Ars Coquinaria

Up North Cookbook

Hello, pals.

It's been awhile since I've posted here, and I hope you know that it's not because I've lost the food writing bug. I've been very busy, what with writing for Eat Me Daily and real life and planning my research trip for my cookbook...

Yes, cookbook! I quit my job and put the dog in the car, and two days later found myself at my parents' house in Madison, Wisconsin. I'm here for 6 weeks, traveling around the Upper Midwest (Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota), interviewing home cooks and chefs and brew masters and cheese masters and cranberry boggers and State Fair ribbon winners in the hopes of eventually painting a picture of the foods I grew up loving.

This idea stems from my frustration with the Midwestern cookbooks out there--outdated recipes that focus on foods I never ate growing up--jello salads and soups made out of bread and meals that include pork AND meat, like they're different. (Ok, that last one is kind of awesome.) In any case, I want to write a book that people of my generation can identify with. Food has changed during our life time; there's a greater emphasis on health and seasonality. There are entirely different groups of people influencing the cuisine of this region than there were whenever the our traditions were nailed down.

The official summary is as follows:

Three years ago, I moved to Texas after spending my entire life in the Midwest. This summer, I will been spending 6 weeks traveling through Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa researching a cookbook and trying to figure out whether or not leaving was a mistake.

I have three goals with the cookbook: 1. to provide a younger generation's view of the North-Central Midwest and its cooking, as most books on the subject seem dated to me; 2. to provide a broader view of Midwestern cuisine that includes newer immigrant groups, like Hmong and Somalis, and 3. to provide a personal account of a road trip through Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota.

I intend to leave for Wisconsin July 1 and return to Texas in early-mid August. I am currently in the process of developing an itinerary of interviews to conduct as well as food festivals and restaurants to visit, and expect my schedule to be rather packed.

If you have any ideas of places to visit, people to interview, or dishes to make, please leave a comment. I'm tweeting from the road at @upnorthcookbook

I am such a precious gaylord.

But I've had a copy of Under Pressure since November and I've never even opened it.

M.I.A.

My darlings, I have been away from you for far too long. Projects of a non-writing yet still culinary variety (and also my writing for Eat Me Daily) have clogged my feeble little brain. Turns out I have something of an entrepreneurial itch. Writing fake business plans is all fun and games til someone puts money behind it.

That said, anyone interested in tossing me about $100k? I'll make it worth your while, and by "worth your while," I mean "baller fine dining experiences."

More tantalizing hints to come, largely in an upcoming post on a certain annual dinner party.

In Which I Continue to be Freakishly Irritated by the Art World

Rockwell Kent's "Whale Beneath the Sea," 1930

For the purpose of argument, let's say there are two kinds of art*. There is lower-case-a "art," which I consider to be any human endeavor that strives to exist on a higher level of consciousness--this can be film, music, fashion, books, buildings, pens, software, food, whatever. The other is capital-A "Art," which is the what we usually think of--paintings, berets, museums, sawed-off ears, the works. This differentiation is, of course, increasingly difficult to discern--note that I'm not using the term "visual arts"--because of the increasing presence of participatory art in the Art world.

Brief interlude: it took me a very, very, very long time to be interested in Art at all. I have never been much of a visual person. I am interested in architecture, but that is largely because I am interested in places and space. Other than that, paintings were neat. Sculpture was cool, you know, in that people know how to do that. Some of my favorite Art is Rockwell Kent's Moby Dick prints, but that largely has to do with the fact that it's about Moby Dick. I've gotten off my high horse about  Art, and realize that it can play a very important and very particular role in many people's lives. I'm just not really one of them.

Hey, isn't this a blog about food or something? Yeah! Well, this Art guy, Corin Hewitt, has an installation at the Whitney called Seed Stage. He has this crazy kitchen set up, and he makes food and takes pictures of it. It got written up in the New York Times, and frankly, it's making me cranky. And if there's anything that irritates me more than Art, it's when Art irritates me and that's somehow "part of the point" because it "got me to question my preconceptions." Barf.

In all fairness, I should get the following off my chest: Holland Cotter, who wrote the Times bit on Star Seeds, is pretty condescending when discussing food ("Mr. Hewitt spends part of his time here doing what cooks do: chopping, slicing, stewing, storing, making a mess and cleaning up.") and that probably affects my opinion of the installation more than it should. I don't know, I live in Texas and can't go to New York before Sunday to see it myself. Ok. Moving on.

What bugs me about this installation is the implication that having a food thing in an Art museum somehow validates the art of it. It's the idea that we have to dress up food in the trappings of a museum in order to "really think" about it. One of the great thing about food is that the art of it is available everywhere, accessible to everyone. Placing it in a museum setting makes it infinitely less accessible, as the audience is required to view it through the lens of the Art world. Also, it robs food of its burgeoning position of an art form in its own right, appropriating it for the Art world. Anyway, horseshit in general. I realize I am in the minority here, so I'll shut up now.

*My blog, my rules. Shut up, Critique and Theory Seminar Spring 2006. Get yer own medium.

Review: The Flavor Bible

Hey, look! I still do reviews!

When I first heard about Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg's The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs, I was incredibly excited. I had dreamed of a book like this for some time, and in fact considered, briefly, creating one. I had a vision of what such a book would entail, and I am therefor pretty biased, and somewhat disappointed.

