Silver Palate vs. Dean & DeLuca

Two of my favorite cookbooks-- from which most of "my own" recipes have been adapted— are based on stores that sell (or used to sell) prepared foods in New York City. The Silver Palate spearheaded a cooking renaissance of sorts in the US; Dean and DeLuca continues to stock the name-brand fancy foods of the world.

What distinguishes the two cookbooks is rather fascinating. The recipes in each book are determined by the foods primarily in stock at either store. In the case of Dean and DeLuca, this means that the recipes feature once-exotic and largely fresh, imported ingredients: the fruits, vegetables, and meats that the store tends to keep on hand. It is, after all, a supermarket first, a prepared-foods dealer second. Thus: shad in season; different varieties of potatoes, greens, and such.

The Silver Palate cookbook features recipes that use lots and lots of preserved foods: foods in jars, such as jams, jellies, mustards, dried figs, and the like.

This is especially useful for the home cook; the Dean and DeLuca cookbook (like Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and the Larousse Gastronomique) is a marvelous resource when you find yourself the owner of a bundle of dandelion greens or sorrel. The Silver Palate is useful when you're trying to figure out what to do with a passel of chicken thighs.

For mother's day, for instance, we made an old favorite from the Silver Palate's "Good Times" cookbook-- Apricot and Currant Chicken, which uses nearly a jar of marmalade and several handfuls of dried fruit. It's even listed as a mother's day recipe, which helps matters considerably.

We made the recipe with chicken thighs instead of with quartered chickens, because they cook evenly and well under high temperatures, due to their high fat content. Here's a digest of the recipe:

Lay 5-6 pounds of chicken thighs (we used bone-in thighs, but boneless would be easy, too) in a roasting pan. Make sure they still have their skins, and position them skin side up. Season with salt and pepper, and sprinkle some grated ginger (a thumb-sized piece or so) over the chicken. Spread 1 1/2 cups of orange marmalade over the chicken, and pour 1/3 cup of orange juice, and 1/3 cup of apple juice, over everything. Roast for 20 minutes in a 375° oven.

Remove the roasting pan from the oven, and add two handfuls of coarsely-chopped dried apricots and the same amount of dried currants, making sure to submerge them in the liquid so they don't scorch. Bake for 30-40 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through (this takes less time with thighs than with quartered chickens), and the skin is nice and browned.

Serve with couscous (as we did) or with some kind of rice dish or pilaf.

Such sweet-savory meats are the Rosso- Lukins specialty. But it was only recently that I realized the material nature of this flavor preference: it's remarkably savvy to base your in-store staple dishes on easily stocked goods. No need to worry about whether the flavoring agent for "Apricot and Currant Chicken" is in season. Imagine if it were based on fresh apricots. This would mean that either the dish would be available only in the fall, or else would require expensive (and perishable) imported apricots.

Mind you, the "Good Times" cookbook does feature seasonal dishes- -indeed, this is the principle of the follow-up to the initial Silver Palate book. But I admire the distinction of the first effort in particular: to use preserved foods is both economically savvy and delightfully old-school.

Preservation, after all, is an art form. But so is cooking that makes use of preserved foods.

Salad Cream

We've recently returned home from a trip to Old Blightey to visit my grandmother. I should mention, as I have been explaining over and again since our return, that there was not "an internet" to be found anywhere. My dear grandmother lives on a farm in the rural south of England; access to the information superhighway is the least of her concerns.

In an effort both to digest and to provide a digest for this past week of British culinary delight, I will focus, uncharacteristically, on two restaurants we visited.

My grandmother "does not cook," which is to say that most of her meals consist of oven-ready specialty dinners from Waitrose's. The notable exceptions are her own casseroles: beef, chicken, or (this time) lamb stews made with her own tomatoes and onions (and her own carrots, too, I think) as well as a heavy dose of good wine. These are humble but quite spectacular. And let's not even talk about how marvelous it is to visit England during my grandmother's strawberry season (she grows them in a greenhouse): fresh strawberries with English pouring cream make my socks roll up and down.

