Happy Birthday, Alice

Alice making fudge as a treat for her class

Wordless Wednesday: Recent Reading

Food in Art and Art in Food

Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy by John Varriano is like a banquet of fascinating concepts. I felt, when reading it, as if I have been waiting for such a book to tell me many things I wanted to learn about the relationship of food and art!

Italian Renaissance cookbooks and books on the art of cooking inform one of the most interesting parts of the study. Varriano compares developments in food theory to developments in art theory. He shows, by many examples, how these two focal points of Renaissance thought are parallel.

Intellectual and culinary currents in the Renaissance are linked in ways I found remarkable. Early paintings used a background of gold, with rather stiff colors and skin tones in the human subjects. Painters slowly developed more naturalistic ways to present human forms -- and in this process, they employed a number of food substances. Egg as a medium for tempera, a number of different oils as a medium for paint, and pigments from foods like saffron provided a variety of effects that the innovative artists explored. Renaissance cooks, meanwhile were also developing new uses for oils, eggs, and of course many other foods. Varriano summarizes these trends:

"By 1500 oil had replaced eggs as artists' binder of choice, whereas cooks continued to choose from an array of possibilities. Whichever method they adopted, it derived from somewhere else -- oil paint from Flanders, cooking oil from Arabia, and butter from northern Europe. Collectively, these ingredients became essential to the creation of Italian Renaissance tastes; indeed, many of the visual and gustatory refinements of the period could not have taken place without them." (p. 159)

Cellini Salt Cellar

Art works were sometimes made directly from foods. Sugar sculptures were popular as a luxurious way to decorate the large and opulent dining tables of the richest Renaissance princes and churchmen. Varriano gives many examples of how the sugar statues were made and decorated with gold or with colors. Some were made in molds that also were used for metal objects of greater permanence. Architectural and other decorative banquet items were also made from cheese, salami, capons and other unexpected foodstuffs. (They really make this weekend's L.A.Times Super Bowl stadium made of various foods look pitiful! )

Tastes and Temptations also discusses the development, in this era, of different types of elegant tableware, including pottery dishes decorated with classical figures and elaborate metalworks. I've seen many of these in art museums, and felt that the description gave me quite a bit of insight into what I've seen. The famous gold salt cellar of Benvenuto Cellini, shown above, is one of these objects.

"The Bean Eater"

Still life paintings, religious paintings of subjects like The Last Supper, and paintings of ordinary people and shopkeepers all provide material for studying food as the subject of art. Each of the author's treatments offered new insights about the paintings under discussion. For example, about Annibale Caracci's work "The Bean Eater," Varriano wrote:

"Judging from the man's garb and demeanor, he is clearly a villino, or country bumpkin. The meal so carefully laid out before him is consistent with the peasant diet... beans, dark bread, a torta da bietola (chard pie), scallions, and red wine -- all foods 'not to be eaten except by those who labor hard.' But in this context, the food probably signifies something more than lower-class humors and appetites."(p. 139)

In fact, scallions "incite the libido... Thus, a link between food, sex, and procreation may underlie the eroticism of many of these Italian genre scenes," continued Varriano. He gave illustrations from various writers about the effect of foods on the humors -- that is, Renaissance health theories, and showed how these theories were reflected in various paintings. All, I find, just fascinating.

Kugel

Challah Kugel at kugel-making lesson, January 29,
Jewish Women's Circle

Potato kugel. Lokshen kugel or noodle kugel. Challah kugel. Apple kugel. Yerushalmi kugel. Vegetable kugel. Rice kugel. What do they all have in common? As with almost any Jewish question, every suggested answer to this question has a sort of counter-answer. Yes, but…

Kugel has always been a dish for the Jewish Sabbath, or Shabbat – at least it was so for Eastern Europen Jews and their descendants in many lands. Traditional Friday night Shabbat dinners often included kugel, as did the foods for Saturday midday meals. On Friday night and Saturday, observant Jews don’t light a fire and don’t prepare or reheat foods, so Shabbat dishes have to be made by Friday afternoon and kept warm on a low, unchanging flame. In other words, a traditional kugel had to be cooked for hours or even overnight without losing its flavor, often in a slow oven.

Yes, but kugel now is also popular with many Jews who don’t observe these restrictions. They make kugel any time, for holidays or potlucks – their kugels most frequently are baked in a hot oven, and have to be taken out while still puffy. Lots of contemporary Jewish cooks would tell you that a kugel is a dish that’s baked, sort of like a casserole.

Yes, but in the past, women made kugel in a frying pan or in a pot on top of the stove. For example, a woman described in a New York Times article a few years ago, “makes her potato kugel without matzo meal and in a pot rather than the usual Pyrex dish so it can finish cooking on the automatic flame.”

