Monday, March 28, 2011
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Wicked ideas
Peeps brulee! Like toasted marshmallows, but awesomer
Give the candy critters a crisp, glassy caramel shell. Go ahead, show them a little love
BY FRANCIS LAM
from http://www.salon.com/food/francis_lam/2010/04/03/toasted_peeps_brulee_recipe/index.html
Before we start talking about torching up our Peeps, there are a couple of things you should know: 1) there's a lot of trial and error, and 2) someone will probably yell, "What the hell is wrong with you? You keep away from my kids, sicko!"
But you can calm them down, because you're just doing it out of love: Fire makes the sugar coating on Peeps get amazing, turning it into a glassy shell, all toasty and caramelly, a crackly crunch surrounding the soft, puffy marshmallow inside. Suddenly, everyone's favorite candy Styrofoam tastes sophisticated! So you know in your heart of hearts that you're subjecting these adorable critters to a flaming crucible because you just want them to be all they can be. OK, so that does sound kind of sick. Whatevs.
Anyway, as with crème brûlée, the magic is in the sugar and the heat. When dull, simple sugar gets hot, it breaks down and reforms on a molecular level, creating compounds that give us the nutty, buttery flavors of caramel. And as it cools, the liquid sugar turns into a new, solid crystal structure, which gets harder the hotter the sugar gets and the more it's allowed to sit still as it cools. (This is why hard candies like Jolly Ranchers and taffies can be still mostly sugar but have such different textures.)
So, for both crème and Peeps brûlée, the trick is to get the sugar coating hot enough to caramelize without cooking the custard or marshmallow underneath. If you have a brûlée torch, you can get flame serious enough to pretty much instantly melt and caramelize the sugar before the heat penetrates into the Peep itself and makes it puff. Check out this awesome picture, even though I'm pretty sure they're using a lightsaber, not a torch available on this planet.
But for those of us without pinpoint flamethrowers, you can still be in business as long as you have a gas stove and a skewer.
Peeps brûlée
Peeps (I have a slight preference for the bunnies, but the chicks work too.)
Special equipment: fire; skewers or thin, wood chopsticks; nonstick pan
Give the candy critters a crisp, glassy caramel shell. Go ahead, show them a little love
BY FRANCIS LAM
from http://www.salon.com/food/francis_lam/2010/04/03/toasted_peeps_brulee_recipe/index.html
Before we start talking about torching up our Peeps, there are a couple of things you should know: 1) there's a lot of trial and error, and 2) someone will probably yell, "What the hell is wrong with you? You keep away from my kids, sicko!"
But you can calm them down, because you're just doing it out of love: Fire makes the sugar coating on Peeps get amazing, turning it into a glassy shell, all toasty and caramelly, a crackly crunch surrounding the soft, puffy marshmallow inside. Suddenly, everyone's favorite candy Styrofoam tastes sophisticated! So you know in your heart of hearts that you're subjecting these adorable critters to a flaming crucible because you just want them to be all they can be. OK, so that does sound kind of sick. Whatevs.
Anyway, as with crème brûlée, the magic is in the sugar and the heat. When dull, simple sugar gets hot, it breaks down and reforms on a molecular level, creating compounds that give us the nutty, buttery flavors of caramel. And as it cools, the liquid sugar turns into a new, solid crystal structure, which gets harder the hotter the sugar gets and the more it's allowed to sit still as it cools. (This is why hard candies like Jolly Ranchers and taffies can be still mostly sugar but have such different textures.)
So, for both crème and Peeps brûlée, the trick is to get the sugar coating hot enough to caramelize without cooking the custard or marshmallow underneath. If you have a brûlée torch, you can get flame serious enough to pretty much instantly melt and caramelize the sugar before the heat penetrates into the Peep itself and makes it puff. Check out this awesome picture, even though I'm pretty sure they're using a lightsaber, not a torch available on this planet.
But for those of us without pinpoint flamethrowers, you can still be in business as long as you have a gas stove and a skewer.
Peeps brûlée
Peeps (I have a slight preference for the bunnies, but the chicks work too.)
Special equipment: fire; skewers or thin, wood chopsticks; nonstick pan
- Skewer a Peep. The thing is, flat surfaces give you the best results, because they can heat and caramelize relatively evenly, which is why I like the bunnies. But a chick Peep's head, for instance, is just going to burst into flames before the rest of the body gets hot enough. Which, granted, is kind of awesome to look at, but not so much to eat. So I prefer the flatter bunnies, and I go in with the skewer between the ears -- so it looks like a Peep lollipop -- to toast their wide bellies, and because this way I kill the Peep instantly. Er, ignore that. And the chicks do have great, flat bottoms, so I skewer them lengthwise, like so:
- Turn your flame on high.
- Start waving your Peep over the fire, letting the flames touch the surface of the sugar. After a couple of seconds, take a look: What you want, as much as possible, is an even, light brown caramel. Now, realistically, that's not going to happen. The edges are probably going to get darker, the middle might not brown at all, and, if it's taking too long and you're starting to cook the Peep, it will start to puff up and deform. It's all OK, just know that your bunnies are going to start looking like spacemen with oversize helmets and the chicks are going to start looking like puffy sneakers from the '80s. Just keep waving the Peep over the flame, check on it every two seconds or so, and make sure a few things happen: you get some caramelized browning, the sugar on the parts that don't brown at least turns glassy-looking, and you DON'T BURN IT. Blow out any flames right away, and if it's starting to get dark brown, stop, unless you really like the bitter taste of char. If you're working with bunnies, flip and caramelize the other side. If you're using chicks, just kind of give the sides a perfunctory go at it, but pretty much the best stuff happens on the bottom.
- When the Peeps get as caramelized as you're willing to risk, set them down, with the skewers still in them, on a nonstick pan so they can cool down and the shell can solidify. When you're finished with the next Peep, the resting one should be cool enough to handle without ripping; now pull out the skewer.
- Arrange your charred, mutilated -- I mean, toasty, crispy! -- Peeps in a fun, carefree tableaux, and charm some young, impressionable children!
Jam-tastic
How to make weapons-grade ratatouille
With flavor so deep it'll drop your voice an octave, this stuff is, well, the bomb
BY FRANCIS LAM
from http://www.salon.com/food/francis_lam/2010/08/07/ratatouille_weapons_grade_style/index.html
Once, in culinary school, I walked in on a heated argument between two men about ratatouille, the kind of conversation that can only ever happen in cooking school. One of these men, Bill Philbins, was a cook with four-star pretensions, and he went on about how it should be made by cooking all the vegetables separately and combining them at the end. And, I'm sure, served on bone china with white gloves to a table with purse stools for the ladies.
I think I made fun of him to his face. Ratatouille is supposed to be a stew, a what-the-hell-are-we-going-to-do-with-all-this-stuff kind of thing. Summer's ending, you're knee-deep in tomatoes and summer squash, and you throw it all in a pot. Bingo.
But somewhere along the line, Philbins got to me. And so I stood in my kitchen the other day for something like four hours, sweating tomato juice, and in the end, well, it was the BOMB. It wasn't a stew, but more like roasted vegetables bound by a tomato-onion jam that was so deep it would drop your voice an octave. It was absolutely worth getting into a fight over.
The key isn't really separating the vegetables, it's that tomato base. And the key to the base is time -- a long, long time. I love the freshness of tomatoes more than anyone, but there's some serious magic that happens when you put those things through the wringer and cook the hell out of them, condensing and darkening their sweetness, compacting their rich, meaty umami until it's weapons-grade concentration. Forget tofu, a superb tomato is the great equalizer between meat eaters and vegetarians.
The point of this recipe isn't to follow it slavishly. If you want more of this, got less of that, go for it. Hate shallots? Skip them. The only thing I insist you do is block off some time on your calendar and hang out with your vegetables for an afternoon -- the low, slow cooking is what makes it knock your momma's bonnet off.
Weapons-grade ratatouille
Makes a boatload, nearly half a gallon, of very intensely flavored stuff
Ingredients:
1 head garlic, minced
3 shallots, minced
1 large onion (about 12 ounces), minced
½ cup of extra-virgin olive oil (yes, that much. Summertime is living it up time.)
A couple more glugs of olive oil. Hell, just keep the bottle handy.
Salt and pepper
2 large red peppers, puréed in the food processor
4 pounds of very good regular field tomatoes, or fancy heirlooms if you're rich. Just make sure they're the kind you eat a piece of ... and then involuntarily eat another piece of a minute later. Oh, and purée them in the food processor too.
2½ pounds of summer squash and zucchini, ½-inch dice
1½ pounds of eggplant, diced into ½-inch cubes
Thyme and basil to taste
Directions:
With flavor so deep it'll drop your voice an octave, this stuff is, well, the bomb
BY FRANCIS LAM
from http://www.salon.com/food/francis_lam/2010/08/07/ratatouille_weapons_grade_style/index.html
Once, in culinary school, I walked in on a heated argument between two men about ratatouille, the kind of conversation that can only ever happen in cooking school. One of these men, Bill Philbins, was a cook with four-star pretensions, and he went on about how it should be made by cooking all the vegetables separately and combining them at the end. And, I'm sure, served on bone china with white gloves to a table with purse stools for the ladies.
I think I made fun of him to his face. Ratatouille is supposed to be a stew, a what-the-hell-are-we-going-to-do-with-all-this-stuff kind of thing. Summer's ending, you're knee-deep in tomatoes and summer squash, and you throw it all in a pot. Bingo.
But somewhere along the line, Philbins got to me. And so I stood in my kitchen the other day for something like four hours, sweating tomato juice, and in the end, well, it was the BOMB. It wasn't a stew, but more like roasted vegetables bound by a tomato-onion jam that was so deep it would drop your voice an octave. It was absolutely worth getting into a fight over.
The key isn't really separating the vegetables, it's that tomato base. And the key to the base is time -- a long, long time. I love the freshness of tomatoes more than anyone, but there's some serious magic that happens when you put those things through the wringer and cook the hell out of them, condensing and darkening their sweetness, compacting their rich, meaty umami until it's weapons-grade concentration. Forget tofu, a superb tomato is the great equalizer between meat eaters and vegetarians.