But with our family of three visiting her for a week, she limited her non-cooking to the mornings and evenings, and we yanks found ourselves exploring the countryside for lunch.

Twice we visited a local pub called the "Boar's Head," an old family favorite; I characteristically ordered things like Steak and Kidney pie, which is, sadly, so hard to find in the US that I order it serially and obsessively every time I visit the UK.

I love kidneys. Really: don't get me started. Or else I'll sound like a bad audition for the part of Leopold Bloom in the stage adaptation of "Ulysses: the Musical."

But the grandest revelation of the pub luncheons were not the standard pub fare, but instead the humble little sandwiches we ordered for A. I naturally ended up polishing these off in a fit of plate-cleaning parental gluttony. The first was a crusty roll with bacon and brie. The crusty rolls were freshly baked; the brie was lightly melted on the inside. And the gammon bacon was deep fried, and thus, of course, unspeakably delicious. The second version was the crusty-roll rendition of the old pub favorite, the cheese-and-pickle. Grated cheddar with Branston pickle has never lit up like it did on a fresh, hot crusty roll.

The child was lucky that I didn't push her out of the way to get at her food. It never came to this, however, since there were more interesting objects for her to explore. For one, we dined in the pub's garden, which opened onto a pasture with cows and donkeys. Even in repose, farm animals are more dynamic than inert luncheon fare-- at least from the point of view of a two year old. At the table, too, she was more enchanted with the condiments than her food, and I can't say I blame her. For on the table was a box filled with brightly-colored packets, which included English and French mustard (we weren't all that far from Hastings, after all); various mayonnaises and tartar sauces; the almighty yet vaguely mysterious "brown sauce"; and, best of all, the unnervingly-titled "salad cream."
The salad cream found its reprise, incidentally, at a Sunday barbecue at the nearby home of Aunt V. and Uncle N., where we were presented with a garden table laden with British wonders: grilled country sausages, a slow-grilled local chicken, allegedly spicy kebabs, and a green salad garnished with boiled eggs from the family's hens. For some reason I forgot to dress the salad with "salad cream." Dang.

Our second flight of restauration (as the French call it) took place during our cheap-day-return pass through London.

H. had the marvelous idea of paying a visit to Wagamama's, the now-ubiquitous noodle bar chain that started near the British museum and, like those other clean-food chains such as Pret-a-Manger, have taken over the country. And rightly so, to a certain extent. The food is clean-tasting, rich and flavorful while refreshingly free from oversalting. The service, too, is stridently professional: efficient yet friendly. They handled a nap-bound two-year-old with panache and grace, providing not only a wonderful children's menu: not pandering to her with hamburgers and spaghetti, but offering simplified versions of their own dishes. And special child-friendly chopsticks.
A clean, clean restaurant. A franchise, yes. But a rhizomatic franchise: a flower that has spread throughout the garden. Has it choked out other flora? It would be more accurate to say that it has simply taken over some open space, and made it pretty.

Of course, given that the dollar has turned into the chump-change of Europe, such "reasonably priced" lunches as pub fare and fast-food noodles have become, quite literally, the kind of meals one writes home about: a simple lunch for two, with one child's meal, and no hooch, ended up costing something in the range of 85 dollars.

We should have smuggled out those packets of salad cream, just to get our money's worth.

Tuning the Fiddle

I've never once succeeded in preparing fiddleheads to my liking. I lived in New Hampshire and Vermont for roughly six years, and each spring I marked the advent of fiddleheads with tremendous curiosity. And each spring I would buy a few handfuls, and then fail to cook them properly.

Yet this only augmented their mysterious appeal. Were these peculiar little snail-shaped vegetables overly subtle, or not subtle enough? What was it that made them resist my advances?

