Warren G. Harding Took His Waffles with Creamed Chipped Beef

Mens’ foods again!  Old cookbooks + Republican kitsch = love.

Matthew Yglesias » Learn to Cook With the Republican Politicians of the Roaring Twenties.

Dave Noon somehow unearthed Google Books’ copy of an extremely amusing 1922 volume titled The Stag Cookbook: Written for Men by Men, teaching the men of the roaring twenties how to cook without turning gay. One recipe offers Warren G. Harding’s waffles and over [sic] you can learn about Senator Reed Smoot’s peach cobbler recipie. And, yes, that’s Senator Smoot from the Smoot-Hawley tariff.

Photo by B. Tse at Flickr

I realize it’s been a slow posting week, but don’t touch that dial! I’m working with a team of high-powered Idlefood Efficiency Experts on how to make blog posts go up faster, more logically, and with only modest and acceptable civilian casualties.

Or, if you don’t want to watch video right now, you could go to Matt’s blog and read about North Korean prison camps, parental leave across the developed world, etc.

Gloomy Shrimp Post

Mark Bittman linked this article by Jim Carrier on the global shrimp industry. It’s compact and thorough, and it doesn’t give much quarter to any period in shrimp history after about 1910. The 20th-century ocean fisheries delivered better shrimp than the farms, but they weren’t a hell of a lot more sustainable.

The story of the globalized shrimp industry, though, gets into a whole other kind of ugly. The last few paragraphs are shocking:

Shrimp: The Truth | Orion Magazine

TODAY, IF YOU LIVE more than a hundred miles from the Gulf Coast, the shrimp you eat most likely come from a foreign farm. You can tour these farms while standing at your supermarket seafood freezer and reading labels. The top ten importing countries are Thailand, Indonesia, Ecuador, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Mexico, India, Bangladesh, and Guyana. The wholesale value of their shrimp is $4 billion a year.

Despite that income, citizens in the developing world have protested shrimp farms—and been killed for doing so. The Blues of a Revolution, a book published in 2003 by a consortium of environmental and indigenous groups, described Honduran shrimp farms ringed by barbed wire and watchtowers and armed guards. Between 1992 and 1998, in the Bay of Fonseca near large shrimp farms, “11 fishermen have been found dead by shooting or by machete injuries . . . no one has been brought to justice.”

One story from the book I cannot shake involved Korunamoyee Sardar, a Bangladeshi woman who, on November 7, 1990, joined a protest against a new shrimp farm near Harin Khola. She was shot in the head, cut into pieces, and thrown into a Bangladesh river. A monument stands where she was murdered. It reads: “Life is struggle, struggle is life.”

Red Lobster, which buys 5 percent of the world’s shrimp, is Bangladesh’s biggest U.S. customer. The restaurant did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.

via Shrimp: The Truth | Orion Magazine.

Zibetto Espresso, 6th Av, New York

The two dudes are so professional, they could be Star Fleet officers.

A few years ago, the famous Zibetto opened, about 3 blocks from my office. I didn’t get around to having a coffee there till the day before yesterday

When I started working full time after many years in grad school and other shady non-occupations, my friend Dennis wisely advised me to save my first morning coffee for the office. It lets you semi-sleep as long as possible and cheers you up in the moment when you realize that you’re actually at work.

This is coffee

A couple days ago, however, I overshot my subway stop, putting Zibetto on my way to the office on a day when I was, oddly enough, early. So I had a double machiatto at the counter.

See?

Fully half the clientele were speaking Italian. The coffee was delicious. The two dudes running the place were quietly awesome. (Certain kinds of barista-proprietors are the new bartenders in New York. See also Cafe Regular in Park Slope.)

I stood next to the guy in the pink shirt, in the first photo. He was drinking a latte and wearing sunglasses, indoors, at 9 am.

But then, Zibetto is very, very shiny.

Shiny

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The Dangerous Lives of Ron Samascott’s Chickens

A few weeks ago, the best eggs at my farmers’ market started selling out before I got there.

I do not rise at dawn on a Saturday to be at Union Square with David Chang, badly as I fangirl him. My general approach to Saturday morning is that there’s an internet out there, and it’s not going to read itself. (Note to self: this is not strictly true.) But hiking the two blocks to my neighborhood Greenmarket at 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon was suddenly much too late for my eggs. 11:00 wasn’t cutting it, either.

