January 14, 2014 On Food, Our Daily Correspondent Sin-Eaters By Sadie Stein Photo: woodenmask, via Flickr “Please don’t confront me with my failures,” sang Nico. “I have not forgotten them.” I can sympathize. Said failures are particularly difficult to forget when they sit glowering at you from your refrigerator. I have often pitied noncooks who will never know the gratification of perfecting a recipe or the sense of achievement that comes from transforming disparate ingredients into something nourishing and pleasurable. But by the same token, these people will never know the heartbreak of a recipe gone wrong. In her classic essay collection More Home Cooking, Laurie Colwin writes of attempting to make a custard in an inadequately equipped rental-house kitchen. When the mixture curdled, “I remember flinging the pot into the sink and flouncing out of the house in tears, which I wept bitterly in a pine wood surrounded by clavaria and Indian pipes.” My mother recalls a similar incident from her childhood in Palo Alto. Her own mother, never the most confident of cooks, somehow screwed up a lemon-meringue pie (there are many components to screw up) and, most uncharacteristically, hurled the misshapen pie out the window in a fit of tearful frustration. To this day, says my mother, the memory of rushing out into the yard and gobbling down the offending pastry off the grass with her father and brother remains one of the most thrilling of her early life. To the noncook, these reactions probably seem excessive. But anyone who has gone through the process of inspiration, planning, shopping, and cooking understands the sense of total emptiness that accompanies such disappointments. After all, if cooking and feeding are the ultimate in social bonding and expressions of love—and we’re constantly being told such things—then these failures strike at something deep. Read More
January 10, 2014 On Food, Our Daily Correspondent Big Trouble in Little Poland By Sadie Stein Conspiracy lurks in every bite. Photo: Edsel L., via Flickr. It is pierogi weather. Here in New York, that means going to Greenpoint, or one of the Polish or Ukrainian coffee shops in the East Village, or maybe one of the two warring dairy luncheonettes nearby. Fried or boiled is a matter of heritage and personal inclination; ditto sour cream and fried onions. I will not tell another person how to live his or her life. This is America. But here is what I will tell you: I was walking down First Avenue, hell-bent on pierogis, when my way was blocked by a very short lady in a very voluminous house dress and a fur coat. Her manner was urgent, her gaze intense. “There is something you need to know,” she said, with the air of a fellow undercover operative making contact. We moved toward the curb so as not to block foot traffic, and she delivered her message. She had, she told me, been eating stuffed cabbage at the Little Poland restaurant “for almost thirty years.” And yet, on this day, they had refused to serve her! “They said they didn’t have any,” she said, furious. “I know they were lying. I saw people eating it.” And that is not all. Following this outrage, she had made her way three blocks south, to Veselka, because sometimes you need stuffed cabbage, and no one will argue with that. “But,” she continued ominously, “do you know what?” I did not. She leaned in close and lowered her voice conspiratorially. “The exact same thing happened!” I agreed that this was terrible, and would have been on my way, but she had yet to impart the most important piece of information. “You know who they were serving?” she demanded. There was a moment of charged silence. “Who?” I finally asked. “Attractive gay men!” She looked at me with an air of knowing triumph. “I wanted to tell you especially,” she explained, “so the same thing didn’t happen to you.” And then, “Thank you for your time.” I think we can agree that the gratitude was all mine. I did not attempt to order stuffed cabbage, because, really, life is hard enough.