The point of this recipe isn't to follow it slavishly. If you want more of this, got less of that, go for it. Hate shallots? Skip them. The only thing I insist you do is block off some time on your calendar and hang out with your vegetables for an afternoon -- the low, slow cooking is what makes it knock your momma's bonnet off.
Weapons-grade ratatouille
Makes a boatload, nearly half a gallon, of very intensely flavored stuff
Ingredients:
1 head garlic, minced
3 shallots, minced
1 large onion (about 12 ounces), minced
½ cup of extra-virgin olive oil (yes, that much. Summertime is living it up time.)
A couple more glugs of olive oil. Hell, just keep the bottle handy.
Salt and pepper
2 large red peppers, puréed in the food processor
4 pounds of very good regular field tomatoes, or fancy heirlooms if you're rich. Just make sure they're the kind you eat a piece of ... and then involuntarily eat another piece of a minute later. Oh, and purée them in the food processor too.
2½ pounds of summer squash and zucchini, ½-inch dice
1½ pounds of eggplant, diced into ½-inch cubes
Thyme and basil to taste
Directions:
- Start by cooking the garlic, shallot and onion in the ½ cup of olive oil over medium-low to low heat in a heavy pot so that they soften and give up their liquid. Stir and try not to let them brown. (Meanwhile, cut the other vegetables; you'll be waiting a while.) Season lightly with salt and pepper.
- Once they became a pale golden sticky mess, add the puréed red pepper and let it get all nice and friendly. Season lightly with salt and pepper. The pepper should have a ton of water, so let it cook down, stirring every few minutes to make sure nothing gets too caramelized and burned, until -- after God knows how long -- you'll have a rich, rusty jam.
- To which, of course, you'll add your load of puréed tomatoes. Bring it to a boil, and turn it way down to let that baby snooze off all its liquid. Season lightly with -- guess what? -- salt and pepper. You've probably already been cooking for an hour or more at this point. You're not even close to being there yet. You're concentrating its sugar and tartness, and it's going to be all umami-oooo-Mommy. It's worth it. Around this time, fire up your oven to 450. Stir the tomatoes occasionally, just so they don't burn at the bottom.
- Meanwhile, toss the zucchini with salt, pepper and olive oil. Taste a piece. Doesn't it taste good? It's going to be even better after you roast it hard in one layer on a baking tray. After the sizzling starts to slow down in the oven, take a peek. Are you getting some nice browning underneath? Great. Take it out, let it cool a bit before putting it in a big bowl and do it again until you run out of squash. Then do the same with the eggplant, putting it in the same bowl, and let them wait for the minister to their wedding.
- When the 6 pounds of stuff you cooked in the tomato pot can be packed into a pint of good-God-DAMN goodness, it will have flavor that doesn't quit -- a finish that lasts forever. You'll know it's ready when it gives the oil back up, it makes squishy noises when you stir it, and when you taste it and suddenly want to punch a hole in the wall.
- Now you're ready to finish. Chop up some thyme and basil, as much as you like (I like a lot. Shocker), and stir the herbs into the tomato base. Carefully combine the tomato with the rest of the vegetables so that you don't mash up your zucchini and eggplant. It's victory lap time. Stick a spoon into it and feed it to people you love. Then wrap it up tightly and let it sit in the fridge for a day; it'll be even better tomorrow -- the flavors meld, the herbs work their way through the whole thing. Just let it come back to room temperature when you serve it, to your favorite people and maybe with some cheese and bread, and try not to break too much furniture.
- Keeps in the fridge for up to 3-4 days. It does freeze well, though, if you fill up the container so there's not much air in it and wrap it tightly in several layers of plastic wrap. Let it thaw in the fridge, and it'll still be awesome in the dead of winter, when tomatoes taste about as good as tennis balls.
Almond joy
The best French toast you've never heard of
Introducing caramelized, almond-scented Bostock, French toast gone to finishing school. And it's ready in minutes
BY FRANCIS LAM
from http://www.salon.com/food/francis_lam/2010/10/01/best_french_toast_ever_brioche_bostock/index.html
Oh, when times were flush and you were loaded, you ate brioche, the millionaire’s bread. Fifty percent butter by weight, you ate it fresh, smearing rich fingerprints all over your coffee mug. What of the leftovers? "Bah!" you said, throwing them out. "I’m made of dough! I don’t eat stale bread!" But then the economy turned to mush and now you’re thinking that maybe tossing food isn't such a super idea anymore.
My friend Emily, the chief baking officer of the super-cute Sweet Cakes Bakery in Chicago, feels your pain and wants to introduce you to the Bostock. (I swear that’s her job title, not something I made up for my stupid economic downturn angle.) This thing is out of control. You take stale, day-old bread, soak it in almond syrup, top it with frangipane -- sweetened, buttery almond paste -- and bake it until the syrup forms a crisp, lightly caramelized sheen. Moist and rich inside, it's like bread pudding you can hold, but only so much better because, if you recall, it’s topped with frangipane. If you topped a manhole cover with frangipane, I’d break my teeth on it.
To my mind, it's the ultimate French toast replacement -- no more batter, no more soggy messes, no more slices burning, eggy and gross, as you try to sauté enough at one time to feed an entire tableful of breakfasters. Baking them on trays means you're freed from that desperate push on the pans. And while this is, honestly, best with brioche, really any stale bread will work. Emily even suggests replacing the frangipane with jam and turning the oven down to 325.
Ingredients:
Almond Syrup
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup water
2 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 teaspoon vanilla
Pinch salt
Frangipane
2 tablespoons sugar
4 ounces (one stick) butter
8 ounces almond paste (not marzipan; this product has less sugar), room temperature
2 eggs
3 tablespoons flour (cake is best, but all-purpose will do)
Baking and Assembly
Stale brioche or other good-quality bread -- it has to be stale!
Toasted, sliced almonds, to taste, for topping
Maybe a handgun to keep people away
Directions:
Almond Syrup
Frangipane
Introducing caramelized, almond-scented Bostock, French toast gone to finishing school. And it's ready in minutes
BY FRANCIS LAM
from http://www.salon.com/food/francis_lam/2010/10/01/best_french_toast_ever_brioche_bostock/index.html
Oh, when times were flush and you were loaded, you ate brioche, the millionaire’s bread. Fifty percent butter by weight, you ate it fresh, smearing rich fingerprints all over your coffee mug. What of the leftovers? "Bah!" you said, throwing them out. "I’m made of dough! I don’t eat stale bread!" But then the economy turned to mush and now you’re thinking that maybe tossing food isn't such a super idea anymore.
My friend Emily, the chief baking officer of the super-cute Sweet Cakes Bakery in Chicago, feels your pain and wants to introduce you to the Bostock. (I swear that’s her job title, not something I made up for my stupid economic downturn angle.) This thing is out of control. You take stale, day-old bread, soak it in almond syrup, top it with frangipane -- sweetened, buttery almond paste -- and bake it until the syrup forms a crisp, lightly caramelized sheen. Moist and rich inside, it's like bread pudding you can hold, but only so much better because, if you recall, it’s topped with frangipane. If you topped a manhole cover with frangipane, I’d break my teeth on it.
To my mind, it's the ultimate French toast replacement -- no more batter, no more soggy messes, no more slices burning, eggy and gross, as you try to sauté enough at one time to feed an entire tableful of breakfasters. Baking them on trays means you're freed from that desperate push on the pans. And while this is, honestly, best with brioche, really any stale bread will work. Emily even suggests replacing the frangipane with jam and turning the oven down to 325.
Ingredients:
Almond Syrup
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup water
2 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 teaspoon vanilla
Pinch salt
Frangipane
2 tablespoons sugar
4 ounces (one stick) butter
8 ounces almond paste (not marzipan; this product has less sugar), room temperature
2 eggs
3 tablespoons flour (cake is best, but all-purpose will do)
Baking and Assembly
Stale brioche or other good-quality bread -- it has to be stale!
Toasted, sliced almonds, to taste, for topping
Maybe a handgun to keep people away
Directions:
Almond Syrup
- Bring everything to a boil. Let cool. Will keep for weeks in your fridge.
Frangipane
- Cream butter and sugar in a mixer, as if for cake.
- Break up almond paste into 1-inch chunks and add to butter and sugar, mixing until not quite fully incorporated (a few BB-sized bits are OK).
- Add eggs one at a time.
- Add flour all at once and continue mixing until just incorporated. It should be very soft and spreadable, like the creamed butter and sugar. Store in the fridge or freezer, where it will also last for weeks.
- Bostock assembly
- Preheat your oven to 350° and put Aretha Franklin on the stereo. Really. It doesn’t come out right if she’s not kicking it.
- Lightly grease a baking sheet, or use some nonstick spray. Scraping caramel is so déclassé.
- Cut bread into 1.5-inch slices. Don't stress over the precision, but do right, woman (do right, man).
- Dunk the slices in a bowl of syrup until they stop bubbling, then squeeze them out like a sponge and place them an inch or two apart on your pan. You really need the bread to be stale or it’ll turn to mush right about now.
- Spread the frangipane from edge to edge, about as much as you would to make a peanut butter sandwich. "Not too much," Emily says. "You’re trying to make money off of food that's garbage. Uh, I mean, it's about economics and preventing waste. Oh, just don’t write that, will you? You’re going to get me in trouble."
- Sprinkle almond slices on top and bake in a 350° oven about 15–20 minutes, just enough to set the frangipane and, if you’ve been good and Aretha’s been playing loud, enough to slightly caramelize the edges and keep the inside moist.
- That's it. It takes hardly any time and even less effort, and it’s so good you might be persuaded to live this financially responsibly forever.
Easy dinner
Pasta with garlicky peas and roasted mushrooms
It's one of my absolute standbys, it's a dinner that's half vegetables, and it's delicious
BY FRANCIS LAM
from http://www.salon.com/food/francis_lam/2011/02/18/pasta_peas_roasted_mushrooms/index.html
. . .
A note about the frozen pea: I love fresh peas, but to be honest, peas lose their sugar and tenderness so quickly that unless you're getting them the same day out of the garden, they can be all mealy and boo-hoo. (And we're still a while from pea season, at any rate.) A decent brand of frozen pea, though, can serve you well; frozen within hours of being picked, they keep many of their fresh charms.