Our chickens are free to pasture graze daily

In the interest of both breakfast and journalism (ha ha), I got there yesterday at 8:30. I got my eggs. I also interviewed the farmer responsible for them, Ron Samascott of Samascott Orchards.

I started by asking the question with the biggest impact on me personally: why were the eggs were selling out so early? I assumed that my unworthy neighbors had caught on recently to the superiority of the eggs and were snapping them up before I got there out of sheer competitiveness.

On a larger scale, I was worried that this was a symptom, that the size of the city (even just the premium-egg market) was out of proportion to the size of the farms bringing the good stuff.

That’s probably true, as far as it goes. Obviously there aren’t currently enough small, truly free range egg producers to supplant the modified-battery “cage free” traffic at the supermarket. But it’s not really Ron Samascott’s problem. The story Ron told me turned out to be a little more cheerful, if you don’t mind a little beast-on-beast violence.

First of all, he explained, the change wasn’t primarily in demand. They just weren’t bringing as many eggs. They have a seasonal store at the farm (in the Hudson Valley, about half an hour from Albany), and they were selling some of the eggs there during the summer “pick your own” months.

But they also had fewer eggs to sell. They’d started out with 200 hens, earlier in the year. But, because they let the hens graze all over the place, they’d lost quite a few to predators.

“Coyotes?” I asked knowingly.

“Yeah,” Ron answered, speaking at half my speed and a couple octaves lower, “But just about everything eats chickens. Hawks. Owls. Dogs.” He looked down at a full-blooded pug who was tied to the table by a leash. “Even this one.”

Ron Samascott, Samascott Orchards, Kinderhook, NY

“I guess you can’t use dogs to protect them, then?”

“Well, there are dogs who are supposed to do that,” he answered, smiling at the pug. “But we don’t have that kind.”

Ron explained how their chicken operation works. They built a mobile coop, about eight feet high, with a series of round beams near the roof – that’s how chickens like to perch to sleep at night. They drive the coop to different parts of the farm each day and let the chickens out to run around and graze. At night, the chickens go into the coop. I asked if someone had to “herd them” in. He said no, they just head on in when it gets dark. Once they’re inside, they’re safe. But during the day, and especially at dusk, they’re in danger.

Not all alike

“The main part of the farm” (with the orchards and the cultivated fields) “has a deer fence around it. From late fall to early spring, we keep the chickens in there, where they’re better protected.” In the summer, though, the chickens can’t be in that part of the farm. Because not only does everything eat chickens — chickens “really do eat everything.”

“They eat grass. You see a big difference where the chickens have been. They pick out bugs. They dig in the dirt, looking for stuff. If they find a rotten log, they tear it apart to get at the insects. They’re carnivores, too. If a chicken dies, the other ones will immediately start to peck at it. If there’s an animal around, they’ll eat that, but they also eat vegetables. You can’t really have peas or strawberries around them.”

So the chickens can’t stay in the cultivated part of the farm in summer. They’ll eat the crops, not to mention poop on them (“sanitary reasons,” Ron says, more politely). “So then we move them to other parts of the farm that don’t have the deer fence, where there’s grass and woods. We have quite a few cows in the woods, but nothing attacks cows. They’re big.”

Orange yolks, like in a kids book

Ron says they’ve bought another 600 chickens, who are 2 weeks old right now. He said they’ll raise them the same way, but there was some hesitation. I don’t really see, realistically, how they can go on losing chickens at this rate without some modification. But clearly there’s a way they like to see their chickens live, and I’m hopeful that the solution will still be good for both the chickens and the eggs.

Samascott usually also has a few dozen eggs for sale with bluish or green shells. These are from a group of 25 chickens who live in the lawn by their house, who are a different breed. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to buy any to photograph for you. And by the time I went back, they were sold out.

More info:

Samascott Orchards participates in these farmers’ markets:

Albany, NY

Lenox, MA.

New York City:

• Upper East Side (82nd Street)
• Columbia University (114th St & Broadway)
• Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
• Inwood Hill
• Rockefeller Center
• Stuyvesant Town
• Union Square (Fridays)

List of Farmers at NYC Greenmarkets

Lucy’s Greenmarket Report. Frequent updates on who has what at the market, as well as news and policy matters affecting the market.

ETA: I think I’ve fixed all the links. Let me know if you still have trouble.

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Popioca – The Tapioca of the Future

Look – inexpertly doctored photos from a visit to ToyQube, a “designer toy store, art gallery, cafe, and lounge” in Flushing, Queens.

