compete by offering produce that the large outfits have neglected, and the market for those products is increasing, to the point that the large concerns are casting an eye at things like spring salad greens.

Now that we finally have an opportunity to support small family farms it is more imperative than ever that we do so. We can create demand for good food and that demand will be met. By supporting small farms we really do not spend more money, if we are smart about our shopping, and by cutting out the megamarket a higher percentage of our food dollar goes directly to the family farmers. If the megamarkets see this, they will be forced to follow (as they have slowly been doing in the Bay Area), and will have to pay better wages for more knowledgeable employees (again, we are seeing this in some of the mass market places here). If the prices of some foods go up it will be more than compensated for by less money going to high value-added processed junk.

We should look to food as a source of contemplation, as a source of community (that includes the farmers), indeed as a focal point of the community, and we should spread our enthusiasm first by praxis, then by words, but if we only spread the gospel of food we miss the mark. It has to go hand in hand with the Gospel. I might seem a bit harsh on Mrs. Dashwood (look, I have the stubborness of a Kraut combined with the hotheadedness of an Italian, and I have found that when I try to beat around the bush I end up insulting people more than when I am truthful and undiplomatic), but have no doubt that she is a good person, a good mother, wife, daughter, and most importantly (the thing that undoubtedly structures it all), a good Catholic. I would rather sit down to a brined pork roast with her than for seared foie gras with some hedonist foodie who lives for his own pleasure alone. I especially dislike the hedonist who uses food as a badge of his social status, who chokes down a shot of Laphroaig even though he cannot stomach the peatiness, simply because that is what the in-crowd drinks.

One final point is that Mrs. Dashwood states that skill is the important thing in cooking. I agree, but consider the shopping part of that skill. I have seen virtuoso shoppers in the form of octogenarian Italian nonne making the butcher cut meat to specifications so demanding that they would make lesser men cry. Watching them at public markets in Italy is one of the few things that rates higher than Grand Opera for passion, with their squinted eyes, twitching noses, and facial expressions scrutinizing the farmer’s every move (in Italy, one does not pick up the produce, but asks for it, bringing in the chance that the farmer will dare to pass off one unripe tomato in a bag of fifty). I have chosen a more collaborative route, working with a small number of farmers who know what I like and know that I will take a chance on their recommendations (or as my friend Ann said regarding fava greens, “ha ha, she has you buying her compost”). Some day, when I am eighty and have grandchildren who know better than to stir sauce into pasta in my kitchen, I hope to attain the level of shopping virtuosity my Great Aunt Sarah had (she was the notorious nitpicker, who my butcher/grocer cousin Mario learned to fear).

I also offer to Mrs. Dashwood and Cacciaguida the open invitation to come to Oakland to discuss this stuff the way it should be discussed: at the table, over good wine and food. If you show up, you will be guaranteed of three good meals a day, and we are in walking distance to a great parish (with a Latin Novus Ordo mass as well as the indult Tridentine). I also give great tours of the Bay Area to our out of town visitors (with the caveat that Amália always insists that a little part of each day is spent either riding on a choo choo or looking at choo choos. She might grow out of this, but I haven’t, so streetcars and regional transit will probably have to be part of the tour).

The utmost importance of food in our culture

In the comments box on autumnal cooking below, Mrs. Dashwood offers the notion that my dislike of brined pork is simply a matter of preference, not a moral issue at all. She rightly states that abortion, divorce, etc. are evils, but not the consumer culture that goes hand in hand with these things.

In terms of proportionality, she is correct. It is far worse to kill a human being in his own womb than to foist off phony food on the market. However, the major supermarkets, and the consumerist culture they perpetuate is part of the same problem. We have a culture that is motivated by inordinate desires for material riches as well as convenience.

Excessive convenience when it comes to the family dinner table is a gigantic erosion of the social fabric that binds families. The other side of selling convenience is encouraging the two income families, and the ills that come with absentee parents. Certainly using pre-brined pork is not going to suddenly break apart a family and send the teenagers into wanton sex and drug abuse, but it is a step in that direction. Pre-brined pork is a fraud. It is a way of boosting the weight of meat and enhancing the flavor of the meat that has been sacrificed by the practices of factory farming. Brines that are loaded with dextrose and hydrolyzed vegetable proteins are designed to increase desire for the product, in essence making them less satisfying to increase desire and consumption.

