Fat Guy

I now have the pumpkin cheesecake recipe and am going to experiment with it for Thanksgiving. If I can make it work at home (definitely in a simplified version) I'll share the instructions.

One big distinguishing factor between Chinese and Vietnamese/Cambodian food is the French influence. Thus, you'll find sandwiches on French-style baguettes, coffee as a beverage, etc. Also, as I indicated before, Vietnamese cuisine is not monolithic. There are various regions, some of which display stronger Chinese culinary influence than others.

Cambodia and Vietnam are neighbors, and their food cultures are closely related -- especially if you focus on the southern region of Vietnam, which borders Cambodia and, I believe, used to be ruled by Angkor long ago. Many if not most Cambodian dishes have Vietnamese analogs and vice-versa. Cambodian cuisine, however, tends to be more rustic than Vietnamese. Cambodians particularly love sour flavors. And when Cambodian dishes are spicy they’re seriously spicy.

From the DOH website:

Jensen, I'm not 100% sure of which dishes you're saying you can't get in which country, but just to pick two examples: 1- congee is not a hyphenated dish; it's part of traditional Chinese cuisine, and 2- Singapore noodles are neither Can/Chinese nor Chinese-American; they're from Hong Kong by way of Southeast Asia, brought over by Chinese and Malaysian restaurateurs -- they're now widely available in the US, but they're also a recent innovation not particularly related to early Chinese-American (and -Canadian) cuisine (I hesitate to say Chinese-North-American because Mexico is a whole 'nother thing).

I misidentified the Channing Daughters wine as "Mosaico." The wine we had was actually their "Meditazione." Here's a link to the producer's description. Mike Anthony provided the following details in an email earlier today:

Adam, you seem to disagree with my "rhetoric," but aside from marginal details it's hard for me to discern what central aspect of it you think is wrong. Let me try to frame the question as precisely as I can, and also reply to a few of your assertions. This particular tangent of the discussion started, I believe, in response to a distinction that was being drawn by a couple of people (yourself included). As I understand it, that distinction was between "a cuisine when adapted by and for the members of the parent culture" and "a cuisine when adapted by members of the parent culture in response to the tastes of an alien culture." I believe this is a distinction without a difference, at least insofar as questions of authenticity and legitimacy are concerned. For most of history, cuisines did not evolve as purely intellectual exercises. They evolved in response to various forms of necessity: what crops were available, economic reality, etc. In other words, all factors other than what we might sit down and say, academically, would make food taste the best. My position is that necessity is necessity: that it doesn't matter if you adapted your cuisine because all the crops died and you needed to use another crop, or because you had to cook to satisfy invaders, or because you were so poor you had to innovate, or because you moved to some other country and found yourself with a whole new basket of ingredients, or because you opened a restaurant and the American, Canadian, British, Australian, etc., customers didn't like your food so you had to adapt. If you adapt by making cheeseburgers, then sure, that's not a form of the parent cuisine. But if you use the basic stylistic elements of the parent cuisine and apply them to new circumstances, that's culinary evolution plain and simple. Again adaptation to necessity is basically the history of cuisine (with a few, mostly modern, exceptions). So somebody needs to explain to me why adaptation to ingredient availability is authentic while adaptation to local tastes is not. In terms of some of your specific points: While I understand that there's a distinction between Mongols and Moghuls, it is typical to refer to them the way I did -- in both the popular and academic literature. See, e.g., "Religious Communication in India," By John V. Vilanilam: "the Mongol (Moghul) adventurer, Babur, established a new dynasty . . ." More importantly, Babur was a descendant of both Tamerlane and Genghis Khan. As for the provenance of Indian restaurant cuisine in the West, the historian Joel Denker, in the 2003 book "The World on a Plate," explains that the dominant Indian export cuisine (he quotes one source estimating the number at 95%) is the Bangladeshi interpretation of North Indian Moghul-derived cuisine. He talks about both the UK and the US, narrating how US Indian cuisine derives from the UK version ("As English immigration laws grew more restrictive, Bangladeshis set their sights on America . . . The inexpensive Indian restaurant in New York City would soon resemble its London relative."). Denker describes the cuisine served at these restaurants (again, the overwhelming majority of Indian restaurants in the US and UK, and probably Canada and the rest of the West too) as: I think Chinese-American cuisine, with respect to Canada as a separate nation, nonetheless covers the US and Canada. I'm not aware of major differences between Chinese-American and Chinese-Canadian cuisines (which I've also seen referred to as Can/Chinese), either in the in-home or restaurant-adapted forms. If you list out the 20 or so most popular dishes, the lists mostly overlap for China and the US, with just a couple of items that seem to have emerged in Canada but not the US. Whereas, I don't think one could say the same overlap exists for all hyphenated Chinese cuisines (Cuban-Chinese, Bombay-Chinese, etc.). Even the adapted Chinese cuisine in the UK is rather different from Chinese-American cuisine. There was an article in the New York Times a couple of years ago (21 September 2005) by Julia Moskin titled "Craving Hyphenated Chinese." It mentions Chinese-Venezuelan, Chinese-Norwegian, Chinese-Mexican, Chinese-Malagasy (from Madagascar), Chinese-West Indian and Chinese-Cuban cuisines. Moskin sets up the argument thus: She then goes on to poke some holes in that dismissiveness. She quotes documentary filmmaker Cheuk Kwan as saying that "The term Chinese food represents an area four times larger than Western Europe and the eating habits of more than a billion people . . . . You could say that there is really no such thing as Chinese food." Another of her sources, a professor of anthropology named Eugene Anderson (who has written a book on the subject) says that in general "Chinese food is defined by a flavor principle of soy sauce, ginger, garlic and green onions" and methods including stir-frying and steaming. Another points out that Chinese food is always in flux.

