Orecchiette with lentils

I sautéed mirepoix along with some garlic and black pepper, then added green lentils and vegetable broth, and cooked this for about 20 minutes. To this I added the cooked pasta, and a handful of grated parmesan.

Falafel problems

There are some falafel problems around the Dugald Stewart Building, where I work.  There is only one falafel that it is permissible to eat, which also happens to be good, from the Nile Valley Café on Chapel Street.  Theirs is spicy, flavorful, with a crisp exterior, served with a good sauce, onions, cucumber, tomato, wrapped up in pita bread and heated in a sandwich press.  (The principal defect of the Café is that it is next door to an offensively bad “burrito” place.)

The alternatives to this are all woefully inadequate.  Beirut, on Nicolson Square, is a tribute to inept restauranteurism: there is never anyone tending the mostly-empty glass counter, and minute, dried-out, sad-looking doner kebabs rest motionless on their spits.  The only time I managed to get served there, I was presented with an extremely boring falafel served with lettuce and tomato, which had not be heated all the way through.  (Don’t even think of trying to get a piece freshly fried falafel — not in this part of town anyway.) The sandwich was as though it had been prepared for the purpose simply of giving an example of a falafel sandwich, with no other aim in view.

Palmyra, on Nicolson Street, has a reasonably tasty falafel, although it is marred by a complete absence of crust.  Their principal failing, however, is that they serve their falafel with an outrageous sauce that is a perfect simulacrum of the dressing on a Big Mac.

Finally, El Falafel, on Bristo Place, offers a delightful salad bar of fixings (onions, sauces, cucumbers, cabbage, carrot, baba ghanoush), but both their falafel and their hummus is bland and insipid, the former having both the flavor and consistency of a dried-out specimen of yak dung.  Or so I should imagine.

Culinary terror

This weekend the British Society for Aesthetics came to Edinburgh; their time in town represented for me a turbulent culinary episode.   Academic catering is a dangerous animal, on which I’ve commented before.  On day 1 of the BSA conference I had a tolerable custard tart at afternoon coffee, but I grew trepidus at the thought of what dinner might consist in, and fled to the Brass Monkey, where I spent the rest of the night imbibing the nutrition of a half-dozen IPAs, along with a ham sandwich, and two small pieces of a chocolate brownie.  On day 2 I visiting the farmer’s market with some colleagues and had an Oink sandwich, which is made of tender and juicy pork with stuffing and applesauce (but which is relatively bland), and by the time of the conference dinner I found myself satisfied by the sandwich and ever-terrified of the catering.  Subliminal causes of culinary terror are everywhere; earlier on Saturday I had walked down Nicolson Street and seen a sign in the window of a Subway for some kind of McRib rip-off:

Apparently this is nothing new; there’s a Facebook page maintained by the sandwich’s British fans.  But I again left the conference, and at home made a dish of stir-fried onions, cashews, two red chili peppers, some broth, soy sauce, black pepper, and green beans.

This was good.  But within hours I was suffering again, not at the hands of the caterers who I had almost completely avoided so far, but at the hands of the New Town’s bartenders.  First, at Bramble, I found it impossible to get a Manhattan made right.

Q: What’ll you have?

A: Manhattan, up, with a cherry.

Q: Sweet or dry?

A: A little bit sweet.

(The perplexing emergence of the “dry Manhattan” in recent years is, well, perplexing.)

Result: the women who took my order relayed it to a moustachioed underling (why?  why?), who combined two measures of Woodford Reserve with one measure of sweet vermouth, two dashes of bitters, into which he finally submerged a black cherry (which garnish is the height of cocktail pretension).  The result was not as bad-tasting as I had expected, given the monumental quantity of vermouth.  Undeterred by this incorrect and outrageous performance, I returned for more.

Q: What’ll you have?

A: Manhattan, up, with a cherry, with just a few drops of sweet vermouth.

Result: the “person” “serving” me proceeded to fill a tumbler with Woodford Reserve, followed by a tiny spoonful of sweet vermouth … followed by two tiny spoonfuls of dry vermouth, all of which was stirred and strained into an elegant little glass.  This could not be said to taste good at all.

