MarketStEl

Mebbe. Online it's easy to pass. ← 'Fraid I'm too dark to get away with that, though Grandma Smith and my Uncle Cole (Dad's older brother, Coleridge H. Smith Jr.; my own name's my Dad's too) went on at some length about the Scots, Irish and two Indian tribes in my ancestry and how there have been ancestors living in Missouri since it was a territory (they didn't say whether it was as free people or as slaves, or both) and there's a painting of my Dad's sister, Dorothy (Hampton), in Grandma's living room where she looks almost as pale as the wealthy family my Grandpa Smith worked for and my Mom once described the Smiths as "light, bright and almost white" and... I guess that if they had been white enough, the Smiths would have had members of the clan in the DAR. Then again, Grandma Smith gave me a copy of Langston Hughes' The Illustrated History of the Negro in America (Crown, 1966), which I still have, for my 10th birthday, and inscribed in the front that she was giving it to me because she wanted to make sure I learned "the things they aren't teaching you in those white schools." (I never attended a majority black school a day in my life.) It's all very complex. Sort of like (as a Jewish friend of mine put it when he was lamenting something that wasn't really Jewish, but tried to pass itself off as the real thing) "serving matzo ball soup with bacon bits."

Yes. I used to buy it when I was lazier. It's probably only a matter of time before Betty Crocker comes out with "Green Bean Helper," a packet of dehydrated mushroom cream sauce and another of french fried onions (the same ones they already put in "Philly Cheesesteak" Hamburger Helper ) that you add to green beans along with water. Just simmer and serve, folks...

Where do I send my resume? ← If I weren't contributing to the CityPaper's built-environment column while angling to get hired at Widener University, I'd have said, "The line forms at me."

Pardon me for commenting on the travel piece here, but: I'm impressed--it touches a lot of bases, including one that I was surprised to see, namely, its quick tour of the Gayborhood. Though why the writer would mention an outdoor deck in December eludes me. (Not to mention that the deck is closed in the winter, though the third-floor indoor bar at 12th Air Command is open year round.) We used to rent an apartment from the owner of the Alexander Inn. He's a great landlord and a benefactor to lots of gay community institutions--including paying off the mortgage on the William Way Community Center. (Which leads me to wonder: Is the writer "family"?)

My dad was the cook in my family, and I don't recall him making tuna casserole that often. (What I do remember is his buying frozen rabbit every so often and serving it fried. Yes, it Tasted Like Chicken, only a little gamier and much saltier.) BTW, your mom sounds like a wonderful person.

Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: It's primarily an African-American tradition now, though I'm sure that plenty of white Southerners will pipe up that they serve it often enough; however, it usually doesn't have the place of honor it does at large holiday dinners thrown by black folk. (BTW, it's not just holidays. It wouldn't be a family reunion without someone making it.) Aside: I find that mixing cubed leftover ham with leftover mac & cheese makes a delish lunch dish. It's something of a post-New Year's staple for me. Now that's something I haven't yet run across--mac & cheese, unadulterated, as a main course! I know that you can get frozen mac & cheese by itself, so it must not be that uncommon.

Aw, s**t, Diva, now you're making me have to come out of the closet and reveal my Inner Oreo! My grandma on my Dad's side, at whose house I ate Thanksgiving dinner every year from when I was old enough to remember until the day I left Kansas City for good, fixed only pumpkin pie for dessert. I didn't taste sweet potato pie until my teens, when I went to a feast at my Aunt Elaine's (one of Mom's two sisters) where it was served. I must agree with you on the relative merits of the two, but I'm afraid the cultural imprint left by Grandma Smith is way too strong for me to overcome without concerted effort. However, you may contribute to that effort with a decent recipe.

Except that she was black, that could have been my mom (KU alumna, BSN '54, MSN '70, first black woman to receive both degrees from the school, and had a '65 Mustang that she loved to death). Did any of said Kansans arrive in Mustangs bearing license plates with the letters JO or WY in the upper left corner? If so, did you require them to take a citizenship test? --Sandy, forever Kansas Citian (Missouri) in a piece of his soul, not unlike Calvin Trillin Edited to add: Confidential to NWKate: I share your sentiments about the Midwest, although I would assert that Kansas City is underrated as a place to live by East Coast natives (most non-Asian, non-Hispanic Californians have a relative who lives somewhere in the area and thus are not completely unfamiliar with the place). However, I've also often been known to assert that after wheat and corn, the Midwest's biggest export is Midwesterners.

