Food – Page 23 – The Hungry Philosopher

Bored with Biryani

June 5, 2014June 5, 20141 Comment

Seventeenth century Dutch traveler, Frans Jansz van der Heiden, describes Biryani, a rice and meat dish in South Asia, in his travel account, as follows:

“…..We were brought int a beautiful hall [and] there we were served a very rich dish, biryani. The guards told us that it was never prepared better for kings and princes than for us at that time. The prince of Bhulua probably ordered his people to do so because he privileges whoever is known to be Christian over his own people.

We were given this rich dish and as a result we quickly regained our flesh. But gradually the heaviness began to bother us and we longed for lighter fare that we could digest more easily. Biryani is very oily and filling. It is prepared, without water, from fine white rice, a whole goose or two chickens, and many cloves, mace, fine white sugar, cinnamon or cassia leaves, saffron, and many other spices. All these are braised together in butter, and in this way the goose and the chickens are cooked in the rice till they are well done. This dish was so filling that ultimately it began to upset us; in the end we would have been happier eating just dry rice with salted fish.”

from the Bangladesh Reader, edited by Meghan Guhathakurta and Willem van Schendel

The seventeenth century description of a dish still enjoyed today is fascinating. It also makes me wonder when does something life saving and tasty turn into something heavy and sickening?

A Food tourist takes a walk on the Socratic Side

June 4, 2014June 4, 2014Leave a comment

The Wok Shop in San Francisco

I’ve been on three food tours so far. First, Georgetown, D.C, second, San Francisco China Town and last week Chicago. I’ve learned a lot, tasted a lot, and enjoyed a lot. Food tourism might just be my new sport. There are a few practical advantages of a food tour besides the obvious excitement of eating cultural history.

First, a tour allows me to sample small dishes in various places without feeling guilty or sorry for the waiter.

Second, it allows me to follow someone around and focus on eating not locating.

Third, it allows me to meet interesting people happy to talk about their food experiences.

All good reasons to go on a food tour.

If you have dietary limitations, allergies or just don’t like trying new things, I would still encourage you to go. Here’s why: while food navigates the tour, the walk and associated stories themselves are well worth it. These discoveries are just as enjoyable as finding a new delicious taste. Like listening to owner of Wok Shop in San Francisco passionately defend the superiority of traditional Woks or looking at the Tiffany Domes in the Chicago Cultural Center while Jazz music floats in the air. These are moments when design and food, the aesthetic and the gastronomic touch in fantastically beautiful and delicious ways. Its better than walking through museums because we use all of our senses as the privilege of the objective eye diminishes. Food tours offer a taste of what might be a 21st century philosophical walk of consumption and shared meaning. The conversations during a food tour center around personal and shared nostalgia, vacation plans, personal taste preferences, favorite sports teams and so much more. The information shared is both public and intimate.

On a domestic level, The Philosopher’s Table by Marietta McCarty aims to help us engage in philosophical dinner conversation. Each dinner involves diners around a table with a question to consider and corresponding food. http://www.thephilosopherstable.com/

Here are a few images from my tours as provocation………to go on a tour and take a walk on the Socratic side.

Taste of Chicago: Tastebud Tours http://tastebudtours.com/tours/chicago-tours/

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Bertha’s Brownies at the Palmer House

June 2, 2014June 2, 2014Leave a comment

Behind this 19th century ornate peacock gate is an equally glamorous design and food history. A wedding present for Bertha Honore from Potter Palmer, the Palmer House Hotel is a piece of Chicago history. The ceiling includes murals of Venus, the goddess of love, framed by Neoclassical Empire style of glam and glitz. It burned down in the great Chicago fire of 1871, only to be rebuilt bigger and better afterwards.

Sure, the Empire style Hall by Bertha Palmer is an architectural treasure and a Chicago historical landmark. Referenced in Devil in the White City, the Palmer House is an exemplar of the gilded age before the crash, the depression, before the World Wars and the ravages of the 20th century. The historical legacy of the Palmer House is unquestionable and excite architectural and cultural historians. However, unbeknownst to most of us, we have an even deeper connection to the Palmer House. A gastronomic connection. I hope you can sense my tone of reverence as I say…..the Palmer House is the birthplace of the ….wait for it…..

