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Peter Ross has been archiving and cross-indexing the post-it notes, scraps of paper, and marginalia he’s found in the massive collection of Elizabeth David‘s cookbooks that went to the London Guildhall library. What he’s discovered is that Elizabeth David liked to write notes to herself and often, they were very mean.
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“Waverly Root is a pitiful phony.”
- scribbled in the margins of The Cooking of Italy by Waverley Root
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“The kind of pretentious rubbish that has brought French cooking into disrepute as a snobs preserve.”
- from the margins of Full and Plenty by Maura Laverty
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“Italian salad p50. Sounds just about the most revolting dish ever devised.”
- from a post-it note in Ulster Fare by the Belfast Women’s Institute Club
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Ah, the true meanness of the straight-shooter. Sometimes I think the food world needs a bit more of it these days.
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The recipe for Italian Salad and more on the marginalia of Elizabeth David, food writer extraordinaire.
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Everyone always wants to find ways to make vegetables more exciting for kids so that they get into the habit of eating them at an early age because habits formed as a child last a lifetime. Now, some genius catering chefs in the UK have found the way: drug food! First up, their snortable asparagus powder, served at their events chopped into a line on a mirror with a rolled up $100 bill as a utensil. For real!
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Inspired by their example, I’m already considering a Fall menu that features Calming Carrot Soup, heated tableside in an old spoon and then injected directly into your arm, Huffable Hothouse Tomato Salad – aerosol tomatoes sprayed into a plastic bag and then immediately inhaled – and Smokeable Cauliflower and Waffles, served in a giant glass bong shaped like a wizard. I’m even going to change my pricing model so that your first meal is free, and then the price increases sharply from there. And I’m looking at a food truck operation that will allow me to locate my business in high school parking lots or maybe I’ll just do a pop-up in some schoolyards and public parks. Parents will love this! They’re going to quickly discover, now that plain old vegetables have the allure of dangerous narcotics, their kids just won’t be able to get enough of them.
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“This cauliflower is, like, totally cashed. Can we get another?”
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For those who don’t know what Modernist Cuisine is, I’ll fill you in. For those who came here for the box porn, just slow down for a minute so everyone can catch up. Modernist Cuisine is a self-published cookbook from Nathan Myhrvold, former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, and a guy who holds something like 100 patents. A few years ago, on his own dime, Myhrvold, Chris Young, Maxime Bilet and a staff of 20 decided to reinvent modern cooking. The result is Modernist Cuisine, a six volume, 2,438 page cookbook that sells for $625 (you can get it on Amazon for only $461.62). You can read all about it on their website. It’s been an object of much speculation and desire, and multiple delays have caused pulses to race and palms to get sweaty as the actual street date nears. I pre-ordered my copy months ago, and last night I came home to find a giant box waiting for me.
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Box porn and a look at the book itself inside.
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We’re in the middle of a new dining trend, and no one even realized it. Carnival Food! New York City chefs are cooking just like the vendors at county fairs. And it’s not just New York. Some of the most popular shows on the Food Network and the Travel Channel (judging by the fact that they always seem to be on) are Diners, Drive-ins & Dives and Man vs Food – both of them odes to Carnival Food. And here in the wicked city I’ve got Fennel Funnel Cake on the menu (and even a fancy version of Cracker Jacks). So every time you hear about some new burger mutation, towering porcine gutbuster, bizarre dessert, or unlawful hybrid of savory and sweet at a classy restaurant, just remember that county fair vendors got there first.
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Chocolate-covered bacon!
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The Indianapolis State Fair offers Doughnut Burgers
and so does RUB BBQ right here in NYC.
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Or have your Doughnut Burger with bacon, egg and cheese!
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Fried Coke!
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Fried Twinkie Lattes!
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Pork Parfait!
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And last, but not least…Fried Butter!
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We eat our food out of trucks. We eat it while walking down the street. We eat it at ourdoor beer gardens. Just like we’re at a county fair!
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Poutine! Cone Pizza! The KFC Double Down! All Carnival Food!
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So let’s give credit where credit is due. The most influential chef in NYC cuisine right now might just be Dennis Reas.
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In the war against the hegemonic patriarchy, Dirt Candy has a new friend: Feminist Hulk.
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Hulk smash gender discrimination!
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Truly inspiring tweets from the world’s only truly feminist superhero.
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Sometimes you come across a website that hates something so specific, and hates it with such passion, that you have to step back in admiration. Train Pigs is such a site. Whoever put this site together is repulsed – scandalized! horrified! – by people who eat on the subway and so they’ve put together a gallery of photos of people sucking up food on the dirty, dirty NYC subway. But it’s not the photos that won me over, it’s the captions, which are little nuggets of molten bile, barely cool enough to read without burning your eyes. Sample: “Parents who are train pigs, have children who are train pigs.” and “Thanks for the daring shot of this man eating broccoli and garlic. What a vile, disgusting creature.”
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Go, go to TrainPigs and bask in the hate. It is truly refreshing, like a Finnish sauna for your soul!
For Christmas this year I received one of the coolest and most baffling presents I’ve ever gotten. My sister-in-law and brother-in-law (sort of, they’re not married but have been together forever, plus they’ve got a fire pit behind their house and do yoga and ceramics together so that’s like being married) go down to Costa Rica all the time. They’re the kind of people who, instead of having a retirement plan they buy a plot of cheap land in Costa Rica, plant 1,000 hard wood trees, hire a family to live on the land and take care of it and plan to cash it in about 20 years from now when they’re ready to retire and the trees are mature. They’re like hippies who are good with money.
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So while they were down putting in their tree farm this year, my brother-in-law bought this giant hunk of raw cacao paste.
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He gave it to me for Christmas. It came wrapped in leaves.
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It’s really awesome, but my question is: what do I do with it? It tastes bitter and dark and intense. I know what to do with it in general but I want to do something really fun with it. But what? I guess I could glue on two googly eyes and sleep with it like a teddy bear but I’d like to have a plan for it that involves cooking.
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Raw cacao, you complete me.
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Annnnd…we’re back. Dirt Candy re-opens tonight and resumes normal business hours.
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A Parisian door expresses the joy
I feel over my vacation ending.
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In case anyone’s interested, Paris was great (duh). One of the highlights was a meal at Shan Gout, a Sichuan restaurant that was totally empty when we showed up and stayed that way all night. The meal, however, was amazing. We basically ordered the entire menu and it was just the cleanest, freshest most intense flavors. An amuse of sliced green apples with basil was incredibly simple but unexpected and truly great.
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I have a huge amount of respect for Michael Pollan and I think he’s a great thinker who has done an enormous amount to draw attention to some serious issues regarding America and how it eats. His basic rule about eating pretty much says it all:
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“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
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And I agree with almost every single one of his expanded eating rules.
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But his piece in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch” left me cold. Pegged to the publicity campaign for the new movie, JULIE AND JULIA it read like a collection of received wisdom and talking points that added up to far less than the sum of its parts. It brought up more questions than it answered, and while that may be what he intended, I found that its relevance was ultimately undermined by the rose-tinted nostalgia that colored the entire piece.
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Julia Child has no time for nostalgia.
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The award goes to A380 in Taiwan. Opening in November, 2008 it’s an airplane-themed restaurant (named after the Airbus A380) that serves airplane food.
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