Then perhaps you would be so kind as to define "credentialed journalist" for us.

I think the choice here may actually be between disingenuousness and delusion. Every single post of yours that's on this website is exactly as you posted it, without a word changed by anyone but you. The claim that we've made such changes is false. But still, you're being allowed to make the claim -- something you'd never be allowed to do by a print publication, which would just toss all such unsubstantiated conspiracy theories in the garbage never to see the light of day. Yes, you've had (a minuscule number of) posts removed over the years, all for good reason, all painstakingly explained to you, and never because you made an argument someone disagreed with. As I already said, websites do and should remove posts that violate their rules or the law. But you've never had your words edited. Nobody here is hiding from your arguments, false though they may be, as this exchange again demonstrates.

You mean like the Mongols? Many cultures adopted their cuisines to Mongol/Moghul tastes. Today, we consider those cuisines (e.g., what's served in most of the world's Indian restaurants) to be "authentic" regional cuisines. In addition, cultures spread. Wherever they spread, they produce hybrids with what was there before -- that's true of just about everything, not just food. Take for example the Peranakan cuisine of Malaysia and Singapore. Chinese migrants settled in those areas, many of them intermarried, and a cuisine was born that adapted to Malay tastes and ingredients. Cuban-Chinese cuisine and a dozen other hyphenated -Chinese cuisines have developed all over the world. Most such cuisines, to the extent they developed in the modern era, were at least in part influenced by what would appeal to local restaurant customers. It seems to me it makes little difference whether you're adapting cuisine to please conquerors, subjects, intermarried spouses or local restaurant consumer demand. It's all part of culinary evolution.