The Brownie.

Yes. Let this knowledge sink into your consciousness and memories of chocolatey, dense, moist deliciousness. It is probably the most coveted dessert in our home, rivaling its cousin warm chocolate chip cookies. The brownie is America’s Proustian Madeline that conjures memories of childhood pleasure and freedom. A “to-go” version of this confection at the Palmer House comes boxed and wrapped with a ribbon. The packaging also includes a brief history and the original recipe. The taste can be described as dense yet delicate, with a texture between fudge and cake that melts in your mouth. The walnuts that compose the top layer have a light glaze. The recipe says its an apricot glaze but a fruity taste is hardly noticeable. It is a familiar (as in brownie mix brownies) but elegant experience between candy and cake. The “to-go” version is perhaps the best way to eat this little morsel since it was designed to be a part of a boxed and portable, working lunch for ladies discussing the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The Brownie represents a designed American cultural experience. We say as American as Apple Pie but I think the saying should be as American as Brownies. This Fourth of July, I’ll have to bake brownies. Let’s start a new trend and vote for the Brownie as America’s dessert. “Bite into a piece of history”………indeed!

Reading stolen pages in the Kitchen

May 23, 2014Leave a comment

I read in and around my kitchen habitually. And, took the privilege for granted. Until, I came across an essay in The Bangladesh Reader (Duke, 2013) about Rashundari Debi, a housewife who taught herself to read and even more miraculously who published “My Life,” the first Bengali autobiography written by a woman in 1897. This is an excerpt about her hiding pages taken from her son’s book:

When the book had been taken inside, I secretly took out a page and hid it carefully. It was a job hiding the it, nobody must find it in my hands. That would lead to severe rebukes and I would never be able to put up with that. It was not at all easy to do something that is forbidden and then to face the consequences. Times were very different then, and I was an exceptionally nervous person. Such days! Where could I hide it that nobody would come across it? Eventually, I decided that it must be a place where I would always be present but which nobody else visited much. What else could it be but the kitchen? I hid it under the hearth.

Food, Color and Happiness

May 21, 2014Leave a comment

Truck Image from: http://www.saglobalaffairs.com/features/1445-a-moving-riot-of-color.html

A blogger from Tasmania, Australia, Harry wrote an entry entitled The Happiest City in the World that referred to Rajshahi, Bangladesh, voted the happiest city on earth by the World Happiness Survey in 2006. What accounts for the happiness in such a difficult social, political and economic context? He asked. His blog entry was again published in The Bangladesh Reader (Duke, 2013) for its vivid description of his dinner and travel experience in Bangladesh. For me, hungryphil, the association of dinner and colorful trucks with general happiness supports my suspicion regarding the inherent sociality and creativity of consumption, both food and design. Here is an excerpt from Harry’s blog: http://www.agentleplace.com/the-happiest-city-in-the-world-2/:

Dinner last night, had at Aristocrat roadhouse halfway between Rajshahi and Dhaka, was a perfect illustration of this. After my favourite Bangladeshi meal, dhal makhani, was served I watched as each of my Bangladeshi colleagues served each other before serving themselves and, having noticed the plate of the person next to them emptying, stopped eating mid-mouthful to add yet more naan to their culinary neighbour’s plate. Such displays of caring and gentleness cycled around the table throughout the meal, naturally amongst the customary pleas of ‘No, no, that’s too much.’ But it would be rude to deny the friendship and, after approaching proficiency in eating with my hands (right hand puckered into the shape of a badminton shuttlecock as it gathers up the food and elephant trunks it into your mouth; left hand avoiding direct food contact but used to spoon yet more dhal onto your plate and the plates of those around you) we rolled down the ornate Aristocrat stairs and into the waiting minibus. It was time to see more of Bangladeshi’s colour, and the road was as good a place as any to observe it.

