MarketStEl

Sounds like we should schedule a future Pizza Club outing to the places with the pies...I assume there are places nearby with a broader variety?

In her foreword to the 1984 reprint, M.F.K. Fisher wonders whether this legendary bit of prose is indeed Ms. Toklas', or whether it might not be Brion Gysin's--the recipe was omitted from the original 1954 US edition and added in a 1960 reprint. It is unusually florid compared to the rest of Toklas' writing in the book, which is spare, direct and clear. Edited to add: Also note the typography. The typeface for the Haschich Fudge recipe is different from that of the text before and after it.

If your "flavor injector" is anything like the "Marinade Injector" I purchased at Fante's last week, it's a bit too big for many of the tasks suggested in this topic. It'd be just fine for infusing a roast or a turkey, but it'd blow those poor cherry tomatoes to smithereens--and it has too many holes in its needle to allow you to suck up the pan juices from cooked meat. If it's not -- that is, if it has only one hole at the tip of its needle and/or holds less than 2 fluid ounces (1/4 cup or about 50 ml) -- then it might work for what's being discussed here.

Wasn't Alice B Toklas the lover of Gertrude Stein? I'm sure I saw a recipe of hers that included hashish in it somwhere... ← It can be found on page 259 of the Harper Perennial edition (1986) of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, in the chapter titled "Recipes from Friends"--it's credited to Brion Gysin there. In the meantime, the "Marijuana Food" topic is over there ------------>

There is somewhere out there on the 'Net a web site that touts a method for taking a huge whack out of your grocery bill -- for a fee, they will sell you a system whereby you can implement their sage advice, but based on the free come-on, it sounds like their method boils down to "Turn your pantry into an annex of the supermarket." In other words, load up on nonperishable staples or other items with long shelf lives (e.g., unopened jars of mayonnaise) when they're on sale and use future sales to restock these items, then use the bulk of the rest of your food budget each trip to buy whatever perishables you want that are attractively priced. (Here, a large freezer is also your friend, as you can then do the same thing with frozen foods that you do with perishables in the pantry. Apartment-dwellers like me cannot take this next step.) The same method would probably work for a "slow food on food stamps" system--the problem is phasing it in while continuing to feed your family on your modest allotment. It would seem to me that (as another poster said upthread) with a little education and planning, you could shift over to a slow/local/fresh food regimen while not shortchanging your day-to-day needs. It might consist of purchasing one or two staples in a large size (for instance, a gallon can of olive oil, which is quite pricey but will keep a while) on each trip until you have your basic arsenal of staples filled out. Along with those would come the smaller quantities of other items each trip.

Those big rolls of one-ply toilet tissue -- Scott Tissue (two words ever since the demise of Scott Paper as an independent company), Marcal regular and their store-brand cousins -- are still 1000 sheets per roll, as they have always been. They have also gotten softer over the years, though they are still not as soft as those puffy 2-ply brands whose roll sizes are shrinking. (Hmmm, hadn't noticed this in the paper products aisle. Maybe that's because all the major brands now have "double roll" and "triple roll" packs that cushion the blow somewhat.)

Is there an onion confit recipe or thread floating around here? (I've already read the one on duck.) I've got this Crock-Pot sitting on my counter saying, Feed me... As for smells, nothing beats bread baking. Nothing. I was surprised to hear that it's considered a pollutant in Southern California. But the smell of cooking onions does come close. I also like the smell of anything with tomatoes and basil simmering--or maybe it's my anticipation of how it will taste that drives my estimation of the smell. As for smells I detest: Limburger cheese and chitlins cooking tie for top dishonor.

