I am indebted to my friend Eileen for alerting me to this nugget of gold from The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs: The Cursing Mommy Cooks Italian. Perfect antidote for a crap day in the kitchen (or the marriage!) …
Archive for the ‘bad food’ Category
Living in the seventies: Fondue, baby!
November 29, 2009
The topic of fondue arose recently, as it does now and then among friends when drink has been taken.
Everyone in the room recalled their parents’ fondue set and its occasional outings along with the funky pantsuits and false eyelashes of yore. But there was general disagreement about what fondue actually involved – some purists insisted that only cheese and bread was called for, while others of us recalled boiling oil and lumps of meat.
Serendipitously, the day after this conversation my beloved spied this book at a market and swooped. I suspect we will never actually use it, but it does make an entertaining conversation starter if you leave it on the coffee table. Published 1971, and in mint condition, Fondue and Table Top Cookery by Marion Howells runs the gamut of things-cooked-at-table, from your trad cheese fondues to your Oriental Fondue (meat in stock) to some rather desperate inclusions such as omelettes and dubious-sounding desserts (Apricots Jubilee, anyone?).
On fondue, Marion tells us that:
This popular dish originated in Switzerland. Many stories are told of the villagers being isolated in the long winter months, and supplies of food becoming short, they were forced to rely on local produce like cheese, wine and home made bread. As the cheese became dry they melted it in their wine.
So there we have it – a yicky gloopy mix borne of near-starvation becomes a classic fad for ‘entertaining of the more intimate type’, and into the bargain produces perhaps the earliest example of Fusion Food. As evidence, I leave you with the list of ingredients for my favourite recipe in this collection.
Fondue Bengali
- 1 clove garlic
- 1.5 cups dry white wine
- 1 tsp lemon juice
- 4 cups grated Gruyere cheese
- 2 cups grated Emmenthal cheese
- 2 tsp cornflour
- 2 tablespoons curry powder
- 3 tablespoons Kirsch
- white pepper, cayenne pepper
- mango chutney
- French bread
Kitchen calamity
August 28, 2009
Well, it doesn’t happen very often, but it did last night. I cooked a Truly Revolting meal for my beau and myself.
It was supposed to be a lovely rich dahl and a dish of potatoes and peas in a yoghurt sauce, but let’s just be frank and call it vomit-coloured slop (and thanks to the yoghurt, there was even a whiff of the sick bowl about it too). I haven’t posted a photograph of it here, but believe me that’s for your own good.
Nor will I slander the recipe-writers because obviously I did something hideously wrong, but they are both well-known & respected. I can’t figure out what I did, unless it was just the combination of dishes that made it so disgusting.
Suffice it to say if anyone has a recipe for dahl that does not end up as powdery, tasteless slop (there’s only so much salt and lemon juice you can add before you get past the point of no return, and it seemed to make no difference), can you share, please? I have eaten delicious dahl many times, so what the hell went wrong with mine?
And ‘yoghurt sauce’. This dish proved that sometimes you really need a photograph accompanying a recipe (I checked back later, and the book had one of those photo pages with a spread of different dishes. But they craftily did not include a picture of this dish). To me, ‘yoghurt sauce’ conjured up images of lovely thick clustery, creamy spicy goodness. But in fact, if one followed the recipe the result was a watery pale yellow (the V-word again) soup in which the peas were drained to a lovely grey colour and the potatoes just gave up the ghost entirely and slumped there, defeated and drowning. I ended up reducing the hell out of it just to rid it of the nuclear-waste-affected pondwater effect, which process sapped even more colour and any remaining life from the solids.
By the time this meal reached the table we had a bowl of rice (fine), a bowl of yellow soupy starchy tasteless slop (dahl) and a bowl of the pale starchy mess, which by now was a sort of grey and lumpy glue, but at the same time tasteless (except for the faint topnote of bile) and somehow textureless. Quite a feat, I think you’ll agree. We also, thank god, had the cumquat chutney – but again, it’s rather tart and sweet, so more than a tablespoon of that was always going to make the eyes water. Nothing could save us on this occasion.