It is the same as selling soda pop as a thirst quencher (the once normal 8 oz. Coca Cola has morphed into the Super Big Slug or whatever the buckets of soda pop are called that you see in the world of convenience foods). I do not make the claim that drinking the occasional 120 oz tub is a mortal sin equivalent to murder, but if we are at all serious about fighting the culture of death we have to deal with the cultural aspects, which begin at the family table. Otherwise we are simply fighting a political battle that will be doomed to failure.

Of course this garbage is foisted on the market in the name of consumer choice (just like abortion), but notice that in the case that brought this all up we are talking about someone who cannot find unbrined pork in any of her markets. When the culture of death strikes it starts with a liberal propostion: a man alone with his God in the supermarket, and don't you food snobs dare tell him he is wrong. Then, when products that are by their very design made to increase desire rather than to fulfill a basic need (believe me, I worked in a food lab where we developed food like this) edge out the staples of wholesome food, the choice suddenly vanishes or is marginalized. Those of us who object to the wholesale destruction of our food culture are then branded as elitists or snobs who obviously have a lot of time and money on our hands (I assure you I have neither, but making sure my family eats a good, wholesome meal around the table is a much higher priority than watching television or the countless other diversions that are sold to fill the time supposedly saved by factory-produced shortcuts).

We live in an era of amazing technological prowess, but the fruits of this prowess in our culture are few and far between. With our power tools and heavy equipment we do not even dare to think that we could build something as magnificent as the cathedral in Chartres, or have artists of the calibre of Giotto painting our churches. Instead our technology goes to more and more trivialities, which are, at best, substitutes for real culture. We work just as long hours and have more two income families than ever, so that we can enjoy canned stock, factory farmed produce, and premade sauces, all in the name of saving time, and you are saying that this is not evil?

Oh Boy! Oh Boy! Oh Boy!

I just went to the Niman Ranch site to see all that they offered and found that they have lardo! If you have not experienced this, it is one of the great wonders of the culinary world. I have no idea how Niman Ranch's compares to the glorious lardo that I ate almost every day in Italy, but I am willing to give it a try. The best use is to slice it thinly and lay the slices on hot toast points. You will never have such a great antipasto, unless you have access to wild boar liver and can make a wild boar liver pate (I have a traditional Tuscan recipe, if you would like).

Alice Waters described it something like this: "cured pork lard? At first we asked, 'but how can anyone eat that' but after a bite we asked 'how can anyone do without it?'" I think it was Waters who said something like that. Anyway, I agree. Traditionally lardo is stored in beautiful marble jars, but I bought it vacuum packed in plastic and it was just fine. I am elated to find that Niman Ranch is offering this. I also noticed that they are now making pancetta, so I will have to try theirs. I have been getting Molinari's, which is outstanding, but I have to try Niman's.

One caveat is that Niman's Italian sausages are good mostly for grilling, but even then I prefer others (either my own, or the Molinari ones, and I have no idea if you can get Molinari products outside the Bay Area). They are fine sausages, but are more limited than typical Italian sausage.

Sage advice for autumn

I received an email from Peony Moss asking for advice on what to do with a bumber crop of sage, so I will make sage the feature of the week. It is an appropriate time to think about sage, since sage is one of those flavors that is naturally autumnal. You see, the Bay Area has about 2 weeks of spring around February, then back to autumn, a week of summer in April, winter from May to August, with a few absurdly warm summer days thrown in for good measure (keeps us neurotic), then our summer starts on Labor Day and lasts until about mid-October, then we begin autumn, which lasts until February, so we get a lot of practice in this autumn business.

Sage is one of those great herbs that just hollers "home." Even for people who grew up on TV dinners, deep down, their inner gourmet demands sage. One whiff and they will wax nostalgic for the childhood cuisine they never had.

My cousin Rita (my grandmother's first cousin, you do the figuring out of the exact term, we are lazy wops, so we just use cugina), who is my only serious rival as the Cook of the extended family (I am arbitrarily kicking Mario out of the running because he married into the family and is a Napolitanese, so it is a different cooking tradition, and you cannot compare apples to oranges, but he is a fine cook, who I would defer to in any but the most Tuscan purist situation) says that you cannot buy sage. Bought sage will not last. You must be given sage. We bought our sage and it is doing fine, and tastes great, but Rita is the better cook, so maybe she is on to something.