You're welcome. I've found the subsequent discussion fascinating as well. And I think that that TV commercial is indeed a clever marketing ploy, given that we have heard from some actual white people who have never even been in the presence of Green Bean Casserole. Tabasco! You forgot the Tabasco! Have you searched your family tree far enough back? There must be some African-American blood in it. Unless, that is, you make yours with Velveeta. I've certainly been to black family gatherings and parties where tuna and noodles in cheese sauce has been served*, so I'm not sure we can use that particular variant of tuna casserole as a marker for whiteness or white-trashness. The kind Garrison Keillor sang about--which IIRC also requires Velveeta, according to the song lyrics, and which sounds like the chip-topped curiosity you've invoked--can be. *I've also made this dish myself several times. As often as not, I add peas, and on rare occasions, peas and carrots. To add to this, if I'm not mistaken, many of the present-day inhabitants of the Caucasus are ethnically Armenian and Turk, and not terribly white. And to you and yours as well!

Ohmigod, no! NOOOOOOOO! Gimme your hand right now! Let me pull you back from the brink! Now go lie down while the urge passes. I'll whip up some macaroni and cheese for you; that should make you feel better. I'd rather die first. Or even eat Green Bean Casserole.

Over in General Food Topics, some of you have no doubt by now seen my post ruminating on the true nature of Green Bean Casserole. Since I've eaten with many friends and acquaintances, I figured that my near-total unfamiliarity with the dish must be due to some cultural factor. Then I recalled another back-of-the-package recipe that I've seen too many times to count everywhere but on an actual plate: Mock Apple Pie ("No Apples Needed!") If you're old enough, you've probably seen this recipe on the back of a box of Ritz crackers, one of the main ingredients. It hasn't been part of the packaging for some time now, but I vaguely recall its making a brief reappearance not too long ago. I can't say I'm so curious about this dish as to actually want to make it. If I want apple pie, the kind that has apples in it is plentiful enough that I don't think I have to worry about making a substitute. In fact, while I've done my share of famous-product-label cooking, most of the time, I usually end up either substituting regular ingredients for the prepared products or trying the dish only once, which is enough. As an example, here's my California Onion Dip recipe: 1 pint sour cream 2 tablespoons dehydrated minced onion 1 tablespoon instant beef boullion or concentrated beef stock base Mix all ingredients well and chill for at least one hour to allow flavors to blend. I'll bet you can't tell the difference from the Lipton Onion Soup Mix recipe. Have any of you ever actually tried to make some of the better-known package-label recipes? If so, have you ever made them more than once? Or have you adapted them to substitute less processed ingredients? Are there recipes you've run across frequently and wonder whether anyone has actually tried them? Have you tried any of these yourself? Have you regretted doing so afterwards, or been pleasantly surprised? The possibilities, as they say, are endless.

It's that time of year again. Every time I turn on the television, eventually that commercial comes on: "Every holiday, every special occasion, the recipe we all remember is Green Bean Casserole." This concoction, up there with California Onion Dip in the pantheon of back-of-the-label homemade classics, seems to be a staple of feasts nationwide. I'm guessing that it's one of the main reasons Cream of Mushroom is Campbell's second- or third-biggest seller, after Chicken Noodle and maybe ahead of Tomato, and it's probably the only reason some people buy French's French Fried Onions at all. (To those for whom this is true: They're actually a tasty topping for a lot of other things and aren't too bad eaten right out of the can.) If I understand this TV ad right, this relatively unoffensive dish is everywhere, and no family feast is complete without it. And yet when I think back across years of visiting friends and relatives, including numerous holiday dinners I had no hand in preparing, I can recall encountering Green Bean Casserole exactly once. At a family gathering at a relative of my partner's. By the way, my partner's white. As are all the people in the Green Bean Casserole commercial. So I got to thinking: Is this dish some semi-secret Caucasian bonding ritual? I began asking all my black friends and acquaintances: Have you ever fixed Green Bean Casserole? I got the same answer from every last one of them: "No." Okay, then, have you ever been served it? So far, the answer to that question has been the same as the answer to the first one. Surely America's made more progress towards becoming an integrated society than the answer to this last question indicates. In any case, I've concluded that this dish, which these ads tell me is so iconic, is definitely near and dear only to white people, and among those, only to a small subset. Unless something else is at work: The dish is either so exquisite or so embarrassing that most white people send it into hiding whenever they entertain black guests. Which is it? Clue me in, please. I know there are white folks reading this.