Bangladeshi trucks must be of the most colorful in the world. With a framing coat of canary yellow, each panel is painted with utopian scenes of snow-capped mountains, meandering rivers, enchanted forests and fairytale palaces; verdant greens, royal blues, crimson reds and burnt oranges. No pastel shades for vibrant Bangladesh. Even the central hub of the rear differential is painted, usually mimicking that of half a large soccer ball. Whereas the trucks are simply glaringly colourful, the passenger rickshaws are both colorful and ornate. Gold, silver and bronze are added, as is the standard shocking pink. The flat-tray rickshaws don’t escape colour either: the slatted sides are painted in alternating blocks of yellow, red, blue, green and orange. Even the twin-light Victorian-style Rajshahi lampposts get the colour treatment with one bulb shining pink, the adjacent one green.

I wonder how I might conduct a study that attempts to find correlations between food sharing, use of color and happiness. In a land of poverty, sharing transforms into a self-negating and revolutionary act. The performance of serving and attending to fellow diners is both an obligation and right of the host. One always offers to fill up another’s plate. If only this sentiment translated into all our actions. Similarly, the brightly decorated trucks attempt to ameliorate the confusion of Bangladeshi roads and aggressive driving. As if the well dressed deserves the right of way. Hmmm. Color masks and highlights the threat of the Bangladeshi roads, just as dinner gestures of sharing masks and highlights scarcity. Is this another expression of what Dan Gilbert names synthetic happiness? The willful construction of joy. Synthetic happiness, Glibert argues is as potent as the natural happiness we experience when we get what we want. http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy

Could it be that food and design are both activities of synthetic happiness through which we fabricate shared joy despite our human condition? Is that the lesson of the World Happiness Survey?

Learning (and Eating) from Las Vegas

May 19, 2014Leave a comment

Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi and Dennis Scott Brown, published 1977, was a postmodern call to celebrate the vernacular and everyday. The images of the strip bustling with billboards and signs challenged the way architects thought about the formal role of commercial and public buildings. The architects, Venturi and Brown, argued against modernist “holier than thou” purist abstraction and suggested that the Vegas strip satisfied a collective emotional longing for the imagined American main street. The post-modern architectural manifesto venerated buildings that spoke volumes through billboards and bright signs of human lust, gluttony and greed. Building that spoke of the messy reality of life instead of an idealized vision projected on a drafting table.

One might argue that today Las Vegas is anything but common and everyday and has lost its 1970s main street appeal. Sure the scale and brightness of the signs have grown to fantastic proportions yet the content is the same: gambling, entertainment and food.

Yes, FOOD.

The extravagance of Las Vegas buffets has long been legendary. My recent visit to The Bacchanal at Ceasar’s Palace certainly supports it’s fame by boasting over 500 international dishes. I felt both dizzy with the seemingly infinite choices and doomed in my incapacity to enjoy all of it. An existential crisis of sorts looking into the cauldron of infinite gastronomical choices. The scripted labels announcing each dish to the diner mimicked the billboards outside. The buffet is an easy architectural translation of gastronomic and aesthetic choice where individual preference has priority over collective good (for example: a school cafeteria lunch). The Bacchanal was NO school cafeteria.

I was surprised how deliberately and unrelentingly celebrity chefs and their restaurants were promoted. Indeed, food tourism has taken a very strong cross media hold in Las Vegas. As an avid Food Network, Cooking Channel viewer I was both soothed by the familiar and overwhelmed by the dominance of personality over food. Are we witnessing the rise of popular haute cuisine as inaccessibly expensive exercises of vanity and commerce or is it a sign of innovative gastronomic experiments? I imagine a bit of both, but how do I decipher the difference? First of all, I can’t afford the $$$$ Yelp range, so that takes care of that dilemma. Even so, there still remains much to choose from.

The privilege of individual preference particularly in Las Vegas makes my experience limited and almost too particular to be worth rational judgment. So, the following is not a review but merely an account of three meals touched by television celebrity. Were my expectations different? Did my food taste different? Did the “chef-signature” affect the quality of the experience? In the buffet of signs, architectural and gastronomic, how do we make a choice?

Yelp did not help me in this overwhelming situation where the quality is generally equivalent. Reviews only matter if you know what you personally like. Maybe I like standard overpriced well cooked steak and potatoes, maybe my feet are tired and despite mixed reviews and warnings of bad service, I’ll eat anything. Maybe I’m lost and I can’t find the four star rated restaurant and instead I have to settle for something else that turns out to be fantastic……………sometimes the uncertainty is too great for the collective might of Yelp. As it should be.

