The great literary genius of the twentieth century slowly wasted away over the last two decades of his life as he tried to capture--in his hundreds of thousands of words--the acrobatics of his brain in those fugitive seconds during which its most secret holds were unlocked by the passing savor of a tea-soaked bite of cake.  If the sweep of the longest novel in the history of the Western World is equivalent to the mental experience of ingesting a single crumb of pastry, what hope is there in bothering with words at all?  The cake would seem to have an insurmountable advantage.  So we enlist experience to speak for us; we draw from the well of wordless vocabulary to express that which words are too clumsy to grasp. 

You and I have lived these years together, and across those years some meaning is etched into our common memory.  Like the memory of a shared meal, the first I ever made for us, and who we were when we sat down together around it, being young and falling in love.  And eventually I decided that one night, one important night, I would prepare the same meal, to explain why I am here, to give proof of my sincerity, to remind us of how this -- all of this -- has come to pass.  And though I might fumble the words, I knew you would understand.

It's the life we live together that lets us understand one another without words--despite them.  The meaning of our lives is recorded in the experiences we share.  Each token of our common memory is a private madeleine.  They bring us back, full circle, to where we once were, and we can live it all again, though wiser now, and wordlessly understand.  That's why I gave you a token on that important night.  That's the meaning of the ring.

Summer is here, and I want to have a barbecue.  But I still live in an airshaft apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which means that trying to set up a smoky hardwood fire to cook meat is likely to end in some combination of eviction, arrest, and   gruesome, painful death.  We city dwellers have a need for great barbecue, but with our few urban smoke houses charging Wall Street prices, our public spaces strictly limiting our opportunities for outdoor cookery, and only one six-hour barbecue festival a year, how are we to satisfy our inborn American cravings for sweet, salty, smoky animal flesh?

We must improvise.  Last week for the Fourth of July, I jury-rigged a faux barbecue right in the comfort of my 20-square-foot kitchen. I say faux barbecue because barbecue, by definition, is meat cooked over the warm sweet smoke of hardwood.  In cramped indoor spaces, we must seek alternatives, and the most well-known substitute for a hardwood fire is liquid smoke.

What we think of today as liquid smoke has been with us at least since 1938, when Saladine E. Colgin patented a process for producing

a condimental substance designed to be incorporated as an ingredient of sauces or to be employed in the cooking or table preparation of foodstuffs and particularly meats, for imparting to them the well known "barbecue" or smoke flavor characteristic of comestibles and particularly meats which have been subjected to the condensation of natural smoke from a hickory fire.

Colgin also claimed to have invented such a condiment which was "inexpensive to manufacture, wholesome in nature and which can be applied with gratifying results to small quantities of meat or other foodstuffs by persons whose skill does not exceed that of the average housewife."  Colgin's invention was offered as an improvement over the so-called "liquid smoke" products of his day, which were nothing more than the liquid that was distilled off during the process of burning hardwood into charcoal.  This liquid, known as pyroligneous acid or wood vinegar, does contain the compounds that give barbecue its smoky flavor, but it also contains other substances such as tars and methanol.  Colgin's innovation was to add salt to the wood vinegar to precipitate out the tar, then fix the remaining aromatic flavor compounds by the addition of caramel before distilling off the harmful alcohols and phenols.  Colgin's company continues to produce liquid smoke by this method to this day, and claims to be the nation's largest seller of the product.

Liquid smoke may be a joke to purists, but to the indoor barbecuer it is one of the only tools at our disposal.  Another helpful substitute for an open fire is smoked spices, particularly smoked chile peppers such as chipotle (smoked jalapeno) or ancho (smoked poblano), which can be used in a dry rub.  A good dry rub for indoor barbecuing will contain one part kosher salt, one to two parts brown sugar (depending on your taste - I prefer my rub on the sweeter side), and one part mixed spices.  I add ground chipotle and/or ancho chile peppers to the spice components in my rub for their smoky flavor, but there are some vendors who sell (very expensive) smoked salts, and smoked paprika is also available.  On top of that, I usually add lots of garlic powder, onion powder, and whatever other spices I'm in the mood for (for a sweeter rub I might use a mix of cloves, allspice, nutmeg and mace; for an earthier Tex/Mex style rub I might use dried thyme, oregano, coriander, cumin and chili powder; for a rub with more bite I might use black pepper, mustard powder and cayenne; the possibilities are endless).

Which brings us to the big question:  how to go about cooking barbecue indoors.  The most important thing you need is a heavy dutch oven or large casserole with a tight-fitting lid.  Ordinarily you would use a cooking vessel like this to braise, but we're going to use it to simulate a smoke pit.  Rub your meat liberally all over with your dry rub, reserving a few tablespoons of the rub for later, and let it sit for an hour or so.  Meanwhile, coarsely chop 3-4 large onions and scatter them around the bottom of the dutch oven, adding a few peeled, crushed garlic cloves.  Your meat will rest on this bed of aromatic vegetables, which will confit in the fat as it cooks off, so you want to make sure the onions are a few inches deep.  This confit will become the base of your barbecue sauce.