As someone has already (finally!) posted some stats on how much Americans spend on food as opposed to Thais, all I will say is that it confirms my suspicion. Generally speaking, Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than inhabitants of almost any other country. "So that's why it's not all that good," I hear some of you say. That may well be. After all, as the old cliché goes, "Time is money." Doing something well usually requires large expenditures of either one or the other, and sometimes both. One of the hallmarks of much of the "common" fare Americans eat is that it is fast and it is cheap. I don't know how much it costs to buy a decent lunch from one of those Thai street stalls, but I suspect that, when expressed as a fraction of the typical Thai national's paycheck, it's more than it costs to buy a $5.99 Happy Meal at McDonald's. And judging from the faces I usually see whenever I walk into a McDonald's, the percentage of Americans who cannot afford a $5.99 Happy Meal at McDonald's is very small indeed. We seem pressed for time all the time, or not interested in spending the time to cook well when we have it, so if our common fare is something of a letdown to those coming here from abroad, that may have something to do with it. (I still hold out "Slow Cooker Helper" as the epitome of what I'm talking about--convenience meal kits for people who don't even have enough time to chop up some veggies and meat, toss it all into a Crock-Pot with some liquid and seasonings, and go about their business for the rest of the day.) And yet...as Mayhaw Man and others have already said, look at the amount of bandwidth we spill here gushing over barbecue (perhaps the slowest of slow food), or hot dogs, or home cooking, or great diner fare. It seems to me that good food can be found anywhere you look in this country, and at all price levels--it's just that sometimes you have to expend extra effort to find it. Good restaurant fare at modest prices is easier to find in the big cities than the small towns, but given that nearly 70 percent of Americans now live in urban areas--and yes, the suburbs count as "urban" for purposes of this argument--most Americans won't have that much trouble finding some if that's what they are looking for. As for the top=flight chefs being interested in more prosaic fare, I recall quizzing Ferran Adrià on this very subject when he dropped by for a conversation with eGulleteers last year. He responded by talking about his "Fast Good" restaurants in Spain, which would be in a category that includes diners in the United States. So it's obviously not as cut and dried as it was first presented here.

Just down the hall from Vegetable Disinformation, I assume.

Thwarting you: One of these days I should surreptitiously slip my copy of the "Art Deco" series anthology "Can't Help Lovin' That Man" into the Muzak® stream at my local Super Fresh. (Backgrounder: The "Art Deco" series of reissues, produced by CBS/Sony Records, digs into the Columbia Records vaults for vintage songs from the 1920s and 1930s. "Can't Help Lovin' That Man" is a collection of male singers and groups performing love songs of the era, where the love object is male, as written. Seems the record companies worried that altering the lyrics would constitute copyright infringement.) Now back to Aisle (?) 1: I think the upscale food emporia do that because, as they know they're not competing on price, they may as well throw their main selling point--quality and service--right at you up front. I hadn't noticed that before, but that Whole Foods Market whose layout I described upthread does the same thing at one remove: of course, WFM being a full-line supermarket, the produce section comes first (it's the place where the store can wow you with the riot of colors and fresh appearance of the veggies and fruits). Then they throw the service counters and buffet at you. Only once you're past that do they let you into the aisles. Since others have mentioned it, it is interesting to try to figure out the logic behind what products a given store chooses to group together. The Acme where I shop puts the packaged dinner kits (Hamburger Helper et al. in the same aisle with the condiments, while the Super Fresh puts them in the aisle with the pasta (which makes more sense to me). Are oils condiments, as they are at Super Fresh, or baking supplies, as they are at Acme? Of course, product mix also plays a factor in determining layout: the Acme, located as it is in the heart of South Philly, stocks fewer organic/all-natural products than does the Super Fresh, located at the edge of Center City and directly across the street from a Whole Foods. It's in Super Fresh's interest to group all the crunchy-granola stuff in its own aisle, adjacent to a freezer shelf where similar frozen products can go, in order to get shoppers interested in those sorts of items to buy them there along with all the "regular" groceries instead of split their shopping trip in two. Meanwhile, at the Acme, buying "all natural" may mean picking up the Ry-Krisp or Stoned Wheat Thins off the shelf in the cracker aisle just down from the saltines and Ritz, or grabbing a pack of whole-grain pasta from the pasta aisle. And that product mix is also driven by the customer mix (real or desired): there aren't as many affluent, super-health-conscious people living in the vicinity of 10th and Reed as there are around 10th and South.

