Category Archives: Features

What Does This Apple Say About Me?: Hunting the Dunlap Apple

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dunlap's aurora

Say my name, say my name...

We’re deep into apple season now, and over the past few weeks, as Jason and I gulped big glasses of cider with dinner and munched on Empire apples from our farm share, a snippet of a lecture I once heard on the radio kept coming back to me. The speaker was an apple crusader by the name of Creighton Lee Calhoun Jr. I use the term “crusader” rather than, say, “enthusiast,” because Mr. Calhoun is a man with a mission: to save as many antique apple varieties as possible in the name of genetic diversity.

Back in the 19th century, the apple scene in America was very different. It was brimming with apple varieties, some good for eating, some for cooking, some for making applejack. And when I say brimming, I’m not talking about the few dozen that you’re probably able to name—there were thousands of varieties, over 16,000 by some estimations, in the late 1800s. But as family farms gave way to mass agriculture, all but the heartiest, most transportable, most eye-pleasing varieties were gradually lost. There are still about 3,000 varieties, but the vast majority of them are like endangered species, available only from specialty orchards.*

To illustrate his point, Mr. Calhoun often gives audiences a list of extinct apple varieties and, without telling them what they are, asks them to scan the list for their last names. That’s how genetically diverse American apples once were: almost every family could claim their own apple variety. I was dying to know—did my family have an apple? Had it survived? But since I’d heard Calhoun’s speech on the radio rather than in person, I didn’t have a copy of his extinct varieties. So I headed down the Google rabbit hole, trying to discover my ancestral apples.

Coming from farm stock and having been raised in Johnny Appleseed territory, I thought my chances were pretty good. Of my four grandparents, two had come from farming families, though one of these seemed more likely to have a tobacco variety named after them. My paternal grandfather’s line, with their farm in Cadiz, Ohio, was the most likely to hit the apple jackpot, I thought, and carried the bonus of sharing my maiden name, so I started hunting for Dunlap apples.

Weirdly, I felt a little nervous while I was searching. What if Dunlap apples were lousy? What would that say about us as a clan? I doubted that Mr. Calhoun would agree with this line of thought, but what if your family apple was like a horoscope? Continue reading →

So How’s Congress Going to Nip that Salmonella in the Bud? Neil Young Will Tell You.

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Last Thursday was Food Day.  What is Food Day?  Is it like Administrative Assistants’ Day or National Doughnut Day (These are both true “holidays,” the latter dating from 1938)?   I guess so, at least in the sense that nobody seems to know about it.

Skinny men...

But Farm Aid, (which has a pretty great picture of Neil Young just not giving a damn on its web site) dropped an email noting Food Day’s existence.  It did so in the context of the Food Safety Modernization Act, pending legislation that aims to address situations like the recent cases of melamine in baby formula, e. coli-spiked spinach, etc.  There are a variety of things to learn about current food safety (including the fact that 15 federal agencies now share responsibility for it) as well as about the Act, and it’s worth reading about them here, but here are a few key things to keep in mind.

  1. Proposed legislation currently mandates on-farm safety standards that dramatically favor industrial-sized farms and threaten the ability of small and mid-sized farms, the very farms that more effectively get fresh produce to all of us and the very farms more likely to be run be people we know and can thus trust, to compete.
  2. The overwhelming source of the pathogens finding their way into our food come from factory farms, where animals and produce are exposed to massive lakes of animal shit, and the antibiotics that are pumped into those animals (70% of the country’s entire use of antiobiotics) so they can remain “healthy” while standing around in that shit, in turn making those pathogens resistant to antibiotics.
  3. The Act currently makes zero mention of those two primary sources of food contamination.
  4. There were an average of 100 food illness outbreaks a year during the 1990s.  George W. largely left safety regulation up to the industry and the average yearly outbreaks during his tenure numbered 350.

So guess who has their hands in the current legislation?

Less-skinny men

Not that that’s a surprise.  But there are proposals to at least keep the local and regional guys from getting buried, including the Growing Safe Food Act introduced by Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow.  Read more about it and help Farm Aid support that and other small-farm protections here.  You can fill out seven boxes with your name and zip and such and hit “send.”  Easy.