Stack your meat (I use spare ribs) on top of the onions, and pour a teaspoon or two of liquid smoke and a tablespoon or two of cider vinegar around the bottom of the dutch oven.  As you cook, these liquids will vaporize and penetrate your meat.  Seal the pot with its lid and put the whole thing into a 250 degree oven.  It is crucial that the oven be no hotter than this, as anything warmer could cause the sugar in your rub and the onions to burn.  Cook for 2-3 hours without opening the lid, and your ribs should be tender and delicious, and ready to eat just as they are.  It would be a shame, however, to waste those lovely browned onions and garlic sitting in a pool of pork fat at the bottom of your pan.  Fortunately, they will help make a killer Kansas City style barbecue sauce.

To make the sauce, start by pouring off and discarding as much of the fat as you can, while reserving the onions and garlic.  Next, deglaze your dutch oven with about a half cup of cider vinegar, scraping the bottom to release all the caramelized bits.  Add to this some brown sugar (about 1/2 cup worth), 2 cups or so of tomato puree or plain tomato sauce (I use Hunt's), a teaspoon or two of liquid smoke, and the remaining spice rub.  If you like (and I do), you can add a shot of bourbon as well.  Once the tomato sauce has had a few minutes to cook, put this mixture into a blender and process it until smooth, then adjust the seasoning for the right level of saltiness (salt), sourness (vinegar), and sweetness (brown sugar).

Serve your ribs dry with this sauce on the side and accompanied by the traditional side dishes of your choice (I made some braised kale with smoky ham and mashed potatoes).  While this urban alternative may not stand up to authentic smoke-pit barbecue, paired with a glass of bourbon and a cold beer it comes just close enough to scratch that summer itch.

On the High Holidays surrounding the Jewish New Year the traditional braided challah is fashioned in round. The special shape is meant to symbolize the cycle of the years: as one ends another begins. It's the kind of simple truth that is equivalent to beauty, and we bake it into our food. And because this remains a foodblog, I'm here to tell you how. Thanks for sticking around for the past two years.

Recipe: Challah

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 lbs. unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 2 tbsp. sugar
• 1/4 cup honey
• 2 eggs plus 2 egg yolks
• 2 pkgs. dry-active yeast
• 1/3 cup olive oil
  
• One egg for egg wash

Heat 1/2 cup of the water to between 100 and 110 degrees. Stir yeast into warm water and allow to soften for 5-10 minutes.

Meanwhile, mix together remaining water, honey, oil, eggs and yolks. Stir in flour and sugar and add yeast mixture. Knead or stir in an electric mixer equipped with a dough hook on low speed for about 15 minutes, or until smooth. Add a small amount of additional flour while kneading if necessary to achieve a smooth consistency.

If you're a traditionalist, pull off a 1/20th portion of the dough now and set it aside. According to Jewish law this is the priestly portion; since the destruction of the Temple it has traditionally been burned in the oven (typically by wrapping it directly around the front of the oven rack) during baking. Set the remaining dough in an oiled bowl and cover with a towel. Allow to rise in a warm place until doubled in size, approximately 90 minutes.

Turn out the dough, punch it down, knead it for a minute or two, and set it back in a covered bowl to double in size again, approximately 60 minutes. This is a good time to preheat the oven to 325-350 degrees.

Turn out the dough and punch it down again, then separate it into two equal portions (this recipe is for two loaves). If making a braided challah, separate each half of the dough into three equal portions, roll them out into ropes of dough, pinch them together on one end and braid them, pinching the ends together when the braid is complete. If making a round New Year's challah, roll each half of the dough out into one thick rope, and coil it around itself in an outward spiral, tucking the end underneath the loaf. Set the loaves on a baking sheet lined with either a silpat or parchment paper, and allow them to rise until 1 1/2 times their original size, about 45 minutes.

Make an egg wash by beating an egg with a small amount of water. When the loaves are fully risen, brush them all over with the egg wash and place them in the center rack of the oven. Bake for 30 minutes or until the loaves make a hollow sound when tapped on the bottom. Cool on a wire rack until ready to serve.

Now, on to why you should vote for Kathy: Check out the wicked po' boy she put together for the first round of the competition. If you want to see more spectacular kitchen adventures like these, be sure to keep Kathy in the running by giving generously:

Kathy's Po' Boy Entry:

Reading about the first challenge, my first reaction was, "but I've never eaten a po' boy before!" How on earth could I possibly do justice to something I had never even tried? Armed with only the most hazy idea of what a po' boy might consist of (something about seafood and a long roll…maybe?) I went in search of more information. I thumbed through cookbooks, searched the web and asked anyone I could think of 1) if they had ever had one and 2) what made it really good. Then the planning began.

I wanted to make something close to whatever a "classic" po' boy might be, if only so I could try one for myself for the first time. I decided to go with fried shrimp as the filling and a remoulade sauce as accompaniment. But the bread was just as important. How to find something light with just the right crunchy exterior?