In theory, they taste like a cross between artichokes and asparagus. Their most pronounced quality is their quickly-oxidizing astringency. It is this cynarin-like bitterness that lingers on the palette, and which causes the cut ends to discolor so quickly. The ferns also bear a leafy, wild-plant flavor reminiscent of asparagus. And indeed, treating them like asparagus is the traditional rule of thumb. In theory, they're nothing short of delicious: sauté them in pancetta, with a bit of lemon juice and chicken stock, and you've got a marvel. Or steam them and toss them, chilled, in a vinaigrette.

In theory, it's a delicious pact with nature. But for me, there has been nothing but disappointment, year after year. Somehow the thrill of bringing home a pint or two of fiddleheads always sputters out as soon as they arrive on my dinner plate. I have overcooked them and undercooked them. The worst version involved onions: a chemical disaster. But I refuse to give up hope.

It was only fairly recently, after all, that I found a way to prepare asparagus to my liking, thanks to H.: drizzle them with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and then roast the hell out of them.

So perhaps it's time to end the cycle of futility for fiddleheads as well.

Indeed, I've continued the pattern now for over fifteen years, only with ever-declining specimens. I now buy fiddleheads at the supermarket, where they've been shipped in from more northern states, either in plastic bubbles or in overpriced "wild produce" stock bins. I only pick them up, of course, if they're near the top of the bell-curve of decay; but they're a far cry from a hearty basketfull of fern tips foraged from the local woods. Not that I've ever done this; I consider foraging a metaphor.

Tonight, back from the supermarket with yet another produce baggie stuffed with fiddleheads, I may have taken a step in the right direction. Indeed, not only was H. willing to try them again, having found them creepy and undelicious in years past, but she actually enjoyed them this time. Nothing fancy, of course: a quick sautée in butter, and then a 5-6 minute braise in chicken broth, with a half-lemon's worth of juice to complement their astringency. Online recipes suggest blanching them first, which would dispel much of their bitterness, as well as to neutralize any number of alleged toxins. But the astringency is the very thing I want to retain, and this quick preparation husbanded it well.

Not there yet, of course. But a step forward. Tonight's experiment yielded merely a small plate of sautéed ferns: a side-dish without a meal. Time for something a bit less modest, I think. Next step: fiddlehead pie.

Here is an anecdotal recipe cited from American Food: The Gastronomic Story, by Evan Jones:

A fiddlehead pie, as served in Maine, is much like a quiche. To prepare one, beat a cup of milk, a cup of cream, two egg yolks, a teaspoon of salt, a half-teaspoon of sugar, and four teaspoons of minced green onion. Chop enough fiddlehead greens to make about one and a quarter cups, add them to seething butter, and cook for about three minutes; then combine with the milk-cream mixture. After it has set for about a half-hour, pour the fiddlehead custard into a partly baked pie shell, baking at 350°F. about thirty minutes.

I imagine that this minimal recipe could be aided greatly by "setting" the custard over a stove, since custard tends not to firm up by itself merely on principle. The green onion seems like a clever addition, though, lending the custard a savory and spring-like air. And I'm especially keen on the idea of chopping up the fiddleheads, which would give their unusual texture a bit more flexibility. Perhaps a bit of cooked bacon might also be amusing. Or would I be veering once again toward the path of disappointment?

More foolproof still, here is a recipe for fiddlehead pickles from the Alaska State Public Assistance web site. No joke! Can't get much more official than that.

The other option would be to roast the fiddleheads like asparagus: drizzle them with olive oil and salt, place them in a 400° oven, and overcook them profoundly.

Serve with trout.
-------

Coda: Sunday, May 18

We just polished off a fiddlehead pie made more or less according to the recipe above. Only I added sautéed pancetta along with the fiddleheads, and made the custard with a combination of half and half and whole milk, rather than with cream. To compensate I added two extra whole eggs.

A success, I think. Indeed, I recommend trying this out, if and when you have access to fiddleheads. A fiddlehead pie is, as David Letterman says, something.