Pasta with peas and roasted mushrooms
Serves 3–4 as a main course
Ingredients:
8 ounces white mushrooms
Salt and white pepper, to taste
Olive oil, as needed (a couple tablespoons)
3 cloves garlic
3 tablespoons butter (you can use olive oil instead, but butter makes it ... special)
Pinch saffron (very optional, but very nice)
8 ounces pasta, some manner of short shape (bowties, pennette, you get the picture. Or saffron malloreddus, if you really want to be a baller.)
10 oz box frozen peas (or fresh, of course, if they're in season)
½ cup white wine
1½ ounces parmesan cheese, grated fine
Chopped parsley, thyme, basil, rosemary or mint, to taste (optional, but nice)
Directions:
It's one of my absolute standbys, it's a dinner that's half vegetables, and it's delicious
BY FRANCIS LAM
from http://www.salon.com/food/francis_lam/2011/02/18/pasta_peas_roasted_mushrooms/index.html
. . .
A note about the frozen pea: I love fresh peas, but to be honest, peas lose their sugar and tenderness so quickly that unless you're getting them the same day out of the garden, they can be all mealy and boo-hoo. (And we're still a while from pea season, at any rate.) A decent brand of frozen pea, though, can serve you well; frozen within hours of being picked, they keep many of their fresh charms.
Pasta with peas and roasted mushrooms
Serves 3–4 as a main course
Ingredients:
8 ounces white mushrooms
Salt and white pepper, to taste
Olive oil, as needed (a couple tablespoons)
3 cloves garlic
3 tablespoons butter (you can use olive oil instead, but butter makes it ... special)
Pinch saffron (very optional, but very nice)
8 ounces pasta, some manner of short shape (bowties, pennette, you get the picture. Or saffron malloreddus, if you really want to be a baller.)
10 oz box frozen peas (or fresh, of course, if they're in season)
½ cup white wine
1½ ounces parmesan cheese, grated fine
Chopped parsley, thyme, basil, rosemary or mint, to taste (optional, but nice)
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 425. Meanwhile, set three quarts of water on to boil, and salt it so it tastes nearly like sea water.
- Rub the mushrooms clean of dirt with a towel or paper towel. Cut off the stems if they're long (but use them). Quarter the mushrooms if they're quarter-sized, and cut them in sixths if they're half-dollar sized. Toss them in a bowl with salt, pepper and enough olive oil to coat lightly.
- Heat a heavy pan, large enough to fit all the mushrooms comfortably in one layer, over high heat. Add about a tablespoon of oil to the pan, and when it's hot enough to shimmer but not quite smoke, add the mushrooms. Let sear briefly, then transfer to oven.
- Cut off half a clove of garlic and mince it very fine. Reserve it. Chop the rest, to somewhere between the size of a pea and a BB. In a pan large enough to hold all the peas, mushrooms and pasta, melt the butter over low heat and add the chopped garlic. Let it get friendly; you're not trying to brown the garlic, but slowly infuse the butter with its flavor. Add saffron, if using. If the garlic starts to brown, take the pan off the heat.
- Check on the mushrooms. Give the pan a toss. You're looking for nice browning and, eventually, for them to have cooked and shrunken enough to be almost chewy, about 20-25 minutes total. Put back in oven and continue to roast.
- Cook pasta in the boiling, salted water.
- When the pasta is nearly done, put the garlic-butter pan back over high heat. Add the peas and heat through with a few tablespoons of pasta water. Season with salt and plenty of pepper. Take the mushrooms from the oven and deglaze the pan with the wine, stirring to dissolve all the brown bits, and bring to a boil to cook off the alcohol. Add to the peas. Stir in the raw minced garlic and herbs, if using.
- Drain the pasta once finished and add to the peas. Toss all together, stir in the cheese, taste and adjust seasoning with salt, pepper and possibly a splash of olive oil, butter or more pasta water if it seems a little dry. Serve right away.
UPDATE: 3/26/11, 7:44 p.m.
i made this dish for dinner tonight. it was quite flavorful. My hubby didn't like the strong butter taste. in general, i thought it quite good with more complex flavors than the typical easy white skillet pasta i'd make on occasion. but it takes three pans, the stovetop, the oven, and about an hour or more of your time. it's tasty, but the meal is easy only because so few ingredients are involved, not because it's quick or not messy. definitely try it if it will appeal to you, but it probably won't end up in my regular roster, just because it's so much effort, comparatively.
Dairy delight
The strangest -- and maybe best -- grilled cheese you'll ever make
I was a firm believer in the classic version. But cheffy tricks with mayonnaise and nuts are making me reconsider
BY FRANCIS LAM
from http://www.salon.com/food/francis_lam/2011/02/25/unusual_grilled_cheese_mayonnaise_nuts/index.html
Every once in a while, something comes along that changes everything: Fossil fuels. The forward pass. Punk rock. And now, mayonnaise-grilled cheese and shaved nuts (no jokes, please).
I've long believed that whatever bourgeois conceit a sandwich maker may have, there is no grilled cheese better than one made with white bread, American cheese and butter. But lately two cheffy ideas have made the art of hot cheese sandwiches come alive in my kitchen, and I fear that my beliefs are being shaken.
The first of these ideas came to me from Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef of the brilliant, beautiful and peculiar restaurant Prune, where I had one of the greatest lunches of my life eating chicken hearts, lemony beans and an omelet stuffed with fried oysters and served with powdered sugar and Tabasco sauce. Prune has the magical charm of being just slightly odd, just outside of sense-making, but it feels utterly unaffected and the food is always filled with subtle surprise. One day, while watching Hamilton lead a cooking class for high school students (more on that another day), I looked twice when she had the kids "butter" the outsides of the sandwiches with . . . mayonnaise.
But it makes perfect sense when she explains it: unlike butter, the mayo doesn't threaten to burn in the pan before the bread is crisped and the cheese melted. It's thick, so it spreads on evenly, unlike oil. And it imparts a slightly tangy flavor in addition to richness to the bread, so it makes for a more balanced sandwich. (I don't know where she came up with the idea, but she hails, like me, from New Jersey, where we cook our hotdogs in deep fryers and know every emotion but shyness. So I think of this as a move from the Dirty Jerz playbook.)
The other idea is for the inside of the sandwich: You lightly toast walnuts to bring out their creamy flavor, shave them fine as snow on a grater (the Microplane is awesome for this), and pile them on the cheese to add another dimension of richness to the sandwich. I stole this idea from a dish I once had at the restaurant Jean-Georges, back when there was such a thing as editors with expense accounts to take out scribblers like me. The grater does a neat little trick -- stripping crunch from the nuts, turning them into feathery shards of pure flavor, it lets you integrate their fatty goodness into dishes without disturbing the texture. I tried it one day on a sharp cheddar grilled cheese, and loved the way the nuts seemed to bolster the richness of the cheese while otherwise melting away.
In the sandwich below, I've taken these two techniques and brightened them up with a little bit of sauerkraut, for crunch and tartness to liven things up and keep it from seeming heavy. And a handful of greens, because, well, why not?
Super-cheffy grilled cheese
Feel free to change quantities or types of ingredients, of course. It's your sandwich. Makes one sandwich. Duh.
Ingredients:
4 to 6 walnuts
2 slices of good bread
Mayonnaise, as needed
2½ ounces cheese, grated or sliced fairly thin (I like sharp cheddar, or a nutty "Swiss" for this)
2 forkfuls of good sauerkraut (or other pickle-type thing)
1 small handful baby spinach or other greens
Directions:
I was a firm believer in the classic version. But cheffy tricks with mayonnaise and nuts are making me reconsider
BY FRANCIS LAM
from http://www.salon.com/food/francis_lam/2011/02/25/unusual_grilled_cheese_mayonnaise_nuts/index.html
Every once in a while, something comes along that changes everything: Fossil fuels. The forward pass. Punk rock. And now, mayonnaise-grilled cheese and shaved nuts (no jokes, please).
I've long believed that whatever bourgeois conceit a sandwich maker may have, there is no grilled cheese better than one made with white bread, American cheese and butter. But lately two cheffy ideas have made the art of hot cheese sandwiches come alive in my kitchen, and I fear that my beliefs are being shaken.
The first of these ideas came to me from Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef of the brilliant, beautiful and peculiar restaurant Prune, where I had one of the greatest lunches of my life eating chicken hearts, lemony beans and an omelet stuffed with fried oysters and served with powdered sugar and Tabasco sauce. Prune has the magical charm of being just slightly odd, just outside of sense-making, but it feels utterly unaffected and the food is always filled with subtle surprise. One day, while watching Hamilton lead a cooking class for high school students (more on that another day), I looked twice when she had the kids "butter" the outsides of the sandwiches with . . . mayonnaise.
But it makes perfect sense when she explains it: unlike butter, the mayo doesn't threaten to burn in the pan before the bread is crisped and the cheese melted. It's thick, so it spreads on evenly, unlike oil. And it imparts a slightly tangy flavor in addition to richness to the bread, so it makes for a more balanced sandwich. (I don't know where she came up with the idea, but she hails, like me, from New Jersey, where we cook our hotdogs in deep fryers and know every emotion but shyness. So I think of this as a move from the Dirty Jerz playbook.)
The other idea is for the inside of the sandwich: You lightly toast walnuts to bring out their creamy flavor, shave them fine as snow on a grater (the Microplane is awesome for this), and pile them on the cheese to add another dimension of richness to the sandwich. I stole this idea from a dish I once had at the restaurant Jean-Georges, back when there was such a thing as editors with expense accounts to take out scribblers like me. The grater does a neat little trick -- stripping crunch from the nuts, turning them into feathery shards of pure flavor, it lets you integrate their fatty goodness into dishes without disturbing the texture. I tried it one day on a sharp cheddar grilled cheese, and loved the way the nuts seemed to bolster the richness of the cheese while otherwise melting away.
In the sandwich below, I've taken these two techniques and brightened them up with a little bit of sauerkraut, for crunch and tartness to liven things up and keep it from seeming heavy. And a handful of greens, because, well, why not?
Super-cheffy grilled cheese
Feel free to change quantities or types of ingredients, of course. It's your sandwich. Makes one sandwich. Duh.