Pastry Chef Jean-Philippe Patisserie at the Bellagio

http://www.jpchocolates.com/

Boasts the world largest chocolate fountain. The choice to visit was easy. Did not know much about the chef and consequently did not have specific expectations. Had breakfast of an Almond Brioche. The bread was a beautifully toasted platform for the slightly sweet almond cream with roasted and crunchy almond flakes. It was delicate and substantive, creamy and crunchy, sweet and slightly salty from the almonds. It was early enough, without a crowd, to eat and enjoy the view of the chocolate fountain. The small and intimate scale of the space heightened the glistening and precious sweets beckoning beyond the glass cases. Next time, I’ll have to have something chocolate. In context, the chocolate fountain made sense and was not a mere publicity stunt. The chocolate fountain summoned us like a religious relic and we as pilgrims rejoiced at the sight and taste. The pastries were quite literally and visually the centerpiece of the establishment (not the personality of the pastry chef). I appreciate the obvious love of crafted sweets that converts indulgence into an art form.

Table 10 Chef Emeril Lagasse at the Palazzo

http://www.emerilsrestaurants.com/table-10

We were tired from walking in the sun and looking for a break around three in the afternoon. Table Ten was a lucky surprise. My sister and I shared the little lobster rolls. Our meal was too small and tame to justify the big personality of BAM! Emeril Lagasse. I can’t fault him for my sense of being underwhelmed. The décor that included multiple chef coats, Emeril spice mixes, cooking tools, alongside the open kitchen highlighted the celebrity chef appeal of the restaurant. The familiar taste of the lobster roll was amplified by a touch of celebrity vanity. Maybe the Lagasse signature convinced me that it was better than it was. Served the same thing anywhere else, my response would be “ Wow! this is very good” instead of “this very good and of course it should be.” Did my high expectations weaken my experience? Does more information enhance or diminish the taste? Like knowing how something is made or who made it?

China Poblano at the Cosmopolitan by Chef Jose Andres

http://www.chinapoblano.com/

Intrigued by the hybrid concept, I hoped and planned for visiting China Poblano. Visually the restaurant maintains the duality by splitting the space into the China side with a dumpling-making area and the Mexico side with a taco-making area. Visitors seated at the “bar” that winds across both work stations can watch the busy construction of dumplings and tacos as they eat. The walls are decorated with masks and large prints depicting both cultures. The restaurant boasts a 40-40-20 split, whereby, each culture is represented 40% and 20% of the dishes represent a “marriage,” not a fusion, of flavors (this according to the hotel publicity channel). Owing to the dual theme (and being already very full from our visit to Table 10) we ordered the guacamole that was being made in front of us at the “bar,” salsa and chips and the beef watermelon radish suimai. Our order reflected the combination of cultures and as well as a combination of familiar and unfamiliar tastes. The beef suimai was new and unfamiliar, tasted like an exotic lemongrass flavored barbacoa wrapped in a dumpling noodle. Experimentation, playfulness, excitement infused the food and the environment. It is an appropriate restaurant for The Cosmopolitan. The theatricality of the space and food production was a happy surprise. It was a learning experience: of how the familiar can feel strange like fantastically fresh guacamole in warm corn tortillas and conversely, how the strange can feel familiar like beef suimai. The tastes were beyond judgments of good or bad: I don’t know if I “liked” the suimai. BUT…it certainly was interesting and thought provoking. To me, a philosopher, that’s worth it. I had also been to Jaleo, same chef but with a very different vibe (Spanish tapas), in D.C with my daughter for her birthday. The menu, atmosphere, food, wait staff, open kitchens everything about China Poblano conveyed its legend of a kidnapped Asian girl taken on a long voyage to Mexico. It makes me wonder about other possible legends, a Bengali in Bolivia? My visit to China Poblano was certainly a trip!

Bobby Flay’s Burger Palace was on my wish list. I appreciate the bright open welcoming design of the restaurant. The menu is visible from the street as are diners enjoying the fare. Again, much like the many restaurants in Las Vegas with open kitchens and dining rooms, eating is a spectacle at the Burger Palace. Alas, I had no room to take in the show.

