Dessert!

<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaMABkwXFJzjYqvbwAAZ8FasslnSyOo6ZF5SUGc47JJDWb2TIo6uCfic7sx32FAO0lXLLQ21Ms5gTYqOJqfYWToQOC2HUizGvY8Ci7WRbxroZ4YW_ln-vvtG5bD6Op7Fxkg5c1GhS48Del/s1600/dessert4031.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5513139880906760978" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaMABkwXFJzjYqvbwAAZ8FasslnSyOo6ZF5SUGc47JJDWb2TIo6uCfic7sx32FAO0lXLLQ21Ms5gTYqOJqfYWToQOC2HUizGvY8Ci7WRbxroZ4YW_ln-vvtG5bD6Op7Fxkg5c1GhS48Del/s400/dessert4031.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 332px;" /></a>Chocolate waffle. Banana pudding. Not shown: key lime pie, white chocolate bread pudding. And a variety of grilled fish, shrimp, and so on before dessert. We love Coastal Flats.

Dessert!

Chocolate waffle. Banana pudding. Not shown: key lime pie, white chocolate bread pudding. And a variety of grilled fish, shrimp, and so on b...

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Miriam's Guest Post: The Trouble with Children's Menus

Miriam says:<br /><blockquote>"The trouble with children's menus is that these are the most common things that are always on them: macaroni and cheese, grilled cheese sandwich, PB & J, cheeseburger, chicken nuggets, and that's all. The sides are always mashed potatoes, carrots, salad, fries, apple sauce, chips, and that's all. But the thing that I don't like about kids' menus is that they're always the same and there's nothing very tropical about kids' menus.<br /><br />"I always have been ordering chicken nuggets or other things, and they are getting very boring. For instance, I am getting really bored of chicken nuggets, so I usually want to order something like shrimp. If only there was something tropical (exotic) on a kids' menu like shrimp and grits that I had tonight or mussels that I had in the past."<br /></blockquote>

Miriam's Guest Post: The Trouble with Children's Menus

Miriam says: "The trouble with children's menus is that these are the most common things that are always on them: macaroni and chee...

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Food Memoirs: "The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth"

Alpine game such as chamois or wild boar, roasted on an open hearth! Cheese made by hand in a farmhouse! Milk from high mountain pastures! Fresh produce picked at exactly the right moment! Tuna from the Mediterranean! Classic Dauphinois, Savoyard, and Provencal desserts! The best wine vintages of the 1940s, 50s, 60s! or the best wine makers' second-best years!<br /><br />The joys of dining at the mysterious -- almost mythical -- Auberge of the Flowering Hearth near the Grand Chartreuse Monastery are the only focus of author Roy Andries de Groot's memoir of his experiences there in around 1970. His descriptions are vivid. Every dish sounds luscious. The two old (middle aged?) ladies who run the Auberge drive their station wagon to Burgundy for wine, to their native Provence for special produce and freshly caught fish, and around the local mountainsides for artisan's cheeses.<br /><br />One of the memorable dinners (actually, they're all memorable) finished thus:<br /><blockquote style="color: rgb(51, 102, 255);">"The cheeses, of strong character, were also ideal -- for the happy purpose of finishing the wine. The first, the famous Saint Nectaire, was a cow's milk cheese from the central mountains of the Auvergne. The best types are still farm-made, but all too many factories are now beginning to dot the valleys and turn out mass quantities of <span style="font-style: italic;">le Saint Nectaire industriel</span>. The best cheeses are matured on rye mats in cool, damp caves. They are best eaten before they are four months old and begin to harden. The young inside flesh is very smooth and creamy -- in my opinion, this is one of the best soft cheese of France." (p. 170)</blockquote>Read it and wonder: will I ever eat anything like this? Every description brings up that question. In some cases, you could at least use the recipes in the second half of the book. But where would you get small game birds, wild mountain chamois, wild boar, or 1948 vintage wine? Even in France, hunting such animals is no longer legal, and wines of that era, if they exist at all, are in the hands of millionaire collectors.<br /><br />The book is very enjoyable as an exercise in nostalgia, maybe for something you never had at all. I was close: we spent several months in that region of France at about the time deGroot was there. But we had no money at all so ate only a very few meals cooked in small restaurants. We rode up those mountains a few times on our motor-scooter (a classic Lambretta), but brought our own salami and bread from the student restaurant along for lunch!<br /><br />Taking a step back, I find it clear that nostalgia for the artisans' food production appears in almost all descriptions of fine meals, especially in France. It drives many food writers today, but the amazing thing is that it was far from new in deGroot's time, either. DeGroot quotes a long passage from Stendhal (a local hero) who visited the Grand Chartreuse in 1837.<br /><br />In this passage, Stendhal describes how he looked at the simple agriculture in the same valleys where deGroot found his Auberge 130 years later; he compared them with more highly developed regions. "In those areas of sophisticated farming,where one often sees forty ploughs working at the same time in the same field, there is the feeling of a great mass-manufacturing process." In the Alps, according to Stendhal, "one feels only the pure joy of the open land ..." (p. 148)<br /><br />The feeling that agriculture and good food are changing for the worse is so far from new, that I almost distrust a writer who dwells on it! But there's such great charm in deGroot's descriptions that this is a minor point. He captures the delights of seasonal food at the Auberge. He presents the methods, shopping, and cooking of the two innkeepers throughout a typical year, explaining what's in season and how it tastes.<br /><br />The book is a wonderful and classic food memoir, idealizing a moment in time and space and still appealing after 40 years. The author writes objectively, impersonally -- he inserts nothing about his personal life other than his love of the food. Most people today find it surprising when they learn that he was blind from injuries suffered during the war, but never once mentioned it. I consider this an indication of how he followed journalistic conventions of that time, very different from most current food-memoir writing.<br /><br />Online, you can find an <a href="http://www.atrefleuri.fr/">Auberge de l'Atre Fleuri</a> in the same town, though I seriously doubt that it's a true descendant of deGroot's original. I'd love to go try it anyway.