Ingredients:
4 to 6 walnuts
2 slices of good bread
Mayonnaise, as needed
2½ ounces cheese, grated or sliced fairly thin (I like sharp cheddar, or a nutty "Swiss" for this)
2 forkfuls of good sauerkraut (or other pickle-type thing)
1 small handful baby spinach or other greens
Directions:
- Toast the walnuts, either in the oven or tossed in a hot pan, until they're just getting fragrant and the surface of the nuts is hot. When cool again, grate them with the Microplane or other fine-toothed grater -- they should come out feathery and light.
- Heat a pan over medium heat. Spread mayonnaise on one side of the slices of bread and lay them mayo-side down in the pan. (How much is up to you -- you don't need very much, basically enough to get an even coat, to do the trick, but of course more is more.)
- Evenly divide the cheese on the two slices, and cook until the bread is toasty brown and the cheese is melted. (If the bread is getting color but the cheese is stubborn, cover the pan for a minute or two.)
- Remove the bread, sprinkle on the nut shavings (no jokes, please), add the sauerkraut and greens. Put the two halves together, and have at it.
Did anyone do anything?
Libyan woman bursts into hotel to tell her story of rape
By the CNN Wire Staff
March 26, 2011 3:24 p.m. EDT
from http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/03/26/libya.beaten.woman/index.html
Tripoli, Libya (CNN) -- Breakfast at a Tripoli hotel housing international journalists took a decidedly grim turn Saturday when a desperate Libyan woman burst into the building frantic to let the world know she had been raped and beaten by Moammar Gadhafi's militia.
Her face was heavily bruised. So were her legs. She displayed blood on her right inner thigh.
She said her name was Eman al-Obeidy. She was well-dressed and appeared to be a well-to-do middle-aged woman. She spoke in English and said she was from the rebel stronghold of Benghazi and had been picked up by Gadhafi's men at a checkpoint east of Tripoli.
She sobbed and said she was held against her will for two days and raped by 15 men. She showed the journalists how she had been tied at her wrists and ankles. She had visible rope burns.
CNN could not independently verify al-Obeidy's story but her injuries appeared consistent with what she said.
Government officials quickly closed in to stifle her. But she persisted, wanting the journalists, staying at the Rixos Hotel, to see Gadhafi's brutality firsthand.
International journalists, including CNN's staff, are not allowed to move freely in the Libyan capital and are escorted out of the hotel only on organized outings by government minders. This was the first time a Libyan opposed to Gadhafi attempted to independently approach the journalists here.
What followed was a disturbing scene of how Gadhafi's government operates.
Security forces moved to subdue the woman. Even a member of the hotel's kitchen staff drew a knife. "Traitor!" he shouted at her in contempt. Another staffer tried to put a dark tablecloth over her head.
One government official, who was there to facilitate access for journalists, pulled a pistol from his belt. Others scuffled with the journalists, manhandling them to the ground in an attempt to wrestle away their equipment. Some journalists were beaten and kicked. CNN's camera was confiscated and deliberately smashed beyond repair.
Security men said al-Obeidy was "mentally ill" and was being taken to a "hospital." They dragged her unceremoniously to a waiting white car.
She kicked and screamed. She insisted she was being carted off to prison.
The journalists believed al-Obeidy's life to be in danger and several of them demanded to see her. At a news conference later, they challenged Libyan Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim on what they had experienced.
Kaim told them that authorities were investigating the incident. "We will let you know," he said.
Later, a government spokesman said al-Obeidy was "safe" and "doing well." He said her case was a criminal one -- not political -- and that she has been offered legal aid.
But his assurances did little to assure the journalists who had witnessed Gadhafi's firm and pervasive grip on Libyan society. A woman who dared to speak against him was quickly silenced. Journalists who dared to tell her story paid a price.
It was one tale that perhaps went a long way in illuminating the need to protect Libya's people.
By the CNN Wire Staff
March 26, 2011 3:24 p.m. EDT
from http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/03/26/libya.beaten.woman/index.html
Tripoli, Libya (CNN) -- Breakfast at a Tripoli hotel housing international journalists took a decidedly grim turn Saturday when a desperate Libyan woman burst into the building frantic to let the world know she had been raped and beaten by Moammar Gadhafi's militia.
Her face was heavily bruised. So were her legs. She displayed blood on her right inner thigh.
She said her name was Eman al-Obeidy. She was well-dressed and appeared to be a well-to-do middle-aged woman. She spoke in English and said she was from the rebel stronghold of Benghazi and had been picked up by Gadhafi's men at a checkpoint east of Tripoli.
She sobbed and said she was held against her will for two days and raped by 15 men. She showed the journalists how she had been tied at her wrists and ankles. She had visible rope burns.
CNN could not independently verify al-Obeidy's story but her injuries appeared consistent with what she said.
Government officials quickly closed in to stifle her. But she persisted, wanting the journalists, staying at the Rixos Hotel, to see Gadhafi's brutality firsthand.
International journalists, including CNN's staff, are not allowed to move freely in the Libyan capital and are escorted out of the hotel only on organized outings by government minders. This was the first time a Libyan opposed to Gadhafi attempted to independently approach the journalists here.
What followed was a disturbing scene of how Gadhafi's government operates.
Security forces moved to subdue the woman. Even a member of the hotel's kitchen staff drew a knife. "Traitor!" he shouted at her in contempt. Another staffer tried to put a dark tablecloth over her head.
One government official, who was there to facilitate access for journalists, pulled a pistol from his belt. Others scuffled with the journalists, manhandling them to the ground in an attempt to wrestle away their equipment. Some journalists were beaten and kicked. CNN's camera was confiscated and deliberately smashed beyond repair.
Security men said al-Obeidy was "mentally ill" and was being taken to a "hospital." They dragged her unceremoniously to a waiting white car.
She kicked and screamed. She insisted she was being carted off to prison.
The journalists believed al-Obeidy's life to be in danger and several of them demanded to see her. At a news conference later, they challenged Libyan Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim on what they had experienced.
Kaim told them that authorities were investigating the incident. "We will let you know," he said.
Later, a government spokesman said al-Obeidy was "safe" and "doing well." He said her case was a criminal one -- not political -- and that she has been offered legal aid.
But his assurances did little to assure the journalists who had witnessed Gadhafi's firm and pervasive grip on Libyan society. A woman who dared to speak against him was quickly silenced. Journalists who dared to tell her story paid a price.
It was one tale that perhaps went a long way in illuminating the need to protect Libya's people.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Devastatingly brilliant lit crit
“When It’s Not Your Turn”: The Quintessentially Victorian Vision of Ogden’s “The Wire”
by Sean Michael Robinson
March 23, 2011 6:07 amArticle, The Wire Roundtable
By Joy Delyria and Sean Michael Robinson
from http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OknQr5ux00gJ:hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/03/when-its-not-your-turn-the-quintessentially-victorian-vision-of-ogdens-the-wire/+hooded+utilitarian+omar+comin&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari&source=www.google.com
There are few works of greater scope or structural genius than the series of fiction pieces by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, collectively known as The Wire; yet for the most part, this Victorian masterpiece has been forgotten and ignored by scholars and popular culture alike. Like his contemporary Charles Dickens, Ogden has, due to the rough and at times lurid nature of his material, been dismissed as a hack, despite significant endorsements of literary critics of the nineteenth century. Unlike the corpus of Dickens, The Wire failed to reach the critical mass of readers necessary to sustain interest over time, and thus runs the risk of falling into the obscurity of academia. We come to you today to right that gross literary injustice.
The Wire began syndication in 1846, and was published in 60 installments over the course of six years. Each installment was 30 pages, featuring covers and illustrations by Baxter “Bubz” Black, and selling for one shilling each. After the final installment, The Wire became available in a five volume set, departing from the traditional three.
Bucklesby Ogden himself has most often been compared to Charles Dickens. Both began as journalists, and then branched out with works such as Pickwick Papers and The Corner. While Dickens found popularity and eventual fame in his successive work, Ogden took a darker path.
Dickens’ success for the most part lies in his mastery of the serial format. Other serialized authors were mainly writing episodic sketches linked together only loosely by plot, characters, and a uniformity of style. With Oliver Twist, only his second volume of work, Dickens began to define an altogether new type of novel, one that was more complex, more psychologically and metaphorically contiguous. Despite this, Dickens retained a heightened awareness of his method of publication. Each installment contained a series of elements engineered to give the reader the satisfaction of a complete arc, giving the reader the sense of an episode, complete with a beginning, middle, and end.
One might liken The Wire, however, to the novels of the former century that were single, complete works, and only later were adapted to serial format in order to make them affordable to the public. Yet, while cognizant of his predecessors, Ogden was not working in the paradigm of the eighteenth century. As a Victorian novelist, serialization was the format of choice for his publishers, but rather than providing the short burst of decisively circumscribed fiction so desired by his readership, his tangled narrative unspooled at a stately, at times seemingly glacial, pace. This method of story-telling redefined the novel in an altogether different way than both Victorian novelists and those who had come before.
The serial format did The Wire no favors at the time of its publication. Though critics lauded it, the general public found the initial installments slow and difficult to get into, while later installments required intimate knowledge of all the pieces which had come before. To consume this story in small bits doled out over an extended time is to view a pointillist painting by looking at the dots.
And yet, there is no other form in which The Wire could have been published other than the serial, for both economic and practical reasons. The volume set, at 3£, was an extraordinary expense, as opposed to a shilling per month over six years. Furthermore, while The Wire only truly received praise from scholars, it was produced for the masses, who would be more likely to browse a pamphlet than they would be to purchase a volume set.
Lastly, one might stand back from a pointillist work; whereas physically there is no other way to consume The Wire than piece by piece. To experience the story in its entirety, without breaks between sections, would be exhausting; one would perhaps miss the essence of what makes it great: the slow build of detail, the gradual and yet inevitable churning of this massive beast of a world.
The genius of The Wire lies in its sheer size and scope, its slow layering of complexity which could not have been achieved in any other way but the serial format. Dickens is often praised for his portrayal not merely of a set of characters and their lives, but of the setting as a character: the city itself an antagonist. Yet in The Wire, Bodymore is a far more intricate and compelling character than London in Dickens’ hands; The Wire portrays society to such a degree of realism and intricacy that A Tale of Two Cities—or any other story—can hardly compare.