In the still-more-distant past, kugels were steamed inside the pot that held the slow-cooked Sabbath stews, often called cholent (though the name varied depending on the time and place). Only slowly did kugel become a stand-alone dish. It seems, in fact, that way back in time there were essentially two types of slow-cooked dishes: cholent, or stew, and kugel, a more solid dish, basically made from a starch bound with eggs.

Kugel could be a very simple dish. Shabbat potato kugel added an egg or two to the daily fare of potatoes and onions that a Jewish family in the shtetl could afford -- like other very poor rural and village people in Poland and Russia in the 19th century. Indeed, almost all kugel recipes include eggs. When people were really poor, putting scarce eggs into a starchy dish was a way to share a few eggs with a large family. So some people say that a kugel has to have eggs. Yes, but somehow the use of eggs doesn’t seem to define the dish, just to contribute to the flavor and texture.

Yes, kugel is a dish for helping a poor family to share a few eggs. But rich people in those shtetls made rich kugels full of eggs. In America, everyone could eat like the rich people in the old world. Like so many foods in America, kugel got richer and richer, so now many American Jews eat kugels with many many eggs, cheese, lots of sugar, and a variety of fruit. While observant Jews distinguish between kugels that could be eaten with meat meals and those ok for dairy meals, that’s no longer important for many Jewish people today.

Apple Kugel at kugel-making lesson

Yes, but now people are health-conscious, and they make new recipes to be healthy by modern standards – with vegetables. Broccoli. Spinach. Apple kugels made with a batter rather than noodles or potatoes are another variation – healthy or not? I don’t know. There are even gluten-free versions.

Raisins were another frequent addition to Eastern European kugels. One bit of evidence for that is the history of Yerushalmi kugel – Yerushalmi means “from Jerusalem.” One story says that Jews who originally came from Lithuania began making it in Safed (Tzfat) in the early 19th century. Yerushalmi kugel is made from caramelized sugar and fine egg noodles, flavored with a strong dose of black pepper. No raisins, but that’s supposedly because they “couldn't afford raisins … so they browned sugar to make their kugels look dark.” Later these Jews were driven out of Safed and settled in Jerusalem where they kept making the kugel. As the name suggests, it’s still very popular in Jerusalem, especially in the Orthodox neighborhoods, where it’s eaten with a slice of pickle.

Yes, but there’s another story: some attribute the Yerushalmi kugel recipe to Rivka Vinegarten, “the curator of Or Chaime Museum in old Jerusalem. Her father, Rabbi Avraham Mordechy Vinegarten, was the last rabbi of the old Jewish quarter at the outbreak of the 1948 war.”

Some rabbis in the 19th century said it wouldn’t be Shabbat without kugel. They felt that kugel was a holy dish, perhaps because of its simple origins among poor people whose lives were seen as holy. Quite a few of these rabbis preferred potato kugel to any other kind. Noodle kugel, called lokshen kugel in Yiddish, was their other primary choice. There are those who limit their definition to just these two kinds of kugel. In any case, kugel was a strictly Jewish dish.

Yes, but I have found so much else about kugel. And I’m going to stop now.

Sources: 

• Eat and Be Satisfied by John Cooper (1993)
• “Holy Kugel: the Sanctification of Ashkenazic Ethnic Foods in Hasidism” by Alan Nadler, in Food & Judaism, ed. Greenspoon, Simkins, and Shapiro (2005)
• “Kugel Yerushalmi (Jerusalem lokshen kugel)”
• “At Home, in a Stranger's Kitchen” by Alex Witchel, New York Times (April 4, 2001)
• “Strike While the Kugel is Hot” by Rivka Tal (August 31, 2006)
• “The History of Kugel” by Gil Marks (September 1, 2011)

Wordless Wednesday: Food for the Lorikeets

San Diego Zoo, Lorikeet House (unknown child)

Miriam

Alice and Miriam

Alice

Sunday Brunch

Sunday Brunch at Gabi's

Yesterday my book group met to have brunch and discuss the book Memoir of the Sunday Brunch by Julia Pandl.

 

The brunch was delicious and the discussion was lively; however, most of us had serious reservations about the book. In my opinion, shared by several others, the book was awkwardly written, repetitive, full of suggestions that didn't go anywhere, and inconsistent in style. There were passages that read like writing workshop exercises, just dropped in place without any explanation. One of my friends pointed out that the theme of brunch that predominated in the beginning chapters, then was forgotten for a while, and made a brief reappearance, contributing to a lack of coherence.

The emotions the author described were raw, clearly showing how she had been a child or young adolescent who didn't know a lot of what was happening to her, and later showing an adult floundering as she dealt with the sad deaths of her parents. Unfortunately, she did little or nothing to shape these emotional passages into a well-written narrative. Some of us felt that an editor would have helped; Gabi, our discussion leader and hostess, had researched the history of the book and thought that the editing gap was due to the original self-publication of the work. That is, Pandl published without editing herself or profiting from a professional editor. Several people in the group, nevertheless, felt that the authenticity of the emotional content made up for the lack of smooth writing. I think we all felt that the book simply failed to live up to expectations for a published memoir -- even one describing confusion and emotional issues.

