Thursday, December 28, 2006

More Vacation Scribbles

Since I’ve been in California for the holidays, I’ve been immersed in foodie stuff, although I haven’t felt hungry for the past few days. I made an absolutely brilliant batch of garlic dills the first day I arrived. I’ve now taken to dragging around a food diary. It’s absolutely essential when you make stuff. You think you won’t forget, but you always do.

When that magical moment hits, when you really nailed the curry, that’s when you’ll be glad you wrote it all down. So I’ve finally worked out all the proportions for the dills—believe me, even 1/6 of a cup of salt can make a huge difference—so now I’m confident I can replicate it over and over, thanks to my food diary (really a tiny battered dollar-store notebook with its own pen.)

A couple of other foodie things have entered my universe, although I actually detest the word “foodie” and will never claim to be one.

One is the Bill Buford book, Heat. I read rave reviews of it here and there, so I was curious to pick it up. It’s actually one of the oddest books I’ve ever read. It’s like this middle-aged guy decided to get into professional cooking all of a sudden and applied to work for free at Mario Batali’s Babbo restaurant. So far so good, from an interesting point of view. You get a perspective from a non-career dude, and one who’s actually a journalist by profession. But when you actually get into the book, it seems like it’s just one stream-of-consciousness narrative from a sometimes drunk writer. He hops all over time, doesn’t mention his two kids even once throughout the whole book, and I was convinced he was gay due to his writing style until he finally mentioned that he had a wife.

Very different from Anthony Bourdain’s tautly-constructed style. Bourdain has a true writing talent and organises his anecdotes in a meticulous, word-spare fashion that neatly builds, shocks, amazes, and resolves in a true writerly manner, yet one is not constantly reminded that he’s writing. A chef homeboy, unabashed and unvarnished. But Buford’s book just left me feeling like he should have maybe smoked less weed during the writing of it.

And tonight I finally saw “Sideways.” Of course, as anyone connected with food should be aware, this was a landmark “foodie” picture. Well, maybe a landmark “winey” picture. As foodie pictures go, it was absolutely first-rate, never losing sight of the story and realism. Which reminds me of another foodie picture, Dinner Rush. That was so involved with food that you knew some major food fans had a hand in it, kind of like Francis Ford Coppola’s movies, in which he worked as much of his love of food and drink into the script as possible.

But this tiny immersion into the foodie stuff that I’ve experienced lately (I actually got a panini grill for Christmas! Damned if I know what to do with it. And a Jamie Oliver Flavour Shaker) reminds me that I really despise those who take food to ridiculous extremes—ever heard of fennel pollen? El Bulli and gastro-molecular cooking? I rest my case—and that food should be what it’s supposed to be—nourishment. Let’s keep the goddamned art out of it. Plaster a canvas with Gouda and green peppers if you want art. Leave my bowl to its lowly misery of mac and cheese.

Now to the matter of the six fondue sauces that I drunkenly promised my sister-in-law for the Great Fondue Party of 2006 . . .

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