That is not to say that one did not have an influence on the other. Oliver Twist is a searing treatment of the education system and treatment of children in Victorian society; meanwhile, The Wire’s portrayal of the Bodymore schools is a similar indictment, featuring Oliver-like orphans such as “Dookey” and the fatherless Michael, and criminal activity forced upon children with Fagin-like scheming. Yet while Ogden no doubt took a cue from Dickens in his choice to condemn the educational institution, The Wire builds from the simplicity of Oliver Twist, complicating the subject with a nuance and attention to detail that Dickens never achieved.
In fact, Dickens, in later novels—which incriminate fundamental social institutions such as government (Little Dorrit), the justice system (Bleak House), and social class (A Tale of Two Cities, among others)—seems to have been influenced by The Wire. This is evidenced by the increased complexity of Dickens’ novels, which, instead of following the rollicking adventures of one roguish but endearing protagonist, rather seek to build a complete picture of society. Instead of driving a linear plot forward, Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House, seeks to unfold the narrative outward, gradually uncovering different aspects of a socially complex world.
While Dickens is lauded for these attempts, The Wire does the same thing, with less appeal to the masses and more skill. For one thing, The Wire’s treatment of the class system is far more nuanced than that of Dickens. Who could forget “Bubbles”—the lovable drifter, Stringer Bell—the bourgeoisie merchant with pretentions to aristocracy, or Bodie—who, despite lack of education or Victorian “good breeding”, is seen reading and enjoying the likes of Jane Austen? Yet these portrayals of the “criminal element” always maintain a certain realism. We never descend into the divisions of “loveable rogues” and truly evil villains of which Dickens makes such effective use. Odgen’s Bodie, an adult who uses children to perpetrate criminal activity, is not a caricature of an ethnic minority in the mode of Dickens’ Fagin the Jew.
In fact, none of The Wire’s villains have the unadulterated slimy repulsion of David Copperfield’s Uriah Heep, except for perhaps the journalist, Scott Templeton. The final installments of The Wire were sometimes criticized for devolving into Dickensian caricature in regards to the plots surrounding Templeton and The Bodymore Sun. (It is interesting to note first that Dickensian characterizations were Templeton’s number one crime, and second, that these critics of The Wire were for the most part journalists themselves.)
If at any time besides its treatment of Templeton The Wire flirts with caricature, it does so in the character of Omar Little. Yet no one would ever reduce such a monumental culmination of literary tradition, satire, and basic human desire for mythos as Omar Little by defining him as mere caricature. Little is not Dickensian. Nor is he a character in the style of Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope, or any of the most famous serialists. If he must be compared to characters in the Victorian times, he most closely resembles a creation of a Brontë; he could have come from Wuthering Heights.
The reason that Little so closely resembles a Brontë hero is of course that the estimable sisters were often not writing in the Victorian paradigm at all, but rather in the Gothic. Their heroes were Byronic, and Lord Byron himself took his cue from the ancient tradition of Romance, culminating in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, but originating even further back. Little would not be out of place in Faerie Queene, and even less so in Don Quixote: an errant knight wielding a sword, facing dragons, no man his master. The character builds on the tradition of the quintessential Robin Hood and borrows qualities from many of the great chivalric romances of previous centuries. Meanwhile there is an element of the fay, mirroring Robin Hood’s own predecessor—Goodfellow or Puck—and prefiguring later dashing, mysterious heroes who also play the part of the fop, as in The Scarlet Pimpernel.
As previously mentioned, Little also has the flavor of the Gothic: brooding, hell-bent on revenge. Indeed, there is a darkness to the character that would not suit Sir Gawain, but does not seem out of place in a Don Juan or Brontë’s Heathcliffe. Little is in fact an amalgamation of these traditions, an essential archetype.
Yet, despite all this, Little can still not be called caricature. There is an awareness of literary canon in Omar Little, a certain level of dramatic irony. The street children and rabble, so Dickensian in their miscellany, always announce his presence, and even as The Wire grows and expands, so does the legend of Little. The Wire is aware of the mythic quality of its character, and allows the rest of the cast to observe it, indirectly commenting on the literary traditions from which Omar Little sprang. Only in the Victorian Age could Romanticism, Gothicism, and poignant satire come to a head in such a trenchant examination of the way such archetype endures. It is lamentable that our culture today, sorely devoid of new mythos, could not produce a character of such quality and social commentary.
Many characters of the age pale in comparison to The Wire, but if any other deserves explicit exploration, it is James “Jimmy” McNulty. While McNulty is rich in his own right, he is particularly interesting in comparison to the viewpoint characters of Dickens. As Dickens progressed from his “picaresque” adventure-style novels to his more serious explorations of society, so too did his central protagonist evolve. And yet, instead of gaining in complexity, Dickens’ viewpoint characters dwindled—in personality, idiosyncrasy, any unique or identifying traits.
Scholars believe the passivity of Dickens’ heroes was a direct result of his shift in style and subject matter: in order to portray the many aspects of society Dickens wished to explore, in order to maintain a strong supporting cast of highly individualized characters, he believed the main character must be de-individualized. He must become a receptacle of the injustices perpetrated by society, so that the failure of social institution can be witnessed and explored as the reader identifies with the protagonist’s essential powerlessness. This is an elegant method, used to near-perfection in David Copperfield, in which the only uninteresting character is David Copperfield himself.
The Wire charted another course. McNulty is a challenging character; in the beginning, he is not easy to like. Though he is our protagonist and usually our viewpoint character on our journey through The Wire, he begins and ends on a note that is extremely morally questionable, despite a redemptive arc mid-series. We are unable to approve of his actions, unable to assimilate his qualities as our own. Yet McNulty is powerless exactly in the way of David Copperfield. He is used and exploited by corrupt social systems, institutions, or figures of power in exactly the way of David Copperfield or Pip from Great Expectations. He is helpless to incite real and lasting change, his passivity forced upon him as he constantly struggles against it, rather than rising from an internal lack of agency. It is this very struggle which endears McNulty to us, in the end.
In fact, the number one way in which The Wire differs from any other Victorian novel is its bleak moral outlook. Dickens’ works almost always had a handful of characters that were essentially likeable. In the end, the power of love and truth is borne out and the individual triumphs over the ugliness of society by maintaining his integrity. Trollope, Eliot, Gaskell, etc all wrote with this essentially Western—not to mention imperialist—mind-set. Only William Makepeace Thackeray, in Vanity Fair—subtitled, A Novel Without A Hero—presents an unrelentingly bleak assessment of society. The ending is unhappy, all of the characters flawed to varying degrees. It is significant that critics of the time chastised Thackeray for refusing to throw his audience crumbs of moral fiber.
The other comparison one might draw in examining the moral character of The Wire is the penny dreadful, Victorian booklets which exploited sensationalist drama, horror, and Gothic tradition. Penny dreadfuls were fiction published on pulp and could be purchased for a penny per pamphlet, often featuring monsters, vampires, highwaymen and crooks. Usually, these publications bear little similarity to the highbrow syndications of the time, their cliché down to an art form, their treatment of hackney topics procedural in nature.
By 1842, the time The Wire first began syndication, the Victorian audience was already familiar with an underworld of crime, the systems arrayed against it, the cop-and-robber story. But while only the penny dreadful exceeds The Wire in its depictions of violence, ugliness, and depravity of the world, these procedurals should be considered as a separate genre. They reached for the simple thrills of titillation. Meanwhile, The Wire had pretenses of social commentary, exposing deeper truths, persuading its readers not only to witness a corrupt society, but also to understand it.
Morality in Art was one of the most prevailing topics in both literary criticism and philosophy of Victorian times, propounded strongly by the art critic and philosopher, John Ruskin. Ruskin’s central argument was that one must reveal Truth in literature, but in doing so also reveal Beauty. One must present the moral beacon to which we all must aspire. One must not write without Hope. It is significant also that today, Thackeray is not charged with undue cynicism or depravity; rather, he is thought to be “sentimental, even cloying.”
Literature today is no longer concerned with morality the way it was in the nineteenth century. Unrelenting, bleak images of society are celebrated for their realism, as representations of humanity. And yet, we have very few images, representations, or new and challenging canon that captures the essential helplessness, the inevitable corruption, the deep-lying flaws of both society and humanity in the way The Wire does. Again, I would contend that such a feat could only be accomplished in the Victorian Age, through the serial format, which allowed for such layered complexity. In no other way could such a richly textured tapestry of a city be constructed from ground-level up. In no other way could the faults in the underlying foundations of society’s institutions be exposed. In no other way could our own society be held up for our examination, and found so sadly lacking.
Yet this extraordinary feat of story-telling could not have been accomplished solely by Bucksley Ogden. It would be a mistake to say that one creator or author was responsible for The Wire, when the illustrations played such an essential role. Just as Sidney Paget immortalized Sherlock Holmes independently of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by giving the detective his famous deerstalker cap and cape, so too did The Wire’s illustrator, “Bubz” contribute to The Wire.
Would William “Bunk” Moreland be the same character without his cigar, ever-present but almost never mentioned? Would Avon Barksdale be as intimidating and yet beautiful, were Bubz not able to capture his panther-like movement, his violent grace? Could Joseph “Proposition Joe” Stewart be as memorable and endearing were he not the portly man we grew suspicious of, and somehow at last learned to love? Certainly Omar Little would not be Omar Little without his coat, like something out of the previous century; nor would he be Omar (“Omar comin’! It be Omar!”) without the weal running down his face, signifying past violence, a life of both heroic romance and mythic tragedy.
The illustrations are yet another essential element lacking from the story-telling of today. For one thing, we would not allow our cast to be represented by the “others” in our society Bubz renders so lovingly. Bubz gave us reality, and he made it beautiful. The standards of art today are no longer concerned with reality, while our fiction demands nothing but. Movies, television, the internet have all morphed our expectations, twisted and changed our visions, until we only wish to see Ruskin’s ideal: a pristine, white, purer version of ourselves.
