And the Dichot

Let me clarify that header for a moment: I am in my underpants. The bánh mì is in a take-away bag and will soon be in me, after I have eaten it while sitting on my couch in my underpants.

If this image disturbs you then please don’t even think of the image of it being made—a walk-up suite of a dingy commercial building near Jean-Talon metro; smears of this and that onto a slit baguette drawn from a plastic bag sitting on a stool behind the counter; the mayo role played by some gelatinous looking yellow stuff, kind of what homemade mayo left out in the sun for a week would look like. (stop reading this, mother) But the true scare comes from the variety of meats (which may in fact be variety meats, that is, dog in a can) that are lovingly layered onto this Vietnamese sub. Even the most tee-pee-call of Italian mountain salumi don’t use pig as efficiently as these three pinkpork products would seem to have.

Back to me in my drawers. I have just returned from a very successful morning at the market where I went to buy lemons and cucumbers. I got a little warm after the jaunt, so stripped down for lunch and a little planning before moving on with my afternoon. I have been inspired (and shamed) by the wondrous and fearless W. Yang, and am finally getting off my ass to make some homemade preserved stuff. (Later in the year I plan to be jamming and curing salmon.)

The lemons are for limoncello. Having had success with a batch of the lovely digestif in Italy, I’ll be trying to reproduce the results here in Canada. (I imagine it will be very similar since the lemons there and the lemons here all seem to come from the same hothouse in Spain.) Curiously, the 94% Alcool I bought here at the SAQ cost $60 for 1.14 L. Shocker! Grain alcohol at Coop in Colorno was 10 or 12 euros. The Québec government clearly isn’t into supporting ethnic gastronomic tra-dee-shun.

The cucumbers are for pickles. I bought the Ruhlman and Polcyn Charcuterie book (again due to the Yang’s shamespiration) and thought I’d start at the bottom. Guanciale (cured pig cheek) seems a bit bold for my first curing attempt. But with my haul of spices from Frenco (10 little bags of coriander, cinnamon, fennel seed, yellow mustard, mace, etc. etc.) and a couple of giant glass pickling jars from Nino, I’m feeling ready for a baby brining step. Coarse salt and white wine vinegar (both Portuguese) and fresh dill came from Sakaris and I’m going to add cumin because they’re Lebanese cucumbers—though locally grown in some Québecois glass- or poly-tunnel. I’m also doing some carrots and cauliflower and kohlrabi, with rice vinegar and some Peruvian aji pinguita de mono chiles I got at Jean-Talon. Poor little pickles—they’re going to have no clue what their cultural identity is.

As I pop down the last of the bánh mì, I think of its multicult status and the absolute satisfaction (salt, sweet, spice; fat, crunch, chew; authentic, synthetic, immigrant) that I get from consuming it. I am what I eat, making me deeply sympathetic with my pickles-to-be. Half-clothed, salty, and immersed in globality.

A fine writer and dedicated appreciator of food and humour, the Forlì-based Albanese-impersonator GG also has an excellent memory. This was demonstrated today over a remarkable lunch at Casa Artusi, by his recall of a piece I wrote back in the good old days when food was fun and light.

http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/cibomatic/anti-bullshit?t

Thanks, GG.

Well, mystery solved.

After recent warm weather caused a number of metre-long icicles to fall off my eaves and onto the street below (I think some angry pedestrian banged on my door, but I was on the phone and can’t be sure), I peered out my window to make sure the restaurant awning below was still intact.

Lo, nestled in a cozy little pool of melt water was one silvery tin of Dean & Deluca cinnamon. Option (a) turned out to be true, farfetched as I originally would have thought.

A quick hop downstairs to my neighbour’s window gave me access to the poor spice babe, and once the snow-seepage-cinnamon-paste was cleared away, a good 80% of it was still useable. Poppa’s makin’ pie tonight!

…except maybe for the soul.

My ex, Steve, could never keep me up til midnight.