Food Festivals

A spartan post today.

A list rather than a bundle of paragraphs. But consider it research toward a series of future travels: here are some food festivals it would be fun to attend sometime soon. Who says we've utterly lost sight of regional cooking in the US?

NB: I'm striving to avoid reproducing a Food Network-style litany of endless BBQ contests, chili pageants, and fried chicken roundups; these are all, for the most part, harvest festivals of some sort or another. Some of them will have, I am sure, the inevitable bells and whistles. But in principle, here is a list of festivals organized in celebration of regionally grown foods:

1. The "Feast of the Ramson" ramp festival in Richwood, VA in late April/ early May. There are others, too, but this one seems like the king. Elkins, West Virginia also has one. Here's a master listing: http://www.richwooders.com/ramp/ramps.htm
And my, my, aren't those ramps delicious. I remember when the (now former) owner of Django in Philadelphia presented us with a raw-milk cheese and a bundle of fresh ramps. It warmed my heart.

2. The Morel Festival in Boyne City, Michigan around the same time (early May). See http://www.morelfest.com/
There are also festivals in Muscoda, Wisconsin; Grafton, Illinois; Nashville, Indiana, and elsewhere. Not to mention on our very own street.

3. The Oregon Truffle festival in Eugene, OR in late January. See http://www.oregontrufflefestival.com/
This one might be a stretch, in the sense of wish fulfillment. But who knows; maybe someone will figure out how to farm white truffles in the US.

4. The Vermont Maple festival, late April, in St. Albans, VT. See http://www.vtmaplefestival.org/
There are others, too: in NY, PA, etc. The Pennsylvania Maple Festival just celebrated its 62nd year; it takes place over two weekends in late March in Meyersdale PA (near Maryland). http://www.pamaplefestival.com/
I wish I'd known about this one-- it will be fun to attend this next year, and a good way to punctuate those bleak final days of March winter (or "mwinter," to coin a term).

5. The Maine Lobster Festival- -in its 61st year-- takes place at the end of July in Rockland, ME. http://www.mainelobsterfestival.com/
I'll even bring my own butter.

6. Seattle Cheese Festival-- in mid-May, in downtown Seattle. What fun to taste artisanal cheeses on the west coast. There's also an artisanal cheese festival in Sonoma county, CA. A worthy road trip.
For something closer to home, there are numerous festivals in NY and PA, including one in late September in Long Valley, NJ. Will there be one in 2008? http://www.valleyshepherd.com/cheese_Festival.htm
It's a digression away from regionalism, but a national event in support of regional cheesemaking is the American Cheese Society's annual conference and competition. This year the 25th anniversary convention will be in Chicago in late July. http://www.cheesesociety.org/

7. The Bethlehem Shad Festival, early May in Bethlehem, PA. http://mgfx.com/fishing/assocs/drsfa/shadfest.htm
There are others on the Delaware and Hudson rivers, too. I'm still waiting for a well-prepared fresh shad roe.

8. The Gilroy Garlic Festival, in Gilroy, CA at the end of July. http://www.gilroygarlicfestival.com/

9. The Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival, in Breaux Bridge LA in early May.
http://www.bbcrawfest.com/
There are also big festivals in Biloxi, Mississippi; Faunsdale, Alabama, etc. I would loooove to do this.

10. The Dungeness Crab Festival in Dungeness, WA in October. http://www.crabfestival.org/
Of all the places to hold a Dungeness Crab Fesival. I mean, seriously.

11. Blue Crab Festival in May in Little River, SC: http://www.bluecrabfestival.org/
Of course, simply heading down to Chesapeake City for a crab dinner is pretty danged fun as well. Here's our old favorite, incidentally: http://www.woodyscrabhouse.com/

12. There are a zillion Apple Festivals, but the National Apple Harvest Festival is in Arendtsville, PA (near Gettysburgh) in October: http://www.appleharvest.com/

13. The Wellfleet Oyster Festival, Mid-October on Cape Cod. http://www.wellfleetoysterfest.org/
One of dozens of oyster festivals. But this is a nostalgic one, as I grew up spending summers there.