December 31, 2013 On Food Faulkner’s Cocktail of Choice By Robert Moor When I first started working at Kings County Distillery, in the summer of 2010, I was delighted to find the job provided ample time to read. Whiskey making has its own peculiar rhythm. Each batch begins in a flurry, as one juggles a series of tasks like a line cook, but ends in a hush, with little to do but watch the languorous drip of the stills. This was in the wobbly-legged days of the company’s infancy, before we moved into the grand old brick paymaster building in the Brooklyn Navy Yards. Back then we were based out of a studio space on Meadow Street with wooden floors and five-gallon steel pot stills that had to be emptied, scaldingly, by hand. (This, as our former downstairs neighbors can attest, would prove an unfortunate combination of circumstances.) During that first summer, we worked singly, in nine-hour shifts, so there was a lot of alone time. So, unless one wanted to lose one’s goddamn mind in that little room, one read. Read More
December 4, 2013 On Food All We Had By Amy Butcher Photo: Luigi Anzivino. My boyfriend Keith does not like my dumplings. He thinks they’re plain-tasting. I stir the sticky dough. He says that even their color is unappetizing. Like paste, he tells me, like something thick from inside an engine. “Like papier-mâché, almost,” he says, and I look at him and blink. Keith and I have been standing in my cramped kitchen for over an hour now, scraping spoons against spoons, and it’s late. On the table behind us, there’s a bowl of French-cut green beans and a whole chicken, getting cold. I take a pinch of flour and release it over the bowl. “Like this,” I say, but still the consistency won’t come together in the way I know it can. I add another pinch, and then another, and then another. The recipe for the dish is my grandmother’s, and it is simple: whisk together flour and egg, whisk until the dough sticks to the spoon and then, at last, snaps back against the bowl. It’s all about consistency, something you can’t put your finger on, something you just have to know. That is why there is no written recipe for this dish, this congealed mess of white that gets boiled in bits and drenched in sour cream and salt and pepper. There is no written recipe because how do you put your finger on dumpling elasticity? “So you just know?” Keith asks. He dips his finger into the simmering stock beside us, pulling it to his lips. “I just know,” I say. Read More
November 27, 2013 On Food Kimchi and Turkey By Michael Croley This Thanksgiving will be only the second time in thirty-six years I won’t be with my mother for the holiday. Last year was the first, when I spent it with my wife and her family. All day long I sat in her mother’s condo above the shores of Lake Erie—ice floes stretching to the horizon—and I thought about my mother, how she always labored over the turkey and dressing, deviled eggs, mashed potatoes, dumplings, corn, green beans, and three of four pies. That’s probably not that uncommon in a lot of homes across the country or in the Appalachian South where I was raised and where we like to serve two starches for every vegetable. But what is unusual is the sight of my mother, a Korean woman of five feet four inches, with beautiful salt and pepper hair, and a round face and almond-shaped eyes working away in the kitchen. Forty-three years ago she left Masan, South Korea, after marrying my father, and when she came to this country, after brief spells in Phoenix and Toledo, they settled in the hills of southeastern Kentucky. She was a vegetarian then but that was not a lifestyle decision. It was borne of necessity. Her family had never had enough money to afford beef, pork, or poultry, items considered expensive delicacies when she was a child, and her body had not learned to digest them. Rice (bop) was scarce and precious, as precious as cornmeal to my father’s family when he had been a child, and it was often the only thing she had to eat. And when there was no food at all, my halmuni still lit a fire and boiled water so that smoke would rise from their chimney and the other villagers would not know the family had nothing to eat. Read More
September 17, 2013 On Food Inherent Vice By Sadie Stein Paper and Salt, a blog devoted to food and literature, is consistently excellent. In a recent post, author Nicole Villeneuve draws attention to a little-discussed aspect of Thomas Pynchon’s writing: his recurring interest in Mexican food. Why, she asks? “Let’s just say he had done plenty of ‘research’ on the subject. As his friends’ memories, he was always seeking his next meal: ‘wearing an old red hunting-jacket and sunglasses, doting on Mexican food at a taco stand.’ Throughout the late 60s and 70s, Pynchon became a regular at El Tarasco in Manhattan Beach (It’s still open today, if you want to follow in his culinary footsteps). Neighbors would frequently spot him chowing down—the notorious hermit, lured into public by a burrito.” Alas! If Pynchon does, indeed, reside in pleasant anonymity on New York’s Upper West Side, his options for good Mexican food are (as California-bred Villeneuve points out) notoriously limited. Good thing she provides a recipe for Beer-Braised Chicken Tacos.