Following this tangent a bit before chomping into the main topic (glad somebody else dug this up and posted so that it showed up in "Today's Active Topics"!): One evening, my partner and I were hanging out at the bar at the Inn Philadelphia, a very good romantic restaurant and piano bar owned by a gay couple of our acquaintance (one half used to work at Penn, and we rode the 40 bus to work every day). I was chatting with that same half-owner, who was complaining about erratic electric service on the charming, narrow little street where the restaurant is located. "The problem is," he said, "the cables under the street are more than a century old. They are wrapped in hemp, and it's finally beginning to fray." Now, moving from that testimony to the versatility and durability of hemp to the main subject: Boy, does this bring back memories! It also reminds me of something my partner's brother said when a Supreme Court nominee's candidacy was derailed by revelations of past marijuana use: "If they make that a deal-stopper, one-third of the country will never hold high office." (This was before Bill Clinton confessed that he "didn't inhale.") Anyway: I spent many fine hours in college and afterward in that glorious state of stupor followed by extreme hunger as well--and also recall dropping tabs and taking trips during which the sound of a tractor-trailer downshifting for a stoplight sounded like a Bach fugue. I too have whipped up a batch of brownies, using the famous Alice B. Toklas recipe (included in a mid-1980s reprint of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, with foreword by M.F.K. Fisher). What doc said about the effect of heat is spot on--you taste chocolate spiked with an herbal flavor (hadn't thought of this, but now that someone's brought it up, it is a little like rosemary), and then, not much later, it hits you. At times like this, Cheetos, Doritos and those other snacks with sprayed-on cheese flavoring never tasted better. Pizza and chicken nuggets were also great beast-tamers. I think that my experiences with the munchies must have left a residue in the form of an extreme love of cheese and dips that lasts to this day. Right now, I don't indulge when friends offer me their shit, because I might get called for an interview at Vanguard, and they test...But once I'm permanently employed, I plan to celebrate in the appropriate fashion. And when that happens, I plan to have lots of chips, dip, cheese and crackers on hand. The Laughing Cow people had better ramp up production again. I hope this happens before the first week in March. A good friend of mine plans to take me to Amsterdam and Antwerp, and I've been informed that one of the first things we will do once in Amsterdam is head for a coffee shop. (Apropos of nothing, this will be my first trip beyond North America. A charter tour to Paris in my senior year of high school was canceled, and I didn't get the shots I needed in time for a church trip to the Osaka World's Fair back in '72. I'm crossing my fingers this time.) Katie--you never told us what you pigged out on when the munchies struck.

One more comment, related to something Andrew mentioned in the other thread--the "Hershey Bar Index": If you go over to that thread and read FaustianBargain's post on the Hershey Bar Index, you will see that Hershey also increased the size of its chocolate bars when the company thought it could afford to. IOW, if Hershey got chocolate for less, it passed the savings on to the consumer in the form of a bigger chocolate bar for the same price. When was the last time you heard about a major food manufacturer doing that?

Not sure I'm geting your point. Is is just that its quite a distance from the upstate locations? Mary ← It's about 260 miles. But I also think he was playing around a bit about people's general perceptions about Harlem. ← He must not have gotten on one of those tourist buses that ply 125th Street these days.

Check out the website, it's very deep. ← I see one of her papers is on promoting Missouri wineries. I hope her efforts pay off. Historical trivia: Before Prohibition, Missouri was one of the leading wine-producing states in the country. The Germans who settled along the Missouri River in the east-central part of the state (about an hour west of St. Louis; Hermann is the heart of the region) brought their viniculture with them and gave rise to a flourishing industry. Unfortunately, the vintners had nothing else to fall back on, unlike the big St. Louis beer breweries, so Prohibition killed them. Judging from the paper, the state's revived wine industry is still small, but has grown smartly and has plenty more room to grow.

It doesn't appear that the Philadelphia Coca-Cola Bottling Company has shrunk their large bottles yet. I'll keep my fingers crossed. I've offered my comments on this elsewhere in this thread.