We had a world-class, category-beating meal at Gramercy Tavern this evening: the best meal I've had at the restaurant, and one of the best meals in the New American style that I've had anywhere. We were a party of eight, and as several of our group were from overseas (Scotland) I asked for a meal that reflected New York, the region and the country. While this is the default state for Gramercy Tavern anyway, the meal we had was more specifically calibrated to the request than a randomly ordered meal would have been. Mike Anthony did two menus, each with five savory courses, and they were served to alternating people around the table -- so we all shared and got to taste ten dishes (in addition to various amuses, cheeses and desserts). This was a special meal, arranged in advance, however I believe most every dish we had came from one or another of the regular Gramercy Tavern menus, be it the main dinner menu, a tasting menu or, I think in one case, the lunch menu. There may have been some minor tweaks, but you should be able to walk in and order this stuff. With our amuses and first courses our captain, Steven Solomon, offered the Lieb sparkling Pinot Blanc, 2003, from the North Fork of Long Island. It was an eye opener not only for our Scottish friends, but also for a couple of the American doubters in the group. One of the amuses was a Fishers Island oyster topped with a touch of mustard-seed vinaigrette, and I can't imagine it could have gone better with any other bubbly from anywhere at any price. The two first courses were, for one group, tuna and beet tartare with radish and hazelnuts and, for the other group, foie gras torchon with roasted pear and pear chutney. Gramercy Tavern has always had a great tuna tartare of one kind or another, but this preparation really blew me away. It's a counterintuitive move: the tuna and beets are cut to the same size dice, their colors (especially in low restaurant lighting) are virtually indistinguishable, and their textures are both yielding. It's an anti-contrast -- very interesting in the mouth. The hazelnuts and radishes add counterpoint in the way of crunch. The foie gras torchon would have been the highlight of many meals I've had in my life, but here it was just a palate cleanser. The torchon was correct, and the two pear preparations were spot on, especially the slightly spicy chutney. Next, cod with zucchini puree and avocado squash; and Spanish mackerel with Brussels sprouts and chestnut sauce. Avocado squash is a type of squash the slices of which actually look, to me, more like Granny Smith apple slices than either squash or avocado. Paired with zucchini puree and a piece of uncommonly moist cod, it made for a buttery-textured but very light-seeming dish. The Spanish mackerel was quite mildly flavored, but had just the right amount of mackerel character to support the mini Brussels sprouts and chestnut sauce. With those two dishes we had, again at our captain's suggestion (he wound up choosing all our beverages, so I won't repeat it), the Rkatsiteli (that's a type of grape) from the inimitable house of Dr. Konstantin Frank, 2006, from the Finger Lakes upstate. Spice isn't an adjective I typically associate with whites, but this one had plenty. It also had overt pineapple notes and good acidity. A special, interesting, different wine. Not at all rustic, either -- this was a clean, modern wine, just not in the generic sense. For the third savory course: smoked trout with sunchoke puree and pickled onion vinaigrette; and blackfish with pumpkin seeds, spaghetti squash and Sherry sauce. The lightly smoked trout being served at Gramercy Tavern is one of the best pieces of fish being served anywhere. (As I've mentioned in other posts, you can get this same trout at the Union Square Greenmarket, albeit not smoked.) It is simplicity itself, just slightly improved by a brief sojourn with applewood smoke, the creamy sunchoke puree and the acidity of pickled onion vinaigrette. The blackfish, too, was a triumph of texture -- this is a fish that deserves a wider audience -- and the pumpkin seeds and Sherry added significant complexity to the dish (the spaghetti squash didn't add much of anything). This course was paired with one of the most unusual wines I've tasted since visiting the Jura in France almost a decade ago. If you've had Vin Jaune, you know where this is going, but this wine was in a much milder -- yet equally intriguing -- style. From the Channing Daughters