June 2006 Archives

Michael Bauer takes a lot of hits from the San Francisco Foodie crowd, but I think it is because they all enviously wish they had his job. I just stumbled on to his blog: Michael Bauer: Between Meals and found it to be both engaging and informative. Though I already visit enough blogs every day, I'm going to read it. Give it a look. Recommended

The greatest marriage of food and literature I know of is Babette's Feast, the short story by Isak Dinesen, but there are other intersections of good food and literature. I've been reading "My Antonia" by Willa Cather. It is a story about pioneer life on the prairie and the relationship of young Jim, the protagonist, with Antonia one of the daughters of an immigrant family, the Shimerdas. In the section below it is the first winter for the Shimerdas and they have sunk into a deep poverty and are in danger of starving. Jim's family visits and leaves them with a good supply of food. In gratitude, they receive something in kind...

The question before us can be stated thus: “Is San Francisco big enough for both Zuni and Winterland?” Except for both having names that inhabit the back forty of the alphabet, there isn’t much about these two places that would indicate they are from the same food world.

At Zuni you get freshly shucked oysters on the half shell, at Winterland you get octopus crudo with smoked paprika. At Zuni you get roasted chicken on bread salad, at Winterland you get “New York Sirloin cooked on Hay” (wheatgrass). Zuni is comfortable, Winterland is edgy. Zuni is establishment, Winterland isn’t. Does San Francisco have enough adventurous diners so that these two worlds can coexist?

Why are there no ice cubes in Europe? This article from Practically Edible: The Web's Biggest Food Encyclopaedia tells the tale.

Recently, I have been reading about the history of wine in America. While I have collected a couple of good overviews (American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine, and A History of Wine in America from Prohibition to the Present) the book that has been the most fun is one providing some original research: The Fine Wines of California: A discriminating buyer's guide for the consumer and connoisseur, by Robert S. Blumberg and Hurst Hannum; Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York 1971.

This book shows just how much better off we are today than just 35 years ago. A large section of Fine Wines of California consists of many tasting notes made in 1969, and it is interesting to speculate on the utility of tasting notes (going back into the early 1960’s) not being published until three to five years after the wines have been released. The implication is that California wines stayed in distribution a lot longer then than they do now.

Thirty-five years ago, we didn’t have the 100-point scale, Robert Parker, or the commonly accepted tasting note vocabulary, and Fine Wines in California meant something quite different than it does today.

Whole Foods has banned the sale of live lobsters in their stores. Somehow keeping the lobsters alive a bit longer seems more humane than having them killed en masse in a factory, but my moral compass is obviously defective because this whole business doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Is a lobster more sentient than a chicken? Is selling live lobsters less humane than selling dead ones????

And, how about potatos? They dig THEM up out of the ground. Perhaps light to a potato is extremely painful. Take a look at this: Don't Slay That Potato, though you really should listen to it.

Also, D. Keith Mano's black satire The Bridge is seeming less and less absurd.

I am certainly not the first to point this out, but EncycloWine, a wiki devoted to wine, has the potential to be really cool.

The success of wikis is really interesting. Without the internet, the wiki couldn't exist. Plus, wikis, it seems to me, are incontrovertable proof of the deep seated cooperative social nature of human beings.

P.S. If anyone reading this is new to the Planet Earth, the best example of a wiki is Wikipedia.

Asparagus. It wasn't too expensive. It wasn't bruised. It wasn't the wrong color. It just was offered. Not one of the vendors had any asparagus for sale. The season for fresh asparagus in Northern California has come to an end.

Tomatoes. Although I had a discussion with the fellow at the Dirty Girl Produce stand about their wonderful dry farmed tomatoes, I didn't buy any. It wasn't that they were pricey, or green, or overripe, or too ugly, it isn't tomatoe season yet and there aren't any locally grown tomatoes to be had.

King Salmon. I didn't buy any of this, either. It has been very windy in the Bay Area this week and Larry at Shogun Fish said that none of the boats had gone out. Salmon has gone up in price because of the short season, but this week, fresh locally caught King Salmon is not available at any price.

The fact that I couldn't buy these items today didn't annoy me, it left me feeling content. I've see more than a half-century of springs and I am familiar with their rhythms. I am used to the progression of the seasons and of the years. Like all things alive, fresh food has a season. The fact that I didn't buy some things at the market this week is good, and is how it should be.

There is no season such delight can bring,
As summer, autumn, winter, and the spring
-William Browne