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From Required Eating
Posted by Adam Roberts, September 18, 2007 at 10:00 AM
Editor's note: We've long been fans of David Kamp's work (author of The United States of Arugula and, now, along with Marion Rosenfeld, The Food Snob's Dictionary), so we turned loose Adam Roberts on him for a chat. What follows is the second part of a lengthy but entertaining interview. Here's Part One, if you missed it.
One of the things I found most fascinating in the book was the idea of objectivity and subjectivity and Giorgio DeLuca's discovery that food can be objectively good. How do you feel about that subject? Do you feel that good food can be objectively good or is it always a matter of taste?
People obviously have different preferences. But the idea that some food is good and some food isn't good—I kind of agree with DeLuca. It is kind of objective. I don't begrudge people their taste if they don't like Szechuan food. But the idea, or what DeLuca was saying, is that in America we're taught to be populist in a really dumb way. That there's good populism and bad populism. But to be populist in a dumb way is to say that Kraft Singles are just as good as Humboldt Fog. No, sorry, certain cheeses are much better than others. A really good chicken is much better than that dried-out Perdue stuff. It's one thing people are catching on to now is that you can actually care more about your food. There was almost a stigma to that for a while—it was an act of sedition to care too much about your food. It seemed un-American and oddly Frenchlike.
One issue that raises for me is the idea of class. If you can afford to get the best of everything, you can eat well, but if you can't afford it can you eat well?
Julia Child was someone who basically said you can just go to the supermarket and make all her recipes. And she's absolutely right that you can. You can do her recipes with cheap chicken. But that said, I think the very fact that farmers' markets are going way up in number and that your average chain supermarket, whether it's an A & P or a Wegman's, is slowly starting to resemble a Whole Foods or Dean and DeLuca in their produce and the quality of meat. It's an indication that Americans are changing. When you talk about the best of everything, I'm not talking about high-end foods like caviar or truffles. I'm talking about paying a little more for a better-quality chicken or a Niman Ranch steak instead of an agribusiness steak pumped full of hormones. That's not the best of everything, that's simply better quality. And, yes, that costs a bit more, but it cuts across class lines that people are embracing that kind of eating. That's what Michael Pollan argues. In other areas of our lives we care about quality—if we're buying a new DVD set, we'll pay $50 more because it's better quality. So why should it be that when it comes to what we're putting into our mouths and into our bodies that we'll buy the cheapest thing possible?
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From Required Eating
Posted by Adam Roberts, September 17, 2007 at 11:00 AM
Editor's note: We've long been fans of David Kamp's work (author of The United States of Arugula and, now, along with Marion Rosenfeld, The Food Snob's Dictionary), so we turned loose Adam Roberts on him for a chat. What follows is the first part of a lengthy but entertaining interview. Read Part Two here.
Let's start with The United States of Arugula. How did the book come about?
I'm not a food writer by vocation, I'm more of a generalist culture writer for Vanity Fair and GQ. Basically, I love food: I found that it was my off-duty passion. Either cooking or shopping for food at markets or thinking about food and reading about food. Particularly, I noticed that when I was really in the unwinding mode, the thing that I found the most relaxing after a long, taxing day was doing food prep with some nice music on—shelling beans or trimming some haricots verts. And the other thing that I found incredibly relaxing is that moment when, if you're lucky, 30 to 45 minutes before you pass out in bed after an exhausting day, when you're actually reading in bed, I always found I was reading A. J. Libeling or M. F. K. Fisher. I realized this is something I want to write about more—how did we get to this point where we've gotten more savvy, more sophisticated, more knowledgeable about food than Americans from 20, 30, 40, and 50 years ago.
Were you always interested in food? Or did that happen later in life?
I come from a middle class family, but we were always a little more aware of food than others. I grew up in New Jersey, and my mom was a very good cook, and some of my earliest memories are—I was the youngest of three, so when the older two were in school, I was still in my toddler days, she would have Julia Child and Graham Kerr on all the time. Do you know who Graham Kerr is? You're young, I know.
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From Talk
Posted by Adam Roberts, September 2, 2007 at 3:00 PM
So my local grocery store sells D'Artagnan truffle butter right next to the D'Artagnan chicken. I was thinking of rubbing this truffle butter all over the chicken, getting some under the skin by the breast, and sprinkling with salt and pepper--maybe stuffing with rosemary--and roasting at 400. Would that be good? How would you do it?