This email mentioned that she cannot get unbrined pork at her local markets. We found that situation one time when we happened to be at the local Satanway market and thought, "hey, some pork would be nice tonight." All they had was this garbage in brine. There are valid uses for brining, but unless I made the brine, or Alice Waters or Paul Bertolli did, there had better be some explaining to do. Lousy, overly lean pork needs brining, good pork benefits from it in specific situations. Markets that only sell brined pork are an abomination, and we should pray that they go out of business so that honest merchants can take their places.

We must cultivate the taste for good pork, as it is one of our front line weapons against Mohammedanism, but that is a different topic, and Ryan might read this and accuse me of ranting and then not come over Friday with his new knife to help me prep for Steve's party and then where will I be?

Sorry. I try not to do too many inside jokes, but some people need the occasional barb thrown their way, and Ryan is one of those. He is a smart fellow with great knife skills who is doing some silly thinking these days regarding Petrine Primacy, although he should know better. But we will discuss this over gin on Friday, and he will see the light, eventually (in spite of my ranting), so there!

Anyway, the situation with regard to mass market pork is terrible, and I recommended to Peony that she contact my neighbors at Niman Ranch. In the old days the great meat was Bird and Schell, then Niman-Schell, then Orville Schell went back to academia and Bill Niman is the undisputed king of tasty, honest pork and beef. His headquarters are walking distance from our house, so the local taqueria uses Niman Ranch organic pork for their carnitas. I might gripe about East Oakland once in awhile (like when my car was stolen), but it has its advantages!

So, the very first thing to know about sage is that you can rub it on your teeth and it freshens your breath. Or chop it finely and mix it with baking soda and brush with it. It lacks flouride, so I would not use it exclusively, but it whitens and freshens.

You can also fry the leaves in extra virgin olive oil and serve them on an antipasto plate. Yummm! Especially in the autumn, the glorious autumn.

If you haven't guessed, I have been eating figs and melon and vine-ripened organic heirloom tomatoes and am especially happy that the season is where it is right now.

Great article.

Look, in Biblical days it was considered a miracle when an ass spoke. Chris Hitchens speaks all the time, and we do not see it as a miracle. The great miracle is when he is so correct as he is here. I am frequently astounded at the notions of health that I encounter once in awhile.

I give up meat for Lent. It is a good, time-honored penance, and has some added spiritual benefits, which I have posted on this last Lenten season. I am amazed at the times I get the question, "do you find that you feel better when you are not eating meat?" Hmmmm. Never realized I felt poorly in general. No, I don't feel better! If you want to feel better through diet, add a Sapphire martini to the diet, but don't think that eating glorious pig is going to make you feel bad. 9 out of 10 people who seek these cures have nothing physically wrong with them. What they need is to go to Confession and to go to Mass.

Anyway, read the article. Hitchens is very good.

Grappa

I should probably discuss grappa (plural is grappe) in general terms first. Oh well, it will have to come second. As it is virtually unknown among non-Italians and much maligned, let me offer an introduction to it.

Grappa is grape brandy (more or less, but that will suffice for a definition here). Generally it is unaged and clear, although sometimes you will encounter amber-colored grappa aged in oak. I prefer the unaged clear stuff, so I will primarily discuss that. If you are in France it will be called Marc.

Grappa varies considerably in quality. Some of it tastes like a cross between gasoline and rocket fuel, and some of it is a complex explosion of flavors: floral, fruit, spice. It is always strong and is not to everyone's taste. Unless it is used as the base for a liquer it is bone dry with no residual sugar. Due to its potency, like other brandies grappa is "tasted" by pouring a small amount on the taster's hand, rubbed and smelled. Otherwise a taster would maybe get to do three intelligent tastes in a session and have to call it quits.

I have seen grappa made out of chardonney, pinot noir, malvasia, moscato, zinfandel, sangiovese, sauvignon blanc, cabernet sauvignon, prosecco, concord grapes, and others. Different grapes impart different flavors to the stuff.

Grappa is generally served in two contexts: as an after dinner digestivo or in caffè corretto, or corrected coffee. Sometimes it is served with a shot of espresso, sometime the two are mixed. Grappa is often served in what looks like a tall shot glass, but there are stemmed glasses with flared bowls (sort of an exaggerated tulip) that are quite good for drinking grappa (Riedel makes them, natch). Grappa should be sipped and savored. One should never quaff grappa (or anything else) to get drunk, although if your judgement slips and you do overindulge, a grappa hangover is not as gentle as a true tequila hangover, but not as ugly as a cognac hangover. Some folks dip their cantucci in grappa, but I am a strict vin santo cantucci dipper.