Were you reading that other thread? The one Andrew Fenton linked above? That was the observation I made in my initial post starting the topic. I really don't like the phenomenon of downsized packages, either. My guess, though, is that the manufacturers figure (probably correctly) that they will get more complaints if they hike the price significantly on the same size container than if they reduce the container size while holding the price constant. The only problem with this logic is that -- as with cans of tuna and (evidently) bags/cans of coffee -- there is a point of diminishing returns, when there's so little product left in the container that customers must buy more containers to get enough to meet their needs, at which point they've just experienced a steep price hike, larger than would have been necessary on a container of constant size. Some companies anticipate complaints, however, and set up mechanisms for handling them. Allegedly: when Turkey Hill Dairy shrunk their ice cream containers from 64 to 56 ounces (a move the Lancaster dairy made before Breyers did locally), they printed a note on the side of the carton: "Now 56 oz. Why? Call 1-800-MY-DAIRY." So I did--and got a recording that the office was only open during normal business hours, followed by an auto-redirect to someone's full voice mailbox. That, IMO, is worse than just letting the change pass unremarked.

I'll hold off until I'm gainfully employed once again.

Yours must be one of those grill-over-a-heating coil models. I've got one where the heating element is incorporated into the grill surface (a DeLonghi Alfredo), and I've never had a problem with flareups. I also like the way it grills. Cleaning it, however, is a minor PITA.

Okay, inquiring minds want to know: What is a Toast-n-Serve bag, and what is it used for, since I assume you don't need one for toast? Moving on from there: We had one of the original GE Toast-R-Ovens in our kitchen in KC, and I remember it rather fondly. I believe Black & Decker still makes this model or a lookalike successor to it. Compared to what else is out there, like that Panasonic gizmo, it's very simple and bare-bones, but it does the job for small stuff. It also does the one thing I think everyone should have a toaster oven for well: make oven-buttered toast. However, I do not have a toaster oven at present--I have a two-slice Sunbeam vertical toaster (a prize won at a bingo night about 10 years ago) instead. So I guess I'm all ready to go with those Toast-n-Serve thingies. That Panasonic model looks pretty cool and versatile, and at about $80 on Amazon.com, it's not all that outrageously priced, either.

the research study ← Hmmmm. Reading this, it struck me that one problem that would have to be overcome in the US is the now well-established practice of naming food products for places that bear no connection to the ones where they are actually made based on the manufacturer's desire to tie into strong positive associations. In the late 19th century, a manufacturer of cream cheese decided to name his product for a city that had a reputation for fine cooking. As far as I know, Philadelphia Brand cream cheese has never been produced in the city. The practice continues today, as evidenced by numerous products that bear the name of a place prominently on their labels (e.g., West Virginia Brand bacon, Jamestown Brand sausage) and elsewhere, in smaller type, where the thing actually came from ("Made in Wilson, NC"). As long as this remains a widespread practice, it will be that much more difficult to get American food shoppers to trust the place associations the folks in Iowa or at Green Valley Dairy seek to establish. The success of the Vidalia onion, though, gives grounds for optimism.

If I could back up Chef Brendis further on his point... Philadelphia has eternally labored in the shadow of New York City. After the national capital decamped for the banks of the Potomac and all the money and much of the port trade moved up to New York, this city has borne a massive municipal inferiority complex. One of the areas in which that complex has dissipated completely over the past few years is the realm of dining. I will grant that Philadelphia has a local culinary history on which it could build a fine dining tradition--the reason the best-selling brand of cream cheese in the country is named for the city is because in the late 19th century, when it was introduced, the city had a strong association with good cooking on which the manufacturer wished to capitalize--but even so, for much of the 20th century, the city's restaurant scene was, to put it mildly, undistinguished. The people responsible for removing the "un" prefix were not looking over their shoulder at Manhattan as they opened quirky, inventive, personality-filled restaurants like the Knave of Hearts (RIP), Friday Saturday Sunday and the Astral Plane (the latter two still going strong three decades out). They were simply creating the kind of places they themselves would like to eat out in, and they found a clientele who agreed with their vision. Having been shown the way by these pioneers, others began following their own visions to create other restaurants that soon fed off their collective energy, and before you know it, a Great Restaurant Town emerged without anyone invoking or inviting comparisons to New York. Those came later, after Philadelphia's reputation was established in its own right. The same process is under way in Washington, with positive results for both the restaurant community and Washington diners. I would submit that one reason for the later start (as I stated in a slightly different fashion above) is that the city has only rather recently (relatively speaking) become a "metropolitan center" with a local identity distinct from that of its chief employer and a population large and sophisticated enough to demand the best urban life can offer. But what Washingtonians have done in such a short time is impressive indeed, and again, nobody is asking--or ought to ask--whether this is as good as or better than New York, or San Francisco, or even Philadelphia. It should rise or fall on its own merits.