in Bridgehampton, on Long Island, I believe this wine was called "Mosaico." It's a Chardonnay/Sauvignon Blanc/Tocai Friulano/Pinot Grigio mix from the 2005 vintage. It flattered each dish in a different way: the smokiness of the trout and the acidity of the pickled onion vinaigrette braided themselves around this slightly (intentionally) oxidized wine to create surprising harmony, while the pumpkin seed bite from the blackfish dish pulled out different flavors from the same wine (the Sherry notes also meshed well with this wine, which was a bit Sherry-like). This was one of those meal moments when you don't want to talk to anybody, listen to anybody or have anything else happen to distract you from savoring the experience. Next, lightly smoked lobster with cauliflower puree and scallion sauce; and veal cappellacci with cauliflower and sage. I suppose if you actually know something about pasta-making technique you'll say there's a difference between cappellacci and tortellini. As a simplified way of understanding this dish, though, think tortellini stuffed with shredded braised veal, plus cauliflower and sage. I've spoken about the lobster before -- it's great. With this course we had little glasses of beer -- a great move as there would have been no way to follow the Channing Daughters with any other white wine, and red would not have worked with the lobster. The beer, Post Road Brooklyn Pumpkin Ale, was a great transition and reacted particularly well with the smoke aromatics of the lobster. Of course it was delicious with the veal tortellini, um, cappellacci, but what wouldn't be? Last savory course: hanger steak and braised short rib with Tuscan bean puree, Brussels sprouts and black olives; and rack of pork and braised belly with baby turnips and Adirondack blue potatoes. These dishes were as good as they sound. They were paired faultlessly with the Paumanok Grand Vintage 2000, a Cabernet Sauvignon from the North Fork of Long Island that is fully as good as, and just as uninteresting as, a typical $40 (retail) California Cabernet Sauvignon. The only thing interesting about the experience was seeing that this uninteresting style of wine can be made on Long Island. Compared to the full-of-character wines we'd had up until this point, though, it seemed so ordinary. We had a selection of seven North American cheeses, no I don't remember what they all were, with two vintage beers: the Brooklyn Monster Ale from 2001, and the Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout from 2003-4 (made during the winter that lies between those years). The Moster Ale was a triumph: a great cheese wine. The chocolate stout was a bit much. The signature tapioca with cilantro syrup was our pre-dessert, and then we had two superb desserts. This was the first time under the new regime that I've had desserts that I felt were on par with what Claudia Fleming was doing back in the day. Different style, but at that level. The two desserts we had were, first, pumpkin cheesecake with spiced Cranberries and lime sherbet and, second, warm chocolate bread pudding with cacao nib ice cream. I had my doubts when I heard pumpkin cheesecake -- it's not a dessert that I'd have thought capable of refinement to Gramercy Tavern standards -- but it worked completely. Not at all leaden -- fluffy, almost -- and the cranberries kept the cheesecake from feeling too overwhelmingly creamy. Lime sherbert was a nice, unexpected touch. The bread pudding had deep chocolate flavor and the exact right bread-pudding texture -- soft and pliable without being mush -- and the cacao nib ice cream at Gramercy Tavern may be the ultimate expression of vanilla chocolate chip ice cream I've seen to date. All this went quite well with a Paumanok late-harvest Sauvignon Blanc, which was a much more interesting wine than the other Paumanok. Still, what I think I learned from this tasting is that Paumanok wines, while technically correct, aren't my first choice among New York wine options. Finally, in the history of Gramercy Tavern I've never until tonight been impressed by the bread service. Tonight, for the first time in my experience, the rolls arrived warm. There were three superb choices of bread, including a salty green-olive roll with huge chunks of olive in it. Aside from an aesthetically unpleasant butter presentation (the pieces look like they were cut from supermarket butter quarters), the bread service was at long last worthy of the Gramercy Tavern name.