14. Laredo Jalapeño Festival, in Laredo, TX in February.
This might sound like it's getting close to Food Network material, but check out the food photographs on this web site: http://www.dallasfood.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=25

15. The Washington, LA Catfish Festival. Takes place in mid-March
http://townofwashingtonla.org/

-- another fun category are the gulf region Mullet festivals, which tend to take place in October. cf, for instance, the Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival in Nicetown, Florida. http://www.cityofniceville.org/mullet.html

16. The World Grits Festival in St. George, SC in mid-April:
http://www.worldgritsfestival.com/

17. OK, here's something gleaned from the internet: the Annual Poke Salat Festival in Arab, Arkansas, in early May. What is Poke Salat? It's mountain-talk for the salad made from boiled pokeweed leaves (Phytolacca americana), which you've no doubt seen by roadsides and ditches. The weed is poisonous, incidentally.
http://www.pokesalatfestival.com/pokeweed.html

18. There are dandelion festivals in Dover, OH; Borculo MI; and Vineland, NJ, among other places. I think this would be utterly delicious. Fortunately we've started to see more dandelion greens at grocery stores, among the ranks of turnip, mustard, and collard greens.

19. The Prestwood County Buckwheat Festival in Kingwood, WV, in late September
http://www.prestoncounty.com/pcbf.htm
Regional? Sounds like it, at least.

20. The Alabama Butterbean Festival, in Pinson, Alabama. This takes place at the end of August. No doubt a fine time to walk around in the Alabama sunshine.
http://www.butterbeanfestival.com/

21. The Irmo Okra Strut Festival, in late September in Irmo, South Carolina. http://www.irmookrastrut.com/

22. The Circleville Pumpkin Show in Circleville, OH in mid-October. Among many, many harvest festivals, this seems to be a big one. And since Ohio begins with the letter "O"-- at once a circle and the general contour of a pumpkin-- Circleville seems like an appropriate setting for the event. http://www.pumpkinshow.com/

23. The Nantucket Cranberry Harvest Festival, on Nantucket Island in October. There may be a lot of bogs around the Northern US, but how lovely to visit Nantucket in the Fall...

24. The Copper River Wild Salmon Festival, held in July in Cordova, Alaska. This is a major event, and worth every ounce of effort to attend, I am sure. http://www.copperriverwild.org/

25. The Fiddlehead Festival in Randolph, VT in early May. Which reminds me that I haven't seen any fiddleheads for sale this season. I hope I haven't missed them!
http://www.fiddleheadfestival.com/

This is, of course, just a partial and preliminary list-- I've left out the innumerable strawberry, peach, blueberry, melon, tomato, and raspberry harvest festivals, as well as the countless wine events and grape stompings. A good source for such events is available at http://www.foodreference.com/html/upcomingfoodevents.html

It also has listings of local food celebrations based on cooking and cuisine, as well: "Taste of Cape Cod," "Taste of Fresno," and so forth.

None of this is especially new: there's a whole micro-tourism industry dedicated to these events, as a way at once to raise capital in small rural towns, as well as to stave off the disappearance of regional cooking. Cooking styles and traditions are one thing, but I'll continue to think about locally-specific (or reasonably locally-specific) foods themselves. Beach plums. Chokecherry. Geoduck. Rocky Mountain Oysters (for this, go to http://www.testyfesty.com/).

Incidentally, we'll be heading to the Rocky Mountains this summer. I see a few such "oysters" in my future...

O, Solo Morel

At first, I thought it was a cruel twist of fate. Two of our neighbors-- A. & K. across the street, and J. down the block-- have morels growing in their yards. In ours, of course, nothing.