Until I listened to the NPR report, I wasn't even sure what the term "place-based food" referred to. Fortunately, the report made the term very clear. I agree with Fritz Maytag that there aren't too many examples of place-based foods in the US (the report offered the Vidalia onion, which Georgia law restricts to onions grown in a 20-county area surrounding the eponymous town, as the best-known example). In general, it seems to me that the place-based distinctions we do observe are either very broad or not strictly enforced, or both (Wisconsin, New York State and Vermont cheeses; Napa and Sonoma County wines; Jersey tomatoes). Yet even within these often broad categories, you can make distinctions much like those embodied in that French word "terroir". Even with pasteurized milk, Vermont Cheddar cheese is different from New York State Cheddar, and neither taste like Wisconsin Cheddar. (IMO, New York State cheddar has the most bite, Vermont is sweeter and Wisconsin milder). But with care and attention--and maybe a little help from the state legislatures, as happened in Georgia--these broad terms could evolve into the sort of regional distinctions so common for European foodstuffs (Roquefort and Parmigiano Reggiano cheeses, Champagne, Westphalia ham...) I know there is a cheese manufacturer in upstate New York that goes to the trouble of identifying its cheese as from Herkimer County, for instance. Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, which is facing tremendous development pressure, could perhaps save its farming industry by promoting the designation "Lancaster County" -- which already is identified with quality farm products in the minds of Philadelphians (a popular local brand of supermarket ice cream is labeled "Imported from Lancaster County") -- as a quality control mark on a variety of foodstuffs that could travel well beyond the region (Green Valley Dairy's Pennsylvania Noble Cheddar, for example, a raw-milk cheese which is the best American Cheddar I've ever had and the rival of the best Cheddar from Britain). I'm sure that there are consumers beyond the Philadelphia region who would willingly pay a premium for high-quality foods certified as of Lancaster County origin.

Can anyone else confirm this bit of genealogy? The 15 Hamburger Mary's currently open all appear to trace their roots to the now-closed San Fran establishment. Perhaps the folks who opened it had been to Hawaii earlier? For the Philadelphians, and any other eGulleteers who are within hailing distance: Sounds like there's interest in checking the place out, even though the food's gotten less-than-stellar writeups. Since I don't want to commit a weekday to this, how does a Saturday in the early or late afternoon sound? Maybe the week before Pizza Club 05.01? IOW, Saturday, 1/22, at 5. This would make either a late lunch or an early bird dinner, and anyone who cared could hang out for a bit at Dragonfly afterwards. (Or maybe not. Saturday early evenings are gay-bar dead zones. OTOH, we'd probably have the run of the place to ourselves.) Any takers? As usual, I'm willing to negotiate on time. If enough people decide they're in, I'll contact the restaurant beforehand in case we need to set aside a large table.