Bernard Clayton's "New Complete Book of Breads" to the rescue. I flipped right past all the classic French bread recipes and settled on "Blue Ribbon French Bread", a loaf enriched with small amounts of nonfat milk, butter and sugar. This would hopefully give the right texture and flavor to complement the shrimp and other fillings. The dough was a little sticky but pretty easy to work with.

They came out just as I had imagined – light, chewy, with just a bit of crunch in the crust. Now, on to the remoulade. But first I needed a good mayonnaise.

Note: this was my first attempt at mayonnaise, outside of opening a jar of Best Foods. I can't even think of a good reason why I haven't made any in the past, other than I've never been a big mayo fan and didn't see the point. But this sandwich deserved the best, and that was not going to come out of any jar.

Now I understand why people love mayonnaise. Truly glorious stuff that I wanted to dollop or smear or just, well, taste over and over to properly ensure quality. I'm all about quality control. I almost hated to add everything else so this lovely sauce could become a proper remoulade. In went the celery, green onion, garlic, mustard, parsley, ketchup, lemon juice, worcestershire sauce, hot sauce (Crystal, my favorite!), and salt. I had to try a little right then and it took all the self control I have not to polish off the whole bowl with a spoon then and there. Off it went to sit in the refrigerator so all those flavors could marry properly. But first, a close up:

Finally, it was time to prepare the shrimp. I mixed them with some mustard thinned with a little bit of milk, then drained them. Off they went into a bag filled with flour, cornmeal, salt, cayenne, and garlic powder, then off into the fryer for a quick dip to crisp up. At the same time I cooked up some Nimon Ranch applewood smoked bacon, This was a complete departure from anything remotely classic, but I thought the smokiness of the bacon would pair well with the sweetness of the shrimp. Once both were drained it was time for a test. I dipped one of the shrimp in a bit of remoulade and took a bite. Completely delicious. Then I tried a bite with a bit of bacon added. Even more delicious. The bacon played a perfect base note to the sweet, tender saltiness of the shrimp. Call me a heretic, but bacon would be in my po' boy sandwich.

I toasted the roll just enough to add another layer of crispness. On top of that, I slathered remoulade sauce with abandon. On top of this came butter lettuce and tomatoes fresh out of my neighbor's yard. Shrimp just out of the hot oil, still tender inside, were placed reverently on top. Then the bacon, tucked carefully between the plump, crispy shrimp. Last came the top slice, also covered in that wonderful remoulade.

As I bit down, all I could think was, "why haven't I ever eaten a po' boy before?" And more importantly, "how soon can I eat one again?"

What did I tell you? Look at that po' boy! How could you not want to see more New Orleans delicacies like this? Well, it's all in your hands: go straight to the Gourmet Survivor donations page and vote for Kathy. Remember: Five dollars per vote, vote early and often, and don't forget to put Kathy's name in the comments for your donation.

I've never been to New Orleans. A year ago Lisa blogged her trip there, and the city obviously deserves to be celebrated. But today there is still too much suffering, too much death, and too little peace to start the dancing. There is work to be done to ease the survivors' suffering, and to bring the too, too many dead to rest.

Adam over at The Amateur Gourmet is organizing a foodblogger charity effort that should be unveiled this week. In the meantime, please donate what you can to the Red Cross.

The end of the rhubarb season generally runs into the beginning of the strawberry season, which is probably why these plants always seem to go together in a pie. Their flavors match pretty well too; the sourness of rhubarb requires a lot of sugar and some contrasting flavor notes to make it enjoyable, and fresh ripe strawberries provide both. Conversely, delicate strawberries don't stand up to well to the heat of baking , but rhubarb contributes both body and a sour background flavor base that allows their sweetness and unique aromatic characteristics to shine.

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

Ingredients:

For the Crust:

• 1/4 lb. Lard, chilled
• 4 tbsp. (half a stick) unsalted butter, chilled
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/4 cup water
• ice

For the Filling:

• 1 quart (2 pints) fresh strawberries
• 1 lb. rhubarb stalks
• 1 to 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 3 tbsp corn starch
• 2 tbsp. butter

Procedure:

