Category Archives: Food History

Whale Sushi, Salt Junk and Other Mysteries of the Sea

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rockwellkent

Eat at your own risk.

I’ve had whales on the brain this week. First, an article from The New Yorker’s annual food issue informed me that a fashionable sushi restaurant in Berkley, California just got busted for serving black market sei whale meat. The restaurant is now closed, and the offending parties are facing up to sixty-seven years in prison and 1.2 million dollars in fines.

While I don’t condone the eating of whale meat, I am a little confused about why this incident caused such a furor in our ravenously meat-eating country. Why is okay that we eat some mammals and not others? Surely part of the reason is because many whales are endangered, but serving up horse is also illegal in California, and we’re not suffering a horse shortage. Is it because they’re cute? Is it because they’re smart? Need I remind all the bacon lovers out there that pigs are pretty smart, too? (In Japan, for example, whence the contraband sushi came, it is culturally acceptable to eat whale, though it is not in vogue with the younger generation, and the government has recently unloaded several tons of its whale meat surplus on Japanese schools for Traditional Culture Week. In comparison to a week of whale on the cafeteria menu, my elementary school’s dreaded enchilada casserole seems pretty benign.)

While I react to the confusing problem of which animals are acceptable for consumption with vegetarianism, my co-worker Devin goes for the opposite approach. “Whales? Sure, I’d eat them,” he announced confidently. “Horses? No problem. It’s not like I’m going to go shank someone’s pet, but I’d eat some horse. Dogs, cats, sure. I had this pet iguana, Freddy? But it didn’t stop me from eating iguana meat. I’ll eat anything except other primates. Well, and rats. And maybe street pigeons.” This seemed like a strange collection of forbidden fruits, but I suppose we all have to draw a line in the sand somewhere.

But back to whales. Devin would almost certainly fare better than I aboard a whaling ship; I reached this conclusion while attending an event called “Thar She Blows!” at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint this weekend, celebrating the 162nd anniversary of the first U.S. release of Moby Dick. Amid the “Melvillainy” on offer (including a sea shanty sing-along, a dramatic reading of one-star Amazon reviews for the book and a pitch for a television version in which Captain Ahab would be played by Zooey Deschanel) was a presentation by a woman who had spent three weeks in Nantucket reading through old whaler logbooks to see what the crew members ate. Continue reading →

The Maitake: Sexy, Lethal, Dance-Worthy

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I’m a big fan of mushrooms.  A few years ago Michael Pollan turned me on to the fact that the mushrooms we see are actually just the furthest reaches of vast fungal organisms that can stretch for miles and miles under the ground.  We can only study them so much because to unearth them is to destroy their most delicate points of composition.  How awesome is that?  Very awesome.

Justin Laman, fearless American Education entrepreneur and unfailingly gracious host, agrees.  I presume.  He’s been a mushroom hound, an amateur mycologist, for as long as I’ve known him, and I have to think he must be at least as turned on by the forever-unknowable heart of the mushroom mystery as I am.

I did not ask him, however.  I’m simply imposing my own feelings onto his.  I did ask him about his favorite mushroom of the moment.  He told me it’s maitake.  I asked him why.  He told me, “Tasty. Real flesh that doesn’t just melt. Hearty meat. Very hard to miss-identify. Nice woodsy flavor. And they grow super huge!”

You probably know maitake.  They’re also called Hen of the Woods, and they’re awesome.  You can drizzle them with some oil, sprinkle on some spices, and roast them for a spell to end up with a hefty entre or side for dinner.  They have substance.  They also, according to the American Cancer Society, were once worth their weight in silver in ancient Japan.  “Maitake” means “dancing mushroom” in Japanese because people were so psyched to discover them.  The American Cancer Society cares because they’re sponsoring research into the tumor-reducing properties of beta glucan, a polysaccaride contained in maitakes.  Japan has been using them as medicine for centuries.

I don’t know if Laman knows any of this.  I asked him which or what kind of band maitake would be if  it were, in fact, a band.  He simply sent the link below.