The chapter about the artificial flavors and aromas was excerpted in The Atlantic Monthly about six months before the book was published. I still remember vividly that closing sentence, in which the author, with eyes closed, describes smelling burgers cooking on a grill--then he opens his eyes and all he sees is a guy in a lab coat holding a strip of test paper and smiling. I've probably passed by International Flavors and Fragrances' (or was it IFF's chief competitor?) facility along the New Jersey Turnpike innumerable times. There's nothing on the outside to identify it. The Atlantic Monthly is one of my favorite magazines, full of thought-provoking writing on a wide variety of subjects, including food, cooking and dining. I encourage all of you to pick up a copy sometime, or better still, subscribe. In exchange, I will go buy a copy of Fast Food Nation as soon as I get paid again.

The former maintenance guy for my building -- a big fellow named "Tiny," natch -- used to describe the game he played this way: "It's me versus the supermarket. Who is going to walk away with more of my money?" If he managed to save 40% on his grocery bill, he bought himself a drink. I share his philosophy. I went out and got plastered yesterday, when I managed to save 48% at the Super Fresh, a number I've never achieved at that chain. I wouldn't know. I don't think they've opened any stores in urban locations yet.

I'm gonna have to check the forecast and then give my friend Mike LaMonaca a call before I can post my bona fides. Unless I can convince the landlord to let me haul a grill into the building's parking lot for a photo op on the right day. For I happen to have that other, serious impediment to grilling: No outdoor space--not even a balcony. Mike lives three blocks away and has a back terrace in his apartment with a Weber kettle. Last night, at his Christmas party, he had a couple of logs in it with a roaring fire going.

My report after a visit ~11:30 a.m. today, Sunday, 12/18: Traffic was modest throughout the market, except at the Down Home Diner, where the patrons were waiting in line to get in. I asked a clerk at Iovine's how business was, and she said, "A bit slow." I imagine things picked up later in the day. My advice for Paul: This may be one of those things where you will have to drag the merchants along kicking and screaming into the present. And also one of those things where you will have to boost your advertising budget for a while.

Whenever I make cheese sauce--which is about once a week, I estimate--you can bet that after I've poured it over/into whatever it is I'm adding it to, I run my finger around the pot to swab up every last bit for eating. I also do the same on those much less frequent occasions when I mix up pancake batter. And I'm also a shameless taste-while-mixing sauce/condiment maker. I try to remember to use a separate spoon from the one I use for the mixing, though.