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
2. Stir the salt into the water until dissolved, then add a few cubes of ice. Let stand to chill.
3. Cut the lard and butter into half-inch cubes and place them in a chilled bowl. Add the flour and roll the chunks of fat in the flour with your fingertips, mixing them and breaking them up until the flour looks like wet sand and there are a few chunks of fat of varying size remaining interspersed in the flour.
4. Drizzle half the ice water over the flour and stir it in gently with a fork. Try to bring the dough together with your hands. If it won't hold together, keep drizzling in ice water and stirring it in until the dough is just moist enough to hold together. Gather the dough into a ball, place it in a plastic bag, and put it in the refrigerator for at least a half hour.
5. Meanwhile, wash and dry the rhubarb and trim off the ends (the leaves are poisonous; the roots are tough), and cut the stalks into one-inch chunks. Wash and dry the strawberries, hull them and halve them, and add them to the rhubarb. Mix in the sugar (using more or less depending on the sweetness of the strawberries) and the cornstarch, and toss all the ingredients together. Let the filling stand at room temperature for at least twenty minutes, stirring occasionally.
6. Remove the crust dough from the refrigerator and let it stand at room temperature for a few minutes to soften. Roll it out on a floured surface to a thickness of about 1/8 inch. Gently line a greased pie pan with the dough, and cut away any excess, leaving an overhang of about 1/2 inch. Collect the scraps and refrigerate them; they can be re-rolled and used to garnish the top of the pie (for example, in a lattice pattern) or saved for another use.
7. Flute the edge of the pie using your fingertips, for example by pinching the overhang with your thumb on one side and your index and middle fingers straddling your thumb on the other side, to create an offset pattern. If the dough gets warm and too soft to work with, refrigerate it for twenty minutes then continue.
8. Stir the filling one last time and pour it into the pie crust. Cut the 2 tbsp. butter into small knobs and dot it over the filling. If you are using your scraps of pie dough to garnish the top of the pie, do so now.
9. Put the pie pan on a baking sheet with raised sides (to catch any bubbling over) and place it in the center rack of the preheated oven. Bake at 375 degrees for 30-40 minutes or until the filling has boiled and the crust is golden brown. Allow to cool for at least 20 minutes before serving. Serve with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a sprig of mint.
   ]]> tag:www.froststreet.net,2005:/blog//1.162 2005-06-20T17:14:00Z 2007-07-09T15:44:53Z
   I have been standing in front of a basket in the produce section of the Columbus Circle Whole Foods for two minutes. There is no identifying name card or price tag on it. If you didn't know any better, you...
   jeremy I have been standing in front of a basket in the produce section of the Columbus Circle Whole Foods for two minutes. There is no identifying name card or price tag on it. If you didn't know any better, you probably wouldn't even notice the contents of this particular basket. But even though Whole Foods has neglected to put a price on them, I have an idea of their going rate, and I have been eyeing them covetously for what seems like an eternity, gently picking them up one at a time to estimate their weight as I run and re-run cost-benefit analyses in my head.

   Whole Foods is selling fresh cèpes, also known as porcinis, the king of mushrooms. They are showing some wear and age, slightly browned and wrinkled--a copule of them are even bruised. But they smell like a hardwood fire in a thousand-year-old forest after the rain, and they are enormous. I have never seen whole, fresh porcini mushrooms for sale in New York. I remember reading somewhere that porcinis are being intermittently foraged in Oregon, but I think most of them still come from Europe, and then only in dried form. Will I ever have this chance again? How much could they possibly cost? In another aisle, chanterelles are going for over twenty dollars a pound. Could porcinis be as much as forty? How many could I afford to buy?

   I walk up to the checkout aisle, my covetousness turned to shame. I have four huge cèpes in my basket. I picked up a few other items too, in an effort to justify to myself what I expect to be a grocery bill of over fifty dollars by lowering the mean per-item cost. As the clerk tallies my purchases, I brace myself for an embarrassing total. But it doesn't come. Instead, the clerk asks me for less than fifteen dollars for my mushrooms, some assorted greens and herbs, and a modest cut of meat. I pay her and take my groceries into the subway, wondering if I've been had. Arriving home, I take out the mystery item and examine it thoroughly. They still look like porcinis to me. How did I get out of Whole Foods with these things for less than twenty bucks?

   I examine my receipt. There is no entry for porcinis. Instead, there is a charge of just over three dollars for just over a pound of portobello mushrooms. Now I know that it's the checkout clerk, not I, who's been had. Portobellos are easily distinguished from porcinis by looking at the underside of their caps. Where portobellos have dark, brittle gills underneath, porcini, being members of the genus boletus, have no gills, but rather a spongy network of microscopic pores through which they disseminate their spores. My shame now turns to guilt, as I realize that the checkout clerk simply didn't recognize what I was trying to buy, and mistakenly charged me for a far less expensive item than the one I was actually purchasing. Almost immediately, I begin rationalizing my good fortune by recalling law school lectures about unilateral mistakes of fact, but mostly I'm just overjoyed that I was able to spot these prizes and acquire them so cheaply. I am somewhat comforted by the fact that the checkout clerk's mistake is unlikely to be discovered, and thus that my gain will not come at her expense.

   I use the caps of my practically-free fresh porcini to make a hearty ragout, coarsely dicing them and sautéeing them in olive oil with garlic and thyme, adding a bit of homemade chicken stock, sea salt, black pepper, and a dash of sherry vinegar. The ragout, served on slices of crusty bread, is a magnificent and rare meal in itself. And the experience is a vindication for my sometimes overbearing, sometimes pedantic, sometimes snobbish attention to gastronomy. Knowledge has value, and in this case my knowledge (or the poor checkout clerk's lack thereof) carried a price. When I contemplate a lifetime of seeking out this type of knowledge and account for the hidden pleasures it allows me to discover, I have no doubt that my life will be richer for the effort. More often than not, my exploration and experimentation leads to disappointment or frustration, but every once in a while it yields a moment of perfect, sublime satisfaction. On balance, it's a price I'm more than willing to pay.