J. mentioned her discovery at a party the other night; my eyes narrowed with jealousy.

And then, two nights later, A. came bounding across the street. In his hand was a massive bee-hive of a mushroom. "The bastard," I thought to myself. "The lucky bastard."

Of course I smiled and congratulated him on his find. A. noted that morels tend to crop up in the same spot year after year, so this boded well for the future. I, for my part, rehearsed the popular wisdom that morels tend to flourish beneath rotting elm trees. And there was indeed a elm tree slowly dying in his yard. "How expensive for you," I offered in sympathy.

But A.'s spirits could not be dampened by a few spiteful words. And so he bounded back across the street to rejoin K. and cook the mushroom.

We went on with our evening, cleaning up after our forgettable meal of-- of-- literally forgettable food. Shortly thereafter, as I was mooning around, doing nothing in particular, I was surprised by a knock on the door.

It was A., and he had brought with him a dainty bipartite dish. In one half there were two small fragments of the morel, which K. had sautéed. In the other half of the dish there was a rich mushroom cream sauce. A. handed me the dish, dashing back to finish off his portion before it got cold.

It was an amuse-bouche like none other I've tasted.

I later asked them how K. had made the sauce; here is A's response:

"I liked the mushroom but LOVED the sauce. It was so mushroomy. K.'s
gone for the day, so I'll try to remember what was in it. Lemon juice, garlic, butter, the mushrooms, salt, and cream. But then she said it didn't quite have any zing. So she followed your suggestion of a wee bit of soy sauce, which made it sing."

That closing rhyme says it all.

Or at least, it says most of it. Central Pennsylvania is prime morel country. One can, on occasion, find withered specimens languishing on the supermarket produce shelves. And from time to time we've been snookered by such displays. But a fresh-caught wild mushroom is rare prey indeed. I once went morel hunting with a senior colleague of mine, tromping across moor and mire for hours. And though we were visiting time-honored mushrooming ground, we, like A., found exactly one specimen.

Only the morel we found was decapitated, a hollow tube with no substance. We left it where it lay. We've never since spoken of our adventure, as if this failed mission were too traumatic to bear.

But now this broken memory can be retired. And in its place is the image of A., grinning from ear to ear, bearing a tiny enamel dish. No longer a twist of fate, but an act of magnanimity.

---

In other news, I made carnitas last night from a recipe that can be found here.

Best tacos ever. I salted the pork overnight, as the recipe suggests, and this was certainly a good idea. Fresh-made corn tortillas also benefited the dish.

I'll cherish this recipe-- just as I will cherish the two little pieces of morels and their sauce.

Homework

Jazz musicians call it woodshedding. It's a ritual of the art: you go underground for a spell, working out your chops, forging a new style. Then you come out to play.

Similar phenomena transpire in the other arts, no doubt. A painter locks herself in the studio to reinvent herself, her work, her oeuvre; another travels to the Continent to study the masters. A classical pianist hibernates in some dingy basement long enough to work through a new repertoire. A professor takes a sabbatical, tunneling from archive to archive in search of new research.

Chefs do this too, but mostly, it seems (from what I've read), when they get fired. Cooking school alone doesn't guarantee the makings of a true chef; to keep your job, or to get a better one, you need to put in some hard time working for a Master. Mario Batali will forever mine his year of kitchen-work in Italy for techniques and anecdotes alike; Bill Buford continues this lineage in Heat, his memoir about working for Batali.

Such apprenticeships are so fully woven into the mythos of chefdom that we have television shows dedicated to them. Programs like "Top chef," which I sometimes watch, and "Hell's Kitchen," which I don't, stage this career transformation as a survival game. The shows promise to catapult run-of-the-mill sous-chefs, caterers, and upstart "executive chefs" into the ranks of the successful restaurateurs. As a marketing ploy, it's good bet. A number of former contestants have opened restaurants, and their efforts have been welcomed by a hearty clientèle.