But my new boyfriend George Stroumboulopoulos shur duz…

My cinnamon has disappeared.

There are a limited number of places it could have gone in my relatively small apartment, and because I live alone I know no one has misplaced it in some annoying spousal way. (Honey, what did you do with the ice cube trays?) My dried herbs and spices reside in a tidy little row of Dean & Deluca tins that sit on the window sill next to my stove. Because they’re in tight, metal containers, I worry not about sun exposure, and the heat is minimal from either oven or sunlight. The metal is getting a little oxidized from the occasional snowflakes that poke their noses in when I open the window to vent accidental burnscent, but I can still pry most of the containers open.

For a while this morning, as I was making up a batch of whole-wheat-rye-rolled-oats pancakes (great fibre excuse for maple syrup and tangerine marmelade…), I convinced myself that I’ve never owned cinnamon. I don’t use it much, so I rationalized that I just never bought it in that D&D splurge so many years ago. But then I remembered the perfumed oranges I made a month or so ago when I had Janelle to dinner. So I must have had cinnamon. Yes, I did. Then where was it?

Like I said, there aren’t that many places for it to go. I searched the kitchen, and nothing. No one else would have moved it, and I’m pretty dutiful about replacing stuff when I cook. So the options: (a) I accidentally knocked it out the window onto the snowy restaurant awning below (to be confirmed, or not, when Spring comes); (b) I drunkenly trashed it (the whole tin, tho?) when cleaning up at 1:00 am; (c) Janelle stole it.

This last seems unlikely, but because I even went there it makes me think about a food life when one has no witnesses, and no other person nearby to blame things on. I end up eating sautéed red cabbage with buckwheat crêpes and chunks of parmigiano reggiano for dinner, and who do I yell at for the weird pregnancy-craving-like menu? I spend 12 hours making quadruple-folded, no-knead bread, it doesn’t rise enough resulting in flavourless, golf-ball-textured baked paste, and where is Mr. X to criticize for distracting me from my dough?

Of course a singleton’s cooking behaviour is much freer than that of someone in a family or a couple. No fussy eaters to veto something yummy and odd. Lots of great leftovers to reheat with polenta or eat, nastily congealed with a mismatched fork, straight from the reused yogurt container. (On that last note, I get to save or recycle as many plastic tubs as I want. When I move, NO ONE will mock me for the enormity of the collection. Lids are always easily accessible and properly stacked. Nice.) And I always know what’s in the fridge and what’s run out cause it’s only me who buys it and eats it.

Nonetheless, it’s good to share a brain when you’re looking for something. I actually had to read—aloud—each of the Dean & Deluca labels to make sure that I wasn’t just missing seeing the cinnamon over and over. Another pair of eyes might also more-quickly confirm that it really wasn’t there. Or they might see the errant tin tucked behind the Cuisinart on the lower rack of my wire shelves. (I looked there, too.) A second brain is also helpful to remind one that people like Janelle are extremely unlikely to steal spices from their dinner-hosts homes, and that calling her, just to see what’s up, really is a bad idea.

Too bad alls I gots is my own head here, addled with feverish images of a gleeful Irish-Franco-Ontarian potter coveting my spices and planning her next stealth mission to nab my allspice.

I have nougat on my digital camera and my house smells like burnt Sunbeam. Needless to say, emotions are running a little high. Let me try to get this down in electrons before the cops show up. Someone has to know the truth, and once the cleanup starts to happen, everything’s gonna get confused.

It all started about an hour ago. Feels like days. Cause I’m a bit of a show-off, I thought, Hey, why don’t I bring along some torrone to Judith’s tonight, along with the aged Gouda and Uruguayan wine I’ve committed to? I’ve been working on a piece on monovarietal honeys, and it seemed that testing a torrone recipe I found online would be good research. Plus, there’s the show-off thing.