   ]]> tag:www.froststreet.net,2005:/blog//1.161 2005-06-10T15:49:49Z 2007-07-09T15:44:53Z
   50 Clinton Street New York, NY 10002 (212) 477-2900 My youngest brother is in culinary school. After years of preparing for a secure but unfulfilling white-collar career, he said to hell with it and followed his passion. He's happier now...
   jeremy 50 Clinton Street
   New York, NY 10002
   (212) 477-2900

   My youngest brother is in culinary school. After years of preparing for a secure but unfulfilling white-collar career, he said to hell with it and followed his passion. He's happier now than he's ever been, and a couple of weeks ago it was his birthday. Because courage like his should be rewarded, and because the allocation of life's material pleasures to those who lack such courage is as commonplace as it is fundamentally unjust, my other brother and I decided he deserved an extravagant night of New York gastronomy. One destination came to mind immediately.

   Walking down Clinton Street on the Lower East Side, you could be forgiven for not noticing WD-50. Situated next-door to a unisex hair salon with a bright pink sign, the restaurant's facade is an unassuming plane of brick, glass and wood. The only identifying mark is a bronze-on-bronze panel perpendicular to the featureless oak door, so subtle you can't read it from more than three feet away. Inside is a sleek dining room in which all axes lead to the open wall in the back, where chef Wylie Dufresne--unmistakable with his signature ponytail and mutton-chop sideburns--bounds about his immaculate kitchen. He is busy creating the most challenging fare in Manhattan.

   The restaurant I have most often heard WD-50 compared to is Per Se, and the comparison is more fair than you might expect. Dufresne certainly has the chops to go toe-to-toe with Keller, having cut his teeth as sous-chef to Keller's four-star rival Jean-Georges Vongerichten. And both Dufresne and Keller have a penchant for joke dishes: deconstructions of old culinary saws that elevate them to the level of haute cuisine. But Keller's gags, confined as they are by the champagne wishes of his clientele, always come off a bit too precious--his "macaroni and cheese" topped with butter-poached lobster; his "oysters and pearls" sporting a half-ounce of osetra caviar. Dufresne, in contrast, is unabashedly honest in his references to the Jewish delicatessens of his neighborhood--a tongue sandwich becomes pickled tongue with fried mayonnaise (WD-50's most famous dish); corned beef on rye with mustard becomes corned duck on rye crisps with mustard. There is no layering on of truffles or cream or foie gras, nor is there any need. Indeed, the foie gras offering at WD-50, often cited as a disappointment by critics, has very little to do with the foie gras, which is prepared perfectly. Rather, the smooth, cool, buttery liver is competing with the sourness and bitterness of dried grapefruit pulp and the eerie discontinuity of pale liquid caramel infused with dried seaweed. For Dufresne, the luxury of foie gras, like the comfort of a deli sandwich, is simply a frame of reference for experimentation. And the point of experimentation in his kitchen is not simply to please, but to challenge.

   When I say WD-50's food is the most challenging in Manhattan, I am not referring to the difficulty of its preparation (though it obviously is the product of the highest culinary skill). WD-50 is a challenging place to dine. There is no comfort food, no velvety cream sauce, no oozing ganache, no porterhouse steak. Flavors are stripped bare and placed in close proximity where they are free to behave as they will. Tender, meaty octopus tangles with almonds and pesto. Rich dark mole is reduced to a transfer-strip of "paper", to be judiciously combined with a juicy roast chicken. Pork belly is served dry and firm, not so much the star of the dish as a meaty accent to the rotating cast of garnishes that are served with it. The sweet cherries of clafoutis are body-snatched by unctuous dark olives, while the eggy cake remains as an echo of the classic dessert. Nothing here is to be expected, everything is a revelation or an amusement. Even dishes that don't quite work are educational. WD-50 is a funhouse for foodies.

   For my brother's birthday, there was no better place to be than in this restaurant. What Wylie Dufresne does takes chutzpah. For every curious foodie that revels in the experience he offers, there will be three or four casual diners who are scared away. Fortunately for him, he has the backing of his his father (an experienced restaurateur) and his mentor Jean-Georges. As my brother learns the skills of his chosen trade, for one night he saw the limits to which they could be stretched by someone who isn't afraid to take risks. It was a lesson in courage for a kid who's already shown a lot of it. As for me, I'm happy I could help get him in the door. See, the world will always have its use for those of us who play it safe. We make possible the courage of those we love.

   ]]> tag:www.froststreet.net,2005:/blog//1.160 2005-06-08T16:09:53Z 2007-07-09T15:44:53Z
   For many of us it started our freshman year of college. We would cruise Bleecker Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, or Broadway between 116th and 106th Streets, not knowing any better, just looking for a place that would serve...
   jeremy For many of us it started our freshman year of college. We would cruise Bleecker Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, or Broadway between 116th and 106th Streets, not knowing any better, just looking for a place that would serve us. We learned to start early, before ten o'clock, before the bouncers manned the doors with their age-identifying flashlights. Once we were in and had a drink in hand, the bouncers just meant that we couldn't leave. Not that we wanted to. We stayed all night, drinking pitchers of the cheapest beer, shots of well tequila, and drinks whose names had words like "sour", "sex", and "screw" in them: drinks obviously designed for children trying to sound grown up. Drinks for people who don't really like drinking.