I was so horrified I could barely eat a mouthful, and sat squirming in my chair while Senor doggedly chewed on, in a prim and dignified fashion, telling me to stop behaving like a three year old as I rolled my eyes and gagged and made faces. He got quite cross when I refused to eat my plate’s worth, and told me I was being ridiculous, and then to prove a point served himself a bit more grey slop. He is a brave and noble man.
I suddenly remembered what it was like being a child and having to eat food that made you physically gag, and felt a stab of surprised sympathy for all the kids at my table over the years who have had the same response to some (perfectly good, I might add) dish I’ve served. Poor little beggars. Next time one of them convulses and makes vomit noises I shall take their plate away and give them ice cream.
Ugh. Bad food. I guess one good thing is to realise how shocking it is when it happens, which shows how generally well we eat.
There is, of course, a bucketload of dahl left, which Senor claims he will eat for lunch. But we shall see. Even the greatest nobility has its limits. To my mind, this is one occasion on which food waste is not only acceptable but the only humane course of action.
What about you? I doubt any of you have had any disasters recently, but any comforting anecdotes of calamities from the past that you’d like to share?
Michael on Julia’s legacy
August 4, 2009Does anyone in Australia understand the Julia Child adoration thing, or is this purely an American phenomenon?
I have known virtually nothing about her except her name – but in the New York Times this week is a long and lovely essay by the wonderful Michael Pollan about Julia Child, the first American TV chef, prompted by the new movie Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep as JC.
He muses about the changes in American home cooking and the influence of television upon it, starting with the way Julia Child apparently liberated a generation of American women from fear of cooking by dropping a potato pancake and then retrieving it and patching it back together – her show was live TV, after all.
Pollan is such an engaging writer (his book Second Nature, about gardens, was a big influence on me as I wrote my second novel The Submerged Cathedral, and his other books on food production and ethics, In Defence of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, are just as lively and provoking), and this essay is a beauty.
Pollan’s essay goes on to discuss the exponential rise of television cookery, and how American studies show that people spend more time watching cooking being done than doing it themselves (particularly interesting given the popularity of Master Chef here, and the talk about how it’s supposedly got people back into the kitchen. I wonder…).
Pollan writes that there are oodles of cooking shows on US television, but says of many of them:
These shows stress quick results, shortcuts and superconvenience but never the sort of pleasure — physical and mental — that Julia Child took in the work of cooking: the tomahawking of a fish skeleton or the chopping of an onion, the Rolfing of butter into the breast of a raw chicken or the vigorous whisking of heavy cream. By the end of the potato show, Julia was out of breath and had broken a sweat, which she mopped from her brow with a paper towel. (Have you ever seen Martha Stewart break a sweat? Pant? If so, you know her a lot better than the rest of us.) Child was less interested in making it fast or easy than making it right, because cooking for her was so much more than a means to a meal. It was a gratifying, even ennobling sort of work, engaging both the mind and the muscles. You didn’t do it to please a husband or impress guests; you did it to please yourself. No one cooking on television today gives the impression that they enjoy the actual work quite as much as Julia Child did. In this, she strikes me as a more liberated figure than many of the women who have followed her on television.
He also notes that Julia Child began her cooking show in the same year that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, and points out that although they could have been seen as adversaries, this wasn’t true: Child had an aversion to the word ‘housewife’ and treated cooking as a skill and an art, rather than another bit of household drudgery for women.
Anyway I could go on and on – but better for you to simply read this excellent essay here.
Then discover more about Julia Child here (or this fab Youtube video of her show here – it’s hilarious), and more here about the Nora Ephron movie (which in the way of this strange new world, originated from a blog. Yes, a food blog, called the Julie/Julia Project.).
I just watched the movie trailer and confess that I can’t wait!
Postscript – October 3 2009
Two more amusing additions to this post must be made.
First, this link to the beautifully narky Regina Schrambling at Slate, on ‘Why you’ll never cook from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking’.
And second, rather more entertainingly, The Defamer’s round-up of cranky food bloggers and their snooty dismissals of Julie Powell, the blogger whose work started the whole JC revival. Hilariously chock-full of envy and rage at their fellow blogger’s success, this stuff makes for rich reading. One namedropping post by a ‘trained chef’ even says, with disgust, “People who happen to eat and are able to type are now our new food experts”. Seems rather to miss the point of Julia Child’s taking cookery to the masses, no? Not to mention that the remark is written by a food blogger.