My Very First MOOC: Adventures in Harvard’s Cyber Kitchen

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the professors

The Professors: This is what would happen if you took Heidi Klum, crossed her with a chemical biologist and then made her stand next to a mathematician who is fond of fleece.

Some believe they herald a new dawn of equality in learning and some think they are the ruin of the American educational system, but regardless of how you feel about MOOCs (Massive Open Online Classes), there are more of them being offered with every passing semester. The idea is that anyone can audit a digital course from a prestigious university (for free, provided one doesn’t want academic credit for it), which is how I ended up attending my first Harvard class, Science and Cooking, while eating leftover pad thai in my pajamas.

One of the allegations against MOOCs is that they can’t possibly be rigorous enough to mirror an actual university class (see: pajamas, leftover pad thai), and I admit that the first few pitches in Science and Cooking seemed like big, slow-moving softballs. There were some fun facts about the invention of the pressure cooker and the modern oven. There was Ferran Adria jumping around and talking about spherification of yogurt like it was a religious experience. There was a music video about El Bulli (Adria’s famous restaurant) featuring a compilation of pretty food pictures edited together at a breakneck pace and set to music that would not have been out of place in a Hans-Zimmer-composed uber-dramatic film soundtrack. This was going to be a piece of cake.

And then I arrived at Lecture #2, in which the actual professors (a German chemical biologist and a mathematician who always looks like he just woke up from a nap) took the reins of the class back from the celebrity chefs. We started to calculate how many molecules were in a batch of chocolate chip cookies. Wait, what’s Avogadro’s number again? Am I really supposed to already know that water is a byproduct of the formation of triglycerides? How the hell am I supposed to know what protein is found in an egg and what its shape is like? And can I even solve logarithms without first locating the graphic calculator that I haven’t turned on since I was seventeen? Continue reading →

Brace Your Sweet Tooth. It’s Festival Time.

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Sugar-Sweets-Poster-webHear ye, hear ye, worshippers of the sucrose! Get thyselves to Havemeyer Street, because it’s time for the Fourth Annual Sugar Sweets Festival this Sunday! It’s the bake sale to end all bake sales, and proceeds will benefit the City Reliquary, a fun and funky museum in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

It just so happens that this year Pitchknives will be represented at the festival in the flesh! Get there earlier enough and you can snap up the sweet treats that we’ll be whipping up on site. Fans of the site will know that we consider ourselves more the cooking and gardening type rather than skilled bakers, but have no fear gentle readers: we’ve come up with the perfect way to circumvent this obstacle. We’ve cooked up a sweet version of Jason’s famous masala peanuts, and we’ll be unveiling them in all their sugary glory this Sunday.

So come on down to hipster-town, eat our peanuts, watch some fun baking competitions and nab some treats from some of the hottest bakers in Brooklyn. Entry is free, so what’s not to like? You can find more details right here.

Fourteen Centuries of Pretzels

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dirndl and pretzel

I admit that this is just a stock photo. But I covet both the pretzel and the dirndl.

Oktoberfest is drawing nigh (more quickly, actually, than October itself—the Munich festival begins next weekend), and though the most celebrated element of the festival is beer, I thought it might be worth delving into the history of another essential feature of both German and American festivities. “The crossbow competition?” you may ask. “The pork knuckles? The traditional hat sporting tufts of goat hair?” These are all good guesses. But in fact, I wish to focus your attention on the story of the pretzel.

Almost every fact in the pretzel’s twisted past (yes, I know–sorry) is up for debate. Though pretzels probably have their roots in the hard-baked biscuits that the Roman army carried into battle, the first of the familiar salted, knotted variety probably emerged on the European scene sometime in the 7th century, perhaps in conjunction with an egg-less Lent. The history, however, has become a little muddled, not least because Flemish painters saw pretzels as so fundamental that they painted them into depictions of the Last Supper. Confusing though this anachronistic tendency may be, I sort of appreciate their thinking: “If I like pretzels, who am I to deprive Jesus of a little nosh?”

Even the origins of the name are open to debate, with one camp (let’s call them the jewelry camp) saying that it comes from a Latin word for “bracelet” and another (let’s call them the pretzel fetishists) saying that it comes from the Latin word for “reward.” Continue reading →

School Lunch Contest! You Could Win!

