Serious Eats
Ed Levine's Serious Diet, Week 11: Less Really Is More
It's only taken me half a century or so to figure out that when it comes to food--crazy good, delicious food--less really is more.
The late, great jazz composer and pianist Thelonious Monk used to say (I am paraphrasing here), "It's not just the notes you play (that make great music), it's the notes you don't play." The very first time I heard Monk I knew that he was right about music. I just could never admit to myself that it might be true about food as well.
See, I grew up the youngest of four brothers, and lordy, we all liked to eat. And though my parents were died-in-the-wool leftists, my mother must have thought there was value in creating some kind of strange, ritualized Darwinian competition among her four sons in everything we did together, even eating.
What else could explain her making nine pork chops for the four of us, so that a fight over the one extra pork chop was inevitable. No wonder we all eat so fast and have battled weight problems all our lives. No wonder I have spent half a century scanning menus looking for the one item that would supply food in bulk to my stomach and brain.
But yesterday, eating lunch with my oldest brother, I realized that quality trumps quantity every time when it comes to food and music and probably every other good thing in the world for that matter.
And all it took was a shrimp salad sandwich from one of my favorite New York lunch spots, the Blue Ribbon Bakery, to bring that lesson home to me one last time, hopefully this time for good.
The shrimp salad sandwich at the Blue Ribbon Bakery is a minimalist masterpiece. Small pieces of meaty, perfectly cooked, poached gulf shrimp are mixed with mayonnaise, celery, salt, and pepper and spread one piece high across two slices of thinly sliced, freshly baked in house challah.
At another time I would have been furious about the meagerness of the portion of shrimp salad. I would have wanted that shrimp salad piled so high I couldn't easily bite all the way through the sandwich. I probably would have said something to the waiter about the paucity of shrimp in the shrimp salad. But yesterday at lunch with my brother I ordered the shrimp salad sandwich KNOWING there wasn't very much to it.
The late New York newspaper man Jerry Nachtman once wrote something to the effect that "I used to think that I could never get enough spare ribs." It was his way of justifying wanting and eating more of everything he loved, including Chinese spare ribs. It turns out there can be enough Chinese spare ribs, and shrimp salad, and perfect scoops of ice cream, and anything else that is crazy good in this world.
The problem with these kinds of cosmic realizations is that they have to be readily available to people like me whenever I need them. Otherwise I end up eating greasy tortilla chips while waiting for my perfect and small lamb barbacoa burrito. That's just what happened to me this past weekend.
So there you have my week for you in a nutshell, or perhaps I should say a tortilla shell. It was a week of the good and the bad, and I hope not the ugly when I get on the scale. Here goes. Well, I stayed even this week. I'm not even that disappointed. It really is a long race. At least that's what I keep telling myself. And that shrimp salad sandwich will still be there next time I eat at the Blue Ribbon Bakery. Unfortunately so will the greasy tortilla chips.