JON FASMAN | ACCOUNTING FOR TASTE


November 10th | Deracinated in DC


Jon Fasman urges would-be smart American restaurants to offer more in the way of local cooking, and less of the Franco-Italian-Asian-accented stuff that you can find in almost every city of the developed world ...

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We left an early-evening movie looking for some place to have dinner in Georgetown. "We use the best naturally-raised and organic ingredients we can find, and source from local growers, ranchers and fishermen throughout the mid-Atlantic whenever possible," boasted the menu of one high-end restaurant on M Street. Another place two blocks west described itself as "a neighborhood restaurant serving responsibly sourced seafood and local products." A third, on K Street by the old harbour (like so many urban American waterfronts, it used to actually be a harbour; now it's a retail and condo complex that calls itself "The Washington Harbour"—yes, with the extra European "u", too), says it is "owned by and sources [sic] the highest quality products from family farmers across the country." We settled on a 30-year-old Vietnamese hole-in-the-wall on Wisconsin Avenue. Too much conspicuous virtue makes my stomach hurt.

I should say right off that I am in favor of traditional agriculture, small farms and local production. This is because I like apples that taste like apples rather than wax, chicken that tastes like chicken rather than boiled sofa, and beef that will neither make me ill nor turn my (non-existent) daughter fertile in kindergarten. What Adam Platt, in a very funny and spot-on piece about the locavore phenomenon, calls "the excruciating preciousness of it all" I could happily do without. Virtue, the saying goes, is doing what's right when nobody is looking. These restaurateurs and their like have turned it into a marketing ploy.

Mr Platt hits on a subtler point about local cuisine, as well. He mentions a trip to Maine, and recalls "a time not long ago when aging WASP families in their decaying compounds subsisted on a steady diet of Triscuits, deviled eggs and gin." Is that not also local food, of a sort?

At the first of those three restaurants I passed by, the menu was offering tuna carpaccio with melon, Thai basil, scallion and yuzu vinaigrette as an appetizer. This is what mid-Atlantic fisherman historically would have called "bait, with salad". Another of the restaurants served prosciutto-wrapped halibut with herb oil, as well as a platter of bresaola, prosciutto, sopressata and caperberries. The ingredients on these menus might have been local, but the cuisine was not. To my mind, there is something perverse about fetishising local ingredients and then using them to produce the sort of transnational, high-end Franco-Italian cuisine with Asian accents that you could find in pretty much any city in the developed world.

Admittedly, this is what sells, but chefs in the culinarily rich, and underpublicised, mid-Atlantic region ought to make at least the occasional nod to local preparations, as well as just local ingredients. The most memorable dish I had at the parade of wonders that is Wylie Dufresne's WD-50 restaurant in downtown New York consisted of pickled beef tongue with cubes of fried mayonnaise, tomato molasses, and a row each of lettuce and onion diced impossibly small. It wasn't just the wizardry of frying mayonnaise (the NYT ran a profile of Mr Dufresne in their Science section that explained how he did it). It was the wittiness of the dish as a whole: the deconstructed deli sandwich was Mr Dufresne's tip of the toque to his neighborhood's eastern European Jewish heritage.

Food gives a region, a city, a country its character; it is not pure sustenance. I yield to nobody in my love of the pig, and joy that pork belly has found its way back into favor. I may even have managed to quell my distaste at the first of that virtuous trio above, and ordered something called an "eco-friendly food's pork chop, [served with] lamb's quarters and chanterelle salad, braised pork belly and fresh polenta." I could not help wondering, though, how much deeper the local connection would be if the belly and polenta had only been combined into a high-end scrapple.


October 24th | A passion for X-rated meat


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Sometimes, confesses Jon Fasman, I worry there will come a day when I cut a thick slice of scrapple for Sunday breakfast and find an angry embedded eyeball staring back atme from the frying pan ...

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In much the same way that humanity propagates itself, sometimes two columns produce a third. Last week I considered offal; the week before the half-smoke; and together they lead me, of course, to scrapple, that unappreciated, raggedy, gap-toothed, car-on-block denizen of the supermarket meat section.