In our age, we can never experience a modern equivalent of The Wire. We would be unwilling to portray the lower classes and criminal element with the patience or consideration of Horatio Bucksley Ogden or of Baxter “Bubz” Black. We would be unwilling to give a work like The Wire the kind of time and attention it deserves, which is why it has faded away, instead of being held up as the literary triumph it truly is. If popular culture does not open its eyes, works like The Wire will only continue their slow slide into obscurity.
Ms Delyria and Mr Robinson are grateful to the Special Collections department of the University of Washington for generous access to their Ogden collection, including the two 1863 editions from which these illustrations were digitally scanned. Those wishing for access to more of “Bubz” Black’s illustrations may contact Mr Robinson at seanmichaelrobinson at gmail &tc.
by Sean Michael Robinson
March 23, 2011 6:07 amArticle, The Wire Roundtable
By Joy Delyria and Sean Michael Robinson
from http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OknQr5ux00gJ:hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/03/when-its-not-your-turn-the-quintessentially-victorian-vision-of-ogdens-the-wire/+hooded+utilitarian+omar+comin&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari&source=www.google.com
There are few works of greater scope or structural genius than the series of fiction pieces by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, collectively known as The Wire; yet for the most part, this Victorian masterpiece has been forgotten and ignored by scholars and popular culture alike. Like his contemporary Charles Dickens, Ogden has, due to the rough and at times lurid nature of his material, been dismissed as a hack, despite significant endorsements of literary critics of the nineteenth century. Unlike the corpus of Dickens, The Wire failed to reach the critical mass of readers necessary to sustain interest over time, and thus runs the risk of falling into the obscurity of academia. We come to you today to right that gross literary injustice.
The Wire began syndication in 1846, and was published in 60 installments over the course of six years. Each installment was 30 pages, featuring covers and illustrations by Baxter “Bubz” Black, and selling for one shilling each. After the final installment, The Wire became available in a five volume set, departing from the traditional three.
Bucklesby Ogden himself has most often been compared to Charles Dickens. Both began as journalists, and then branched out with works such as Pickwick Papers and The Corner. While Dickens found popularity and eventual fame in his successive work, Ogden took a darker path.
Dickens’ success for the most part lies in his mastery of the serial format. Other serialized authors were mainly writing episodic sketches linked together only loosely by plot, characters, and a uniformity of style. With Oliver Twist, only his second volume of work, Dickens began to define an altogether new type of novel, one that was more complex, more psychologically and metaphorically contiguous. Despite this, Dickens retained a heightened awareness of his method of publication. Each installment contained a series of elements engineered to give the reader the satisfaction of a complete arc, giving the reader the sense of an episode, complete with a beginning, middle, and end.
One might liken The Wire, however, to the novels of the former century that were single, complete works, and only later were adapted to serial format in order to make them affordable to the public. Yet, while cognizant of his predecessors, Ogden was not working in the paradigm of the eighteenth century. As a Victorian novelist, serialization was the format of choice for his publishers, but rather than providing the short burst of decisively circumscribed fiction so desired by his readership, his tangled narrative unspooled at a stately, at times seemingly glacial, pace. This method of story-telling redefined the novel in an altogether different way than both Victorian novelists and those who had come before.
The serial format did The Wire no favors at the time of its publication. Though critics lauded it, the general public found the initial installments slow and difficult to get into, while later installments required intimate knowledge of all the pieces which had come before. To consume this story in small bits doled out over an extended time is to view a pointillist painting by looking at the dots.
And yet, there is no other form in which The Wire could have been published other than the serial, for both economic and practical reasons. The volume set, at 3£, was an extraordinary expense, as opposed to a shilling per month over six years. Furthermore, while The Wire only truly received praise from scholars, it was produced for the masses, who would be more likely to browse a pamphlet than they would be to purchase a volume set.
Lastly, one might stand back from a pointillist work; whereas physically there is no other way to consume The Wire than piece by piece. To experience the story in its entirety, without breaks between sections, would be exhausting; one would perhaps miss the essence of what makes it great: the slow build of detail, the gradual and yet inevitable churning of this massive beast of a world.
The genius of The Wire lies in its sheer size and scope, its slow layering of complexity which could not have been achieved in any other way but the serial format. Dickens is often praised for his portrayal not merely of a set of characters and their lives, but of the setting as a character: the city itself an antagonist. Yet in The Wire, Bodymore is a far more intricate and compelling character than London in Dickens’ hands; The Wire portrays society to such a degree of realism and intricacy that A Tale of Two Cities—or any other story—can hardly compare.
That is not to say that one did not have an influence on the other. Oliver Twist is a searing treatment of the education system and treatment of children in Victorian society; meanwhile, The Wire’s portrayal of the Bodymore schools is a similar indictment, featuring Oliver-like orphans such as “Dookey” and the fatherless Michael, and criminal activity forced upon children with Fagin-like scheming. Yet while Ogden no doubt took a cue from Dickens in his choice to condemn the educational institution, The Wire builds from the simplicity of Oliver Twist, complicating the subject with a nuance and attention to detail that Dickens never achieved.
In fact, Dickens, in later novels—which incriminate fundamental social institutions such as government (Little Dorrit), the justice system (Bleak House), and social class (A Tale of Two Cities, among others)—seems to have been influenced by The Wire. This is evidenced by the increased complexity of Dickens’ novels, which, instead of following the rollicking adventures of one roguish but endearing protagonist, rather seek to build a complete picture of society. Instead of driving a linear plot forward, Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House, seeks to unfold the narrative outward, gradually uncovering different aspects of a socially complex world.
While Dickens is lauded for these attempts, The Wire does the same thing, with less appeal to the masses and more skill. For one thing, The Wire’s treatment of the class system is far more nuanced than that of Dickens. Who could forget “Bubbles”—the lovable drifter, Stringer Bell—the bourgeoisie merchant with pretentions to aristocracy, or Bodie—who, despite lack of education or Victorian “good breeding”, is seen reading and enjoying the likes of Jane Austen? Yet these portrayals of the “criminal element” always maintain a certain realism. We never descend into the divisions of “loveable rogues” and truly evil villains of which Dickens makes such effective use. Odgen’s Bodie, an adult who uses children to perpetrate criminal activity, is not a caricature of an ethnic minority in the mode of Dickens’ Fagin the Jew.
In fact, none of The Wire’s villains have the unadulterated slimy repulsion of David Copperfield’s Uriah Heep, except for perhaps the journalist, Scott Templeton. The final installments of The Wire were sometimes criticized for devolving into Dickensian caricature in regards to the plots surrounding Templeton and The Bodymore Sun. (It is interesting to note first that Dickensian characterizations were Templeton’s number one crime, and second, that these critics of The Wire were for the most part journalists themselves.)
If at any time besides its treatment of Templeton The Wire flirts with caricature, it does so in the character of Omar Little. Yet no one would ever reduce such a monumental culmination of literary tradition, satire, and basic human desire for mythos as Omar Little by defining him as mere caricature. Little is not Dickensian. Nor is he a character in the style of Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope, or any of the most famous serialists. If he must be compared to characters in the Victorian times, he most closely resembles a creation of a Brontë; he could have come from Wuthering Heights.
The reason that Little so closely resembles a Brontë hero is of course that the estimable sisters were often not writing in the Victorian paradigm at all, but rather in the Gothic. Their heroes were Byronic, and Lord Byron himself took his cue from the ancient tradition of Romance, culminating in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, but originating even further back. Little would not be out of place in Faerie Queene, and even less so in Don Quixote: an errant knight wielding a sword, facing dragons, no man his master. The character builds on the tradition of the quintessential Robin Hood and borrows qualities from many of the great chivalric romances of previous centuries. Meanwhile there is an element of the fay, mirroring Robin Hood’s own predecessor—Goodfellow or Puck—and prefiguring later dashing, mysterious heroes who also play the part of the fop, as in The Scarlet Pimpernel.
As previously mentioned, Little also has the flavor of the Gothic: brooding, hell-bent on revenge. Indeed, there is a darkness to the character that would not suit Sir Gawain, but does not seem out of place in a Don Juan or Brontë’s Heathcliffe. Little is in fact an amalgamation of these traditions, an essential archetype.
Yet, despite all this, Little can still not be called caricature. There is an awareness of literary canon in Omar Little, a certain level of dramatic irony. The street children and rabble, so Dickensian in their miscellany, always announce his presence, and even as The Wire grows and expands, so does the legend of Little. The Wire is aware of the mythic quality of its character, and allows the rest of the cast to observe it, indirectly commenting on the literary traditions from which Omar Little sprang. Only in the Victorian Age could Romanticism, Gothicism, and poignant satire come to a head in such a trenchant examination of the way such archetype endures. It is lamentable that our culture today, sorely devoid of new mythos, could not produce a character of such quality and social commentary.
Many characters of the age pale in comparison to The Wire, but if any other deserves explicit exploration, it is James “Jimmy” McNulty. While McNulty is rich in his own right, he is particularly interesting in comparison to the viewpoint characters of Dickens. As Dickens progressed from his “picaresque” adventure-style novels to his more serious explorations of society, so too did his central protagonist evolve. And yet, instead of gaining in complexity, Dickens’ viewpoint characters dwindled—in personality, idiosyncrasy, any unique or identifying traits.
Scholars believe the passivity of Dickens’ heroes was a direct result of his shift in style and subject matter: in order to portray the many aspects of society Dickens wished to explore, in order to maintain a strong supporting cast of highly individualized characters, he believed the main character must be de-individualized. He must become a receptacle of the injustices perpetrated by society, so that the failure of social institution can be witnessed and explored as the reader identifies with the protagonist’s essential powerlessness. This is an elegant method, used to near-perfection in David Copperfield, in which the only uninteresting character is David Copperfield himself.
The Wire charted another course. McNulty is a challenging character; in the beginning, he is not easy to like. Though he is our protagonist and usually our viewpoint character on our journey through The Wire, he begins and ends on a note that is extremely morally questionable, despite a redemptive arc mid-series. We are unable to approve of his actions, unable to assimilate his qualities as our own. Yet McNulty is powerless exactly in the way of David Copperfield. He is used and exploited by corrupt social systems, institutions, or figures of power in exactly the way of David Copperfield or Pip from Great Expectations. He is helpless to incite real and lasting change, his passivity forced upon him as he constantly struggles against it, rather than rising from an internal lack of agency. It is this very struggle which endears McNulty to us, in the end.