   The bars had different names, different decor, different addresses, but they were all essentially the same. The kids came either from Manhattan colleges or suburban highschools. The boys were frat-boy casual: denim and plaid wrapped around an old ratty t-shirt; 50 percent chance of a baseball cap. The girls aimed for sexy-not-slutty, usually missing the target to one side or another. They wore jeans that were tight in awkward places, tops that were either low-cut or short-hemmed. Each girl had an accessory to conceal whatever bodily insecurity she had recently discovered. Behind the bar there were twelve types of vodka but only two types of wine. The music and the crowds were loud enough that we couldn't really understand what anybody was saying, but there wasn't much need for verbal communication when an evening could only follow one of two patterns: (a) get drunk, then get laid; or (b) get drunk, then get sick.

   The crushing repetitiveness of this routine (coupled with the overwhelming prevalence of pattern (b) over pattern (a)) got tired quickly, and eventually we discovered a neighborhood spot, where they never carded us and they always had our favorite beer on tap, a spot that the bridge-and-tunnel kids and those obnoxious freshmen hadn't found yet. The jukebox was never too loud, and it had all our favorite songs on it, although whether they were our favorites before we heard them on this jukebox is something we can't remember. The regular bartender learned our names and slipped us a free drink from time to time. Drinking became less of a quest and more of a way to spend a quiet evening with friends and lovers, slowly nursing a beer and trying to develop a taste for whiskey, gradually slipping free of whatever obligations we thought were so oppressive at the time and sinking into a warm, fuzzy forgetfulness.

   By the time we enter the high-flying world of young Manhattan professionals, drinking has become a career skill. The bars are different from those of our college days only in the most superficial respects. The sticky wooden bar has been replaced with sleek back-lit glass; the rickety barstools with velvet upholstery, the din of college alt-rock with the din of last summer's hip-hop. We still can't hear what anybody is saying, but we've perfected the art of looking interested in conversations we neither understand nor care about. The men are business casual, all of them sporting identical flat-front pants and spread-collar shirts in a rainbow of pastels. There is not a baseball cap in sight; the over-under is on sport jackets. The women aim for sophisticated-but-sexy, still missing to one side or another. They now have entire wardrobes designed around the insecurities they nurtured in college. Their accessories are carefully calibrated to telegraph both the wealth they expect from the future and the youth that is fading into the past. En masse, we scour Manhattan for the latest twelve-dollar cocktail. Martinis, cosmos, mojitos, saketinis, sidecars; as soon as you develop a taste for one, it's time to move on. Those of us who worked so hard to learn to tolerate whiskey can now tolerate only the finest single-barrel bourbons and 18-year-old malts. Those of us who drank Bud Lite by the pitcher now sneer at anything less than a dozen microbrews on tap. It's the same game, it's just gotten more expensive to play.

   Most of us don't make it back to the neighborhood bar much anymore. We see less of friends and lovers, and our once-fuzzy forgetfulness has taken on a razor's edge. If we went back to our neighborhood joint today, would the regular bartender would still recognize us? And would we still have a taste for the house pour?

   ]]> tag:www.froststreet.net,2005:/blog//1.159 2005-03-02T15:10:04Z 2007-07-09T15:44:53Z
   It figures. I do a post about delivery food in Manhattan a week ago, and today the entire New York Times Dining Section is about... well, I'll give you three guesses. I wouldn't have thought that the Times dining desk...
   jeremy It figures. I do a post about delivery food in Manhattan a week ago, and today the entire New York Times Dining Section is about... well, I'll give you three guesses.

   I wouldn't have thought that the Times dining desk reads Frost Street, but now I'm not so sure. Personally, I think the Times is not approaching the phenomenon of delivery from much of a critical distance. Half the restaurant meals in the New York area are made for takeout. Delivery boys are praying for rain to buoy their three-dollar-an-hour wages. Why am I the only one who has a problem with all this?

   ]]> tag:www.froststreet.net,2005:/blog//1.158 2005-02-24T17:54:25Z 2007-07-09T15:44:53Z
   Allium sativum, known in anglo-saxon as the spear-leek, and hence to us as garlic, is one of the oldest gastronomical plants known to man. It is believed to have originated in central Asia a few thousand years ago, and to...
   jeremy Allium sativum, known in anglo-saxon as the spear-leek, and hence to us as garlic, is one of the oldest gastronomical plants known to man. It is believed to have originated in central Asia a few thousand years ago, and to have been spread across the known world by humans who just can't get enough of the stuff. It was the staple food of Egyptian pyramid-builders, and came over to the New World with the earliest Spanish explorers. Today there are countless varieties of garlic cultivated the world over, including cultivars that have become uniquely identified with particular regions.

   Fairway usually keeps at least a couple of varieties of garlic available, so I gathered a few over the course of a few weeks and decided to do a little taste test. I use a fair amount of garlic in my cooking, so I thought I'd try to identify my favorite one. I was able to find four varieties: one from California and three from France.

