Fat Guy

The New York Times today has a report on a controversy over the invention of the hamburger. Athens, Texas and New Haven, Connecticut both claim to be the point of origin. Louis' Lunch, in New Haven, is still open for business and its proprietors are disputing a proposal to have Athens, Texas, declared the home of the hamburger. What's interesting to me is that both claims -- which date to around 1900 -- are so recent. I would have figured somebody would have come up with the hamburger concept much earlier. And why is it named for Hamburg, Germany, if it was invented in Texas or Connecticut? The Frankfurter, too, seems to have a German name though it seems to have been invented here. What's up with that?

Kugel aka noodle pudding freezes quite well. We make a chicken stew, similar to beef stew, that freezes well.

I've gone back and forth on those blends. Right now we're in a phase of using a single type of lettuce per salad. I think the supermarket blends tend to look more interesting than they taste. Recently we've been getting these packs of two heads of "live" Boston lettuce from Costco -- they're great. That and red leaf lettuce will get us through the winter. There was an awesome place I went to at some farmer's market where they had all the different types of greens and you could make your own blend and pay per pound. That was the best.

Now wait a second! How much time does a spice blend really save? These aren't blends of 145 spices. More like five, six or seven in most cases. So what's the big deal? Taking five spices off your spice rack and adding some of each of them to a pot of chili takes, what, a minute longer than using one blend? In terms of cookware sets, if your sole concern is utility, there's pretty much no good argument for the sets unless your cooking habits exactly reflect the composition of the set, however a lot of folks value a nice display of uniform-in-appearance cookware on the pot rack. To me, there's no set more beautiful than a totally mismatched set of well-used cookware where every piece is right for the job -- but that's just me.

Right, cupcakes are often baked in paper liners too. This just seems like a much higher level of application to me, for some reason.

Polenta in Italy is the big one, but when it comes to corn-based recipes North America certainly dominates. Indeed, I'm often amazed at how corn-resistant French chefs are even when they operate restaurants in the US. They all recite the same platitudes to the press about the wonderful American ingredients they've found, but you go to these restaurants in August and there's not a kernel of corn on the menu.

This particular manufacturer, Novacart, seems to be Italian.

Is anybody familiar with this line of paper baking pans sold by ThePepperMillInc.com, or similar products? Maybe everybody but me is using these already, and I'm no stranger to the notion that paper ignites Fahrenheit 451 and therefore not at any normal baking temperature up to 450, but it nonetheless seems like a revolutionary idea to me. By the way you and I may say "oven safe" but the food service technical term for this is "ovenable." For example, for six bucks you can get 25 mini loaf pans. They are, like, totally ovenable, and when you bake a mini banana bread for someone (presumably they're also banana proof) you can just give it in the paper pan and never worry about it again. Hmm. I wonder what else could be made of paper that I haven't thought about . . . .

When we did the eGCI eggs class, the student feedback really underscored and confirmed the importance of using a deep vessel with a lot of water. Poaching eggs in a stockpot is simply much more reliable than in a shallower pan. I don't think any other factor made such a big difference in the results I've seen. When you poach in a stockpot, the motion of the eggs falling to the bottom really seems to do a lot to help shape them into poached eggs with proper comet-like tails. When you poach in a shallower vessel you tend to get poached eggs that look more like boiled fried eggs.

I agree that I personally would much rather participate in a cooking class than in any other forced corporate team-building experience I've survived. I remember a particularly embarrassing outing where I didn't even know how to play the sport in question and was totally ineducable. Still, even though forced cooking is less awful than forced sports (indeed, voluntary cooking with friends is one of my favorite activities), it's amazing to me that sophisticated corporations persist in that sort of Dilbert-esque behavior. I wonder if there's any actual evidence that it improves anything, or if it's just something consultants tell corporations to do because they figure there's no way to measure performance so it's a safe recommendation. I'm thankful to be out of that world, at least during the 30 days of the month when the Visa bill doesn't arrive.