Dennis, Heather, and Sarah A at ToyQube

Flushing is the site of New York’s largest and most prosperous Chinatown. It’s also a very long subway ride from most other parts of the city, so I don’t get out there more than a few times a year. Our main destination this time was Fu Ran, which took over the the site of a famous restaurant specializing in cuisine of Northeastern China, the now defunct Waterfront International.

As far as Fu Ran goes, the jury is still out for me and my pals. Heather and I had one exceptionally good meal there a few months ago – steamed pork & sour cabbage dumplings that tasted like they’d been made to order and whole fish with a hot, spicy sauce. But the meal we had on this occasion was not that great. We did have this, but didn’t love it. Not sure if it was our taste that failed or the preparation.

Vampire Toast

However, we did make our third or fourth visit to ToyQube, a designer toy shop right up Prince Street from the restaurant. I’m tempted to call it an adult toy shop, but it’s not sex toys. It’s just toys designed for adults (see detail – vampire toast). In the photo above, Heather is holding Gloomy, the Naughty Adult Bear, who is pink and has a propensity for violence.

Although small, ToyQube does make room for a bubble tea counter and two tiny tables. This time, they were excited to announce the debut of a new type of boba (bubble tea bubbles): “Popioca, the bubble tea of the future.” Popioca bubbles have a refreshing liquid filling! I was a little worried about a cum-gum effect, but it was good. In the picture, you can see some passion-fruit flavored ones glittering futuristically in the February sun. The boba also come in chocolate and yogurt flavors. Tea available in about 30 flavors. Sarah A had a rose tea with chocolate popioca.

TOS gently

After assiduously combing the extensive Terms of Service at Serious Eats for a minute, I have reached the legal determination that it’s OK to re-post my comment here.

This was in one of their frequent “post a comment, win a cookbook” threads (Cook the Book). The prompt was to write about a favorite childhood food memory. The theme was inspired by, and inspired, sentimental collections of whatever the hell it was that you ate as a child that was so awesome, and you never have it any more, e.g. Wonder Bread French toast with cream in the batter and grape jelly on top.

I wrote this:

I was seven the first time I had the chance to travel outside North America. My dad was Israeli, and my mom’s family was English, so we took a family trip to Israel and England. This was in 1970, just 3 years after the 6-day war had given Israel control of the eastern half of Jerusalem, including the Old City.

I liked what I knew as “Israeli” food OK. I liked English food better. (Hey, I was seven! Double cream!) I liked pastrami sandwiches and bagels and lox. But the revelation of my first trip abroad came when we went to a sit-down restaurant in the Arab quarter.

I was not a “kid’s food” kid. Whenever we traveled, I always ordered the most exciting, novel-sounding thing on the menu, and my parents always let me. (This included the time when I got food poisoning at age 10 after being permitted to order steak tartare in a restaurant in France.) So I asked for the pigeon.

I didn’t expect anything more out of it than novelty and bragging rights. But I thought that roasted pigeon was one of the most delicious, savory, tender things I’d ever tasted.

I still love pigeon, but fresh pigeon is hard to get in the US. I live in New York, where you almost might as well ask for rat. It’s sometimes sold frozen, e.g. at Dean and Deluca, as “squab.” It’s easiest to find in Chinatown, but in my experience is not always cleaned in Chinese groceries. But in some Mediterranean countries you see dovecotes everywhere.

I’m sure that pigeon (that pigeon) was one of the freshest, least intensively farmed servings of poultry I’ve ever eaten. I don’t want to get all wistful about a bygone Palestinian food culture that I know nothing about–for instance, whether it’s actually bygone. All I know is, I really liked that pigeon.

Dovecote in Greece, by Imira at Flickr

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Only God can make a peach. And only the chef at El Nuevo Ambiente can make that particular goat stew.

I usually think of cooking as ingredients + techniques. Recipes are supplements. It’s a little dishonest, because I often start with recipes, even if I don’t follow them. Recipes are how I first started cooking. But logically I think of them as secondary phenomena.

When I’m thinking this way, I think that no quality – not daring, not experience, not knowledge, not equipment, certainly not instructions – is more important in the kitchen than humility. Because no matter what I do, how many steps I follow, or how accurately I measure the stupid flour, I am never, ever going to make anything that is anywhere near as complex, as nuanced, or as delicious as a (good) peach. Or, you know, a fruit you actually like.