Food Memoirs: "The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth"

Alpine game such as chamois or wild boar, roasted on an open hearth! Cheese made by hand in a farmhouse! Milk from high mountain pastures! ...

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We eat our mistakes

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12003515@N05/4925171928/" title="pizza by mesander2000, on Flickr"><img alt="pizza" height="484" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4135/4925171928_95f9ba2507_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><br /><br />We are experimenting with pizza made on the grill. The first try didn't work very well. The crust was hard to manage, though the toppings were great, and I included them in the photo. Tonight we did better. We made the pizzas smaller so they were easier to handle. Just a few more tweaks and we should really have it nailed.<br /><br />Toppings on the first try: onions, tomato, olives, arugula, capers, and more. Second try: eggplant, tomatoes, sauteed red peppers with garlic & capers. Both times: mozzarella and shaved parmesan cheese. Lots of olive oil. We had all toppings ready to eat before adding them to the pizza, as they don't stay on the fire for long.

We eat our mistakes

We are experimenting with pizza made on the grill. The first try didn't work very well. The crust was hard to manage, though the topping...

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Food Memoirs: "Pig Tails 'n Breadfruit"

<blockquote><span style="color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">"The incontrovertible truth is that cou-cou, a dish made from corn that you grind-up, fine-fine-fine, into a meal and cook in water that have okras boil in it, was first cooked in Barbados. From there it spread all over the world." </span><br /></blockquote>Austin Clarke's memoir <span style="font-style: italic;">Pig Tails 'n Breadfruit</span> has a very loveable persona as its narrator. Maybe this persona is Austin Clarke, maybe not so much. You can see some of this narrator's character in this little quote from page 100. He writes in Bajan English -- although the real Austin Clarke is a highly educated professor and novelist who has lived in the US and Canada. The character who emerges in the telling reminds me a little of Langston Hughes' Harlem everyman, Simple.*<br /><br />Clarke's narrator insists that Barbados food culture is superior to that of other Caribbean islands. Virtually every dish he describes is original to Barbados, he claims, despite many examples of parallel (or in his view, derivative) dishes elsewhere. Even those commonly credited elsewhere: "I, though, have a way of cooking jerk pork -- which in truth and in fact was invented in Barbados -- which have some Jamaicans trying to change their citizenship and become Barbadian!" he says on p. 200.<br /><br />Each chapter of this memoir has a focus on a single dish and how to prepare it. The first thing you learn is how a kitchen could be as simple as "three large stones placed on the ground or on an elevated base made of hard rock or concrete," and a cooking vessel could be as simple as a tin can or three-legged iron pot. (p. 16) But if you are cooking his recipes in a modern kitchen in Toronto or Brooklyn, NY, there are suggestions for you -- in fact, there are quite detailed descriptions of how the narrator pictures your life and your kitchen.<br /><br />Throughout the recipes, you hear how his mother and her peers cooked them in the 1930s and 1940s when Austin Clarke was a boy in Barbadoes, and how people there viewed each dish and its preparation. As the book proceeds, the narrator describes his feelings about women, about education, about Barbados history and slavery times, about race, and lots of other topics -- up to the last chapter when he describes an encounter with Norman Mailer!<br /><br />Not only do you learn how to shop for the ingredients, what utensils and cooking pots to use, and how to prepare the food, you also learn what music to listen to and when to take a little drink while you are cooking. After you wash the oxtails for Oxtails with Mushrooms and Rice, you are advised:<br /><blockquote style="color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">"Have a drink at this juncture. A lil red wine, preferable. But since this is Wessindian food, there isn't nothing better than a strong rum. Being a multicultural kind o' man, I myself would make a strong-strong, dry-dry martini to take the chill off my bones. Bombay Gin, no ice, and with four nice, big, green juicy olives. I don't lift a spoon or a pot cover unless I have a drink in my hand." (p. 202)</blockquote>My favorite chapter is called "Killing a Pig to Make Pork Chops with Onions and Sweet Peppers." Lyric descriptions of the delicious nature of pork chops begin the chapter, and the author clearly lets you know he's heading for a description of the local itinerant butcher and his business slaughtering and butchering a family's one and only pig.