No need to go into the basement. I provided a link to the story in my first post. But the issue is the use of "self-appointed" in the headline, and the repetition of the "self-appointed" mantra in various other stories, as well as related distinctions like "professional" versus "amateur" and "credentialed" versus "uncredentialed" none of which hold up particularly well under scrutiny. I have no idea what a "credentialed journalist" is, nor do I know what it means that rebuttals were "taken seriously." Does "taken seriously" mean they were published? Does it mean the writers were fired? If not, what impact is there to taking such things seriously, other than making serious faces and nodding a lot? I'm thinking of all the major newspapers. Who appointed Frank Bruni to be the New York Times critic? As far as I know, it was Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times. What makes him well suited to make that choice? Nothing, as far as I can tell. The most obvious proof is that Bruni was simply a terrible choice, one that no food-knowledgeable editor could have made with a straight face. Accountability? Clearly, there isn't any, otherwise Bruni would have been out of a job after his first few months. Beyond that, I see nothing about food in the Times archive written by Bill Keller, and there doesn't appear to be any information anywhere indicating that he has any particular food knowledge. So why is he picking the world's most powerful restaurant critic? His imprimatur is worthless. We could go through this exercise for most any newspaper in the US or the UK -- especially in the UK.

Your post demonstrates the fallacy of your argument: you've just had your chance to hold me accountable. You happen to be wrong, you happen not to have made a persuasive argument, but you've had your say. Did anybody edit your post? Of course not. Meanwhile, I've had many letters to the editor published in newspapers, including the New York Times. Every single one of them has been edited. I've never heard of a letter to the editor being published in a newspaper without some edits. In many cases I've felt that the edits made to my letters have weakened them substantially. So, first of all, newspapers have just as much editing ability as websites and, second, newspapers routinely exercise that editing ability whereas in my experience -- which is extensive -- websites rarely do. Most websites simply do not edit posts or blog comments for content. They may delete ones that are beyond the pale -- as they should -- but they don't go in and change content the way newspapers almost always do.

In at least one critical aspect, online reviewers are usually more accountable than newspaper critics. Online, there is typically the ability to respond. Newspapers tightly control their letters to the editor sections, and generally decide unilaterally who will be able to disagree on equal footing with the critic. Meanwhile, if someone posts comments about a restaurant in a discussion forum, like this one, other people can respond. As long as the response is on topic and doesn't go off the deep end, it stands with equal prominence to the original. Most responsible bloggers allow comments to appear immediately after their blog entries. So online writers are not only accountable to their readers, but also their readers have the opportunity to respond. Newspapers just don't do that. They rally around their writers in a closed-off system and only bring their accountability mechanisms into play in the most extreme instances.

Yesterday morning at Fairway I noticed something by the exit. Perhaps it's new, or perhaps I've just walked past it hundreds of times and never noticed: a suggestion box. This should be fun.

Given the avalanche of demand, I'm going to let the list of appointees accumulate and then do a special ceremony -- kind of the online equivalent of the Moon Mass Wedding Festival.

White Lotus, there are some notes on this topic on places to eat in the Akron-Canton-Massillon area, tilting towards Canton. I confess, when I'm there, I don't even really know where one ends and the other begins.

A recent article in the Montreal Gazette about online restaurant reviews bears the title "The self-appointed critics." This echoes the use of the same phrase in a recent Wall Street Journal article about the ethics of online restaurant reviewing: "There are blogs hosted by self-appointed critics, such as Restaurantgirl or Amateur Gourmet in New York . . ." (Here's a link to the reprint of that story that ran in the ProJo.) Google leads to several other uses of that and similar constructions. The description "self-appointed critics" is meant to imply inferiority: a lack of credentials, a lack of a rigorous appointment process. It's a way print-media people try to distinguish their own critics from the online ones. This insinuation, I think, bears some examination. The opposite of "self-appointed" is "other-appointed." If you're a critic, and you haven't been appointed by yourself, then you must have been appointed by someone else. But who is this other? Who appoints the other-appointed critics? Were the other to be some illustrious body -- say, a tribunal formed of Craig Claiborne, Julia Child and Auguste Escoffier -- I might say, you know what, being appointed by them is more impressive, more credible, more deserving of respect than being self-appointed. In reality, though, the other is usually some know-nothing newspaper executive with no culinary background and no special knowledge of anything related to the task at hand. Being appointed by that person is not the slightest bit superior to being self-appointed. Moreover, those who are self-appointed need to compete for readership. Those who are other-appointed get brought into pre-existing publications with infrastructure. It would be interesting to see how well the average newspaper critic would do if forced to compete on a level playing field with the average online critic who regularly files reviews. But of course, the newspaper critic wouldn't enter that competition, because the newspaper critic is likely not motivated enough to do that job for free. The self-appointed critic is most likely in it for love of food; the newspaper critic may not even enjoy dining out. I'd also like to extend an offer to anybody online who's feeling bad about being self-appointed: I'm willing to appoint you. Just let me know you're interested in receiving my imprimatur, and I'll happily declare your appointment. Then, if anybody calls you self-appointed, you can say, no, I was appointed by someone.