The Veneto region leads Italy in grappa consumption, as well as in UFO sightings. I am not drawing any conclusions, but you may, if you wish. Some of the best grappe are homemade and completely unavailable except from the proud farmer who will pour you a glass of it just to see his grappa appreciated. If you encounter a farmer like that, you will never want to leave Italy, because the chances are that you will be invited to lunch, and have just about the best meal you ever had, and met some great people, etc.

Recommending grappe is as difficult as recommending single malt scotches. Some folks like one set of traits, others like others. For a good, starting bottle, the Clear Creek distillery in Oregon makes a fine grappa (as well as a great Williams Pear eau-de-vie), as does Bonny Doon vineyard in California. Of the Italian brands I like a whole bunch, but have been drinking Nardini recently to great satisfaction. Inga makes some decent grappe, and Grappa Julia, which is found in just about any Italian restaurant, is a bit rough, but not altogether unpleasant. You have to realize that I have a fondness for some of the rougher grappe, though.

Other than that, it would be easier for me to make recommendations if you tell me one you like, and I can think of something similar. Or if you are thinking about buying one and would like to know if it is rotgut or decent, I will be happy to tell you.

You may also encounter grappe with herbs in them: rue is a common addition. I like them for variety, but generally stick with the straight stuff. One exception is technically a liquer, because it has been sweetened, but is a favorite of ours (Melanie is especially fond of it) is chamomile grappa. You can buy it, although it is expensive, or you can make it by steeping chamomile blossoms in a decent grappa, filtering it, sweetening it, bottling it and letting it sit for a few months. However, before you do that, you should taste either the commercial variety or mine, so you get an idea of how sweet to make it and what flavor profiles to look for. So, next time you are in the Bay Area, holler!

Hunger for something I cannot get

We are trying to do most of our cooking on the weekends, so that we have food ready to go when it is dinner time during the week. Amália is not into waiting two hours for Babbo to roast a chicken when he gets home. Amália starts getting grumpy and doesn't even want to think about chicken. It is during those times that only sausage and blueberries will do: "SHAUSHAGE!" Or maybe "PIZ_ZZZZZAAAAAAA" but certainly not "wait and wait and wait for some chicken."

So the first week we did this, Melanie took advantage of my being out with Amália for a few hours and did a bunch of cooking. As I mentioned before, either here or on another blog's comments box, this food was fine, but I was uneasy all week. I would walk by the little bin full of wooden spoons and they would look at me with accusing glances, "Vergogna!" My ancient cast iron skillets refused to make eye contact, murmering, "fine, at least Melanie will touch us once in awhile." It was painful. I would eat a bite of Melanie's delicious beef soup and think, "well, this is fine, but I would have done it this way." I couldn't stand it any more. Last weekend I did the cooking and last week was much more restful.

Yesterday Amália was particularly difficult. It was getting closer and closer to time to go to Mass, and she was no closer to being dressed and even farther from being somewhat comported towards public existence. Melanie was not ready either, mostly because she was attempting the great adventure of Tame That Toddler. I can't really say that Amália was misbehaving, she was just, well, full of joie de vivre. So it came time, and I ended up going to Mass by myself, as I was on the schedule as an usher and could not wait. As I walked out the door I suddenly had a panic attack: there was a bunch of beef and pork waiting to be made into ragù. I looked at Melanie and said, "please don't make the ragù while I'm gone. I want to do it." She agreed, and I went on my way.

So last night I was chopping vegetables, sautéing chicken liver and anchovies, soaking and draining and chopping dried mushrooms, picking herbs, browning pork and beef, stirring, simmering, skimming, tasting. Pure joy!

A good ragù must simmer for hours, so I let it simmer overnight. Needless to say, when we woke up it was to the smell of all that is good in the world: traditional Tuscan brown meat ragù. As I was driving to work I had it in my head. As I wrote up new release sheets I had it in my head. Packing orders was done to the imaginary smellscape of ragù.

But I have leftover sausage that must be eaten today, and I will be in Sacramento tonight, so ragù will wait. It always does. But IT IS KILLING ME! Eating grilled Neiman Ranch Italian sausages as part of a North Beach sandwich should be more than satisfactory, but for that ragù.