"On Such a Full Sea"

The New York Times review on January 2 described Chang-Rae Lee's novel On Such a Full Sea as "a wonderful addition not only to Chang-rae Lee’s body of work but to the ranks of 'serious' writers venturing into the realm of dystopian fantasy." The reviewer compared it favorably to similar novels by Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, and Anthony Burgess. I decided to read it.

On Such a Full Sea was a terrible disappointment overall. The author's choice of showing a distopian future by describing a naive member of society making a road trip isn't very original as far as I'm concerned. The traveler's  discovery of a series of enclaves with varying types of people and levels of control by government is predictable. Her encounter with rapacious or pathological expressions of human nature didn't rise above the ordinary. Pointed parallels to the tendencies or dangers of our own society in fact become tedious and a bit hackneyed. I just don't agree with any of the favorable reviews I read.

The naive traveler, a very young woman named Fan, comes from B-Mor, once the city of Baltimore, and she travels west into "The Smokes." The one unusual feature of the novel is the narration by a collective voice representing the people of B-Mor: people who came from "New China" in the nearly-forgotten past and displaced the original inhabitants. The voice relates what "we," the people of B-Mor at some unspecified future time, know about Fan and her journey, and above all how "we" don't know what her motives were or why she made each decision to move on.

The people of B-Mor in this distopian era make a collective living by producing industrial and very hygienic food -- specifically fish raised in tanks and hydroponic, very uniform vegetables -- for more elite towns, where the people are very rich. In B-Mor people like Fan worked very hard and had little imagination or richness to their lives; they appreciated having a schedule: "it helps one to sleep more soundly, to work steadily through one's shift, maybe even to digest the hearty meals, and finally to enjoy all the free time." (p. 2; Kindle location 76)

In fact each part of the region that hasn't been totally ruined makes a living from some collective occupation serving the rich, while out in "The Smokes" poverty and living by hook or crook prevades. Ok, sounds like Hunger Games, but the NYT reviewer didn't stoop to that comparison.

Traveling in search of her disappeared boyfriend Reg, Fan discovers new sorts of people as she grows hungrier and hungrier -- she's pregnant and struggling to hide her condition from each group of people or family that take her in, mostly for terrible motives. The author does a good job using food to distinguish the old inhabitants from the "New China" interlopers, Fan's people. Food enables the author to let the reader know what he thinks of various people: vegetarians who are also murderers, poor people living on the edge, rich people obsessed with cuisine. But it's a bit predictable.

In B-Mor the "New China" people are fond of their native food; a funeral feast illustrates this. "Homemade delicacies" included "Shanxi-style smoked pork belly, stuff you hardly ever see these days. The fatty peppery scent of the dish was absolutely transporting ... but ... it was a cloud you kept wishing would blow away, so you could taste only woe." (p. 28; Kindle location 419)

As the collective "we" describes their view of Fan, sometimes the reader learns more about them; for example as they hear stories about old times "Auntie Virginia poured cups of iced tea to go with the boiled peanuts she'd bring out in a white plastic bowl." (p. 68; Kindle location 927)

During Fan's final adventure, in the poorer places people eat almost exclusively from canned goods and long-lasting food pouches, which are usable as barter as well as edible. Fan often observes them eating right out of the can or pouch. An evening meal in one household in the Smokes "meant sometimes frying up eggs, or game if someone shot or trapped any, but mostly it was heating stuff right in the cans... everyone would share what they had, a potluck of diced carrots and mackerel and kidney beans, and if someone was feeling extra-generous maybe a tin of beef chili or chicken stew." (p. 86; Kindle location 1151)

In contrast, in one of the elite compounds, she's taken to a kind of rogue fair where people dare to eat street food. It's daring to eat this rather than the very pure and artificially grown food like that raised in B-Mor: "you could get Belgian street frites, or a Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, or a gravy-sopped plate of chicken and dumplings. They went to Vik's favorite, the Chinese-Korean tent, where he ordered them bowls of chive jajang noodles and a small platter of braised sea cucumber, which Fan could not stop eating." (p. 271; Kindle location 3517)

Fan's final stopping place, in the high-status compound, introduces her to one of the wealthiest families of the tale, where the head of the house believes that "Eating was obviously elementary, it was what people did most of their day, literally taking in the world." He was fascinated by food preparation, and tried to involve all his children in it "from the selection of the ingredients at the village market to the chopping and measuring and cooking (the babies given a strong whiff of everything from ginger slices to cinnamon sticks, after which they'd sometimes cry), the idea being a holistic appreciation through mindful exertions that would result in the best chance for well-being." (p. 343; Kindle location 4436)

Obviously, this noble view of food suggests that the character is out of touch with the lower classes. He too ends up not so nice, but I'll refrain from spoiling the ending. No one is nice in this distopia!