So I got myself all prepped—honey, heavy pot, orange flower water, egg beaters. Recipe printed out, candy thermomether swabbed down, Editors playing on iTunes. Everything. (Honestly officer, none of this was premeditated…) It’s a remarkably straightforward recipe. You make a sugar and honey syrup, bring it to hard-crack stage, then pour it over egg whites whipped to soft peaks with a little salt. Keep beating for about 20 minutes, stir in some flavorings and pistachios (shelled in front of the CBC News the night before), give it a quick knead with cornstarch-dusted hands. Then it just needs to sit in a pan for a few hours and presto! Instant Eyetalian treat.

I’m not naïve, you know. I’ve made candy before—fudge, divinity, toffee. Crème caramel is my standby guest dessert, so the batches of caramelized sugar I’ve gone through I can’t even tell you about. But hard crack is something different. (No, I’m not writing more gay food erotica.) 300°F the syrup has to get up to, and that’s a lot of boiling boiling boiling and washing down the sides of the pot with a water-dipped pastry brush. Sure, by the time I transferred the cascading syrup from my 2-qt pot into the as-indicated 5-qt pot, the bubbles were neatly under control, but it took some doing. (Hot honey foams!) At about 250° I thought it would never happen, and the sugar was getting pretty dark already. At 275° suddenly the temp started to rise, and in a (calm) panic, I whipped the eggs.

Okay now, the reason I used the smaller pot was cause it has a handle, and I needed the maneuverability since I was using a handheld mixer, not a 12-cup. mint-green Kitchenaid standalone. (Lost that in the divorce.) The large pot was going to prove a bit unwieldy when filled with three cups of molten death. Nonetheless, I persevered and pouring the syrup in a thin stream down the side of the pyrex bowl was mostly fine, though once again volumes were an issue. The hot caramel made the already well-mounted egg whites mount higher and higher, flecking white- and coffee-colored ur-nougat across the counters, dishes, cooks, and appliances within a four-foot radius. By the time the syrup pot was mostly empty, my un-aproned sweatshirt looked like a costume element from some Torrone Horror pic (the lesser-known genre of American movies that were shot on low budgets in Italy in the 1960s).

So back to the burnt Sunbeam. Though you might think that’s the name of the new hot lip shade from Mac for drag queens of color, it’s actually what happens when you use a bargain-priced handheld mixer on high speed to beat rapidly thickening, tawny-hued concrete for 20 minutes. Rising above the sweet aroma of mildly toasted sugar and unpasteurized Québecois clover honey was the undeniable smell of vaporizing appliance lubricant heated above safety levels. (Chablis fans know it well, but for those of you unfamiliar, it’s like burning rubber mixed with steamed organic broccoli. Yeah, the teeniest waft of E. coli is in there, too.)

By now the white-tiled floor of my kitchen is dotted with caramel syrup (mercifully rock hard and not sticky–remember, I went to hard crack stage), the walls, fridge, washing machine, and all the clean dishes next to my sink have Pollock-like streaks of solidifying fluff on them, and the apartment smells like ass. The Editors are wailing at me, You don’t need this disease/Not right now/No you don’t this disease/Not right now no no not right now. But what about Judith’s dinner guests? I wail back.

The delicate scent of orange flower water calms me as I spoon it into the terrifying now-orangish mass. A bit of almond essence goes in, and my spirits rise. The vanilla (my innovation!) adds a little warmth to the room, and partly masks the airborne Sunbeam toxins. Once the pistachios go in, I can see the light at the end of the torrone tunnel, and I’m actually looking forward to the kneading part. Nice texture—too bad it doesn’t exactly flow onto the chopping block. Two spatulas and a little tricky knee-and-elbow work (glad I went to yoga last week), and it’s flopping around on the thin sheen of cornstarch.

While I’m kneading, it occurs to me that I need photographic evidence of the chaos. I wipe down (though not well enough), grab my camera, and snap off a few pics. Nougat jams the shutter button and white powder (It’s cornstarch, officer!) mars the LCD screen.