I'm nearly done and, no, the subject matter doesn't become much more food-oriented. There's certainly no way it rates as a top-ten food book because it's not a food book; I wouldn't really put it in the genre of food lit -- it's a memoir. It's particularly silly to categorize it, as the publisher does, as a "cookery" book. Is it a top-ten memoir? I haven't read ten memoirs this year, however it's the best memoir I've read. I'd say it's a memoir by an interesting person with an interesting story to tell (he worked on Apocalypse Now, he is cousin to the late actress Lee Remick, etc.), who happens to be more interested in food than most interesting people with interesting stories to tell, and is a standout writer. So, much of the narrative is organized around food incidents and recipes. For the most part this is effective. Then again, in some places it seems forced. Probably the most forced example -- so forced I suspect it may be an intentional parody of the concept rather than a failure of creativity or a passive-aggressive response to an editor who wrote "needs transition" on the manuscript -- comes on page 190, when he's telling about his family's move from New York to North Carolina. He goes from . . . . . . to, next line . . . and he talks about bread pudding a bit. The chapter closes with a bread pudding recipe. I hasten to add that I've enjoyed the book immensely.

K8, that's right, there's a very small amount of malted barley flour in most general purpose flours. I'm not sure it's part of the enriching process, though. I believe they add it because it gives fuel to yeast and makes bread recipes more predictable. For example, if you look at the ingredients for Pillsbury's all-purpose flour you'll see: I think it's the "Niacin, Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid" part that constitutes enrichment, whereas the addition of barley is a baking issue.

There was a piece in the New York Times yesterday -- in the business section -- about the trend of using cooking classes as corporate team-building exercises: Needless to say, we at the eGullet Society use cooking and eating as our exclusive means of corporate leadership training and team building. And it sure beats the ropes course or anything involving the outdoors. Has anybody here ever been to one of these structured events, though? I'm assuming you won, but what was it like? Was it totally artificial and ridiculous, or was it a good thing?

What I love the most about IKEA's kitchen stuff is that it gives me so many little IKEA friends to talk to. Every morning when I walk through the kitchen I say hello to ALFONS, my favorite dining-room chair. ELLY and LYDIA, my dishtowels and placemats respectively, are always there for me. I love both big REDA and little REDA, two mixing bowls -- medium REDA went MIA after I took her to a party and she got left behind. There's my faithful trivet, SNILLRIK, and my cheap but beloved frying pan, the unfortunately named SKANKA. And I hope I never have to choose between my three favorite potholders: IRIS, AMALIA and LISBET.

Yes, I think a lot of the seasoning blends tend to be rather one-dimensional, with one flavor clearly dominating and the others barely recognizable -- they don't actually give the benefit a blend of seasonings should give. Needless to say, blended spices are pre-ground and already mixed, so there's no possibility of grinding fresh spices or toasting them individually before use or anything like that.

I've definitely noticed that, in France, there's a perceived virtue to being able to hold it in through an entire meal. Not drinking much water certainly helps with that. But it does seem to be a point of pride especially with a certain breed of well-heeled French matriarch.

It's not so much a question of expertise as it is an inherent problem with one-size-fits-all solutions, which in mass marked food production almost by definition are lowest-common-denominator solutions. I'm sure that, given a single, focused application, a team of engineers with good palates could come up with something nice. But they're making these spice blends to be used on everything, and they're targeting average tastes. In addition, I doubt they're totally focused on excellent taste. I'm sure they're also on a cost-cutting mission: if one component of the blend is more expensive than the others you can be sure the focus of the research is to determine how little of that they can use and what cheaper ingredients they can replace it with -- they'll sacrifice flavor to save a cent per unit because they sell ten million units.

Gregg, where is that unfortunate link? I can't seem to locate it.