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school lunchWhat’s that smell in the air? Is the crispness of fall? Or is it the trays of rectangular government-issue pizza being loaded into industrial ovens?  Few arenas of school life are as rife with drama as the cafeteria, and no one does his or her time there without coming out with a few war stories. Like the time I gagged on a hamburger, puked on myself and then plowed into a very elderly and startled-looking first grade teacher. Or the time Dave found a slimy brown mutant apple hiding inside his apple, turning all of us off fresh fruit for weeks. Or the time Maureen thought she had lost her tooth in a can of Vienna sausages and then thrown it away. (She hadn’t.)

We’re asking you to share with us your most hilarious or harrowing stories from the front lines of the lunchroom. Tales from any grade level or perspective (yes, teachers, that means you) are welcome. We’ll pick our favorites and share them on the blog next week. In addition to fame and accolades, one lucky grand prize winner will receive a special treat in the mail from us.

Submit your stories to submissions@pitchknives.com before the deadline of midnight on Saturday, September 14. Hoist high your brown bag, and let the lunch meat fly!

Fried Green Tomatoes and a Food Film Puzzle

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fried green tomatoes

I never met a fried vegetable I didn't like.

Last weekend, during a visit to my parents’ house, my mom fried up some green tomatoes from my dad’s garden that Jason and I scarfed down like they were going out of style. In addition to being tart and crispy and delicious (her secret: use seasoned fish fry for the breading instead of humdrum cornmeal), the tomatoes reminded us of the movie of the same name, particularly the awesome scene in which Kathy Bates wraps herself in Saran Wrap.

But Fried Green Tomatoes was hardly the first or last film to feature a food item in the title. Have you been following Llalan’s beer and movie guidelines? If so, you’ll be able to identify the movies that contain the following quotes. Ten of the titles include something edible; the other two feature beverages.
  1. kathy bates“In telling the story of my father’s life, it’s impossible to separate fact from fiction, the man from the myth. The best I can do is to tell it the way he told me.”
  2. “You realize we’re all going to go to college as virgins. They probably have special dorms for people like us.”
  3. “Seems like the government’s got more interest in a dead man than a live one.”
  4. “Thanks for the compliment, but I know how I look. This is the way I look when I’m sober. It’s enough to make a person drink, wouldn’t you say?”
  5. “No, I can’t. My wife can always tell. She can smell it on my sweater.”
  6. “Apart from you, they’re the most stupid creatures on this planet. They don’t plot, they don’t scheme, and they are not organized.”
  7. “Isaac started the whole thing. He’s a boy preacher who came to this town three years ago. At nine-years-old back then, he had a charming way that appealed to all the kids and teens like us to follow him with his own teachings of the bible and of the Old Testament. But me and Sarah thought he was just plain weird.”
  8. “Centipede, I do not know whether to kill you or kiss you.”
  9. “There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.”
  10. “This is not gonna work, Little Chef! I’m gonna lose it if we do this any more. We gotta, we gotta figure out something else. Something that doesn’t involve any biting, or nipping, or running up and down my body with your little rat feet.”
  11. “Think of your children pledging allegiance to the maple leaf. Mayonnaise on everything. Winter 11 months of the year. Anne Murray – all day, every day.”
  12. “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door… And that’s all. I ask for the movement to continue. Because it’s not about personal gain, not about ego, not about power… it’s about the “us’s” out there. Not only gays, but the Blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us’s. Without hope, the us’s give up – I know you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living.”
When you’re ready to see the answers, click away… Continue reading →

I’ll Have the Usual

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sam

I'm still a little in love with Sam Malone.

I was still in the single digits for most of the illustrious run of Cheers on television, too young, really, to understand much about alcohol or why bars might be a good place to hang out. But even then, I loved that the characters could belly up to the bar and Sam or Woody would just slide a beer over to them while conversing about something entirely unrelated. I was a painfully shy child, and I hated having to talk to strangers (i.e. waiters) about what I felt like eating. A place where everyone knew your name and knew what you wanted before you even had to ask? It sounded heavenly to me.