Plenty of commercial bakery ovens use convection.

It was some ridiculously low loss-leader price like 98 cents a pound, for any of about six different varieties of apples from this orchard. I don't have the receipt but I should be back Tuesday so I can check.

If you look back at my earlier posts, my concern has never been about authenticity. It's been about clarity. My contention is that Chinese and Chinese American cuisines should be considered separate cuisines, much the way that Mexican and Tex-Mex are considered different styles of cuisine. ← I don't think one should draw a line and put Chinese cuisine on one side of the line and Chinese-American cuisine on the other side. I think it's more a question of there being many types of Chinese cuisine: Shanghai, Sichuan, Hunan, Bombay Chinese, Chinese-American, etc.

But my understanding is that one reason Tex-Mex cuisine is the way it is is that many dishes have been adapted to appeal to American palates, not because Texas is a region of Mexico. And pizza is the most popular Italian-American dish in existence; the fact that it has become American simply demonstrates how effectively is has penetrated the mainstream. (Incidentally, the National Restaurant Association's studies indicate that Americans consider Mexican and Chinese food to be part of mainstream American cuisine too, just as the British now consider curry to be a traditional British food.) I don't think it's possible to substantiate the blanket claim that Italian-American and Tex-Mex cuisines are real immigrant cuisines while Chinese-American cuisine isn't. Maybe it's possible to argue that Chinese-American cuisine is more heavily adapted to consumer preferences than Italian-American or Tex-Mex, but I'm not even sure about that. I also know Chinese-American and other Asian-American families who cook entirely recognizable versions of Chinese-American restaurant food at home: "barbecued" spare ribs, fried rice, cold noodles with sesame sauce, etc. And I know a couple of formally trained Chinese chefs who take Chinese-American cuisine very seriously and cook it at a high level. More importantly, so what if a cuisine is adapted to please local palates? It's still either good or not good. Well-made Chinese-American food is delicious, as is well-made American pizza. The question of authenticity is a red herring that distracts from real discussion of quality.

Stef, what are you trying to get from the bread? Do you want it to have an independent, complementary flavor? Or do you want it to be essentially invisible? Also, what method are you using for toasting the bread? I've found that most toasters aren't very good at creating toast. They simply brown the outside of the bread. The oven, at a moderate temperature, does a much better job of gently toasting bread all the way through, removing much of the moisture in order to give the toast a proper texture. It's kind of a pain to pre-heat the oven just to make a couple of slices of toast, but it greatly improves the texture of your toast. I happen to like toasted challah (or brioche or another egg-based bread) a lot as a substrate for poached eggs. But that assumes you want your toast to bring flavor to the table. You also have to toast challah low and slow or it burns.

The Italian-American rendition of pizza doesn't come from the home. It's a restaurant product. It would have been unusual to see pizza made in an Italian-American immigrant home. There are plenty of other examples like that: Italian beef sandwich, muffuletta, etc. Italian-American restaurant menus include a mix of dishes made in immigrant homes and dishes that restaurants developed for success in the marketplace. I don't know as much about Tex-Mex cuisine, but my limited understanding is that it has very much been adapted to appeal to American (Texan) palates. Otherwise, why would there be a different Tex-Mex cuisine when Texas borders Mexico, you have a zillion Mexicans living and working in Texas, and you can get all the same ingredients?

This week Stew's had Macoun apples from Blue Hills Orchard in Connecticut. Excellent specimens. Unwaxed, in great shape -- just like what you'd get at a farmer's market but cheaper. There's also a ton of Halloween stuff there. I had wanted to go on October 13 to see the baby water buffalo from Woodstock Water Buffalo -- they make actual buffalo mozzarella domestically. But I couldn't pull it off.