Author Archives: Jason

Dead Man Gnawing: The Hotdog, from Maximilian II to Jimmy Durante (1200s & 1916)

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Two days from now, many New Yorkers and perhaps a greater number of tourists will celebrate the 236th anniversary of These United States by watching a group of Americans stuff as many hotdogs down their gullets as they can.  I refer, obviously, to the famous hotdog eating contest Nathan’s Famous hosts each year.

The hotdog seems to me a most American food.  You can eat it with one hand.  It’s  inexpensive on the Wallet of Now but maybe not so much on the Self of Tomorrow.  Its immigrant origins are hotly debated by those jockeying for brand superiority in a never ending race in which only one can be the victor.

So I poked around.  Here’s what I found: Continue reading →

Concrete Jungle: English Peas on Eastern Parkway

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If you take Brooklyn’s shuttle train south to Botanic Garden stop you’ll come on Eastern Parkway between the intersection of Franklin Avenue and the St. Francis de Sales School for the Deaf.  There’s a huge tree that has been propped up with a fifteen-foot-high cone of poured concrete and a great bicycle and pedestrian lane, canopied by trees, that runs almost all the way to Coney Island.

A bit to the right of that stop, you’ll find PitchKnives’ most recent installation of English Peas

Dead Man Gnawing: The Netherland Carrot vs. the Byzantine Carrot (500 & 1700 C.E.)

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There is a World Carrot Museum.  It’s only virtual, which leaves me feeling a bit had, but at least there’s a place where you can find the sentence: “Welcome world wide web traveler to the World Carrot Museum, dedicated to telling the fascinating story of the wonderful Carrot.”  A clause in the book The Edible History of Humanity sent me searching, but more on that in a minute.

Our hero carrot’s history is “surrounded by doubt and enigma.”  As far as we know, cultivation started around 3,000 B.C. in Afghanistan.  Imperial Rome grew them for medicinal means and as ingredients for aphrodisiacs.  After the fall of Rome, Europe went carrot-less for ten centuries until the Arabs reintroduced them.  The original carrots (and I’m talking about the roots that we eat here) were purple, white, or yellow.  China developed a foreshadowing red carrot around 1700.  Continue reading →

Community News: The Southeast’s Best at the Bonnaroo Oasis

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My family always does a decent job packing in our own food to each Bonnaroo; we’ll equip camp with trail mix and fruit and bread we’ve already toasted so we can make PB&Js or cheese sandwiches.

But we inevitably end up eating at least one meal a day inside Centeroo, the main concert area, the first years out of convenience but now out of a sense of adventure and excitement.  Each year, the festival has grown its food presence.  You’ve got your typical “event” food, tweaked toward a more pleasant pitch: the traditional fries, sausages with peppers, and crappy beer in plastic bottles, as well as the Samosa Man, jambalaya, and a Broo’ers tent selling handcrafted beers.

Last year, they hopped the American food truck craze and established a Food Truck Oasis.  It perches on a slight rise up between the This Tent and the Other Tent.  At night, with the Christmas lights that outline truck awnings flashing pinpoints in the dark and the diffuse yellow bulbs from the kitchens throwing shadows of the along the metal, you can stand at a distance and believe that you’re watching a caravan in the desert or a circus camping down for the night.  It’s beautiful. Continue reading →

Feature: The Amish, doughnuts, & Bruegel the Elder @ the Roo

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I did not grow up on doughnuts; we were not a junk food household.  I’d have them occasionally, of course.  I was always jealous of a friend whose old man would disappear the mornings after sleepovers and return to leave a box of Krispy Kreme on the kitchen table to greet us on the way from the bedroom to the den to catch Saturday morning cartoons.  I came to adore Krispy Kreme (at the store, you could watch a massive, sweating, silver machine turn out newborn doughnut after doughnut after doughnut).  I also worked briefly at age 16 for Dunkin Donuts (who trucked their doughnuts in from some unseen source twice a day) and eventually came to lament that Dunkin secured a niche on the country’s coffee addiction train and spread its subpar sugar rings across the national landscape, forcing Krispy Kreme to the fringes.

