After I watched Smoke Signals for the first time, I sat in the dark and thought about Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s breakfast story:
Hey Victor! I remember the time your father took me to Denny’s, and I had the Grand Slam Breakfast. Two eggs, two pancakes, a glass of milk, and of course my favorite, the bacon. Some days, it’s a good day to die. And some days, it’s a good day to have breakfast. Continue reading
Filed under Recipes, Theory and Criticism
Zach Bell, Yale University
A staple of American dessert culture is the lemon meringue pie. Although lemon flavored desserts and custards have been in use since medieval times, the lemon meringue pie as we know it did not emerge until the nineteenth century. For my lemon pie, I used a recipe that originated a bit more recently. My recipe came from my great-grandmother’s cookbook, dating from the early to mid- twentieth century. Although I only have vague memories of her, and none of her lemon pie, I hear stories of her baking virtuosity. So I decided to test out her recipe and see if I inherited some of her baking genes.
Zach Bell, Yale University
Savory food isn’t really my thing. When it come to meals, I’m pretty much exclusively the dessert chef/procurer. Yet, in my exploration of pie it was inevitable that I would one day have to face the meat pie. Meat pies have a long history, tracing back millenia, with many theories about its various uses. Scholars believe that medieval meat pies were more like casseroles, with a much thicker pastry acting as the cooking container and preserving mechanism. From the Greeks to the Romans to the Middle Ages, the pastry was not meant to be eaten. Over time, the crust grew lighter and flakier until today when the historically “inedible” crust separates a pot pie from a meat stew.
The morning is greasy.
The Donut Shop is where John R. Junkin Drive meets Lower Woodville.
The gray is braless and fat and ready for rain.
(Two nurses from the Natchez Regional Medical Center came for breakfast:
Two hundred glazed balloons
deflating behind bulletproof glass)
I ate a stuffed porcupine skin: caramel, maple, cinnamon dough.
I suffocated the rain with my coffee, and the nurses waiting inside their cars
for two boxes. After the rain the morning was a luminousgreaseball
expanding like a hot air ballon
rising along her curvature to float
breathless, a Galilean moon. Gravity
could not hold me—just a tunic of muscular mucous
aroused underneath her diaphragm.
Zach Bell, Yale University
Failure is hard to swallow in any context, but for a baker, this translates literally… a failure is actually difficult to choke down. A few days ago, I failed to bake an edible Linzer Torte. What should have been a buttery raspberry pastry ended with a texture best described as bizarre. Although many a mentor has told me, “Do not be afraid to fail!”, I cannot deny my totally rational fear of that monstrous Linzer Torte.
Filed under Food, Pics or it Didn't Happen, Zach B.
I am surprised that chefs do not regularly take curtain calls. After a final spoonful of (chocolate bacon) panna cotta that jiggles like Lucia di Lammermoor’s “Il dolce suono,” diners should bravo the chef into postprandial ecstasy; when polishing off a plate of hormone-free lamb-balls, the modern eater must rise and applaud. The charismatic chef deserves, no, demands praise. His food is an extension of his irresistible and indefinable and authentic personality.
Reading Zachary Woolfe’s piece in the Sunday Times, “A Gift From the Musical Gods,” I was impressed by how well his commentary on classical music charisma describes the economy of fine dining. Today, there are two types of successful chefs: the skilled technician, operating behind the scenes, and the celebrity chef mogul industry giant whose magnetism gives electric motion to a personal brand. If there is a Mary Callas of American cooking, it is Thomas Keller, a man whose “Oysters and Pearls” would send a dining room into bivalvular orgy—mouths open to receive Chef Keller’s winsome and terribly genuine “Zen and the Art of Fine Dining” philosophy, anuses expelling a continuous stream of savory tapioca pudding. And if there is a Christian Tetzlaff, Mr. Woolfe’s example of the “technically flawless” but uncharismatic musician, it is Eli Kaimeh, Thomas Keller’s chef de cuisine at Per Se. Continue reading
Filed under Theory and Criticism
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
Lately, I have been reading Nicholson Baker to excess. I first heard about Mr. Baker from a New York Times Magazine article—”Nicholson Baker: The Mad Scientist of Smut.” House of Holes, Mr. Baker’s most recent work of erotic fiction, just hit bookshelves. Besides his “miniaturist” style—expanding fragments of plot into absurdly dense treatises on everyday minutiae like the comma (Room Temperature) and shoelaces (The Mezzanine)—Mr. Baker is famous for erotica. In Vox, The Fermata, and now House of Holes, Mr. Baker explores the literary limits of sex writing. In my final two weeks before the fall semester, I have indulged in some “pleasure” reading, albeit of a non-prurient variety. Not to worry, I’ve been keeping my mind out of Mr. Baker’s dirty dollhouse. Intrigued by the prospect of miniaturism—maximalist, but munchkin!—I bought Room Temperature and The Mezzanine at a Borders blowout sale. Unlike David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo, Mr. Baker is one postmodernist who has escaped academic celebrity. Search Jstor for journal articles on Mr. Baker’s novels, I dare you: few and far-between results. As Charles McGrath notes in that NYT Mag piece, Mr. Baker pioneered the footnoted, wry academicism David Foster Wallace made thesis-worthy. Where DFW used the footnote as a vehicle for formal digression and neatly organized scholarship, Mr. Baker trips towards James Joyce the Nebbish, allowing that cavern beneath the big print to plunge into the narrator’s wandering consciousness. In his most boring moments—and there are many to choose from in The Mezzanine (a representative sentence: “Let me mention another fairly important development in the history of the straw.”)—Mr. Baker reaches the zenith of postmodern irony. His contemporaries stoop, humbled, to tie his broken shoelaces (a problem solved, we are informed, by Z. Czaplicki in “Methods for evaluating the abrasion resistance and knot slippage strength of shoe laces.”). The less patient author bows, awed, before this perfect distillation of post-Fordist ambiguity. Do we love the mechanical mundanities of corporate America—is there a phrasing of the epic in escalators and Popular Science? Or is the frayed fascination of Mr. Baker’s protagonists with the plastic drinking straw funny because it reads as pathetic and picaresque?
Filed under Recipes, Theory and Criticism
Zach Bell, Yale University
One year ago, my Mom requested a chocolate pie for her birthday. This year, she wanted a repeat performance. I used the same recipe (although with a pastry crust instead of graham cracker), but the process went much more smoothly this time. After a year more of baking experience, I whisked the custard with ease and confidence, trusting in the process. Check out chocolate pie 2.0:
Also, check out this “how-to” video on whipped cream:
In the end, practice is key to a polished pie.