My perfect vision (ha!): ingredients listed in alphabetical order, with basic cooking instructions, storage information, and "traditional" flavor affiliations. The idea would be to aim the book at home cooks, or people who go to the store and say "Wow! Those artichokes are a hell of a lot cheaper today than they were last week. I wonder what I could do with them?" This would allow the amateur to become acquainted with traditional food pairings and allow the professionals to avoid them.

The Flavor Bible has different goals, and aims to a higher level of sophisitication. The book is designed for the professional, and I have heard rumblings in the at-home-cook blogging sphere that the book is all but useless to them. The charts of flavor affiliations were created by polling chefs and accumulating their answers, loosely ranked by how many chefs responded with each answer*. Accompanying these charts are brief sidebars on various ingredients as well as menu items including each ingredient from famous restaurants.

It is an ambitious undertaking, and an invaluable resource in many ways. However, the book proposes to be a thesaurus for the culinary world, and it falls short by failing to be comprehensive.  For example, ingredients are not cross referenced. If I find an rare flavor affiliation listed under a common ingredient, that ingredient does not necessarily have its own entry. This makes it somewhat difficult to build a dish beyond a single flavor affiliation. The entire book could have used better data compilation; hiring an intern to index the whole thing properly would've done wonders for its usability.

The entries themselves are somewhat limited in terms of scope; the entry on "whiskey" only includes sweet flavor affiliations. I wonder what good a book that proposes to be a resource for professionals and advanced home chefs is if the majority of the entries are predictable? Shouldn't they go above and beyond what the cook in question can come up with on their own? I suppose it would do in a pinch, if one were terribly stuck, but by and large the entries are too pedestrian to jump start one's creativity.

The book succeeds in the essays and sidebars, particularly in the second chapter, entitled "Great Cooking = Maximizing Flavor & Pleasure by Tapping Body & Heart & Mind & Spirit: Communicating Via the Language of Food." (Did Dr. Bronner edit this book or what?) The comments on the seemingly-basic steps to creating a dish or menu are invaluable, and by spelling them out, they force the reader to step back and contemplate what they are doing. This functions much in the way that learning prosody forces the poet to be conscious of his or her word choice, regardless of whether or not the poem in question employs meter.

All in all, pretty cool in theory, but doesn't really hold up to use in the kitchen. I want to see a revised, expanded edition.

*Responses submitted by multiple chefs are in bold, by several chefs in BOLD AND CAPS, and by the most chefs *STARRED AND BOLDED AND IN CAPS.

Oh, The Face

Hi guys. I have started a facebook page for Ars Coquinaria. Mostly this will be useful if you want to find out about things I've written for other sites (which means I can stop posting about them here).

Discipline Differences

More on the economic difference between food and art from Carolynn Carteno (can't figure out tildas in Typepad, sorry), although she appears to have taken it down.

"I know nothing about art and my opinions should count for nothing. The difference is that when I don’t like an exhibit at an art museum, I don’t demand my money back. Or a free pizza. Besides, this exhibit was worth the price of admission, even though it is very sad."

True.  I'd wager it HAS happened, although not nearly as often as restaurants.

2 More Resolutions

And then I'm done, I swear:

1. Better posture. (I do this every year. Every year it is literally sorely needed.)
2. Learn to cook more Asian food. Specifically, and I need suggestions here, people:

• Chinese, particularly street food.
• Japanese, particularly soup.
• Vietnamese.

New Year's Resolutions

I have started two posts since I got back from Christmas, one of which got ranty and bitter in an unproductive way, and thus was trashed, and one of which was basically about how I have no understanding of food science. In the spirit of the New Year, some (food) resolutions:

1. Develop a working knowledge of food science and nutrition before I go to grad school. Start with McGee and then move on to This. Internalize the knowledge. Write quizzes and then take them. Make flashcards. Ask the brilliant food scientists I know for help if I don't understand something.

2. Eat breakfast.

3. Don't let my real job get to me to the point that I don't have the energy to come home and work on my career.

4. Come home from work and work on my career. This involves: applying to grad school (again), writing a least one essay for Ars Coquinaria per week, and finding freelance opportunities. It also involves #1.

5. Leave Texas in 2009.

These Are a Few of My Annoying Things

I never understood why that song is somehow a Christmas song, but if the shoe fits.

I realize I have abandoned you somewhat, my cookbook-reading public. I am very sorry. This whole economy thing is crappy and makes me want to drink beer instead of read cookbooks. So, while this is lame, in no particular order, here are things that are annoying me today:

The Burger King perfume, the fact that I don't have Nach Waxman's job, the fact that Serious Eats keeps trying to blame bacon on hipsters instead of themselves, Mark Bittman making vanilla meringues when everyone knows there are WAY better flavors for merinques and it's kind of a waste to only flavor them with vanilla, the story on failing catering companies I heard on NPR the other day, New York-centric food blogs that I have to read even though I will probably never eat in any of the restaurants, that dude who recreated the Keller/Achatz meal, the fact that food media is either really bitchy or sugary sweet pablum, our water supplier who refuses to answer his phone or call me back even though I want to give him money in exchange for goods, the fact that I have zero time to finish my Christmas presents, the fact that I can't take a nap right now, the fact that I have to work between Christmas and New Year's, the fact that the only food I have at my house is 700K tamales.

The end.