The beast is now en-panned. Sitting on a layer of edible wafer paper (”azime” in Frenchish), it’s probably not gonna be ready for the dinner tonight. Supposed to dry for 8-12 hours before cutting, I now read in the Epicurious printout. Wanh. That’s a hard crack to take. I turn back to the Editors track now playing for solace:

Though this world’s essentially
An absurd place
To be living in—
It doesn’t call/for total withdrawal.

I’ve been told it’s a fact of life
Men have to kill one another
Well I say: there are still things
Worth fighting for

La Résistance
La Résistance

I guess there’s a reason that Torrone is one of those things that people buy instead of make. It’s a lot of work, a lot of drama, and probably results in too many false home-violence reports to the coppers. (Honestly, officer, it’s really worth the effort. Just try a piece.)

1. Astro BioBest Vitalité Yogurt: Ick. Stop eating fucking yogurt with bacteria in it to make you shit. Probiotics in foods have been being blabbed about for some time now, but Astro’s ad for this weird goop really takes the Meaninglessness Cake. (Don’t eat that! Cake might constipate you!) It features two women talking about how great the stuff is because it contains probiotic AND prebiotic cultures. A spiral yellow arrow hovers over the first woman’s stomach, pointing downwards in the presumed direction of the material that will eventually be inspired to come launching out of her. “Wow,” says the second woman.

Prebiotic, when you look it up, seems to be a synonym of probiotic. (”Pro-” vs. “anti-”, I get. i.e. a culture that promotes life forms instead of killing them. But “pre-”? What, it triggers biological activity in your gut before you even eat it? Di-gi by osmosis? The power of suggestion?) I can only assume that the word is the fake-food marketers’ new up-the-ante fake vocab, conceived to float into our brains and make us think it means something. The word has also found its way into a brand of sliced bread with the least food-like name I’ve ever heard: Bon Matin GrainsEntier Prébiotique. “Let’s just say it gives you energy,” hums the ad’s voiceover, as a suburban mom jogs back into the driveway where her husband and son are shooting hoops. She grabs the ball, goes all CGI, and slam-dunks it through the net 10 feet above the ground. Let’s just say…

A recent story on the CBC raised the question of whether probiotics actually benefit ordinarily healthy people in any way. And apparently a class-action lawsuit is being launched against Dannon in the U.S. for making allegedly misleading claims about probiotics. So maybe all this blather about prebiotic is just a buzz-word hedge for the time when future injunctions prevent the use of probiotic by consumable plastics manufacturers like Astro and Danone.

I think I’m gonna go copyright prubiotic and pribiotic right now, so I can cash in when prebiotic gets locked down in a couple of years by the courts. What’s that you say? What about prabiotic? I don’t think so. Too weird sounding.

Not that you actually need to call bullshit when it comes to food advertising—the stuff seems to rain from the skies these days. But TV spots for processed and convenience foods, omnipresent on those great flatscreen hypnotizers in our living rooms, need some calling out. The medium makes all its content deliciously easy to absorb, so when ridiculous products or ridiculous claims get delivered, I find them slipping by even my own attentive and irritable filters. Here, then, is the beginning of a series of posts about food advertising that needs a finger pointed at it, just so we stay on our toes a little and remember that natural, wholesome, and easy aren’t necessarily the most honest of words.

1. McCain Slow Cooker Solutions: Where to begin? First, the ad is weird. Family members shriek or gasp when Mom tells them that dinner is ready the second she comes home. The horror! But mainly the product concept itself. Slow cooker solutions? I thought the crock pot was the solution. Dump in meat and veg at 9:00, let it cook all day, stew by 5:30. Too complicated, apparently. McCain solves all our problems by freezing pre-chopped ingredients in ice cream boxes so that all we have to do is add water. (They’ll probably find that consumers don’t find it homemade enough, so they leave out some key ingredient like salt, à la Betty Crocker cake mixes of the 1950s.)