<br /><br />But first, there's a long digression about public dances called <span style="font-style: italic;">brams</span>, where "a man could meet a woman and put some sweet talk on she." If he wanted to treat that woman right, "the only thing was to offer the yourng lady one thing. Not a Coke nor a beer nor a ice cream. Not even a Cadbury chocolate bar nor a pack o' Wrigley's chewing gum. He would offer the lady a pork chop. A pork chop! ... The price of a pork chop sold at a bram was one shilling. The pork chop was golden brown and crispy and hot with fire. It was served plain, by itself, on a piece o' brown paper that quickly became soggy from the grease...." (p. 128-129)<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Pig Tails 'n Breadfruit</span> is so skillfully written that you hardly know what's happening to you. Just a wonderful book to read.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*If you haven't read Langston Hughes' stories about Harlem dweller Jesse B. Semple, called Simple, you have a treat in store for you: don't waste any time getting a copy of some -- <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Best-Simple-American-Century/dp/0374521336/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1282673623&sr=8-1">The Best of Simple</a> </span><span class="ptBrand" style="font-size:85%;"> by Langston-Hughes</span>

Food Memoirs: "Pig Tails 'n Breadfruit"

"The incontrovertible truth is that cou-cou, a dish made from corn that you grind-up, fine-fine-fine, into a meal and cook in water tha...

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Canniversary

Since Louise is not currently blogging edible celebrations, I felt I should link to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/22/AR2010082202732.html?sid=ST2010082202785">an article</a> in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Washington Post</span> today about the 200th anniversary, said to be Wednesday, of the humble tin can (now made of aluminum, steel, plastic-lined metal or whatever).<br /><br />Evidently August 25 is the date in 1810 when inventor Peter Durand took out the first patent on the tin can, along with various other food preservation containers. The article doesn't say exactly what event occurred on this anniversary, and I haven't found any other explanation. Louise <a href="http://monthsofediblecelebrations.blogspot.com/2009/08/happy-can-opener-day.html">once mentioned</a> August 24 as <span style="font-style: italic;">can opener </span>day, so I'm a bit puzzled. The can opener was not invented until 50 years after the can, and there were some heroic struggles while people waited!<br /><br />The <span style="font-style: italic;">Washington Post</span> author asks:<br /><blockquote>"What if gold prospectors relied solely on foraging on their treks out West? What if tinsmiths didn't handcraft 35,000 cans a day for meats and condensed milk during the Civil War? What if Chef Boyardee and Hormel Spam didn't nourish Patton's armies, whose soldiers wore can openers around their necks in communion with their jangling dog tags? What if canned food had never freed the American homemaker from time-consuming dinner duties?"</blockquote>Wednesday, maybe, we should remember canned tomato soup and a cheese sandwich for childhood lunch. Or Andy Warhol making us revise our view of that can. Maybe we should think about canned fruit, or maybe about Sterno. Here's <a href="http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/03/21/romance-of-the-tin-can/?Qwd=./ModernMechanix/2-1937/tin_can&Qif=tin_can_1.jpg&Qiv=thumbs&Qis=XL#qdig">an article</a> about the history of cans from <span style="font-style: italic;">Modern Mechanix</span> of 1937:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD8FSOfgUL-RryWImO6Ayme-Thz9KOiK_w5qB8TLryIBJ4wAO9VFVI3xVyx8miDsmApKL47xSgda5Dq_sixqXZRjsQTzE3Fw_c9YZqfIPF1fyfCCfoHXsjoU55aFKmdjBjVtx-Lf8ChxDp/s1600/romance.tin.can.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5508643684665854002" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD8FSOfgUL-RryWImO6Ayme-Thz9KOiK_w5qB8TLryIBJ4wAO9VFVI3xVyx8miDsmApKL47xSgda5Dq_sixqXZRjsQTzE3Fw_c9YZqfIPF1fyfCCfoHXsjoU55aFKmdjBjVtx-Lf8ChxDp/s400/romance.tin.can.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 224px;" /></a>