Tuesday night I will sauté some pieces of celery and toss them in warm ragù with some tomatoes. We will eat this with tomatoe and crouton salad and perhaps slices of cold roasted chicken. Tuesday.

Looking for the Full Story on Bison...

Could someone please tell me what is going on in the bison meat market? I keep hearing sob stories of bison farmers who are just not able to sell their meat, and have to settle for a pittance per pound. Then Melanie gets bison steaks without noticing the price, and they are outrageously expensive (but worth every bit of it, yum!). Then, a week later she finds at Trader Joe's ground bison for $5 for 2 pounds. For some reason she only bought one package. So, what is the deal? My butcher who sold us the steaks is a little on the high side, but would not gouge Melanie or me, but it would seem that if the bison rancher is getting any decent percentage on the sale, he has nothing to worry about, even if he is selling his lesser cuts to Trader Joe's for grinding into the $2.50/lb stuff.

Do any of you know the real story? By the way, I highly recommend bison meat. For Melanie's birthday I grilled bison burgers (with lovage and garlic, following Alice Water's recipe in Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook) over mesquite and oak, and served them on toasted pan de mie rolls with balsamic grilled onions and a green salad on the side (tomatoes are finally acceptable here). I was going to make classic pommes frites (cut thinly - McDonald's actually gets this right, par-fried in peanut oil, allowed to cool, then fried again in fresh peanut oil), but found a farmer at the market who was selling zucchini blossoms, which are one of Melanie's favorites (I batter them in a light egg/flour/milk/salt/pepper batter and fry them in extra virgin olive oil), so I did those instead.

We served it all with a bottle of 1995 merlot (that a friend made, sorry, it's not on the market) and were in for some good eating. Our friends brought over some gelato from the one place in the Bay Area that makes authentic gelato (not the best, but satisfactory).

Pearl's Cafe Review

As promised, the full review of Pearl's Cafe. It was slightly edited for print, but I do not have an electronic version of that, and I do not have the time to hunt through for changes and to type. Sorry. I think we added something at the end, too. The long and short of it is EAT AT PEARL'S! Yum yum!

If one expects the façade of a restaurant to somehow advertise the quality of what is inside, Pearl's Café in Fremont will first confound then delight. The humble exterior yields absolutely nothing about the cuisine and setting that awaits the diner behind the red door that separates the restaurant from the front-yard/parking lot of what was once a humble single family home.

Although Pearl's is not in a rustic stone building in the countryside, nor has it the elegant formality of a classic haute cuisine restaurant, executive chef Christine Fahey is preparing food that will earn her a place in the canon of Bay Area culinary legends.

Starting with the freshest ingredients, Fahey uses her astounding inventiveness to combine the perfect blend of flavors and textures to live up to the dictum that in a well prepared meal, the diner should taste the food and not the cooking.

Fahey stands out from her peers by combining disparate ingredients while maintaining the integrity of the essential elements of the dish. For instance, in the first appetizer, clams and mussels in a tequila broth with tomatoes, avocado and cilantro (a special appetizer priced at $10), nothing is lost in a fog of competing flavors. Rather, the tequila structured the dish, while the cilantro and tomatoes provided a refreshing lift, with the edges rounded out by the avocado, leaving the center of the dish to be the wonderfully sweet and briny shellfish.

Our other appetizer, a goat cheese flan with fresh berries and baguette slices ($9) was exquisite. The warm flan was delicate and smooth, highlighting the flavor and texture of the goat cheese. The ripe, cool, seasonal berries counterbalanced the earthiness of the cheese with their sweetness and slight tartness.

All entrees are served with a choice of soup or salad (which can be ordered separately for $5 or $6, respectively). The salad, mixed organic greens with marinated red onions, blue cheese, strawberries, and toasted sunflower seeds, was an archtypical Californian salad. Perfectly dressed, the salad balanced the slight bitterness of the greens with the piquancy of the onions and cheese, the sweetness of the berries, and the nuttiness of the sunflower seeds.

The noble simplicity of Fahey's cuisine is exemplified in the soup of the day, which was a chilled melon and basil soup the evening we visited. Each bite of this soup exploded on the palate with two flavors that epitomize early summer. The soup was light and refreshing, a good palate cleanser between the appetizers and the main courses.