Second, I was accosted by a bartender at Rick’s hotel and told, concerning my choice of Jamison’s, that I ought to drink Scotch whisky “while in Scotland.”  (The same grimy twerp later asked if I wanted ice in a glass of Highland Park, moronically assuming that taking ice in Irish whiskey is somehow equivalent to taking ice in malt whisky.)  This insult, these kinds of insult, are quite vexing, both to the (easily-repaired) dignity and to the (inconsolable) understanding.  The poverty of British service is most troubling.  Smith may have described capitalism, but his present-day countrymen do not know how to practice it.

However, whether your drinks are made right or not, whether you are disgraced while they are served to you or not, you will get drunk.  Aaron Meskin and I dined on deep-fried pizza and chips on the way back from New Town, and this delicious but undeniably disgusting meal was a kind of hazy foreshadowing of the weakness that I manifested on Sunday, after my talk, when I ate some of the sandwiches that University catering had delivered to the Old College.  There were definitely disgusting, but decidedly undelicious.  Dainty little packets of nastiness, they were.

All ended tolerably well.  I was taken by some colleagues to the Fruitmarket Gallery, beneath North Bridge, where I had a coffee and an outstanding little sweet cornmeal cake, a polenta they called it, flavored with orange, and covered with almond frosting.  And thus fear gave way, finally, to a quiet peace.

The perfect club

The club sandwich is an elusive creature.  We all know, whether by native intelligence or sentimental education, what a club should be.  But, like all such simple and familiar dreams, few, if any, have tasted the perfect club sandwich.  Like the idea of divinity, according to Descartes, it is like a mountain we can touch, but cannot embrace.

The recipe for a perfect club sandwich is relatively simple.  It is the juxtaposition of:

Turkey: roasted, sliced relatively thin, which must not to be too dry.

Bacon: which must be crisp.

Mayonnaise: never mustard, never anything but mayonnaise, liberally applied.

Bread: white , toasted, three slices; it is a matter of taste how the fillings are to be arranged within the bread, along with lettuce and tomato.

A privation of cheese: contemporary fashion adds cheese to everything, in the manner of totalitarian propaganda; a club sandwich never has cheese.

A context: the club is eaten, primarily, in your hotel room, alone, passing from place to place, room service better than venturing into the unknown night, too tired and too sick; better to eat in, a baseball game on TV, or just the sight of cars passing on the highway outside your window, or the grind of elevated trains on their tracks.

All real clubs fall short of this perfect ideal; the best come closest to it.  The club I just ate, in my room at the Hilton at Logan Airport, was one of these: generous mayonnaise, excellent turkey, tasting of rosemary, but inexplicably untoasted bread.  You might think this could be remedied by a rigorous order, but this is where the club sandwich imparts its lesson to the fallible human: no matter how hard you try to order the perfect club, you will fuck it up, you will forget something — as I, tonight, failed to demand toasted bread (I just assumed); while insisting explicitly on the condiments, other elements, I never thought to mention the toasted bread.  It was just too obvious.  But whatever gets fucked up is always too obvious. And if you try to do it right, obviously right, you will fuck it up too.  That’s being human: not getting the perfect club.

Of course, if this thought is right, then even the description of the perfect club, above, is incomplete.  But that consequence should be embraced — nothing else explains the elusiveness of this dish, the unavoidable imperfection of every actual club.   The idea of the perfect club persists, the idea that makes it possible even to recognize real clubs in their imperfection.  To theorize the perfect club, it seems, is inevitably to fall short: to understand this sandwich is as difficult as making it.

Should we give up our pursuit, then, of the perfect club — or give up ordering the persistently imperfect thing?  No, we must not despair; we must celebrate the fact that we can even touch this sublime recipe, even if we cannot grasp it.  We must follow Descartes, mutatis mutandis, in concluding that:

[J]ust as we believe through faith that the supreme happiness of the next life consists solely in the contemplation of the divine majesty, so experience tell us that this same contemplation, albeit much less perfect, enables us to know the greatest joy of which we are capable in this life.