Ever since, I’ve held in high esteem the archetype of the regular, but I’ve had a hard time putting on that mantle. My first attempt was during my weeklong summer sojourns at my grandparents’ house when I  would accompany my grandfather to buy his morning paper. Every day, he stopped at a little joint called Rollin’s on the way home, and they always had a cup of coffee poured for him before he was fully in the door. I fancied that after enough times, I could just saunter in, spread my copy of Harriet the Spy on the counter and be served my grape juice straight up.  But my grandfather was always too solicitous, worried that I was bored, and would nervously run down a list of items I could order in place of or in addition to my regular order. Geez, Grandpa, pizza at ten in the morning? You’re ruining our style here.

broadway gourmet

My usual lunch date. (photo courtesy of the sushi fruit hating Devin)

Even as I got older and outgrew my deathly fear of waitstaff, the stars just never aligned correctly for me to be a regular. Big cities, where I’ve lived most of my adult life, are tough for the regulars, because there are just too many restaurants with too many choices to commit wholeheartedly to the lifestyle of “I’ll have the usual.” Variety is what I love most about the New York dining scene, but sometimes you want to go…well, you know.

And then, just as I was beginning to doubt my potential as regular material, an avocado and cheddar sandwich came and tapped me on the shoulder. It’s a beautiful mess of cheese and sprouts and cucumber and mayo on multigrain bread. We met at the Broadway Gourmet Deli, just downstairs from where I work, and we rendezvous at least once a week. Mind you, it isn’t always an easy relationship. Continue reading →

The Genius of Psychic Sandwich

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rupert jee

Rupert Jee (from the Hello Deli website)

Allow me to be frank, dear reader. I haven’t been doing much cooking lately. I could make excuses, but I won’t bore you with them, and truthfully, it probably has to do more with summer torpor than anything else. But don’t think that food has not been on my mind. You know what I have been doing a lot of lately? Scouring the internet for clips of Psychic Sandwich.

This weird obsession started a few weeks ago when I heard a very brief radio clip in which a guy talks about why he loves David Letterman. His argument, as I remember it, was something about how it was worth Dave looking bored and basically phoning it in a lot of the time because every once in a while you end up with a moment of pure comic genius. And then he referenced this bit, entitled “How Many Guys in Spider-Man Suits Can Fit into Jamba Juice?” It’s worth watching:

I really like this clip, but even as I watched it, somewhere in the back of my mind the words “Pyschic Sandwich” repeated like a mantra. I haven’t even watched The Late Show for decades, but those two words kept surfacing with the clarity of those chimes they ring in meditation class. For those of you who don’t remember, in the mid-90s, Dave had a repeating comedy bit in which he would send an “intuitive” named Deborah Lynn into the Hello Deli and, blindfolded, she would try to divine what kind of sandwich Rupert Jee had just prepared. Though she was earnest to the point of seeming borderline autistic, she never once guessed correctly. And twenty years later, the words Psychic Sandwich floated back to me through the mists of time. Continue reading →

Wilco, Newports, and Hoboken’s Finest

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I have this on a shirt from a show I attended in 1998. That's right, baby, the "Being There" tour. Jay Bennet played fiddle while hanging by his knees from the HVAC.

Broadening PitchKnives’ scope from comestibles to ingestibles, allow me to recount last Friday night at the Americanarama Music Festival in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The overwhelming takeaway from the evening was a trio of rock n roll reiterations and a surprise:

1)    My Morning Jacket is the weirdest, mightiest, stadium-sized ROCK! band alive.
2)    Wilco is an unstoppable, deeply organic live act that covers a sweeping stylistic range in realizing some of the very best songs of the last 20 years.
3)     Bob Dylan can deliver a much better performance than you might expect.

That these are the takeaways is a testament to what the bands accomplished.

Because approximately 90 seconds into My Morning Jacket’s set, the crowd two feet in front of us scattered apart to reveal two men, each roughly twenty-five pounds over weight and with a bronze badge swinging from a chain around his neck, slamming a college-aged kid in loafers into the grass.  My first thought was of festival security and the fact that they weren’t interested in what I took out of my backpack and jammed into my pockets, only that I leave the empty backpack in the trash.  The Boston Marathon was on my mind.

But it immediately became clear that Hoboken’s Finest had, at the instant the kid broke out a dime bag to roll a joint, tackled his ass, twisted his limbs around, pressed his face into the ground, and cuffed him.  Why bother, after all, with something like, “Sorry, buddy, you’re busted; you’re under arrest; let’s go” when you can save your breath and rough up the threat to society?  The kid had no chance to run.  He didn’t even know what hit him.  Continue reading →