What was your family food culture when you were growing up? Mom's side of the family: Soul food. Dad's side: Middle American, with a black accent. My own cooking reflects Dad's side much more than Mom's. Was meal time important? Somewhat. As both of my parents worked jobs that sometimes required evening shift work, we didn't always sit down together for dinner every night. The family dinner tradition in my family was furnished mainly on Sundays by my grandmother (Dad's side). As my parents' marriage deteriorated, dinnertime often devolved into a running feud. After their divorce, the meal that Mom and I would most often share was Sunday brunch. Was cooking important? For Grandma, definitely. Dad shared some of this attitude--he was definitely the more enthusiastic cook most of the time. He especially loved the traditional guy-cooking activity, grilling outdoors, but wasn't bad in the kitchen, either--after the divorce, he got himself an indoor smoker and began smoking his own meats. Mom knew how to put out a spread for guests, though, which came through more after the divorce. But she didn't really get into cooking as a pastime or pleasure. What were the penalties for putting elbows on the table? A rap across them. Who cooked in the family? Dad, mainly (see above). After the divorce (which happened when I was 12), I kinda-sorta took over some of Dad's role. Were restaurant meals common, or for special occassions? Special occasions, definitely. There was (and, I believe, still is) an all-you-can-eat buffet in North Kansas City that was a favorite with my grandparents, and we would go there about twice a year. (When my grandmother, uncle and father took me and my partner out to eat the year I took him to "meet the Smiths", we went to this restaurant.) Mom was a little more adventurous when she took us out to eat, which happened a bit more often after the divorce, but still wasn't a regular affair. Most of the meals were chain fare (Red Lobster, Sizzler Steakhouse), but she occasionally took us to some of KC's better spots (Plaza III, Gaetano's, Italian Gardens...) Ironically, I never had a meal in any of the city's best steakhouses until Dad took my partner and I to the Hereford House in 1984. Did children have a "kiddy table" when guests were over? No. When did you get that first sip of wine? Beer, at age 4. Granddad let me have a little of his Coors. (This, BTW, was back when you couldn't get Coors east of the Missouri-Kansas border.) Was there a pre-meal prayer? "God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food. Amen." Was there a rotating menu (e.g., meatloaf every Thursday)? Not really, though meatloaf was definitely a regular item. As befits a Kansas Citian, beef and pork dishes made up the bulk of the menu items, but there was also chicken, and fish from time to time. And, for a while, Dad would reguarly buy frozen rabbit. How much of your family culture is being replicated in your present-day family life? The casual approach to eating together definitely is, though I have a friend who comes over almost every Tuesday for dinner and enjoy cooking for guests (which I guess is replicating Mom's food culture). I definitely share my Dad's love of cooking. Even though other threads cover memories of specific foods or dishes, please include those memories here if they illustrate your family's food culture. Mom was no respecter of traditional borders: chitlins and kielbasa would often show up together for one of her spreads (though not too often--I never could stand the smell of chitlins cooking.)

They're working on that, Mike. The checkout clerk at the 1228 Chestnut Street superstore took the time to banter with me on an extremely busy New Year's Eve, as I was stocking up our liquor closet with friends of mine. Maybe it's because she recognizes me now, since I come in there often enough -- "You're the one who doesn't drink, yet you're always in here!" (Hmmm. Fodder for a future session with my therapist?) But she was very cheerful and pleasant, joking with a few other regulars and smiling with the rest. Maybe she just hasn't been through the training yet. But that can't be--I've dealt with her for more than six months.

Watching the Mummers Parade on TV Saturday (yes, I did wander over to Broad Street briefly in the middle of the string bands), I saw several ads for a recently-opened burger joint on Chestnut Street, Hamburger Mary's. This is the Philadelphia version of a legendary San Francisco eatery/bar that has spread to about 15 cities, mostly on the coasts. Menu is, of course, burgers, along with related grill fare and some salads in a nod to the California sensibility. I've scoped out both the restaurant (decor looks like a '60s hallucination) and the upstairs video bar, Dragonfly (much more minimalist and High Modern stylish, probably to match the men there). I've looked at the menu (promising) and read a few reviews (decidedly mixed, though the place gets high marks for service and atmosphere). I've even met the co-owners, a trans-Atlantic gay couple who were hanging out at Woody's karaoke night a month ago. What I haven't done yet is eat there myself. I'm more than game, though. Anyone else? The restaurant's straight-friendly.

Sono Motoyama? With the Daily News, I believe. That's where she went after the Penn Current. Holly & Co. followed the "take a large group to the restaurant and have everyone order a different item from the menu" approach. Call this a "build-your-own-tasting-menu" meal. It probably requires lots of passing of plates.

Can't say I've ever heard of or seen anyone putting potato chips in their hoagies around these parts. They're usually served on the side.