In fact, the number one way in which The Wire differs from any other Victorian novel is its bleak moral outlook. Dickens’ works almost always had a handful of characters that were essentially likeable. In the end, the power of love and truth is borne out and the individual triumphs over the ugliness of society by maintaining his integrity. Trollope, Eliot, Gaskell, etc all wrote with this essentially Western—not to mention imperialist—mind-set. Only William Makepeace Thackeray, in Vanity Fair—subtitled, A Novel Without A Hero—presents an unrelentingly bleak assessment of society. The ending is unhappy, all of the characters flawed to varying degrees. It is significant that critics of the time chastised Thackeray for refusing to throw his audience crumbs of moral fiber.
The other comparison one might draw in examining the moral character of The Wire is the penny dreadful, Victorian booklets which exploited sensationalist drama, horror, and Gothic tradition. Penny dreadfuls were fiction published on pulp and could be purchased for a penny per pamphlet, often featuring monsters, vampires, highwaymen and crooks. Usually, these publications bear little similarity to the highbrow syndications of the time, their cliché down to an art form, their treatment of hackney topics procedural in nature.
By 1842, the time The Wire first began syndication, the Victorian audience was already familiar with an underworld of crime, the systems arrayed against it, the cop-and-robber story. But while only the penny dreadful exceeds The Wire in its depictions of violence, ugliness, and depravity of the world, these procedurals should be considered as a separate genre. They reached for the simple thrills of titillation. Meanwhile, The Wire had pretenses of social commentary, exposing deeper truths, persuading its readers not only to witness a corrupt society, but also to understand it.
Morality in Art was one of the most prevailing topics in both literary criticism and philosophy of Victorian times, propounded strongly by the art critic and philosopher, John Ruskin. Ruskin’s central argument was that one must reveal Truth in literature, but in doing so also reveal Beauty. One must present the moral beacon to which we all must aspire. One must not write without Hope. It is significant also that today, Thackeray is not charged with undue cynicism or depravity; rather, he is thought to be “sentimental, even cloying.”
Literature today is no longer concerned with morality the way it was in the nineteenth century. Unrelenting, bleak images of society are celebrated for their realism, as representations of humanity. And yet, we have very few images, representations, or new and challenging canon that captures the essential helplessness, the inevitable corruption, the deep-lying flaws of both society and humanity in the way The Wire does. Again, I would contend that such a feat could only be accomplished in the Victorian Age, through the serial format, which allowed for such layered complexity. In no other way could such a richly textured tapestry of a city be constructed from ground-level up. In no other way could the faults in the underlying foundations of society’s institutions be exposed. In no other way could our own society be held up for our examination, and found so sadly lacking.
Yet this extraordinary feat of story-telling could not have been accomplished solely by Bucksley Ogden. It would be a mistake to say that one creator or author was responsible for The Wire, when the illustrations played such an essential role. Just as Sidney Paget immortalized Sherlock Holmes independently of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by giving the detective his famous deerstalker cap and cape, so too did The Wire’s illustrator, “Bubz” contribute to The Wire.
Would William “Bunk” Moreland be the same character without his cigar, ever-present but almost never mentioned? Would Avon Barksdale be as intimidating and yet beautiful, were Bubz not able to capture his panther-like movement, his violent grace? Could Joseph “Proposition Joe” Stewart be as memorable and endearing were he not the portly man we grew suspicious of, and somehow at last learned to love? Certainly Omar Little would not be Omar Little without his coat, like something out of the previous century; nor would he be Omar (“Omar comin’! It be Omar!”) without the weal running down his face, signifying past violence, a life of both heroic romance and mythic tragedy.
The illustrations are yet another essential element lacking from the story-telling of today. For one thing, we would not allow our cast to be represented by the “others” in our society Bubz renders so lovingly. Bubz gave us reality, and he made it beautiful. The standards of art today are no longer concerned with reality, while our fiction demands nothing but. Movies, television, the internet have all morphed our expectations, twisted and changed our visions, until we only wish to see Ruskin’s ideal: a pristine, white, purer version of ourselves.
In our age, we can never experience a modern equivalent of The Wire. We would be unwilling to portray the lower classes and criminal element with the patience or consideration of Horatio Bucksley Ogden or of Baxter “Bubz” Black. We would be unwilling to give a work like The Wire the kind of time and attention it deserves, which is why it has faded away, instead of being held up as the literary triumph it truly is. If popular culture does not open its eyes, works like The Wire will only continue their slow slide into obscurity.
Ms Delyria and Mr Robinson are grateful to the Special Collections department of the University of Washington for generous access to their Ogden collection, including the two 1863 editions from which these illustrations were digitally scanned. Those wishing for access to more of “Bubz” Black’s illustrations may contact Mr Robinson at seanmichaelrobinson at gmail &tc.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Considering storage boxes . . .
(i think i could make a serviceable replica of the above box using a map of a city dear to us . . . hmm . . .)
Balancing act
TRUE STORY: i love white, frothy dresses with heavy, black tights.
(tom and lorenzo would judge and find me wanting.)
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
The best restaurant review I have ever read in my life
GASTRONOMY
Tour De Gall
From Bill Clinton to Woody Allen, it seems every American (or Brit) visiting Paris on an expense account has the same favorite “Please don’t write about it” bistro: L’Ami Louis. Given its colonic décor, surly service, unbelievable food, and hefty bill, the restaurant is a true Gallic triumph.
BY A. A. GILL
APRIL 2011
from http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/04/lami-louis-201104
FOIE BLAH: Inside L’Ami Louis, Paris’s worst-kept secret. Photograph by Ed Alcock/The New York Times.
As you know, it was Thomas Gold Appleton, Longfellow’s brother-in-law, who said, “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.” He failed to add that, prior to joining the choir eternal, good Americans all go to eat at L’Ami Louis. Presidents, movie stars, C.E.O.’s, playboys, and Woody Allen all make their way to a little bistro on a side street near the old market of Les Halles. It’s not just good Americans—fat Englishmen are drawn to L’Ami Louis. Two nations, separated by a common language and a mutual antipathy to each other’s cuisine, are joined in an appetite for L’Ami Louis.
In all my years as a restaurant critic I have learned that there is a certain type of florid, blowsy, patrician Brit who will sidle up and bellow, with a fruity bluster, that if I ever happen to find myself in Paris (as if Paris were a cul-de-sac on a shortcut to somewhere else) there is this little place he knows, proper French, none of your nouvelle nonsense, bloody fantastic foie gras, and roast chicken like Bridget Bardot’s tits, and that I should go. But, they add, don’t bloody write about it. We don’t want Monsieur Yank and his good lady wife turning up in droves. It’s called …
I know what it’s called. L’Ami Louis. I ask the hotel concierge at Le Meurice to book a table for lunch. “L’Ami Louis,” he says, with a pitiful sadness. “It’s always L’Ami Louis for les Anglais.”
What you actually find when you arrive at L’Ami Louis is singularly unprepossessing. It’s a long, dark corridor with luggage racks stretching the length of the room. It gives you the feeling of being in a second-class railway carriage in the Balkans. It’s painted a shiny, distressed dung brown. The cramped tables are set with labially pink cloths, which give it a colonic appeal and the awkward sense that you might be a suppository. In the middle of the room is a stubby stove that also looks vaguely proctological.
At the end of the dining room is the tiny kitchen and an even tinier bar, where the waiters lurk like extras for a Gallic version of The Sopranos. The staff are an essential part of Louis’s mystique. Paunchy, combative, surly men, bulging out of their white jackets with the meaty malevolence of gouty buffalo. They may well be related by blood—theirs or other people’s. They exude a pantomime insolence, an existential Le Fug Youse. As you walk in, one approaches with an eyebrow raised and nose aloft to give you the benefit of full-frontal froggy nostril. If you get past the door, and many don’t, the first thing your waiter does is take your coat. The next thing he does is fling it with effortful nonchalance into the luggage rack. Returning customers know to keep wallets, BlackBerrys, and spectacles out of their pockets. As it is, a tinkling dandruff of change scuttles behind the banquettes.
We are sat at a table by the door. Our particular chubby, oyster-eyed fellow dumps off a pair of menus and a large book without a word or the offer of a drink. The menu is brief and bloody. The tome is the wine list. It turns out to be a massive eulogy to claret. Every grand château and vintage is represented with sycophantic prices. The wine cellar is behind the lavatory in a crypt that smells overpoweringly of fetid bladder damp. After a lot of smiley semaphore, I manage to beg a single glass of house red for my companion.
We order foie gras and snails to start. Foie gras is a L’Ami Louis specialty. After 30 minutes what come are a pair of intimidatingly gross flabs of chilly pâté, with a slight coating of pustular yellow fat. They are dense and stringy, with a web of veins. I doubt they were made on the premises. The liver crumbles under the knife like plumber’s putty and tastes faintly of gut-scented butter or pressed liposuction. The fat clings to the roof of my mouth with the oleaginous insistence of dentist’s wax.
As I suck my teeth, I watch the waiters saunter up and down the aisle like Vichy ticket collectors. Another one appears. Not fat, not white, not a caricature. A lithe, handsome boy, who is probably North African. He is plainly a prop. His job is to be wrong, to soak up blame. The big men bully up, roll their eyes, wave their chubby knuckles at him as he delivers and clears and sweeps crumbs. A man pretends to cuff him round the ear and looks over at a table of Americans with a grin and a wink to include them in the jape.
An Englishman in blinding tweed and racy cap pushes through the door and roars. A waiter steps forward, arms outstretched, and makes hee-haw, hee-haw noises like Bart Simpson pretending to speak French. It is the practiced and familiar ritual greeting of mutual incomprehension and ancient contempt. Our servant glides past and does a silent-movie double take. “Your snails!” he exclaims. “They have not come!” His cheeks bulge as he flaps his short arms. In all my years of professional eating, I have never seen this before. I have seen waiters do many, many things, including burst into tears and juggle knives, and I once glimpsed one having sex. But never, ever has a waiter commiserated with me about the lack of service.