Wondra is a brand name of instantized flour, made by Gold Medal. Another brand is Shake & Blend. Instantized flour goes by many names: instant blend, quick blend, quick mixing, granular, maybe others. It's processed in such a way as to make it blend easily into liquids.

Oh, I totally agree with that. Organizing genre restaurants into genres and treating them in groups is not just the best way to keep up with the rising numerical tide of restaurants but also the best way to discuss the genres. It also forces the critic to self-educate at a higher level than with a one-off review. I do think some genres should be handed off to an Ed Levine type of writer -- indeed, that's already the Times practice, it's just a question of expanding that practice. For example: hot dogs, hero shops, burgers. The relevant point of differentiation has been the focus on a single ingredient or dish. Steak already fits very nicely into that scheme -- you could shift all the steakhouses over to Levine tomorrow without changing the system at all. We already know that the conventional reviewers do a bad job with steakhouses. We wouldn't actually want them to restate the entire body of evaluative criteria in every review, so they state it in no review. This is a simple fix. I think when you get into multi-item menu genres, it's a little more complex, unless the menus are close to identical. Sushi bars isn't as tight a category as steakhouses. Steakhouses get judged on steak -- on this everyone agrees -- with a sentence or two about starters and sides and, if applicable, seafood. The enterprise of sushi is more diverse, more nuanced. It doesn't stand or fall on, say, toro. I do think it would be interesting for the critic to devote 2-3 weeks of reviews in a row to covering perhaps the 9 most high-end sushi places. And a genre review on small, hip sushi places might be in order. But I wouldn't relegate sushi to a once-a-year (or less frequent) roundup. Also, the roundup format doesn't have to be monolithic. New openings can be covered throughout the year in capsule reviews by the person who does the roundup: Levine can put in 250 words, "Six months ago we evaluated the top steakhouses serving USDA Prime dry-aged beef. Last month Joe's opened and it definitely makes the grade, so to speak. The steaks at Joes' live up to the criteria we set out in . . ." Meanwhile, with less on the plate, the main critic can do more re-reviews and dig deeper into the part of the dining scene that reflects real culinary artistry.

Sugar cream pie, which I've seen called Hoosier sugar cream pie or Indiana sugar cream pie or just "Hoosier pie" in cafeterias in the Midwest, originated, at least according to this source, in the Shaker community in the 19th Century. It also seems to be a popular Pennsylvania/Ohio Amish item.

Here's a piece on Indiana food brands. Several significant ones including Clabber Girl and Sechler's.

Van . . . Camp's . . . Pork . . . and . . . Beans! Indianapolis, 1861

Yes, this seems like one of those etiquette rules that nobody knows about, which means it's not a rule or even relevant. It's just an interesting, weird historical factoid. In addition, it makes no sense. It doesn't serve to make people more comfortable or anything like that. It doesn't even have a coherent symbolic interpretation: "The rule is rooted in 19th-century beliefs that anything suggesting the body or bodily functions is improper conversation for the dinner table." If there's anybody left in France who's offended by talk of food, so be it -- be sure not to say bon appetit to that person, in fact I suggest you never talk to that person at all. Maybe there some rarefied aristocratic subculture where if you say bon appetit you're pegged as a rube, but servers in the best restaurants in France have said it to me plenty of times, and I really don't think they were being rude, as in "Bon appetit, stupid American, and may you have terrible gas tonight." It has seemed much friendlier than that. I somehow don't think Ducasse would allow his servers to say it at the Plaza Athenee if it violated an aristocratic etiquette custom. Maybe this is one of those pranks like the tribes play on anthropologists all the time.

Maybe that varies by mushroom type. I've not seen that happen much, but the ones I've used were probably something bulk, commercial and grown rather than real wild mushrooms with earth on them. Also, based on some package directions I read ages ago, I always rinse them first -- not that I do any of this very often; I somehow have never incorporated dried mushrooms into my cooking routine so only use them when they're very specifically called for.