The spectacle of food raised to level of theatrical entertainment competes for our attention and money. Images of the Cake Boss, Giada, Bobby Flay are displayed alongside the Beatles, The Blue Man Group, Cirque de Soleil, magic shows and adult entertainment. The visual and the gastronomic are now combined as the theatrical experience of Las Vegas hyperreality. This is not the era of static billboards but giant dynamic video screens. Celebrity chefs perform online, on T.V and through the fantasy of their restaurants. What I learned through visiting these three establishments is their vision as displayed and interpreted by designers and their taste as performed and imitated by local culinary talent. It’s a production like any other.

So, does the “signature-chef” experience affect the quality of the experience? Like all good philosophical questions the answer is both: yes and no.

For me (quality level being generally equal) the answer depended mostly on my expectation and my physical state (hungry, tired). How do you decide where to go, what to eat and how much you enjoyed the experience? In the buffet of restaurants what is your criteria? What LOOKS good to you?

It seems, there is still a lot to learn from Las Vegas both visually and gastronomically.

Pondering Brillat-Savarin’s Portait of a Pretty Gourmande

May 12, 2014May 12, 2014Leave a comment

Those of us, who may have over-indulged on Mother’s Day Brunch, may find consolation in transcendental gastronomy. Very roughly summarized and perhaps twisted: women who eat are pretty and wrinkle free (although I don’t think 18th Century French secret food writer Brillat-Savarin would approve of either a buffet or the indulgence it fosters). Nevertheless, I think he offers something to think about against the contemporary valorization of thin.

Brillat-Savarin’s meditations The Physiology of Taste (first published 1826) is full of fascinating observations about food in its fullest sense. The encyclopedic account of all things related to eating covers definitions (or rather meditations) of senses, taste, gastronomic sciences, appetite, specific food items like chocolate, sugar, truffles and fish (and their associated erotic properties), methods of cooking such as frying, thirst and drinks, obesity, cooking, illness ….and so on.

Meditation 11: On Gourmandism describes the pretty gourmande as follows:

Nothing is more agreeable to look at than a pretty gourmande in full battle dress: her napkin is tucked in most sensibly; one of her hands lies on the table; the other carries elegantly carved little morsels to her mouth, or perhaps a partridge wing on which she nibbles; her eyes shine, her lips are soft and moist, her conversation is pleasant, and all her gestures are full of grace; she does not hide that vein of coquetry women show in everything they do. With so much in her favor, she is utterly irresistible, and Cato the Censor himself would be moved by her.

…..ladies who know how to eat are comparatively ten years younger than those to whom this science is a stranger.

Brillat-Savarin continues his description of sensuality as both physical and gastronomic in his account of “Sensual Predestination”:

People predestined to gourmandism are in general of medium height; they have round or square faces, bright eyes, small foreheads, short noses, full lips and rounded chins. The women so predisposed are plump, more likely to be pretty than beautiful, and have a tendency toward corpulence. The ones who are most fond of tidbits and delicacies are finer featured, with a daintier air; they are more attractive and above all are distinguished by a way of speaking which is all their own.

It is by these outer traits that the most agreeable dinner companions must be judged and chosen: they accept everything that is served them, eat slowly, and enjoy reflectively what they have swallowed.

I doubt if Savarin’s physiological theory that people with “a general air of elongation” do not enjoy food. Even so, his coupling of the visual and the gastronomic could offer a clue to our current fascination with thin. Does minimalist modern design feed into the aesthetic and gastronomic sensibility of “thin”? Can we study design eras in relation to celebrated body types? I digress……

Happy Belated Mother’s Day to all those agreeable, pleasant, plump and pretty gourmandes everywhere. Hope you enjoyed your brunch buffet!

Soren Kierkegaard on food

May 7, 2014Leave a comment

Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.

