Monday, October 20, 2003

Don’t Judge Too Soon   I have a customer who, once we’ve chatted for a few minutes about this and that over the phone, will start the business end of our conversation by saying, “so, let’s see. . . .”  As in, “enough of all that, we have things we need to talk about that have nothing to do with ourselves as people.”  I find that to be a reassuringly real expression of the odd relationship one has with likeminded people who are, at the end of the day, business associates.  And it is a good introduction to today’s laundry list of food and wine related tidbits.  So, let’s see. . . .   First off, I take back what I said about the Near a Thousand Tables book.  It’s a tease.  It gives ME lots of good ideas, without expressing many ITSELF.  It’s scattered.  It dwells on cannibalism and merely touches on the funny food faddism that used to make fat bad and carbohydrates good (the vegetarian/pasta diet of my youth!) and now makes fat good and carbohydrates bad (the ridiculously undernourishing Atkins diet of today.)  You see, I still think the former is better than the latter.  But is that just because of cultural brainwashing?  Who can tell?  I mean, it seems common sense that a diet with bread, pasta, legumes and vegetables is better than one with just protein and fat.  But then. . .  don’t I feel better and less hungry if I have eggs for breakfast than, say an apple?  If I have fruit and yogurt for breakfast I feel like chewing on my arm by 11:30 am.  There must be truth both ways.  Food fads are fads. . . . aren’t they? Or are they science?  Interesting little quandaries like this are what Fernandez-Armnesto hints at while saying really nothing, in his book, skipping from topic to topic.  I want him to really get INTO it, which IS TOO possible in the non-fiction form.  Look at Fast Food Nation.  There is s a book that says many things, meanders around a lot, but is overall trying to take on thorny questions rather than just alluding to their existence .  Perhaps this is the central difference between journalism and academia.  If so, I come down on the side of the journalists, who are trying to say something, rather than that of the academics, who often seem to be just trying to show that they’ve read a lot of stuff and are stringing it together.  Apologies to any academics I might have offended (my parents especially!!).  Having said that, I’ll keep slogging through Fernandez-Armnesto, I’m sure.  But I left it upstate in favor of Paris to the Moon, which my mom (or stepfather?) nicely packed on top of a box of books they dropped off at our house, and which I’ve been secretly wanting to read for a while and for some reason not buying.    Secondly, I have to take on a little problem I have.  I think of it as the “tasting rather than drinking” thing.  Namely, this:  There are wines I can smell, taste, find very nice and in fact show to many people in a day who also find them nice.  Often I taste these wines with each customer (it’s considered convivial, and fortunately most are okay with you spitting – professionally, after all).  And still I can find these wines nice, each time.  Then I go home and pour myself a glass with dinner . . .  and find the stuff actually undrinkable.  And often the reverse happens – I work with a wine I have drunk, with enjoyment, with dinner, many times. And most people who taste with me during the day don’t like it, or just aren’t excited by it.   Odd, right?  Why is that?  I guess because many wines that are nice for one or two sips can become downright cloying after more.  And many wines that are refreshing and brisk and delightful to pair with many foods are easy to pass by in a just a sip.   Easy to say that, but what makes it so?  I think it is sweetness (in part).  Sweetness is alluring for a sip; often cloying after more.  This is true for food as much as for wine, I think (except that we save overt sweetness in food for dessert.) Oak in wine adds to the sweetness – but also can give a harsh, almost astringent note, if too much, or too new, so that there is a disjointedness between the beginning and end of each taste of the wine. This is actually possible to overlook on just one sip. . . .  But so many “new world” wines rely on the easy appeal of sweetness to make people buy them.  And they DO taste good.  I mean, they even please me, the wine snob, for a moment at a time. But then I find that I can’t actually drink, as opposed to taste, them.  (And I must add here that I speak only of an elite subset of  wines, the ones made with a light touch, that SEEM to be elegant and pretty until you really get into it.  Because even sweetness can’t seduce me to like a wine that is heavy, coarse, or bad-smelling.  And let’s face it, I can’t make myself or anyone else like, or even just buy, those.)   So, now that we’ve addressed a couple of thorny issues tonight, I must issue more “props.”  First to our friend Rick, for the “Supremely Smoky Duck” he made this weekend at our house.  A nice little duck, coated with some spices and honey and stuffed with an apple and who knows what else, then smoked on the Weber for hours, with the judicious addition at intervals of apple chips clipped with our pruning clippers from a branch we were planning to (horrors!) throw on the burn pile.  Nice green chips make good apple-wood smoke when added to a low charcoal fire, it turns out.  And it turns out that duck cooked this way is so divine that you really only need four bites to swoon (especially while drinking Chassagne Montrachet Rouge. . . . the lovely, rather fresh and quite delicate counterpart to that region of Burgundy’s rather big, muscular whites) and also I must mention that we had root vegetables (turnip, new potato, and carrot) roasted with olive oil, rosemary and some duck fat (well, there’s so much yummy fat when you cook a duck that you really can’t resist!!) and some fresh-fresh brussels sprouts (Rick brought a couple of branches of them, or are they stalks, from a farm near him in Ithaca. . . I’ve never seen Brussels sprouts in their natural state – Amazing!!! They sprout out of huge stalks!) cooked with our fabulously bacon-y Dine’s Farms Bacon (okay, we didn’t have enough saturated fat).  A meal that was almost too good.   But I also have to issue some demure and very modest props to myself for the apple pie that followed for dessert.  I can’t say enough about the good features of my favorite Macoun apples.  They are tart, sweet, and crisp!  And they don’t keep well. After a week, they are slightly spongy like their inferior cousins, the Macintosh. You have to eat them close to the source to get them at their best.  So much the better, I say – it means we only get them one time out of the year.  This pie was made of 6 thinly sliced, peeled Macouns, a mere sprinkle of sugar, a mere the same of flour, and for spice just some minced lavender leaves from the garden and a quick shave of whole nutmeg.  And it was great.  Of course I didn’t spare of good butter in the crust (and for cutting the butter finely into the flour a food processor is worth its weight in gold) and added just a bit of salt and sugar.  I always mix the water in by hand (the blessed fp overdoes that part of the mixing) but then – Voila!  A crust that is flaky and resilient but not too buttery.  It was good, and sufficiently not-sweet that we could have it again for breakfast (!).  I am not much of a baker; I am consequently very  proud of my interesting, apple-y, double-crust pie!  Lavender leaves gave a nice touch – their flavor somehow really answered to the fresh bright tartness of the apples.  Too much would have been bitter. . . . but the smell (and taste, because I kept sneaking snacks of the peels as I went!) of these apples reminded me of lavender. . . a hunch that worked out.   And after tonight’s dinner of lamb stew bones braised with a cinnamon stick, two carrots, one onion, half a jar of my precious canned tomatoes, and Brussels sprouts (we’re still eating the damned things, but I’m starting to have respect for their versatility – they picked up the cinnamon in a way that was wonderfully earthy and not – as I feared – odd) I’m more happy than ever with hunches.  Lamb + couscous calls for cinnamon. Thank goodness I didn’t question its appropriateness with the Brussels sprouts – I would have been the loser.  And with it, a wine that was not at all sweet, but had leaning towards sweet spiciness (like cinnamon) – Lascaux, couteaux de Languedoc “Les Nobles Pierres” (the noble stones) – a Languedoc wine that is made from vines that grow in stony soil.  It is ripe, sunbaked, spicy – and not sweet, but full of ripe, sweet character.  Yum.  I think I’ll go read Paris to the Moon for a few moments until my eyes close under their own weight.  In case I last that long. . . .     10:20:10 PM    comment []