Living in New York City, I have been lucky enough to discover the Doughnut Plant.  Eating at the Doughnut Plant was my first step to experiencing the doughnut as art; they do things like stuff handmade doughnuts with homemade peanut butter and glaze them with homemade jam, buy bushels of in-season lavender from the farmers market for a beautiful gray-blue glaze, concoct tres leches cake donuts and other artisanal delights.  Stumbling upon this place was like stumbling upon El Dorado when the most precious metal previously known was tin.

But gold isn’t the only precious metal (it’s softer than Sabbath) any more than the Doughnut Plant’s gilded doughnuts are the only doughnuts.  The hands-down, full-on, good-goddamn-a’mighty culinary work of art at the Bonnaroo Music Festival this year was the Amish Baking Company’s doughnuts.  Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Provenance of Our Big Gulp (1676 – 2012)

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Among my different jobs is one that takes me to public middle schools to teach creative and academic writing.  In those classrooms, I have discovered that the craptastic school lunches I sometimes ate while that age are nothing compared to the contemporary dining habits of the Bronx’s eleven-to-thirteen set.  Oversized plastic cups of sugared coffee slushy and a few Dunkin donuts, as well as the bags of Skittles or Doritos that were less of a surprise, are routine.  Of course, I had a class at one of those schools whose lunch period began at 9:10, just after first period.  It’s safe to say that our kids are both getting and seeking a raw deal.

And that takes us to Michael Bloomberg, who in spite of getting the law changed so he could have a third term, seems likely to go down in history mostly for banning smoking in bars, making us a more bike-friendly city (!), and trying to outlaw oversized soda containers in certain types of business.

Well, it's not Joe Camel...

I presume the soda ban is national news; I can’t imagine the Glen Becks of the country passing up such an opportunity.  And so I’ve scrounged up a few key pieces of soft drink history: Continue reading →

Concrete Jungle: Pencil Pod Yellow Wax Beans, Manhattan Bridge, NYC

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These are the source seeds. They are tenacious as hell. Props to Botanical Interests.

The Seed Saver Exchange, an organization that does just what the name states and with the authority deserving of proper noun status, has 4,000 types of bean in its collection.  Among these is the Pencil Pod Yellow Wax heirloom variety.  Pencil Pods are bush beans, meaning they don’t need the high vertical supports string beans and other pole beans do.  They were developed around 1900, soon after folks started trying to breed the pesky “string” fiber out of beans (Check out Monday’s post) and are best raw or lightly steamed.  They also have little black seeds nestled in golden flesh, giving the bean a cool bumblebee color scheme or—if you happen to be appreciate your Christian Hair Metal—making it a fine tribute to Stryper. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Stringless Bean (1884)

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This isn't Keeney's brand, but I do love the old-time packaging.

For most of the thousands of years that humans have grown them, beans have had long, fibrous strings running along the pod seam (hence “stringbeans”) and a tough lining between the peas and the pod.  The original bean farmers, native tribes in the Americas, raised beans to shell and discard the pods, not enjoy fresh what we generally know today as green beans.  There are far more fresh, eatable beans than just green beans, of course, but that’s not we’re addressing today.   We’re addressing the origin of those fresh snap beans, a dude named Calvin Keeney. Continue reading →

Concrete Jungle: Laxton’s Progress Shell Peas, Manhattan Bridge, NYC

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One of my pleasures in life—one that combines in a strategic way my humanistic impulses with my unbecoming “Told ya so!” competitiveness—is proving to people that they will in fact enjoy foods they now despise, so long as they have them my way.

Dark greens like kale and collards are prime catalysts for achieving this conflation of the altruistic and the vain, but so are peas, an early treat from the year’s bounty.

Most of us know peas as at best little green balls filling up a freezer bag best used as an ice pack and at worst mushy gray globs taking up plate space next to the mashed potatoes.  This is a travesty.

Continue reading →

Breakfast on the Go

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New York, as the City of Immigrants, is the City of Coincidental Comestible Revelations.  And I’m not just talking about the Ethiopian restaurants or the kimchi tacos. I’m talking about Hispanic fare, the cousins of the common taco and burrito that everyone in the country has experienced.  The Mango-on-a-Stick, in which the fruit is carved into a petaled flower shape and rubbed in lime juice, salt, and hot sauce, was an early discovery in my life here.  Recently, I have discovered Mexican drinkable oatmeal. Continue reading →