 

My interpretation is maitakes are fun, even playful.  You can enjoy their essential components because you’re enjoyed them a million times before in different forms, but this time, your enjoyment just might lead to the shrinking of a cancerous growth.  Refraining from imposing upon the ‘shroom any larger meaning beyond the simple, nay—syllabic, joy frees it to thrive in its essential fungal’ness.  Perhaps they create dance parties or playtime butchery in the mouth as well.

Bananas Foster, Proprietary Erythritol, and Life After Spinal Tap

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Amongst those bee keepers and bacon curers and renegades of raw-milk cheese on hand at the Mother Earth News Fair a week ago were a few purveyors of actual manufactured food.  Amongst these was Begley’s and Bill’s, an all natural soda company owned by Ed Begley, Jr., that most famous of Spinal Tap drummers and a long-term and pleasingly unassuming environmentalist.

Begley’s sodas are not only all natural (a term not regulated by the FDA), but calorie free (a term which is).  Or, to be more precise, they have 0.2 kilocalories per gram which is the same, as far as the FDA is concerned, as calorie free.

I am not a soda guy.  I haven’t had a Coke in years and only occasionally mix ginger ale in a drink.  Our favorite Chinese delivery place (J’s Wong, here’s to ya) continues to bring us cans of Pepsi and they are lined up like soldiers beside the sink, waiting to see which of my impulses—(a) to not waste and thus put them on the stoop for passersby or (b) to do the world a favor and pour them down the drain—will win out.

And I think artificial sweeteners are poison hand’s down.  After all, what foodstuffs taste like poison until you ingrest them enough to become inured?  Other than Aspartame and its cohorts, the thing that springs to mind is whiskey.  I like whiskey.  But I’m under no illusions.

So I was interested in checking out Begley’s soda.  I bought a four-pack that included root beer, ginger ale, strawberry, and banana’s foster.  That’s right.  Whomever thought of that last as a soda flavor was a genius.

But first, let’s address the zero calorie thing. Continue reading →

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 →

Roanoke Kinda Sucks (Except for this Moon Pie)

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I noted the existence of Moon Pies in a post a few weeks back.  I declared them “two pieces of cardboard stuffed with low-grade putty and shellacked in plastic.”  Lo and behold, on a trip down the Shenandoah Valley last week, I was forced to eat my words.  That, of course, has never happened before.

This eating of words proved to be, happily enough, the most pleasant part of our 20-hour stay in Roanoke, Virginia.  Shannon and I were both excited to visit Roanoke, though neither of us could say exactly why.  Maybe it was because it’s a city in the western edge of the state, a beautiful part of the country, or maybe it was because it shares the name of the famous Lost Colony, and few things get me as excited as groups of people, shrouded by the mists of history, mysteriously wiped off the face of the earth without a trace.  Regardless of the reasons for our excitement, modern Roanoke is a bit of a lost colony itself.  A railroad boom town gone bust, it is a charmingly refurbished and tiny city center ringed by a blasted landscape of empty streets and crumbling housing surrounded by lovely countryside carved into a sprawling network of McMansions.  Want to be depressed?  Drive around Roanoke.

But that charmingly refurbished city center did include the Euro Bakery, which sold us a homemade Moon Pie.  Now, the Moon Pie was born about a century ago across the border in Chattanooga.  It is supposed to be a mound of marshmallow glop sandwiched between two graham cracker-style cookies.  It is, without a doubt, vile.  This Moon Pie, however, appropriated the title for what is essentially a homemade Swiss Roll made in a Moon Pie shape.  Continue reading →

Quotable Vegetables Puzzle

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vegetablequotesIn all the plant kingdom, no food inspires more words of wisdom than garlic. Or so it seemed, at least, as I went searching for questions for our latest food puzzle. Everyone from Cervantes (“Do not eat garlic or onions; for their smell will reveal that you are a peasant.”) to William Shatner (“Stop and smell the garlic! That’s all you have to do.”) has been willing to offer up an opinion on the humble bulb, and a few have even extended their commentary to include other vegetables. Can you identify which vegetable has been removed from each of the quotes below? (Hint: The answer to none of these is garlic, and no vegetable is repeated.)