2. McCain Oven Roasts: These “gourmet” seasoned potato chunks are apparently the upscale version of “McCain Roasters,” which seem to be the same product without the premium pricing. The ad depicts a busy female exec rehydrating old bread rolls at her desk and then chopping them into fresh (as it were) breadcrumbs at the conference room table during a speakerphone call. Oh, the wit. Stop it, my sides are splitting and my knees can’t take the compulsive slapping this spot induces. Right, moving on. (Except to point out that even when they’re homemade, crumbed Cajun-flavored potato nuggets AREN’T GOURMET.)

3. Nutella: Don’t get me wrong, I love Nutella. Eat it with a spoon even when I haven’t been broken up with lately. But come on: Central Casting’s SmartSerious Young Mom telling us that it’s part of a nutritious breakfast because it starts with hazelnuts, milk, and just a “hint” of cocoa? (Is “hint” supposed to make us relieved it’s not some junky confectionery spread? Find me the geniuses who wrote that copy…) “Start” is such a funny word. Like “is” in milennial American Politicotainment news. A glance at the label tells us that Nutella actually starts with sugar and palm oil. Though indeed, cocoa is listed down the line, so maybe “hint” is the most accurate part of the TV spot. Nummy! (P.S. This potential inaccuracy has been noted by more cranks than just the Dichot.)

Ben, non, je n’écrit pas en français, j’ai dit. Je suis communicateur anglophone—j’oserais jamais de m’exprimer dans une langue autre que l’anglais.

À l’autre côté de la table, avec deux bières qui nous séparaient (une blonde, une rousse), mon interlocuteur souriait. Mais t’as déjà écrit en français. Nous nous avons rencontré online; la première fois que nous avons “parlé” c’était en écrivant.

Il avait raison.

Comme anglo-Montréalais, revenu ici en Québec après 18 ans (ayant fait un tour du monde, ou au moins, un tour de Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, Portland, et Italie), j’ai finalement mué l’embarras de ne pas parler le français parfaitement. Même quand le gouvernement provincial m’a informé, officiellement, que je fusse bilingue, je ne le sentais pas. Et donc j’ai quitter la province, et la ville que j’adorais, pour trouver un emploi ailleurs. L’année passée, cherchant mon identité gastronomique (la manière dont ma crise de la quarantaine se manifeste), je me trouve encore sur La Main, mangeant de rillettes d’oie et des grillades portugaises (et des baguettes, des tranches de pizza toutes garnies, de la poutine au foie gras…) Je suis capable de bavarder online avec des gars anonymes (même si le slang gai m’échappe des fois) et je peux échanger des blagues avec M. Le Charcutier Français-de-France cinq numéros plus bas de chez moi.

Mais écrire? Bloguer? (Comment dit-on “yikes” en français?)

Alors je tenterai de la faire. Il y aura pas mal des fautes de genres (même avec mon ami fidèle, wordreference.com, je ne vais pas vérifier tous les mots), il y aura des absences des accents (mon clavier est américain, sans raccourcis européens ni franco-canadiens), il y aura des répétitions des mots (que je connais) et des expériences de vocabulaire mal conçu (on pourra blâmer mon cher wordreference.com encore). Sûrement il y avait été déjà, dans ce blogpost ci, nombreuses fautes de conjugaison.

Mais je crois qu’on va voir aussi une changement de mes perspectives au sujet de la bouffe et de la gastronomie—ce dernier basé sur deux moments récents quand j’ai apérçu une différence en ce que je disais en parlant en français de l’alimentation. J’explique:

À cause de mes compétences communicatives en anglais je peux dire presque n’importe quoi, en particulier en écrivant. Mes doigts peuvent taper aussi vite que vont mes pensées—aussi en parlant. Je sais comment construire une phrase utilisant des expressions et des mots avec un double sens ou avec une connotation culturelle, pour rendre la phrase une espèce de shorthand. Et tout ça se fait intuitivement. En français? Devinez si ça se passe. Alors quand je parle (ou écris) de mon sujet préferé en français, les pensées sont rendues en parole plus simple, moins fine, plus formulée, moins fluide. Et cela me fait arrêter de faire compliquée la chose. Alors c’est possible que je vais retrouver encore la plaisir dans mon sujet (choquant!). Je serai, peut-être, moins fâché, moins frustré. On verra.