But is a game show any substitute for real apprenticeship? One could argue that the game show format, with its art-school panel judgments and celebrity-studded collective tastings— not to mention its arbitrary barrage of "challenges" — in fact offers something that culinary woodshedding doesn't. Judgment; teamwork; conflict. A constant pressure to invent.

Of course, being forced to invent is not the same thing as forcing oneself to invent. Woodshedding, it seems to me, involves a separation from the sphere of commerce, even at the expense of making a living. That's why it's called the woodshed, after all. Shouldn't the demand for invention, change, and development emanate from the art itself, rather than from the marketplace? Or is this asking too much of a practical art?

And besides, woodshedding is also very much about practice, unlike the serial format of the game shows: there's no invention without endless repetition and rehearsal. Mastery of form comes first. Only then comes the deformation of mastery. Herein lies the appeal of Batali's travels on the Continent: he didn't just make gnocci for the "quick fire challenge." He made it night after night. It was work that felt, no doubt, like work.

The thought of apprenticing oneself to a chef is daunting precisely for this reason. It heeds woodshedding's abandonment of the marketplace, yet renders its laboriousness all the more visible. When you apprentice for a chef, you do it for free, providing the chef allows you to work in the first place. Gone, however, is the image of a solitary musician or artist toiling away into the wee hours. To apprentice in a kitchen is to enter into the fray. It's more a firebox than a woodshed.

There is, of course, another option, that of the test kitchen. This is the road taken by the likes of Julie Powell, author of the blog that became Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. There's no need to beg for unpaid work, no need to perform for a paying clientèle, and no need to endure the mind-numbing stress of a busy professional kitchen. Under these conditions, apprenticeship becomes a formal problem that begins and ends at home.

Rather than yoking your art to someone else's professionalism, that is, you can develop your skills as an amateur. But there's a problem here: amateurs do not woodshed. There's no retreat from the sphere of commerce, after all. And there's no vow of poverty.

So let's call it homework, instead.

And I've got plenty of homework piled up. April was the cruelest month.

My first assignment will be to read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemna, which has been sitting on my bedside table since dear S.W. sent it to me some weeks ago. It's due for a good reading.

My second assignment concerns a somewhat longer-term project. This afternoon, we signed up for a CSA farm subscription from a nearby organic farm. Starting in early June, we will receive a box of produce every week for 22 weeks. We don't even have to go to the farm to pick it up; they will deliver it to us, as they have another client in our town.

A summer filled with homework assignments! I've been imagining this, indeed, as my own version of "top chef," only without the celebrity judges and bickering fellow contestants. Quick: invent a three course meal comprised entirely from kale! Find a way to administer ten pounds of cabbage!

The best thing is that I can't be sent home for failing to satisfy the demands of the assignment. I'm home already!

1913

Is there-- or has there ever been-- a Marcel Duchamp of the kitchen?

Most of the cooking I know remains resolutely neoclassical. My own cooking barely crosses the threshold of figural realism: most of the time I struggle to make food simply taste like what it actually is. (Indeed, the challenge is to prevent, say, broccoli rabe from devolving into spinach, and spinach from devolving into shredded newspaper). But there are other kinds of cooking out there. Commercial cooking has all the integrity of a suburban bazaar: there may be everything under the sun for sale, but for the most part it's the same old shit. Chicken Caesar Salad. Wasabi mashed potatoes.

Experimental cuisine, from what little I know of it, seems to fall into two general categories.

The first is a mode of avant-garde cooking whose essential gambit is to alter food's basic form. Foams, chemically- forged tubes and unguents, aspics-- a new vocabulary of unexpected shapes, temperatures, and textures. Dishes come in forms never before witnessed: transparent meats; noodles made from fresh pea shoots; savory vegetables frozen into sorbets.

It's something, at least. It's certainly recherché. But I wonder about the extent to which the flavors remain devoted to a more or less classical sense of order. Things certainly look astounding: it's Cézanne; it's Braque, it's Picasso. But they still taste pretty.