Food Security in 2014

Percent of population that is undernourished, 2012 data -- Wikipedia

Thinking of the grim topic of hunger throughout the world, I have been trying to read about food security and insecurity in the coming year -- a very broad topic. Discussions of inequality in our own society often touch on the consequence, for the poorest Americans, of having too little food and on the political motivation that causes much of the hunger in America. Throughout the world, both climate change and population growth are already affecting food supplies in many areas. Wars and conflicts also can drastically change the distribution of food, as when a dominant group oppresses its traditional or new opponents. Certain conflicts, like those in the horn of Africa and Syria, in fact, may themselves have origins in declining supplies of food and other resources.

Hunger will continue to be widespread in 2014, and growing: "the reality [is] that by 2050, the world will likely have another two billion mouths to feed and face an estimated 70 percent increase in global food demand." source  

First, what is food security? A useful and frequently cited definition from Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations:

"Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life." source source

Who are the insecure in the US, and why are they suffering in a country that seems so prosperous? Changes to government aid to the poor (such as reductions in SNAP benefits, formerly called food stamps) are a major reason why the poorest people in America are losing ground in the struggle for food security. Poor people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds are suffering; here is one example:

"Even though a large percentage of American Indians receive SNAP benefits, current data suggests that a large percentage of American Indians are food insecure. ... In total, roughly 22 percent of American Indians do not have sufficient food maintain healthy lives." source

Who are the insecure outside the US? Almost every Asian and African country suffers from the threat of food insecurity. Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China, Nepal, the Phillipines, North African and sub-Saharan countries, and many others have been the subject of recent news articles about hunger.

"'We should expect much more political destabilisation of countries ...,' says Richard Choularton, a policy officer in the UN's World Food Programme climate change office. 'What is different now from 20 years ago is that far more people are living in places with a higher climatic risk; 650 million people now live in arid or semi-arid areas where floods and droughts and price shocks are expected to have the most impact.

''The recent crises in the Horn of Africa and Sahel may be becoming the new normal. Droughts are expected to become more frequent. Studies suggest anything up to 200 million more food-insecure people by 2050 or an additional 24 million malnourished children. In parts of Africa we already have a protracted and growing humanitarian disaster. Climate change is a creeping disaster.' he said." source

What are some of the consequences of this widespread disaster? In the underdeveloped world, the consequences are simple to grasp: many children and adults tragically starve to death; others experience terrible suffering.

In the US, things aren't quite as grim, but there are consequences. Two examples:

"In the US, chronic food insecurity has been documented to lead to, paradoxically, obesity, especially in women and girls. One theory as to why food insecurity leads to obesity is that episodic periods of food insecurity cause the sufferer to overeat in an attempt by the body to recoup missing calories. The type of food consumed in food insecure households may be another factor: high calorie food made from commodity crops (e.g., fast food and 'junk' food) is often cheaper and easier to access than healthful food with high nutritional value." source

"Poor people with diabetes [in the US] are significantly more likely to go to the hospital for dangerously low blood sugar at the end of the month when food budgets are tight than at the beginning of the month, a new study has found." source

 The subject of food security is broad and complex. I have excerpted just a few quotations to try to grasp the breadth of the problem.

Wordless Wednesday: How the Squirrel Defeats the Bird Feeder

Wordless Wednesday: A Photo of Dessert

Goodbye, Sunshine

In-N-Out Burger, Carlsbad, California

After a glorious sunny morning in Del Mar, California, yesterday, the six of us checked out of our motel and headed north. We stopped just up the freeway in Carlsbad for our last cultural experience: lunch at In-N-Out Burger. We seem to agree that it's a good burger -- though maybe not quite up to the hype and poetry that it sometimes inspires.

By the time we drove up to our airport hotel near LAX, we had lost the good weather: fog or smog now obscured the blue skies we had enjoyed for 10 days. We said our goodbyes to each other and to California in the evening, preparing to fly back to our separate homes early in the morning. It was still dark when the shuttle dropped us at the airport this morning, so I don't know what the LA weather is today.

We arrived back in Ann Arbor happy with our experience of on-time flights and good luck with lines in the airports. As soon as we got home we had to shovel the snow out of our driveway and get over to Whole Foods to stock up the house in anticipation of a predicted storm that's supposed to drop more and more snow (though the predictions are currently being moderated). So many people had the same idea that there were empty shelves and depleted supplies at the store. But we're ready for whatever storm comes our way tomorrow.

Happy New Year

Sunset on the first evening of the year in Del Mar, California:

... and dinner at Barbarella in La Jolla
(behind the bar a sculpture by Nikki de Saint Phalle)