Bref, apparément mon français écrit était capable d’appâter deux hommes (différents nuits, bien sûr) et les faire venir prendre une verre avec moi. Étant donné ces réussites, je devrais être capable de décrire un fromage quelconque (bien que les chèvres laitières ne sont pas aussi désespérés que les chèvres sur Manhunt).

*J’ai appris le vocabulaire de l’anatomie humaine en français quand j’avais 12 ans. Une des catégories des muscles est nommée “lisse.” (Je me souviens pas des autres dénominations.) J’ai toujours apprécié ce mot là—sa qualité descriptive et texturée—et en l’apprenant j’ai commencé une admiration des différences et des possibilités de communiquer en langues diverses. Et plus important, j’ai découvert qu’il ne soit pas toujours un équivalent exact pour chaque mot en chaque langue. Même si la dictionnaire dit que “lisse” se traduit en “smooth,” le mot n’aura jamais une traduction parfaite pour moi en anglais. C’est seulement, toujours, simplement: lisse.

Et oui, je sais que “lissement” n’est pas un mot. J’invente en italien aussi.

There’s no damn fresh pizza dough at Provigo. Or at least none that I could find after stalking around all the chilled areas for longer than was socially comfortable. (I felt like some kind of pâté pedophile after my third circuit of the ready-to-serve section.) And there ain’t no way I’m gonna buy a tube of pop’n'fresh pizza-in-a-can. That little prediliction died with my last relationship (sorry, Steve).

So what’s a boy to do when he needs a third-sick-day-Friday-no-date dinner that comforts the soul and reminds him of who he is? He makes his own crust, that’s what.

Fortunately, Frères Sakaris (my next-door Portuguese-Asian grocery store) stocks industrial-sized packages of Fleischmann’s yeast. More importantly, I knew a quick dough recipe that could rise and be ready in two hours. (This was 4:10 pm, at the realization.)

Back when I was shackled to the best and worst relationship of my life (sorry, again, Steve), we used to make pizza roughly once a week. It was kind of fun, kind of easy, and only relatively fraught with disharmonious food-taste differences and power issues. I’d sauté the orange pepper and onions, he’d cut whack the Pillsbury tube on the counter and snip the end off the packet of Boboli sauce. Since a can unrolls into a rectangle, we’d end up with a cookie sheet of ‘za, easily divided into His Half and My Half (icky onions on mine). The Doughboy dough wasn’t all that bad, though in retrogust I recall a nasty feeling at the back of my throat. Three squares later and our hearts would be pounding, less with lust and more with MSG (or whatever industrial-authentic flavour buds the dough was peppered with). Friday-night pizza Chez D & S was the best disincentive to hot hot man-on-man action ever.

For years, I have skipped home pizza making. The above-noted memories were one reason. The remarkably different thing that pizza is in Italy (even more so, in Napoli) is another. Plus, I lost my stone and peel in the divorce. So tonight, as I sought something nice and familiar, a good complement to a low-rent bottle of Shiraz-Merlot (sweet!) from the SAQ, when my frozen heart turned to home-made pizza, I felt a certain sense of reclaiming something that was mine, but lost. (Years before the advocate of Man/Doughboy love entered my life, I’d made a lot of crusts, topped with gorgonzola and endive. Asian pear and walnuts. And that was even before the poofter pizza chefs were doing it. Anywayssss….)

One pie for now, and one for tomorrow, I made. Tomorrow’s will crisp up nicely in the oven, or taste really good at midnight if I ever go out socializing again. To hell with the Ravioli Tonkinoise and the charcutier-down-the-street’s housemade foie gras. And to hell with losing a favorite comforting evening, just because I left a relationship three years ago. That pizza is mine, goddammit.