Anyway, all good for a laugh and found here.
Bon appetit!
Moore fictional food from Lorrie
June 20, 2009
Another taste of food-in-fiction from the superlative Lorrie Moore, still from this old collection Like Life.
This from a story called Joy, where Jane works in a midwestern shopping mall, in a cheese shop called Swedish Isle. Her job is to proffer samples of cheese spreads and dips on crackers out in front of the shop.
She liked the customer contact. “Care to try our chive-dill today?” she would ask brightly. She felt like Molly Malone, only friendlier and no cockles or mussels; no real seafood for miles. This was the deep Midwest. Meat sections in the grocery stores read: BEEF, PORK, and FISH STICKS.
“Free?” people would ask and pick up a cracker or a bread square from her plastic tray.
“Sure is.” She would smile and watch their faces as they chewed. If it was a man she thought was handsome, she’d say, “No. A million dollars,” and then giggle in the smallest, happiest way. Sometimes the beggars – lost old hippies and mall musicians- would come in and line up, and she would feed them all, like Dorothy Day in a soup kitchen.
Jane runs into an old high school friend in the mall.
“Bridey, you look great. What have you been up to?” It seemed a ridiculous question to ask of someone you hadn’t seen since high school, but there it was.
“Well, last year I fell madly in love,” Bridey said with great pride. This clearly was on the top of her list, and her voice suggested it was a long list. “And we got married, and we moved back to town after roughing it on the South Side of Chicago since forever. It’s great to be back here, I can tell you.” Bridey helped herself to a cheddar sample and then another one. The cheese in her mouth stuck between her front teeth in a pasty, yellowish mortar, and when she swallowed and smiled back at Jane, well, again, there it was, like something unfortunate but necessary.
At the end, Jane’s colleague Heffie quits work at the shop, “but the day she did she brought in a bottle of champagne, and she and Jane drank it right there on the job”.
They poured it into Styrofoam cups and sipped it, crouching behind the deli case, craning their necks occasionally to make sure no customers had wandered in.
“To our little lives,” toasted Heffie.
“On the prairie,” added Jane. The champagne fizzed against the roof of her mouth. She warmed it there, washing it around, until it flattened, gliding down her throat, a heated, sweet water.
She and Heffie opened a jar of herring in a cream sauce, which had a messily torn label. They dug their fingers in and ate. They sang a couple of Christmas carols they both knew, and sang them badly.
…
Inside the deli case, the dry moons of the cheeses and the mucky spreads usual plastic tags: HELLO MY NAME IS. Jane reached in and plucked out one that said, HELLO MY NAME IS Swiss Almond Whip.
“Here,” she said to Heffie. “This is for you.” Heffie laughed, gravelly and loud, then took the tag and stuck it in one of her barrettes, up near the front, where the hair was vanishing, and the deforested scalp shone back in surprise, pale but constant, beneath.
Long extract, I know, but I couldn’t resist.
Rice is (gulp) nice?
June 9, 2009
The Empress and her Three-of-a-Kind column today made me gag, I’m afraid.
I’m sure all of you will love it, but childhood memory makes me distinctly bilious at the mention of rice pudding.
If it weren’t for this (literally) gut-level aversion of mine, Steph’s column would be interesting for the cultural combo of what different folks do with rice pud, but sadly since the age of twelve I have not been able look, smell, hear of the stuff.
(That, and much worse, bread-and-butter pudding. Ugh, even typing that made my reverse-peristalsis-muscles twitch. Nobody in my whole family can go there, thanks to a visiting stand-in mother while our mum was in hospital for some procedure or other, probably either another baby or varicose vein surgery – no wonder she died young! – and this woman must have done something godawful with B&BP; none of us know what the problem was, but we all knew even then it was horrific and have never eaten it since).
Anyhoo for some reason – probably the combination of five whining children, hungry husband, no money and the sedative effect of seven stomachfuls of stodgy carbohydrate – our mum was a big fan of the rice pud. Too big a fan. But I ate every bowl, of course. Read the rest of this entry ?
When your fingers do the baulking
May 26, 2009
Finger food fiasco - the kind of creation that ends with an olive in the cleavage (& a toothpick in the chef's eye).
Note to party caterers: when finger food can’t be eaten with the fingers, it’s not finger food.
