Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (14 page)

Note: Some definitions may not be ‘technically’ correct,

and certain foods mentioned may not, in fact, exist.

Antipasto
:
small,
unsatisfying portions of food served before the meal, typically at tedious
group events, designed to distract people from how long it’s taking to get
their main course

Aspic
:
a jellied meat
stock, probably originating as a prank that got out of hand . . . since it’s a
jellied meat stock, and therefore not meant for actual consumption

Bard
:
to tie fat around meat before
cooking, apparently to increase the amount of fat in one’s diet . . . also, to
recite Shakespearean monologues while cooking

Broiler
:
the part of an
oven, typically on the bottom, that is impossible to clean…most often used to
test the smoke alarm in my apartment

Brûlée
:
from the French
for ‘burnt,’ first used to illustrate that everything sounds more appetizing in
French

Burgoo
:
a spicy stew,
sometimes called ‘roadkill soup,’ popular in areas where people would willingly
eat something called ‘roadkill soup’

Caul
fat
:
the fatty membrane surrounding an animal’s internal organs, used in dishes
that require a fatty organ-covering membrane

Free
range
chicken
:
any chicken that is allowed to roam outside of a cage before being
slaughtered; these ‘special chickens’ are able to run errands, get library
cards or take night classes…they can frequently be found taunting traditionally
‘caged’ chickens

Mandolin
:
a device used for
cutting food into uniformly sized slices; often confused with ‘mandolin,’ a
device used for creating bluegrass music; the first mandolins actually were
used for both purposes

Mince
:
to finely chop
something while watching ‘Sex and the City’

Parboil
:
a combination of
the words ‘partially’ and ‘boil’… less well-known but related words include
‘almosteam’ and ‘sortapoach.’

Proof
(see also Prove):
in
baking, the process of illustrating, through logic and deductive reasoning,
that you should make cookies more often

Reduce
:
when referring to
liquid in a pan or skillet, the step immediately before ‘burn’

Salamander
:
a kitchen tool
used by chefs to aid in browning meat; more frequently, a double entendre
employed by chefs, as in, “Waitress, have you seen my salamander?”

Sauerkraut
:
A generally
unhappy marriage of cabbage and bacteria, from the same people who brought us
World War II

Scotch
egg
:
the result of taking a hardboiled egg, wrapping it in sausage, coating it
with bread crumbs, and then deep-frying; a technique designed to make something
bad out of something healthy (see also ‘Scotch broccoli’)

Tofu
:
a tasteless, oddly-textured
substance that allows vegans to believe that they don’t miss real hot dogs

Yam
:
Apparently not the same as a
sweet potato; best to avoid both just to be sure.

It’s a little known fact that many famous authors,
at one time or another, tried their hands at writing cookbooks. Recently
discovered correspondence between these authors and their publishers reveal the
culinary passion of some of history’s most famous writers.

William
Shakespeare

Shakespeare mentioned food in many of his plays. In
Romeo
and Juliet,
he offers the cooking mantra,

“’Tis an ill cook cannot lick his own
fingers.”

And in ‘As You Like It,” there’s this classic
food-related insult:

“Truly, you art damned like an
ill-roasted egg, all on one saide.”

 
In
Henry
IV, Part I
, Shakespeare
introduces the phrase “
eaten me out of house and home
.” By the end
of
Part
II
, King Henry has finally forgiven Hal and dies peacefully.

Surprisingly, in the never-published
third
part of the saga (to be titled
Figs and Worts
: Recipes for
Martlemas
), we see Hal planning to abdicate the
throne and open a chain of topless alehouses.

Charles
Dickens

The problem Dickens faced when he started a cookbook
wasn’t with his recipe for pigeonpie.
David Copperfield
’ (the novel, not
the annoying magician) hints at Dickens’ love for cooking with a description
that could easily have come from a judge on
Chopped
:

“The leg of mutton came up very red
within, and very pale without; besides having a foreign substance of a gritty
nature sprinkled over it, as if it had had a fall into the ashes of that
remarkable kitchen fireplace.”

No, the reason Dickens was never able to publish his
cookbook was that he insisted on releasing his recipes in weekly segments.