  1. “_____ is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” –Mark Twain
  2. “The day is coming when a single _____, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.” –Paul Cezanne
  3. “For every _____ full of weevils, God supplies a blind grocer.” –Arabic proverb
  4. “When General Lee took possession of Chambersburg on his way to Gettysburg, we happened to be a member of the Committee representing the town. Among the first things he demanded for his army was twenty-five barrels of _____.”—Editor of ‘The Guardian’ (1869)
  5. “We kids feared many things in those days – werewolves, dentists, North Koreans, Sunday School – but they all paled in comparison with _____.” –Dave Barry
  6. “A man taking _____ from a woman will love her always.” –Sir Thomas Moore
  7. “My boy, the ‘quenelles de sole’ were splendid, but the _____ were poor. You should shake the pan gently, all the time, like this.” –Marie-Antoine Carême (Supposedly his last words, spoken to a favorite pupil, January 12, 1833)
  8. “A cooked _____ is like a cooked oyster: ruined.” –Andre Simon
  9. The ____ is “one of the earth’s monstrosities.” –Pliny
  10. “The _____ is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. ____ are deadly serious.” –Tom Robbins
  11. “Fatherhood is telling your daughter that Michael Jackson loves all his fans, but has special feelings for the ones who eat _____.” –Bill Cosby (1986)
  12. “My idea of heaven is a great big _____ and someone to share it with.” –Oprah Winfrey

Don’t click continue reading until you’re ready to see the answers!

Continue reading →

Great GoogaMooga: Marcos Lainez from the El Olomega

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Marcos Lainez’s family has been selling fresh Salvadoran food to hungry soccer players in Red Hook since 1988.  Their signature snack is the pupusa, a stuffed corn pancake created by the Pipils Indians in the territory now demarcated as El Salvador, but they also turn out freshly fried plantain chips and atoll de elote, a hot drink made of yellow corn.  Pupusas are similar to arepas or gorditas, except instead of regular corn dough, pupusas are prepared with nixtamal, a kind of corn flower that’s mixed with an alkaline solution that makes the nutrients more easily absorbed by the body.  The Pipils (or their progenitors) figured this out around 2000 BC, using quicklime and ash.  We asked Marcos about his pupusas, Brooklyn eats, and the weekend’s performers.  We edited his answers a bit to fit the format.

What is Red Hook El Olomega Pupusas’ specialty?
Our specialty is the Pupusas.  A pupasa is a traditional Salvadoran dish made by hand using traditional, non-additive corn flour. The main ingredient is pork & cheese but can be made of a variety of flavors, like beans & cheese and spinach & cheese. From our menu my favorite pupusa is a very traditional Loroco flower and cheese.

Why is Brooklyn a good place for El Olomega?
We have been in Brooklyn for over 20 years and the pupusa is still fairly unknown
here and in the U.S., but each day it is gaining popularity among a very wide group of people.  Brooklyn is now a very diversified borough, and this is the time and place to let them know about this Salvadoran treat.

What band are you looking forward to hearing at GoogaMooga? What’s the best concert you’ve ever seen?
I am looking forward to hear the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.  I am not familiar with them, but had to give my friend a ticket because he has talked about them so much that I am very excited.  Saturday and Sunday I expect to be very busy, so I will do a quick tour each day. Continue reading →

Easter Peeps and Mucilaginous Root Pulp

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marsh mallow

Althaea officinalis (or Mother of All Peeps)

Ah, the glorious Easter baskets of yore, that would come to the rescue just as last year’s Halloween candy had dwindled to nothing but Bit O’ Honeys! Among the jellybeans and Cadbury eggs there was always at least one box of Peeps, those Technicolor chicken- and rabbit-shaped marshmallows. In my house, however, they were always destined to play second fiddle to the painstakingly nibbled chocolate rabbit and they usually ossified into little chick-shaped rocks before I got around to eating them. It wasn’t until adulthood that I began to understand the beauty of the Peep.