   Clockwise, from the upper left, these are (1) L'Ail Rose de Lautrec, the famous pink garlic of the Midi-Pyrénées, famous for its use in cassoulet; (2) standard American white garlic, from California; (3) L'Ail Violet de Cadours, a lesser-known purple variety from southwestern France, not far from Lautrec; and (4) L'Ail Fumé d'Arleux, the famed smoked garlic of northern France.

   Each of these garlics has its own peculiar history. Clotilde has ably described the culture of pink garlic. Purple garlic is something of a stepchild to its pink cousin; situated on the opposite side of Toulouse from Lautrec, Cadours is still seeking an AOC designation for its signature product. Cadours produces about 800 tons of garlic annually, compared to about 4,000 tons in Lautrec.

   The garlic you're used to seeing in the supermarket is a white variety prevalent in California, and particularly associated with the town of Gilroy, the self-proclaimed Garlic Capital of the World. Gilroy assumed this title in imitation of Arleux, the home of my last garlic variety. In Arleux, in the cold and humid North, the farmers learned to smoke their own variety of pink garlic sometime around the sixteenth century. It is hypothesized that the discovery was made by accident, as the smoke of kitchen fires improved the flavor and shelf-life of braids of garlic stored indoors. The garlic of Arleux is woven into magnificent braids and cold-smoked for ten days.

   This is all fine and good as a history lesson, but I wanted to know how all this garlic tastes. To get a fair sampling, I prepared each variety three ways: (1) raw, both straight and rubbed on dry toast; (2) dry-roasted unpeeled cloves; and (3) peeled cloves confited in olive oil. The roasting and confiting were both done at low heat to allow the garlic time to caramelize. Safety Note: if you're going to confit garlic, you should either use the oil right away or discard it; garlic is known to harbor Clostridium botulinum spores, which can survive low-temperature cooking and thrive in an anaerobic environment like a layer of organic sediment sealed with oil.

   So do these different varieties of garlic taste different? Absolutely. The California garlic was by far the sharpest of the bunch. Raw it was firey and harsh; cooked it was mellowed but still had considerable bite. Eating too much of this stuff could definitely cause some serious indigestion. The pink garlic was much milder, even when raw. Cooked, it became quite sweet and mellow, very smooth. The dry-roasted preparation was superior to the confit; the heavy flavor of olive oil overpowers this delicate allium. My violet garlic seemed to have suffered from poor storage; it had a faint aroma of mildew, and had begun to develop light green shoots in the center of the bulbs (a dead giveaway of garlic past its prime, such shoots must be removed prior to cooking or they will become bitter). Beyond that, I would say its characteristics were similar to those of the pink garlic (which also suffered a bit from age, but not to the same degree). The smoked garlic, however, was by far my favorite. Nearly as mild as the pink garlic, it had the added dimension of gentle hardwood smoke. This made it complex enough to be satisfying raw, and added a layer of intrigue to the cooked preparations. Given its expense, I would only use this garlic in a dish where it's going to be the star performer, but when allowed to shine, it is really quite remarkable. The added expense of the other French garlics is similarly unjustifiable where the garlic is going to be playing only a supporting role (in a tomato sauce or as part of a marinade, for example). California garlic may be harsh, but it's cheaper than dirt.

   A few pointers for would-be garlic aficionados. First, select whole heads of garlic that have a taut, unbroken layer of paper, and none of those gray or black speckles around the root (that's mold, and you can taste it). Choose heads that are heavy for their size and have firm bulbs -- this indicates high water content, which in turn indicates freshness and proper storage (and makes cooking easier). The odor of garlic comes from sulfur compounds formed by the degeneration of the fat-soluble molecule allicin, garlic's primary defense mechanism and a powerful antimicrobial, antifungal, insect-repellent chemical. Unfortunately, there is no proven way to eliminate allicin's odor, which continues to develop in our bellies as we digest it. This is why garlic breath can last for hours or even days, and why a heaping dose of garlic can reveal its odor in your sweat. Some suggest eating parsley, the digestion of which does release certain compounds that neutralize or counteract foul odors. But when all is said and done, the consumption of garlic will inevitably make you stink to some degree. There's a bright side though, captured in an New York yiddish proverb: A nickel will get you on the subway, but garlic will get you a seat.

   ]]> tag:www.froststreet.net,2005:/blog//1.157 2005-02-20T21:49:55Z 2007-07-09T15:44:53Z
   It is an enduring part of the mythos of Manhattan that you can have anything imaginable delivered to your doorstep at any hour of the day or night. In practice, there are many qualifications to this rule, but it remains...
   jeremy It is an enduring part of the mythos of Manhattan that you can have anything imaginable delivered to your doorstep at any hour of the day or night. In practice, there are many qualifications to this rule, but it remains a huge element of the city's appeal, and a major counterbalance to the sacrifices city-dwellers make on issues such as square footage and cost of living. Case in point: many urban professionals are familiar with Seamless Web. This is a web-based service that allows you to peruse the menus of many local restaurants and delivery joints, order what you like, and charge it either to a credit card or a firm account. This is the primary mechanism by which large professional service firms provide their most pervasive perk: if you're in the office late at night or on the weekend, the firm (or more typically, the client) pays for your meals. It works like this: after a certain hour of the day, the Seamless Web website is open for you to place an order, up to a certain dollar limit, at any one of many local restaurants. The restaurant delivers your order to your office, and the cost of the meal gets billed directly to your firm's accounting office. You just pop down to the lobby to pick it up.