Canniversary

Since Louise is not currently blogging edible celebrations, I felt I should link to an article in the Washington Post today about the 200t...

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Food Memoirs: "Amarcord: Marcella Remembers"

Passion isn't a characteristic of Marcella Hazan's memoir <span style="font-style: italic;">Amarcord: Marcella Remembers</span>. She mentions that at the age of 84, memories are fluid, sweeping over time and space in no particular order. (Despite this, the book seems well organized and not especially jumpy.) Maybe age also made her somewhat detached and dispassionate about some of her experiences.<br /><br />Politics is also not of much interest to Hazan. Her description of her family fleeing from their native farm and suffering in World War II completely avoided any statement of which side they were on (so I assume they supported the Italian Fascists). After the war, she was threatened by returning partisans, but avoided punishment. She seemed very distant from all this, as she did when describing her university studies of science and her early life as a teacher.<br /><br />Hazan's descriptions of her husband seem pale and though she says he was a wonderful person, the reader isn't given a lot of specifics. He was a Sephardic Jew whose parents had immigrated to Italy and then fled to America in 1939, which could be interesting but is never elaborated. His parents didn't accept her, and maybe there was little contact -- but they are basically not characterized in the book. Her husband had lost many family members in the Holocaust -- but this is mentioned as a sort of aside, in explaining why he didn't want to spend time in Germany.<br /><br />In the introduction, Hazan explained her title <span style="font-style: italic;">Amarcord</span>, which means "I remember" in the dialect of Romagna, as a sort of homage to Fellini's film. She's from the same area of Italy, and her cooking school specialized in the dishes of this region. Clearly, she revised the American view of Italian cuisine, which derived from an immigrant community that had merged many of the regional traditions into an Italian-American style. She wrote:<br /><blockquote style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">When I first started to cook after arriving in New York, not even a year into married life, it was as though I were telling a story I had heard as a little girl in another land. To judge how closely my tale corresponded to the original, I had nothing but my memory and my cookbook. I was not acquainted with any other recently arrived Italians.... The so-called Italian food I found in New York at that time -- spaghetti and meatballs; machine-made ravioli with pungent, dark tomato sauce; manicotti; lobster fra diavolo; veal parmesan or <span style="font-style: italic;">alla francese</span> -- resembled only occasionally in name, but never in appearance, taste, or intentions, what I had known at home. (p. 103)</blockquote>What for her was "normal food" was extremely exotic in 1975 in New York, but she explains how she created Italian cooking classes and later cook books that enabled a new American consciousness of regional Italian food.<br /><br />Over time, she describes how, in partnership with her husband, she increased her visibility to Americans and thus contributed to a trend of growing interest in authentic cuisines. As they expanded their teaching into schools for Americans held in Bologna and later Venice, she provides an interesting account of her experiences and of her many famous students. Interestingly, she describes how her own interests include a love of Asian foods as well as the cuisine of her native region.<br /><br />For me, this book was not nearly as enjoyable as Julia Child's book <span style="font-style: italic;">My Life in France</span>, though both of them had the perspective of a person who has outlived many of her contemporaries and feels free to publish critical views of many of her acquaintances. Although I enjoyed her memories, and developed respect for her accomplishments, of which my knowledge was previously vague, I found her lacking in attachment to many things. I liked the book, but it just didn't have the depth or passion to make me really love it.

Food Memoirs: "Amarcord: Marcella Remembers"

Passion isn't a characteristic of Marcella Hazan's memoir Amarcord: Marcella Remembers . She mentions that at the age of 84, memorie...

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