The scientist, not the gourmand

The Guardian reports that cooking began 1.9 million years ago.  The reasoning behind this is as follows: it takes longer to eat uncooked food, so from the percentage of time people spend eating, we can infer whether they enjoyed the benefits of cooking.  Our noble cousins, known etymologically for their erect stance, it was discovered, spent no more time eating than we do.  Our sapientia, it seems, is not a matter of our cuisine.

The anthropologist may be satisfied by this line of reasoning, but the gourmand should balk at the premise that time spent eating corresponds straightforwardly with whether food was or was not cooked.  These learned scientists’ assumption, of course, is that one eats as quickly as possible: while we scarf down a bowl of hamburger helper in minutes, our unerect ancestors would have spent hours gnawing on hard ears of corn and raw chicken legs.

The assumption is obviously flawed, for one can, indeed one ought, linger over a meal, a meal (it goes almost without saying) that may very well be cooked.  I have been engaged at table on many occasions for well over 3 hours, and on some vigorous trips to Montréal have spent the bulk of the waking day dining, when a long nap is flanked by 4-course lunch and a 5-course dinner.  Such a leisurely pace is at times necessitated by the meal itself, as with a long succession of courses, some auteur‘s “tasting menu,” or when engaging a large roast, for example, a whole hug.    It can also result from the circumstances of the meal; I once consumed a relatively meager breast of chicken, along with a few steamed carrots and a spoonful of rice pilaf, while Stanley Fish presented a long-winded lecture on television’s The Fugitive.  (Recall Conrad’s reminder that the idea of someone telling a three-hour story, as in Lord Jim, is perfectly credible on the presumption “that there must have been refreshment on that night, a glass of mineral water of some sort to help the narrator on.”)

Far from a sign of primitive technological deprivation, a slowly-prosecuted meal is the height of cultural, religious, and aesthetic advancement.  Only a spoiled and naïve child complains about saying grace, or about the magid, and only a spoiled and naïve adult complains about the time it takes to get to the center of an artichoke, or to peel crayfish,  or to make one’s way through to the end of a long meal.  Indeed, to complain of the length of a meal seems no less absurd than to complain of the length of one’s life (which is not to say that one can’t be tempted by that thought — but tempted by a rather bizarre thought, one might admit).  We eagerly push forward, yearning for this and that to be over, rushing, hurrying, anxiously waiting, we wish to arrive, for it to be over, which is a fair enough wish, but when we arrive at that end, most of us will go ungently into the night, crying out and wishing for more time.

Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis spent nearly a tenth of their time eating, by contrast with our paltry 1/20th?  And we conclude that they couldn’t cook?  We should conclude that that they could cook better!  They reclined in the long African evening, savoring every morsel!  They paused to reflect, to pray, to digest and prepare for another course.  They may even have looked ahead in trepidation to a future of power lunches, 30-minute meals, protein shakes that replace your lunch — or to a science that would understand dining as a race.

“Nowadays the 10 yuan Gaijiaofan smells of hogwash oil”

http://www.chinahush.com/2011/08/11/lunch-headaches-in-beijing-cbd/

(Via the LA Times‘ coverage of the VP’s  lunch in Beijing, which included some “smashed cucumbers.”   I’ll have the Biden set, please!

On his Chinese trip, Biden has been doing a good job satirizing the Onion‘s satirical coverage of him, e.g. by facing off with an immense Mongolian wrestler.)

Groundnut stew

I went to a reception this evening at which was served a “groundnut stew,” of (so I was informed) Ethiopian extraction. This was a delightful dish, made of peanuts (a.k.a. groundnuts) and vegetables, including yams, floating in a relatively thick, light-brown-colored, peanut-flavored broth.  For future research: groundnuts, calling peanuts “groundnuts,” stews made from groundnuts.

Famine and affluence seem in particularly uncomfortable (but darkly hilarious) tension in this case: not only did I gorge myself on multiple helpings of dinner, whilst Ethiopians starve to death, but I gorged myself on heaping portions made from their recipe.  I not only stuff myself with burgers while they go without groundnut stew, I stuff myself with groundnut stew while they go without groundnut stew.    Yikes.