That’s the recurring theme of many of my household gods – Elizabeth David, Alice Waters – whose wisdom has become so conventional as to be annoying. Great food is all about great ingredients. Everything else is secondary.

But it leaves out another obvious truth (besides the fact of my laziness): there is wonderful, sometimes rather complicated, food that is made without wonderful ingredients. And that’s what most poor people – i.e. most people – eat when they eat well. Because “simple” “peasant” food is freaking expensive, but expertise can be cheap.

There was an eloquent column about this in the New York Times a couple years ago. I think it must have been a response to Michael Pollan’s magnum opus magazinium and the frenzy of snack-time virtue that ensued.

The article — which I can’t find now, so please comment if you remember the author’s name! — wasn’t dissing the wonders of fresh, local food. But it defended as excellent, and worthy of the greatest respect, the marvelous dishes that people make every day using cheap ingredients from the grocery store like dried beans, canned tomatoes, oil, cheap cuts of cheap meat, and bottled spices.

This is the ancient chowhound vs foodie divide, from the point of view of the home kitchen.

Obviously “cheap” depends on your point of view. Cheap meat is incredibly expensive to the planet, to the animals, eventually to billions world wide. But if you don’t have much money, whose point of view are you going to look at your dinner from? If you do have money, whose point of view should you consider before that of people who don’t? And if you are lucky enough to eat a delicious meal, inexpensively but expertly made, from what point of view should you judge it?

ETA: WordPress suggests that this post is connected to articles about “intelligent design” and Glenn Beck. Welcome to blogging, me!

First, catch your egg

I had intended to launch this blog today with a post on roasting asparagus. Timely, helpful. Brimming with potential controversy. Illustrated.

First I couldn’t find the charger for my camera battery. Somewhere between recognizing this sorry fact and finding the charger, I pulled the battery out of the camera and misplaced it. My camera is idle, and so is my blog.

It’s probably all for the best, since I always thought that if I ever wrote anything about cooking I’d start by writing about eggs. It’s not that I’m an expert on cooking anything, including eggs. It’s just that eggs are something almost everyone cooks. They have a general air of primacy, including being finalists in the “which came first” competition. They are exceptionally delicious and easy to prepare well. And yet, in my experience, there are a lot of sup-optimal eggs being served up out there. So I always thought maybe I could do a little egg education. Which I will not call “eggducation,” because I’m a better person than that, and I don’t want to hurt your brain.

This is not a post about how to cook eggs. It’s just a recipe for a very nice egg dish that I made for me and the HDGF last Saturday afternoon, back when my camera had a battery – good times! These are poached eggs on a bed of spinach and green garlic.

True confessions: I paid $1 a stem for the green garlic. (That’s a lot. At least, it seems like a lot, to me.) Many other allium types would, I’m sure, be splendid in this dish.

So: 3 stems of green garlic (dark green removed, rinsed thoroughly and sliced fairly, but not obsessively, thin); 2 or 3 large handfuls of spinach, no stems; 4 excellent eggs; cheese (see below); olive oil; salt and pepper.

Start heating the water for the eggs in a wide pan. Saute the green garlic and salt till translucent; add the spinach and sautee until well and truly cooked. I am not a fan of undercooked spinach. I’ll have to get back to you on the whole oxalic acid question and how it fits into the need to cook spinach pretty well. In the meantime, take my word for it, and cook it a few more minutes after it wilts.

Keep the spinach in the pan so it stays warm. Poach the eggs. I do not need to explain this process, as the Google supplies an excellent explanation right here, on something called “What’s Cooking America.” Because nothing says “Homeland Security” like poached eggs. (Their home page is currently enjoining us to celebrate “dad’s day” with “men’s foods” – eep!)

I shaved the cheese, as I usually do, with a vegetable scraper.  This dish turned out to be the killer app for a wonderful creamy pecorino from my farmers’ market, but I’m sure Gruyere would be great, or Parmesan. Put greens on the plate, cheese next, eggs next, and pepper over the top. Warmed baguette was the bread of the day.

As you can see in the photo, I poached the eggs pretty firm – this was three minutes. I think that was right for this dish; a very runny yolk wouldn’t have had the right balance with the cheese. The overall effect of discrete parts that harmonized well was excellent.

And that’s my first post! Considering how long I’ve been fake-blogging at SNS-based services, and considering how many half-written drafts are chilling back stage, this was murder to write. But that’s ok. It’s got an egg in it.