Choosing an entrée at Pearl's is one of those tasks that one undertakes with expectation and a touch of regret. From Cajun-spiced prawns sautéed and tossed in housemade barbecue sauce finished with a splash of cream over crisp fried polenta ($22) to semolina gnocchi stuffed with basil pesto and fresh mozzarella cheese ($18.50), everything on the menu tantalizes with daring combinations of fresh ingredients.

We chose the lightly smoked double cut pork chop on a warm German style potato salad with blackberry chutney and grilled asparagus ($23) and the daily special, a generous piece of escolar grilled and served with purple basmati rice, a coconut milk broth, carrots, broccoli, cilantro and a lemon grass aioli ($24). The pork was perfectly cooked, moist and not overpoweringly smoky. The sweet chutney was a good foil to the richness of the pork, and the heartiness of the potato salad. The only problem with our whole meal was the asparagus, which were slightly undercooked and should have either been peeled or had the bottom inch cut off.

The escolar was grilled to an even doneness, flaky and moist, and the preparation gave a pleasant Southeast Asian accent to the dish. The seasonings brought out the fish's delicate flavor, while the lemon grass aioli added richness that pushed the dish over the top.

For dessert we ordered the Scharfenberger chocolate and espresso crème brulee with almond biscotti and the fresh berry beggars purse with vanilla bean whipped cream and raspberry coulis (all desserts $6.50), both of which were outstanding. Each bite of the crème brulee was an explosion of chocolate and coffee flavor, with contrasting textures provided by the smooth custard and the crisp caramelized top. The biscotti were dipped in molten Scharfenberger chocolate and would have made a good dessert on their own.

The berry beggars purse was a buttery puff pastry base topped with an ample amount of warm coulis. Although the menu said it was to be finished with whipped cream, ours came with vanilla bean ice cream, which was a good contrast to the warm beggars' purse.

Portions of all of our dishes were generous, and the presentation of everything was appealing. All of the details of every dish were tended to with care and expertise. Even the bread, a homemade herb bread, and the homemade herbed butter were memorable.

Pearl's service is excellent, yet informal. Our server was exceptionally friendly, helpful, knowledgeable about the food, and attentive. The enthusiasm the staff has for the food is readily apparent in the attitudes of all the wait staff. Not only was our server able to recommend wines, but he gave us tastes of the wines available by the glass.

Pearl's Café's wine list is excellent, with some unusual varietals and blends alongside the usual offerings. Wine prices are reasonable, and the wine by the glass list is diverse enough to offer diners a match to any of the items on the menu.

In contrast to the rather subdued exterior, the interior of Pearl's Café is warm and inviting. Either in the two dining rooms or in the pleasant patio in the back, diners are surrounded by décor that harmonizes with the superb, yet unpretentious food Pearl's offers. The use of space in this small restaurant is efficient, yet does not feel cramped. There is ample room between the tables, and the noise level is acceptable.

In Praise of MSG

I am just finishing my lunch and contemplating what a marvel msg is. I just ate a few too many barbecue potato chips, enough to make my tongue tingle a bit, and it got me to thinking about what msg can do for flavor. It is powerful stuff, and needs to be used in moderation, but it is really the unsung hero of the kitchen.

Now, I don't have a bottle of msg in my kitchen, but I use it in other subtle ways: in the fermented anchovies of Worcester sauce, in dried seaweed flakes, in Maggi sauce (I guess it's called a sauce), etc. Obviously some folks are allergic to it, and should stay away, but for those who are not allergic, it is time to rehabilitate msg into the canon of valid kitchen seasonings.

Now, if my foodie friends read this I am probably going to have to defend myself on charges of heresy, but I will stand by my defense of our noble friend, monosodium glutamate.

San Fermin Menu

Oh yeah, here is my menu for San Fermin:

Tapas:

1. Anchovie stuffed olives
2. Spanish chorizo
3. Queso Manchego with membrillo

Sopa:

4. Gazpacho

Carne:

5. Linguiça
6. Chourico
7. Boef Gardienne de la Comargue
8. Basque marinated steak
9. Bifanas (Portuguese marinated pork)
10. Carnitas con guacamole y tortillas

Dishes that were on the menu but got nixed:

11. Papas bravas
12. Tortilla español

Main Course:

13. Paella

Postres:

14. Cheesecake.
15. Fresh fruit

Dessert that was on the menu but no one remembered to take it out:

16. Pan de higo.

If you want recipes or sources for any of these, holler and I will post them.