   I've made a lot of use of Seamless Web during my time here, but I increasingly get the feeling that there's something horrifically immoral about all this. It comes down to a basic lack of respect for the process of eating. It disrespects the restaurant that prepares the food, whose cooks and management work in thankless anonymity. It disrespects the animal that died to have its carcass shipped across the country only to be chopped up and wedged into a plastic dish or styrofoam tray and hung off the handlebars of a rickety bicycle. It disrespects the deliveryperson who speeds that bicycle into oncoming traffic, riding headlong the wrong way down a one-way street, to bring dinner to my door, even though he and I will never meet face to face. It disrespects the person whose job it is to sit in the lobby and place anonymous phone calls informing perfect strangers that their dinners are getting cold forty stories under their feet. It disrespects everyone who paid a little more to heat their homes because my firm used up so many kilowatt-hours of energy to run an elevator carting me, alone, down and back up forty stories to pick up my meal. It disrespects the client, who shells out an extra twenty or thirty dollars to keep me at my desk for another hour or two of work (for which they are already paying several hundred dollars). It disrespects me, who accepts the twenty or thirty dollars in exchange for getting my sustenance this way.

   We are not meant to dine alone. Food is pleasure; it wants to be shared. Shared pleasure is the most intimate and fulfilling category of human experience, and letting someone else prepare food for you is an act of trust. This is why dining, at its best, must ultimately be about hospitality; my most memorable meals have left me feeling not only satisfied, but grateful. These connections between guest, host, and meal are all bound up in an essential sense of respect -- for the life we consume, for the skill of its preparation, for the trust in that skill, for the pleasure of the shared experience.

   What Seamless Web says about city living is that these basic human interactions -- hospitality and gratitude, pleasure and sharing -- have a price, and can be readily traded away. An economist might call this efficiency, and they would be right, for what it's worth. But we who live in the city, who gorge at our desks on the labors of a faceless multitude, are on the wrong end of this bargain. Each time I click in my order, I am commodifying -- disrespecting -- both the multitude and myself. Even though I never spend a dime out of my own pocket, in a very real sense I am paying for both sides of the exchange.

   ]]> tag:www.froststreet.net,2005:/blog//1.156 2005-01-30T03:14:13Z 2007-07-09T15:44:53Z
   I was born on January 29, 1977. A few weeks later, some vines in northern Portugal began to awaken from their winter slumber. A few months after that, bunches of grapes were maturing on those vines, swelling with seaborne rains...
   jeremy I was born on January 29, 1977. A few weeks later, some vines in northern Portugal began to awaken from their winter slumber. A few months after that, bunches of grapes were maturing on those vines, swelling with seaborne rains and basking in the summer sun. By the time I took my first step, the grapes had been pressed into juice whose sugars were beginning their metamorphosis into alcohol. When I was old enough to talk, the young wine was transferred to vats and fortified with a local brandy known as aguardente. Not long thereafter a little under a liter of the resulting elixir was placed into a dark glass bottle, labeled, and laid sideways on a shelf. At some point over the past twenty-odd years, this bottle made its way from the town of Oporto to the New World, finally coming to rest at a wine shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where it stayed until the night before my twenty-eighth birthday.

   That's where my two little brothers found it, purchased it, and brought it to me as a birthday present last night. We drank half of it waiting for the clock to strike on the first day of my twenty-eighth year, after a dinner prepared for us by my youngest brother, who just started culinary school. Vintage port is only made in years where the grapes show special promise, and the 1977 vintage was one of the most magnificent in the past century.

   How do you do justice to a wine that has been waiting your whole life for you to drink it? I have never seen anything the color of this port anywhere else in the world. I have never smelled anything so delicate or subtle. I have been drinking port for years, but I never tasted anything like this before. The sweetness of Douro grape sugars, mellowed by wood and sharpened with the fire of brandy, has been maturing for decades in this magical bottle, waiting for us to open it up and admire its sublime balance. This port was noticeably more alcoholic than most other port I have tasted; it is about 22% alcohol compared to about 19% for the blend I usually keep around the house. The extra bite of spirit is tamed by decanting and allowing the port to breathe for a while.

   Aside from giving sediment time to settle, patience allows the wine to realize its full potential; just a sip of my birthday port lingered for several minutes, continuing to soothe and satisfy as it unfolded on the palate. As I turned a year older, surrounded by family, the smooth comfort of the port that grew up with me served as a reminder that the relentless flow of time carries with it special pleasures. We cannot always anticipate where they will come from or when they will cross our path, but they are surely ours for the taking, if only we will take as much time enjoying them as they take in readying themselves for us.

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