Happy Birthday Kierkegaard

Squashed Strawberry Cake and Baked Fudge Pie

May 5, 2014May 6, 20142 Comments

Published recipes are tested and idealized concepts executed with skill. The application of such perfection are, shall we say sometimes, less than perfect. Most always, still delicious, most always, opportunities for learning and creative adjustment. In the spirit of sharing the tasty and the ugly, just thought I’d report on my weekend baking experiments. I tried two recipes from recent issues of Southern Living Magazine. As I have previously admitted, I am incapable of following recipes. It might be symptomatic of my general aversion to authority and direction. So…. when I say I’m reporting on executing recipes, I mean, I’m confessing how I subverted or mutated the recipes, for better or worse. At any rate, I eat the evidence. Don’t judge me.

The first recipe was from the Community Cookbook section of the magazine for Fudge Pie. For the most part I followed the recipe. I was so proud of myself until I realized that I was supposed to mix in the pecans (and not merely scatter them on top like a pecan pie). No worries, the pecans got toasty and the pie was just as delicious (I imagine). Will I mix the pecans in next time? I don’t know.

The second recipe was far more ambitious. It was the Strawberry Lemonade Layer Cake on the cover of last month’s issue. Mine does NOT look like the cover. My analysis of the visual discrepancy identifies three deviations from the recipe:

First, I did not use the 9 inch pan as directed. The 8 inch pan yielded a taller cake. A situation which would not be so bad except that the cake would not fit in my covered cake container. So, yes, I squished the cake (a bit) for the lid to fit. I’m not sure how detrimental this deviation will be at dessert time. I may have to pretend its a rustic strawberry shortcake or maybe I can dump it in a trifle bowl. Some creative adjustment may be required.

Second, when I squished the caked down, the delicious strawberry jam (yes! the recipe called for me to MAKE the strawberry jam) leaked out. Again, a situation, I’m guessing the magazine recipe did not call for. Instead of delicately sitting between the cake layers like a glossy red sweet and fruity buffer, the “jelly” behaved more like an oozing red sauce bleeding out of the white and red speckled cloud. Hmmmm. Was I supposed to boil the “jam” liquid more? Fear not, this is just another moment of creative rescue. I’ve decided to serve the left over red strawberry lemon syrup…yes…”syrup” not “jam” as a drizzle over each serving of cake (spooned or sliced, as the first condition dictates).

Third, I did not add the red food coloring in the frosting. The cake looks good anyway. Just not like the image on the magazine cover. As you can somewhat see below (I’m afraid to take off the lid for a picture!), reality on the right and ideality on the left. I would eat both. But, my very own tasty ugly reality that I brought into being is what I have sitting in the refrigerator waiting to be devoured. Can’t I make my cake, have my cake and eat it too? Yay to glorious imperfect making and …….eating. Happy cooking and eating everyone!

Confessions of an Egghead

May 2, 2014May 6, 20142 Comments

” The most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken.” …..from How to Cook a Wolf by MFK Fisher

“So beautiful in conception! The symbol of progress! If the egg were any other shape, the life of the hen would be intolerable.” ….. Raymond Loewy, French American Industrial Designer

In the kitchen, the egg is ultimately neither ingredient nor finished dish but rather a singularity with a thousand ends.” ……Egg by Michael Ruhlman

Previously, I had mentioned my adoration of the egg. For my birthday, my Jim, gave me Ruhlman’s recent ode to the humble egg. It is the most romantic gift that I have ever received. I’m not being sarcastic. Really. The man obviously knows and loves me well.

The images are as sensual, as instructive, a gastronomic kama-sutra. The chapters are divided into the multiple methods an egg can be employed: in shell, out of shell, whole, separated, separated and reunited. Each recipe begins with a narrative that relates the history of recipe, the variations and sometimes even the limitations. The recipes are in both grams and cups! yay…thank you Mr. Ruhlman for indulging our American hubris. There is even a pull out flowchart (which I must frame)! Anyway, didn’t mean to write a review. (Sorry, force of academic habit.) Ahhhh. look at this. As I’m writing this blog with the cooking channel on, I see Giada’s episode entitled, what else….”eggilcious.” I better go.

The point is…………..eggs are magnificent, comforting, binding, fluffy, frothy, sweet, salty, spicy, hard, soft, liquid, fragile, hard and so much more. What did I have for my birthday breakfast, you might ask? A sunny side up egg with a dash of Tobasco sauce on white buttered toast with guava jelly. Yum. I love eggs.

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