The other mode is to invoke the foreign, the "acquired taste." Introduce the street cooking of Bejing, or the traditional diet of the Brazilian rainforest, and you've got a whole new palette of flavors that might challenge or even shock. This is precisely what the former category tends to leave under-explored.

The result is an experimentation on the very level of prettiness. The flavor of dried shrimp, or of fish sauce, ginko, abalone, lotus root: these are dark, peculiar tastes that might disturb the sensibilities of the classically Westernized palette. The acrid wince of rot, for instance, might be expected in a Roquefort or Camembert. But in a preserved fish? In pickled mustard greens?

There's an intrinsic limitation, however, to this mode of exploration. Each of these flavors derives from a specific geographic source. They're all native to a place far enough away for their unfamiliarity to register as a breach in expectation.

To put it otherwise: it's a kind of exoticism, or even primitivism.

In terms of culinary experimentation, we're still playing around like it's 1912. Our experiments generally either take place on the level of pure form, or else they derive their challenge to our notions of taste and pleasure from "foreign" places.

Is there an alternative? How about this: to what extent might it be worthwhile to consider the possibility of experimenting with the limits of taste itself? Not by rooting around for strange, odd, and funky flavors from other cultures. But by exploring possibilities already lurking within the sphere of culinary production we currently inhabit. What are our taboos? What are our limits?

I tip my hat to the Vosges chocolate company for becoming the first commercial venture I know of to experiment with flavor in such a way (Their site: http://www.vosgeschocolate.com). As a gastronomic chocolatier, this company doesn't tread lightly in its pursuit of intense but succulent flavors. Of course, a number of their "gourmet bars" fall into the orientalist/primitivist category: spice-trade derived combinations of spices, nuts, berries, etc.

But they've been traversing an even narrower path as well: not only do a number of their products feature salted chocolate (hardly a surprise in Mexican cooking, where sweet fruits, salt, and chili are a natural combination), but two more pronouncedly unusual combinations appear in their catalogue as well. The first: white chocolate with kalamata olives. Seriously! And the second, perhaps even more intriguingly: milk chocolate with bacon.

Milk chocolate with bacon! Sacrilege! Why, it's more shocking than having my chocolate bar fall into your peanut butter!

I remain mildly suspicious of whether such combinations merely sound startling in name whereas, in their actual flavor, they're reasonably tame. We've seems plenty of sweet/salty combinations before. Peanut M&Ms. Sugar-coated bacon. Sweet n' sour chicken.

But it's an intriguing start. And it suggests a direction worthy of further pursuit. Indeed, might it be possible to invent flavor combinations that really do challenge the very basis of our tastes? And wouldn't such challenges contribute to the very pleasure of eating itself-- or rather the excitement, the bliss, the jouissance of eating?

I'm eager for suggestions.

Here are a few, but they are only illustrations. I don't wish to think of them, even for a second, as attempts to find a static formula; I think this would spoil the idea. For the key seems, in my mind, to confront the expectations (to confront, I should emphasize; not to confound) implicit within any specific dining situation. Thus:

1) to experiment with the flavor of burnt things. Imagine an ice cream that tasted burnt. This, more than anything, could easily become an acquired taste.

2) Sulphur. We might tolerate it in an egg salad. What about in a pasta dish? We prize truffles for their earthiness-- an earthiness, moreover, that lingers almost oppressively on the tongue. To what extent might a sulphurous flavor take on similar properties?

3) Perhaps a misplaced fishiness. Everyone love salmon, it seems. But it's a surprisingly fatty, strongly flavored fish. Just as turkey, America's holiday meat, is remarkable in its gaminess. What would a chicken pot pie made with fish stock taste like? What kinds of challenges for the palette might fishy poultry induce? After all, oyster stuffing is a classic forcemeat for turkey. So we might not be all that far off.

Or are we? How far off might such a path take us?