Tag: foodie culture

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Caviar for the 99%

caviar-wikipediaThere is a dish you can eat in a cellar in Brooklyn that is a work of art, and also soulful. It costs $12, and will fill you up.

That dish is Mekelburg’s salt-baked potato with crème fraîche, black caviar, and smoked black cod.

You may think it’s not for you because caviar is a token of luxury, in a city where you finally understand you cannot afford luxury. You may assume the roe must be inferior and the dish somehow a sham, because the really good stuff wouldn’t cost $12, not even as a dollop on top of a potato. Ignore your thoughts, though, and just eat the thing: a huge potato completely covering a small plate, with unctuous, salty bits of smoked fish around it (and, you will discover, thoroughly veined in a little network inside it, like eggs or seeds).

That fish is smoked sable, what “black cod” is called when it’s at home. Ashkenazi Jews of a certain age know sable as the best thing to put on a bagel, so much better than lox it’s not funny. On top of the potato is a creamy mound of crème fraîche with a huge load of unusually buttery, unsalty, even fruity-tasting caviar on it. There is softened butter with dill (and more bits of sable) around the edges of the plate. Together, the potato and sable and only-slightly-sour cream and caviar make up a food that mixes Jewish and Gentile, the feeling of being cared for by one’s mother and the delights you can get when you go out on your own into the world. How that plate brought together salt, sweet, fat, sophisticated, homey almost made me cry.

It’s an odd time for eating out in New York. The places most likely to be reviewed by critics are restaurants where entrées cost $30 and tasting menus cost $100 and more. They are tiny food-temples and shiny mega-boîtes where most of us can’t go even if, by normal US standards, we are “upper income” — little palaces where, we, reader, certainly can’t eat if we are what the government calls either low income or middle-class. (Note that $55,575 is the median household income in the United States; median household income in the city is $67,201.) Reading the reviews has become an exercise in tantalized frustration: breathing in paragon writer Pete Wells’ description, in the New York Times, of the grated frozen foie gras appetizer at Momofuko Ko, you could be forgiven for feeling like the orphan cousin not invited to the party. “A cook behind the counter would rub a frozen cured brick of it across a Microplane held above a bowl with pine nut brittle, riesling jelly and lobes of lychee, showering them with falling pink flakes of airborne pleasure.” (The liver is part of the $195 tasting menu for lunch or dinner, the only way that you can eat at Ko.) The other spots in critics’ reviews – restaurants like Cosme and Blue Hill and even Contra and The Spotted Pig — are not for us, either, unless we’re in the top 5%, or interested in acquiring a load of debt that will cripple us.
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Getting Fancy

Bio-Revival's "Burst Active" fruit pearls. bio-revival.com
Bio-Revival’s “Burst Active” fruit pearls.

The words “fancy food” make my heart swell, for better or worse. In 1970, “fancy food” is what we called it when my father got a gift basket from his boss full of special jams and cheeses that weren’t Kraft Singles and chocolates that were not from Hershey. That basket thrilled me. (The cheeses were still processed ones, but it was 1970 and for them not to have been, we would have had to be Italian-American or a different income level.) The words artisanal and upscale, and that strange new term “noms,” had not yet been applied to food, but I would get a feeling of world-shaking satisfaction whenever I’d go to the Jewish “appetizing” store on Avenue J, where there were preternaturally bright dried fruits and smoked fish that magically smelled delightful, not offputting. Hence “fancy,” special. We seldom could buy anything there, but seeing it was enough. So it was with a sense of being in a childhood paradise that I found myself at the Summer Fancy Food Show last week, the national trade show for the Specialty Food Association, the 64-year-old association of producers and purveyors who sell “high perceived value” food to the American market. Continue reading “Getting Fancy”

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On Luxury Food

cavia-bob-ricard-soho-londonThis is part of a series I am beginning to write on foodie culture, and food and class. You can find the rest of this essay below at Local Write Up (see link):

When I was a child, I had my first bit of education about luxury when I found myself drawn again and again to the same two-page spread of my mother’s New York Times Cookbook, which featured no recipe whatsoever, just a photo and description of the best way to serve caviar.

It was Craig Claiborne’s famous cookbook, and we kept a copy not to cook, but to stare at and get ennobled by through osmosis, by merely perusing the veloutés, the lobster anastrover a l’ Americaine, the poached chicken in aspic. Or perhaps my mother actually intended to try and cook some of the things. I do not think she ever made more than one or two of them.

My mother cooked about once every two weeks or so, when she was home from her gigs teaching college philosophy courses at night, and the rest of the time my sisters and I ate cold cuts from the supermarket, scrambled eggs, Campbell’s tomato rice soup, and bread.

My father, it’s important to say, didn’t cook, either, although he did show an example of astonishing gusto in his food by constructing lipsmackingly elaborate sandwiches for himself, not fancy but delicious-looking: roast beef with piles of tomatoes, cheddar cheese, pickles, olives, onion. Mayo on one side, mustard on the other; he never made any sandwiches for me.

My mother, when she did cook, usually made pot roast: flanken, as we called it, with potatoes, carrots, onions, in a brown gravy. It was sustaining, occasionally even tasty, but I wanted more: wanted something different every time, wanted a parent who would cook for me every night, wanted things in different colors, different textures, wanted something expensive, elaborate, that would cram pleasure into the back of my throat, ravish my teeth, and thrust some unimaginable delight behind my eyeballs.

Because nobody had taught me how to cook and almost nobody used the stove in our house, I assumed that any kind of cooking would be as far beyond my ken as piloting a spacecraft. My mother had brought us up with the idea that if we didn’t start out excellent at something, there was almost no chance we’d ever be able to become good at it over time. She wanted us to stick with what we were already good at. The New York Times Cookbook, therefore, was a rather frightening read. But I could look with considerably more ease on my two favorite pages, which I now know almost by heart, over 30 years later. It was there that that gouty gay alcoholic, Craig Claiborne, pronounced the following round and fizzy words: “Appetizers or hors d’oeuvres are the frivolities of a meal, and, like champagne, they are capable of setting a mood. There are several that are almost guaranteed to give a feeling of elegance and richness. These are fresh caviar, genuine foie gras, cold lobster, smoked salmon and thin slices of fine ham such as that of Paris, Parma, Westphalia or Bayonne.”

To read more, click here.