Very enjoyable couple of hours at the A&U publishing party the other night, at which NSW Premier Nathan Rees gave a short and very welcome speech about his support for territorial copyright and opposition to parallel importation of books, and then enthusiastically nattered to writers. Imagine – a politician who likes to speak publicly about how much he enjoys fiction, and then wants to talk at length to the kinds of people who write it. All a bit of a shock.
Anyhoo, twas a great party all round, except the finger food was rather too frequently impossible to eat with the fingers – so that when a young woman appeared with a huge tray of food, a gaggle of starving people gathered round her and stared down at this big platter of something scattered with a wet-looking salad and what appeared to be lentils. Then everyone simply looked confused, then disappointed, said ‘ah, no thanks’ and stuck their noses back in their glasses.
It was the image of how one should eat it that put one off: just scoop up the bits in two hands, perhaps? Or tilt one’s face to the platter and bite it off the surface, like bobbing for apples? Bizarre.
Then there is the mix-of-things-on-an-Asian-flat-spoon approach, which I have no qualms about, provided the mound of stuff is able to be got into the gob in one go. Having a big gob, I managed better than many more delicate guests who nibbled round the edges of a high pyramid of squiddy-salady stuff, neck extended turtle-style to avoid getting food on themselves when bits of it inevitably began falling. Read the rest of this entry ?
More bad literary food
May 5, 2009
I have found a fellow bad-food-in-fiction-admirer in Geoff Nicholson, with his nice piece on literary food in the New York Times this month. In his mini-essay, Go Ahead. Spoil My Appetite he says:
I’ve realized that the moments of literary eating I like best are the ones in which the characters suffer because of their food. In “Gravity’s Rainbow,” for instance, there’s an early scene in which the wartime inhabitants of a London maisonette enjoy bananas served in myriad forms, including mashed bananas “molded in the shape of a British lion rampant.” This is good stuff, but the truly magnificent scene in the book has Tyrone Slothrop sampling various hideous English candies, flavored with the likes of quinine, pepsin, eucalyptus, tapioca, until, choking, he’s offered a Meggezone, “the least believable of English coughdrops.” This is a real product, a nasty little black lozenge, still available, and if my childhood memory is reliable, Pynchon’s description of its effects — “Polar bears seek toenail-holds up the freezing frosty-grape alveolar clusters in his lungs” — gets it about right.
Give me a freakin break dept.
March 13, 2009
As a schoolfriend’s mother used to say when exasperated, JesusMaryandJoseph, I wish I was in heaven.
This article from the excellent Slate magazine had me retching over my breakfast. Apparently, in the States, there is a new food fad – small children as restaurant critics, chefs and food columnists. The New York freakin Times Magazine, for God’s sake,
has pledged one-quarter of its monthly food real estate to the kitchen exploits of a 4-year-old, Dexter Wells, who just happens to be the firstborn of the newspaper’s food editor, Pete Wells. Read the rest of this entry ?
Adriatic Salad and other fictional foods
March 4, 2009
When my novel The Children came out I received several very gratifying emails from readers who particularly liked the family barney in the fictional country town of Rundle’s RSL Club restaurant, which featured an escalating argument between two adult siblings, Mandy and Stephen, sparked by a dish on the menu described thus: ‘Adriatic Salad: Cajun prawns, sweet potato, snow peas and lime mayonnaise.’
For some reason, lots of people liked the sound of this dish. A couple of people even wanted the recipe. That salad actually exists, in a motel restaurant in a country town that will remain nameless, where I did a bit of research for the book – it seemed too good to be true, so I pinched it. I quite enjoyed writing that scene actually – and now I find myself scanning menus hopefully at all times now for fictional fodder. Tricky though - it would be so easy to repeat oneself, but there’s such a wealth of material out there I’m not sure I will be able to resist bad menu items for the book I’m writing now (I’ve got three words to say to you, Kimmy: Gourmet Pizza Kitchen).
On the topic of food in fiction, here is a wonderful New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik about cooking real dishes after their fictional appearances in books, with varying results. He says, for example, of the eponymous dish from Gunter Grass’s Nobel-provoking novel The Flounder:
Eating Günter Grass’s flounder was actually like reading one of his novels: nutritious, but a little pale and starchy.