With these ‘cliffhangers’, the first week you might
get the ingredients, then the following week the actual instructions, and his
publisher believed this approach could frustrate the amateur cook at home.

James
Joyce

Like many English majors, I’ve read at
least
three or four pages of Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness classic,
Ulysses
.

Publishers weren’t thrilled with Joyce’s intended
follow-up. This excerpt from
Ulysses
was originally intended to be
the introduction to his “
Portrait of the Cook as a Young Man.
’

“
If you leave a bit of codfish for
instance. I could see the bluey silver over it. Night I
went down to the pantry in the kitchen. Don’t like all the smells in it waiting
to rush out.”

e.
e. cummings

Buoyed by the success of his poem
‘[as freedom is
a breakfastfood]
,’ cummings wanted to do an entire book of breakfast
recipes written in his idiosyncratic style.

However, an early edition of
breakthefastwithsome
eggs maybe and a heartywarmmuffin
proved to be unpopular with cooks
accustomed to punctuation.

Raymond
Chandler

Chandler may be known for murder and deception, but at
heart he was a foodie. He began work on his cookbook in 1956, but only a few
snippets of it have survived.

Apparently, the book was to be called
Easy Chow
for Dames and Grifters,
and in it, Chandler demonstrates a fondness for
hearty American fare, while still maintaining his uniquely hard-boiled writing
voice.

This is a fragment of one of Raymond Chandler’s unpublished
recipes:

 “Start the marinade early, when the
moon is exhausted and the sunlight still has the deluded notion that it can
fight its way through the choking L.A. smog. Sautée the onions until they’re as
transparent as a philandering husband’s alibi.

Then take your knife, glistening like
the drop of sweat on the forehead of a guy who just bet his last hundred on a
longshot at the track, and cut the lamb.

The oven needs to be hotter than an
off-the-shoulder silk gown wrapped around the curves of a sultry chanteuse, but
not as hot as the asphalt on Wilshire Boulevard in July.

Jay
McInerny

The first hints at what would become McInerny’s
iconic style occur in a small volume he pitched to publishers in early 1983.

Entitled
Bright Lights, Big Flavor!
, the
manuscript is filled with all the touchstones of McInerny’s later work, starting
with the urban-angsty, ironic second-person detachment of the opening:

“You’re tired and beat down but you know you
have
to cook. You find
yourself in a messy kitchen, trying to make sense of the instructions on the
package. You think to yourself,
“Why did I buy orzo?”

You realize the orzo was a mistake, just like the
eight-ball you
got
from Rico at the club
.
But you’re depressed,
and you still need to eat something, anything to take the edge off.

Your hands are shaking and your head feels like a
construction site, so you resign yourself to a morning
bowl of
orzo
and regret.”

Publishers felt that McInerny overemphasized cocaine
as a seasoning, and recipes like ‘Peruvian marching powdered biscuits’ ensured
a fairly narrow audience.

D
r. Seuss

While the venerable Theodore Geisel earned accolades
as a children’s writer, he hoped one day to publish a cookbook for more adult
palettes.

To be called
Oh, the Couscous You Will Cook Cook
,
it was never released, as Geisel’s publisher worried that someone trying his
recipes would become confused trying to find whimsical ingredients such as
“floopers,” “jibberjam,” and “cardamom.”

Imagine a musical
ensemble that makes all of its own instruments a few hours before every
concert. Or, imagine if performance art broke out at a farmers market. Or,
maybe there’s no way to describe the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra . . .

Sometimes called ‘Das
Erste Wiener Gemüseorchester,’ they play music on instruments made from fresh
fruits and vegetables.

photograph taken with special lens that filters out joy

The twelve member
ensemble composes and plays a wildly eclectic mix of modern music including
“beat-oriented House tracks, experimental Electronic, Free Jazz, Noise, Dub…”
Oddly, enough, they don’t mention ‘bluegrass,’ which would seem to be right up
their alley.

They buy about ninety
pounds of fresh produce for each concert (playing concert halls across Europe),
then a few hours before showtime they make their instruments. Cutting, carving,
chopping, drilling—you know, the usual things musicians do before a show. . .