Didn't you spend some time in my dorm room groovin' to "Aja" in college? I find it especially hilarious if the store is playing "Hey Nineteen" or "Cousin Dupree" while I'm shopping. (Both are supremely catchy, very hummable tunes, like so much of Steely Dan's best--and both are about pedophilia, more or less.) Now, my own confessions inspired by this article: I'm usually one of those methodical, up-and-down-every-aisle shoppers. I actually like the game of food shopping: A local chain, Clemens Family Markets, used to run radio ads that began, "Okay, those of you out there who actually enjoy grocery shopping raise your hand." I reckon I was probably one of five listeners who did so when the ad ran. And I also usually shop left to right, clockwise, in no small part because two of the three supermarkets I frequent have you enter to the left of the store. The Acme's entrance takes you into an enormous produce section as well as the deli and bakery departments; these three sections are the newer part of the store, which expanded into the space formerly occupied by a State (Liquor) Store about five years ago. From those you are funneled into the left rear corner of the original store, past the refrigerated cold cut/hot dog/breakfast meat case, which is--oddly enough--separated from the rest of the meat department by the service seafood and butcher counter; to the right of the prepackaged deli case, the regular aisles begin with the condiments, just as the first aisle past the produce on the left-hand side of my local Super Cruise^WFresh contains condiments. But the Acme puts the cooking oil with the baking supplies two aisles away, while at the Super Fresh, the oils and condiments are in the same aisle. Similarly, the Super Fresh puts the frozen meats, poultry and seafood next to the fresh meat case, while the Acme splits the two between a space between the seafood counter and meat case and the frozen foods aisles next to the dairy case. Go figure. Neither store has moved the milk out of the right rear corner of the store. It's harder to "shop the perimeter" at the Super Fresh because it has two, sort of: The deli counter, bakery, and prepared-foods buffet are all located around the store commissary, which is just in front of the meat and seafood departments at the back of the store, creating an island just in front of the perimeter. This also creates three sets of aisles--the main set in the front of the store, and two smaller sets of three aisles to either side of the island, separated by a wide cross-store aisle. This does have the advantage (from the retailer's point of view) of offering more endcaps in a store that would otherwise have fewer due to its small footprint. I almost always shop with a list, but also almost always buy stuff that's not on it because there's a sale. I also carry the Super Fresh circular with me to the Acme to make sure that I don't buy something at the Acme that's on sale for less at my last stop. As for the Whole Foods Market I mentioned at the start of this thread: It departs from traditional American supermarket design significantly. I have heard that its design was inspired by European supermarkets the chairman of WFM visited on a trip a while back. The entrance and exit are at the center of the store, but the layout sends incoming traffic to the right, into the produce section (natch). Your journey through the store roughly describes a C-shaped path counterclockwise, from produce to the seafood and meat counters at the right rear of the store. Past those, on the left, are the bakery counter and hot and cold foods buffet (two Y-shaped arrays); beyond these are the juice bar on the left, the cheese department in the middle and the deli/kitchen to the right. (Here they have precooked, refrigerated foods, cold sandwiches, sushi and rotisserie chicken as well as deli meats.) Once past these, the aisles begin, with the frozen foods to the right and the dairy case at the rear. The aisle immediately adjacent to the checkouts has a refrigerated grab 'n' go foods case and the salty snacks. It's a really great design--and designed to part you with as much of your money as possible early on, by putting all the good, fresh, natural stuff before the processed foods (even if these are processed the all-natural, totally organic way). Edited to add: I also found it mildly amusing and mildly annoying to be asked by the checkout clerk at the Super Fresh, "Did you find everything you were looking for today?" as he or she rung up my order. But the question is not as inane as it sounds on first blush: there have been times when I've come in and the store's been completely out of some special item, in which case, the answer to the question becomes "No--you were out of <insert items>" and it's off to the courtesy counter for a rain check after checking out.

I was a little startled to pick up the paper recently, read the fine print on one of those Macy's 25-percent-off-everything* (*with a bunch of exceptions in fine print) bonus coupons, read the fine print, and see listed among the exceptions "Frango." I thought these had not yet spread beyond Marshall Field's territory. I guess Federated Department Stores is getting a head start on this one item. If you're talking about Valomilk, I can think of a few other products native to the Kansas City area that I wouldn't mind seeing in stores here on the Right Coast. Gates' Barbecue Sauce, for one. Actually, for a while, I could find it in a spice shop in the Italian Market. The owners had problems dealing with the distributor, though, and discontinued it.

According to some nutritionists, whole grains--as the name implies, grains that are milled hulls and all, as opposed to refined flours, which are made from grain that has been hulled first--are also better because the carbohydrates in them are complex, not simple, and thus do not produce a sudden sugar spike in your bloodstream the way simple carbs do. Whole grain foods definitely have a heartier flavor than foods made from white flour. --Sandy, whole-wheat bread fan ever since his first slice of Roman Meal at age 12

As legendary Philadelphia merchant prince John Wanamaker once put it: "I know I waste half the money I spend on advertising. The trouble is, I don't know which half!"

'Scuse me? Winter an impediment to grilling? As long as you can make a clear path to the grill, what's a little sub-freezing weather? Lack of outdoor space--now that's an impediment to grilling. Don't get me wrong--I love my countertop grill. But it's not quite the same thing, and besides, you can't barbecue on it.