From Talk
Posted by Adam Roberts, August 6, 2007 at 1:35 PM
In the summer, all the magazines, TV shows and cookbooks espouse the joys of grilling. But I live in a tiny Brooklyn apartment with no yard: what are my options? Should I get a grill pan? Buy a portable grill and bring it to a park? How do you grill when you don't have a grill?
From Required Eating
Posted by Adam Roberts, April 3, 2007 at 12:00 PM
Photograph from iStockphoto.com
Note: This is the second of two parts. Read Part One here.
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From Required Eating
Posted by Adam Roberts, April 3, 2007 at 7:00 AM
Photograph from iStockphoto.com
Yoga led me to waitering.
Let me explain. It was the second semester of my senior year of college (Emory, in Atlanta) and I had almost enough credits to graduate. In fact, the only credit I needed to graduate was a P.E. credit. Which was one credit. So I signed up for yoga and once a week for one hour I had to do yoga and that was it. My parents, not surprisingly, weren’t too happy.
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From Required Eating
Posted by Adam Roberts, March 27, 2007 at 7:15 AM
My First Chicken Stock
Photograph from iStockphoto.com
There once was a boy who bought his chicken stock in a box, no questions asked, and used this boxed stock in every recipe he cooked that required chicken stock. Did he stop to think about making his own stock from scratch? He didn't. He said to himself, "Why should I spend three hours simmering chicken bones and water? This boxed stock is fine, and this dinner will be fine, and anyone who thinks different gets a zero in my book."
OK, confession time, that boy was me. I am a chicken stock skeptic, a perpetual purchaser of those colorful boxes, the ones that help you save time and make a complicated recipe like risotto a cinch to pull off. Sure, it'd be nice to have homemade stock around to cook with, but I'm an impulsive person, and I rarely know what I'm going to make for dinner until the last minute. If I decide to make something that requires stock, I never have time to make it from scratch. And, so far, I've been living a very happy life as a consumer of store-bought chicken stock.
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From Required Eating
Posted by Adam Roberts, March 20, 2007 at 7:00 AM
Photograph by Adam Roberts
“This is a really big step: you should be really proud.”
I’m talking to Molly Stevens, author of my new favorite cookbook—All About Braising—and she’s patting me on the back for something I haven’t done yet.
“When you don’t use recipes anymore, when you call on your own techniques, that’s when you can call yourself a chef,” she says. “Coming up with your own recipe is a big moment in your development.”
What Molly doesn’t know and what the voices in my head keep reminding me is that this big step I’m about to take is one I’m not ready for. Like some kid who likes to dive in the family pool and then enters the Olympics, I am in over my head.
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From Required Eating
Posted by Adam Roberts, March 13, 2007 at 6:00 AM
Photo credit: iStockphoto.com
If you chopped my arm off with an axe, you might be surprised to see that the stump that remained had a giant hole in it. That’s because my body is made of bagels. I am 70 percent water, 30 percent bagels. No week passes in my life without the consumption of at least one or more bagels. If I go for more than a week without a bagel, my hair falls out, my eyes turn black, and I start chanting strange Kabbalic verses that’d make Madonna’s head spin. Luckily, I live in New York City, so unless someone kidnaps me and ties me to a chair and feeds me a constant stream of ham and mayonnaise to un-Jew me, I will never be without a bagel. And thank God, because bagels are my favorite day food. (As opposed to my favorite night food, which is pasta. But that’s another subject.)
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From Required Eating
Posted by Adam Roberts, March 6, 2007 at 6:00 AM
Illustration: iStockphoto.com; photographs: Adam Roberts
I'm on the phone with my dad, and I'm lying.
"I'm about to put together a bathroom fixture," I say while flipping through Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess
.
"Good!" my dad says. "That'll be good for you."
The bathroom fixture sits in a bag from Target near the door. The fixture is a two-shelf wall mount that we need because our bathroom sink is scattered with hair brushes, contact-lens solution, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and other bathroom miscellany.
"It's messy because there's no storage," is the justification my roommate, Diana, and I often make. But the solution is simple: Buy a bathroom fixture, put it together, mount it on the wall, and clean off the sink. And this is what I intend to do, but Nigella is calling to me, whispering two words over and over again: "Fairy cakes. Fairy cakes."
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