Twenty minutes later, possibly under their own steam, the snails arrive. Vesuvian, they bubble and smoke in a magma of astringent garlic butter and parsley. We grasp them with the spring-loaded specula and gingerly unwind the dark gastropods, curling like dinosaur boogers. They go on and on, expanding onto the plate as if they were alien. We have to cut them in half, which is just wrong. The rule with snails is: Don’t eat one you couldn’t get up your nose.
Twenty minutes later, our plates are taken away. Twenty minutes after that, our main courses arrive. Or rather, my companion’s does. A veal chop, utterly plain, unaccompanied or sullied by decoration or inspiration. Just an awkwardly butchered skinny rib that has been grilled for too long on one side and too little on the other so that it is simultaneously stingingly dry and overdone and flabbily, slimily raw. She can’t decide which side to complain about.
I have decided not to go for the famous roast chicken, mainly because I’ve suffered it before and I’d just been watching a Japanese couple wrestle with one like a manga poltergeist from some Tokyo horror movie, its scaly blue legs stabbing the air. So on to the broiled kidneys. Nothing I have eaten or heard of being eaten here prepared me for the arrival of the veal kidneys en brochette. Somehow the heat had welded them together into a gray, suppurating renal brick. It could be the result of an accident involving rat babies in a nuclear reactor. They don’t taste as nice as they sound.
As an afterthought, or perhaps as an apology, the waiter brings a funeral pyre of French fries—they taste of seared and overused cooking oil—and then a green salad of frisée and mâche, two leaves that rarely share a bowl, due to their irreconcilable differences. They have been doused in vinegar that may have been recycled from the gherkin bottle. Dessert is four balls of gray ice cream and something that had once been chocolate.
Now the good bit. The reckoning. The foie gras appetizer was 58 euros. That’s $79. A single glass of house wine was $19. And the final bill for lunch for two was $403. That isn’t the most expensive meal in Paris, but in terms of quality, service, atmosphere, and all-round edible value, it’s way out there at the far end of the naughty step. So why do the Americans and English come here? Men who, at home, are finickity and fussy about everything, who consider themselves epicurean and cultured. Men who choose their own ties and are trusted with scissors and corporations, who have “sophisticated” on their Facebook pages. Why do they continue to come here? They can’t all have brain tumors. The only rationally conceivable answer is: Paris. Paris has superpowers; Paris exerts a mercurial force field. This old city has such compelling cultural connotations and aesthetic pheromones, such a nostalgically beguiling cast list, that it defies judgment. It’s a confidence trick that can make oreille de cochon out of a sow’s ear—reputation and expectation are the MSG of fine dining.
But still, it’s undeniable that L’Ami Louis really is special and apart. It has earned an epic accolade. It is, all things considered, entre nous, the worst restaurant in the world.
Tour De Gall
From Bill Clinton to Woody Allen, it seems every American (or Brit) visiting Paris on an expense account has the same favorite “Please don’t write about it” bistro: L’Ami Louis. Given its colonic décor, surly service, unbelievable food, and hefty bill, the restaurant is a true Gallic triumph.
BY A. A. GILL
APRIL 2011
from http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/04/lami-louis-201104
As you know, it was Thomas Gold Appleton, Longfellow’s brother-in-law, who said, “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.” He failed to add that, prior to joining the choir eternal, good Americans all go to eat at L’Ami Louis. Presidents, movie stars, C.E.O.’s, playboys, and Woody Allen all make their way to a little bistro on a side street near the old market of Les Halles. It’s not just good Americans—fat Englishmen are drawn to L’Ami Louis. Two nations, separated by a common language and a mutual antipathy to each other’s cuisine, are joined in an appetite for L’Ami Louis.
In all my years as a restaurant critic I have learned that there is a certain type of florid, blowsy, patrician Brit who will sidle up and bellow, with a fruity bluster, that if I ever happen to find myself in Paris (as if Paris were a cul-de-sac on a shortcut to somewhere else) there is this little place he knows, proper French, none of your nouvelle nonsense, bloody fantastic foie gras, and roast chicken like Bridget Bardot’s tits, and that I should go. But, they add, don’t bloody write about it. We don’t want Monsieur Yank and his good lady wife turning up in droves. It’s called …
I know what it’s called. L’Ami Louis. I ask the hotel concierge at Le Meurice to book a table for lunch. “L’Ami Louis,” he says, with a pitiful sadness. “It’s always L’Ami Louis for les Anglais.”
What you actually find when you arrive at L’Ami Louis is singularly unprepossessing. It’s a long, dark corridor with luggage racks stretching the length of the room. It gives you the feeling of being in a second-class railway carriage in the Balkans. It’s painted a shiny, distressed dung brown. The cramped tables are set with labially pink cloths, which give it a colonic appeal and the awkward sense that you might be a suppository. In the middle of the room is a stubby stove that also looks vaguely proctological.
At the end of the dining room is the tiny kitchen and an even tinier bar, where the waiters lurk like extras for a Gallic version of The Sopranos. The staff are an essential part of Louis’s mystique. Paunchy, combative, surly men, bulging out of their white jackets with the meaty malevolence of gouty buffalo. They may well be related by blood—theirs or other people’s. They exude a pantomime insolence, an existential Le Fug Youse. As you walk in, one approaches with an eyebrow raised and nose aloft to give you the benefit of full-frontal froggy nostril. If you get past the door, and many don’t, the first thing your waiter does is take your coat. The next thing he does is fling it with effortful nonchalance into the luggage rack. Returning customers know to keep wallets, BlackBerrys, and spectacles out of their pockets. As it is, a tinkling dandruff of change scuttles behind the banquettes.
We are sat at a table by the door. Our particular chubby, oyster-eyed fellow dumps off a pair of menus and a large book without a word or the offer of a drink. The menu is brief and bloody. The tome is the wine list. It turns out to be a massive eulogy to claret. Every grand château and vintage is represented with sycophantic prices. The wine cellar is behind the lavatory in a crypt that smells overpoweringly of fetid bladder damp. After a lot of smiley semaphore, I manage to beg a single glass of house red for my companion.
We order foie gras and snails to start. Foie gras is a L’Ami Louis specialty. After 30 minutes what come are a pair of intimidatingly gross flabs of chilly pâté, with a slight coating of pustular yellow fat. They are dense and stringy, with a web of veins. I doubt they were made on the premises. The liver crumbles under the knife like plumber’s putty and tastes faintly of gut-scented butter or pressed liposuction. The fat clings to the roof of my mouth with the oleaginous insistence of dentist’s wax.
As I suck my teeth, I watch the waiters saunter up and down the aisle like Vichy ticket collectors. Another one appears. Not fat, not white, not a caricature. A lithe, handsome boy, who is probably North African. He is plainly a prop. His job is to be wrong, to soak up blame. The big men bully up, roll their eyes, wave their chubby knuckles at him as he delivers and clears and sweeps crumbs. A man pretends to cuff him round the ear and looks over at a table of Americans with a grin and a wink to include them in the jape.
An Englishman in blinding tweed and racy cap pushes through the door and roars. A waiter steps forward, arms outstretched, and makes hee-haw, hee-haw noises like Bart Simpson pretending to speak French. It is the practiced and familiar ritual greeting of mutual incomprehension and ancient contempt. Our servant glides past and does a silent-movie double take. “Your snails!” he exclaims. “They have not come!” His cheeks bulge as he flaps his short arms. In all my years of professional eating, I have never seen this before. I have seen waiters do many, many things, including burst into tears and juggle knives, and I once glimpsed one having sex. But never, ever has a waiter commiserated with me about the lack of service.
Twenty minutes later, possibly under their own steam, the snails arrive. Vesuvian, they bubble and smoke in a magma of astringent garlic butter and parsley. We grasp them with the spring-loaded specula and gingerly unwind the dark gastropods, curling like dinosaur boogers. They go on and on, expanding onto the plate as if they were alien. We have to cut them in half, which is just wrong. The rule with snails is: Don’t eat one you couldn’t get up your nose.
Twenty minutes later, our plates are taken away. Twenty minutes after that, our main courses arrive. Or rather, my companion’s does. A veal chop, utterly plain, unaccompanied or sullied by decoration or inspiration. Just an awkwardly butchered skinny rib that has been grilled for too long on one side and too little on the other so that it is simultaneously stingingly dry and overdone and flabbily, slimily raw. She can’t decide which side to complain about.
I have decided not to go for the famous roast chicken, mainly because I’ve suffered it before and I’d just been watching a Japanese couple wrestle with one like a manga poltergeist from some Tokyo horror movie, its scaly blue legs stabbing the air. So on to the broiled kidneys. Nothing I have eaten or heard of being eaten here prepared me for the arrival of the veal kidneys en brochette. Somehow the heat had welded them together into a gray, suppurating renal brick. It could be the result of an accident involving rat babies in a nuclear reactor. They don’t taste as nice as they sound.
As an afterthought, or perhaps as an apology, the waiter brings a funeral pyre of French fries—they taste of seared and overused cooking oil—and then a green salad of frisée and mâche, two leaves that rarely share a bowl, due to their irreconcilable differences. They have been doused in vinegar that may have been recycled from the gherkin bottle. Dessert is four balls of gray ice cream and something that had once been chocolate.
Now the good bit. The reckoning. The foie gras appetizer was 58 euros. That’s $79. A single glass of house wine was $19. And the final bill for lunch for two was $403. That isn’t the most expensive meal in Paris, but in terms of quality, service, atmosphere, and all-round edible value, it’s way out there at the far end of the naughty step. So why do the Americans and English come here? Men who, at home, are finickity and fussy about everything, who consider themselves epicurean and cultured. Men who choose their own ties and are trusted with scissors and corporations, who have “sophisticated” on their Facebook pages. Why do they continue to come here? They can’t all have brain tumors. The only rationally conceivable answer is: Paris. Paris has superpowers; Paris exerts a mercurial force field. This old city has such compelling cultural connotations and aesthetic pheromones, such a nostalgically beguiling cast list, that it defies judgment. It’s a confidence trick that can make oreille de cochon out of a sow’s ear—reputation and expectation are the MSG of fine dining.
But still, it’s undeniable that L’Ami Louis really is special and apart. It has earned an epic accolade. It is, all things considered, entre nous, the worst restaurant in the world.
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