There are a lot of Peep haters out there, my husband among them, probably because they taste like nothing, really, beyond enamel-destroying sweet, but their origins are arguably the most noble of any Easter basket classic. While poking around on FoodTimeline.org, I noticed that marshmallows shared the same origin date, 2000 B.C., as apples. Yes, you read that correctly. Proto-peeps are as old as apples! (I’m not too clear, actually, if 2000 B.C. is the date of the first wild apple or merely the first time apples were cultivated by humans for food, but still…).

Marshmallows are called such because of the marsh mallow, a wild plant that ancient people ate in many forms. You can eat the flowers, you can eat the greens like lettuce or you can boil the roots to obtain a “mucilaginous substance.” This substance was used as a cough remedy, but there’s also evidence that as early as 2000 B.C., Egyptians were mixing the mallow mucous with honey to make a sweet confection, reserved for royalty and gods. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, you Peep haters. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Nature of Beignets and the Precision of Vincent Drake (1st Century & 21st Century, A.D.)

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If you read our last Grub Match, you will have noticed repeated references to one Vincent Drake.  Vince just might be the best cook I know (after my mom, obviously).  He definitely embraces a holistic definition of “gastronome” like none of my other friends.  He seems almost as focused on the proper process of making a dish as he is on the actual end result.  He actually uses a jigger to measure liquor.  I haven’t seen anyone do that since my grandfather died.

Though Vince also happens to be one of the kindest people I know, he did not hesitate in his secret bid to steal the Grub Match crown for himself by replacing PitchKnives’ typical bar-based final debate with a mega brunch.  That brunch included brioche French toast, and he ended up, after making four loaves, with enough leftover dough for probably two more.  Enter: beignets.

Brioche is a viennoiseries, the French term for baked goods that use choux pastry dough, dough that is yeast-based but that includes extra butter, eggs, etc.  Beignets are viennoiseries as well, and V simply decided to reclassify the brioche choux pastry as beignet choux pastry and go to town. Continue reading →

Squirrel Stews of Our Forefathers: Oddities in Presidential Eating

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rushmore

Jefferson is thinking, "Seriously, Abe, you should check out this waffle iron I found in Holland."

Presidents’ Day is one of those holidays that I have too often let slip by without much notice, so this past week I resolved to make it a more personal experience. Given my obsessions with food, I landed on the presidential page of foodtimeline.org and quickly became entranced. Food Timeline is a dizzying array of food trivia, all compiled and maintained by a single reference librarian who, it would seem, likes to eat. Let’s go ahead and get the criticism out of the way: it is not the sexiest of websites. The whole thing is an off-putting beige color, over which is a seemingly endless scroll of text. In fact, I’m pretty sure the only target audience (other than me) is the average elementary school child saddled with an interactive social studies report. I know this because the page devoted to presidents is peppered with advice like, “Need to make something for class? How about President Taft’s beloved almond snack?” and “NOTE: boiling fat is very dangerous. Adult supervision is strongly recommended.”

Nevertheless, I find Food Timeline riveting. As might be expected given the privileged, gentlemanly upbringing of our early presidents, there are a more than a few gourmets among the bunch. Jefferson loved bringing the discoveries of his European travels home with him, making his table a cornucopia of French sauces and Dutch waffles and Italian cheeses. Chester A. Arthur brought a French chef with him to Washington. And Dolley Madison, by all accounts, could throw a seriously fab dinner party.

It isn’t that evidence of discriminating gustatory taste makes me think less of these presidents. But far more endearing, I think, are the presidential foods that are commonplace or even rather lowly. Isn’t that one of our mightiest democratic fantasies—the greatness in every man, and an everyman behind greatness? Continue reading →