Scrapple is a breakfast food that consists of meaty pork bones and scraps boiled until the meat falls from the bones. Cornmeal and seasonings are stirred into the meaty soup, and the mixture is left to set into a sort of thick loaf. To eat it, one slices the loaf, dredges the slice in corn meal, fries it, and serves it, usually as a sandwich, or with maple syrup or ketchup. Cooking it requires some skill, or at least some attention: undercooked scrapple has a distinctly slimy quality, while overcooked scrapple tastes like playing cards.

Like the half-smoke, scrapple is a regional delicacy. Having come over with the Pennsylvania Dutch as panhas, a German dish in which buckwheat was simmered in pork stock with scraps of pork and spices, it remains largely unknown outside of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Washington, DC (although two variants exist: in Cincinnati virtually the same dish is known as goetta, and in the southeastern United States it goes by "livermush").

And like any dish named for scraps, it contains offal. Indeed, the ingredients in my supermarket's leading brand of scrapple read as follows: "Pork stock, pork livers, pork fat, pork snouts, corn meal, pork hearts, wheat flour, salt and spices". I found a recipe for scrapple in a cookbook published in 1869 that begins, "Take eight pounds of scraps of pork, that will not do for sausage." Once your meat has descended in size and quality beyond sausage utility, you are at the bottom of the proverbial barrel. Sometimes I worry that there will come a day when I cut a thick slice for Sunday breakfast and find an angry embedded eyeball staring back at me from the frying pan.

And yet—here I sense some of you will just have to trust me—scrapple is unquestionably delicious: crusty outside and soft within, soothingly seasoned with that nursery texture of mashed potatoes, it is comfort food at first bite. The ingredient list is alarming, but if you've ever eaten a hot dog, you've probably had worse. It also counts as a form of good stewardship. If we're going to slaughter an animal, we really should use all of it, and since nobody really wants to come to dinner and find a plate of hearts and snouts steaming on the table, scrapple turns those unwieldy bits into positively G-rated form.

Still, scrapple suffers from a branding problem. It might plausibly claim to be a form of pâté (in the same way that a switchblade fight is a form of fencing), even if it sounds more "Deliverance" than "Babette's Feast". But something about its name sticks a little too close to its origins: it serves as a visceral reminder of what we're eating. We refer to "blue" cheese, not "mouldy" cheese; prosciutto is "aged", not "allowed to rot in a controlled manner"; yoghurt cultures are "living", not "teeming and swarming". Scrapple reminds us that however humanely our pork is raised, however caring the farmer, bucolic the setting and rosy the chops, at the end somebody has to eat the scraps.

October 18th | Your heart in my mouth


Offal is is the bold diner's favourite dish, and the restaurateur's too: buy cheap, sell dear. But in the first of his new weekly food columns, Jon Fasman worries that fashionability may be driving up the price of a juicy cheek or a well-pressed ear ...

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A few weeks ago, on the cusp of summer's end and the beginning of fall, I found myself on a family friend's farm in the western corner of Loudoun County, just beyond (at least for now) the ever-unfurling sprawl of the DC suburbs. The mother and daughter who run the farm are the eighth and ninth generation of the same family to work that same land. Before Virginia was part of a country called the United States, their forebears were tending cattle on the same patch of earth. The air had the fetid heaviness of late northeastern summer: I smelled decay and finality rather than fecundity and life.

We went into a low farmhouse to admire the contents of a freezer chest, which held what remained of their spring slaughter. They raise cattle, and they raise them well: the cows eat grass and roam freely, giving them a rich, full beefy taste, with none of the insipid flabbiness of battery-farmed beef.

The freezer was nearly empty: we took home about 30 pounds of beef-chuck, short ribs, ground beef, marrow bones—and left roughly the same. What surprised the mother, though, was how quickly the off-cuts had gone. The heart, tongue, lights and liver used to be giveaways; now they had a freezer full of hamburger and chili meat while the kidneys ran away with the steak.

Perhaps this shouldn't be such a surprise. Offal may be enjoying its gourmet moment now, but farmers and butchers have long kept choice cuts like tongue and oxtail for themselves. Besides, the farm's price list spoke for itself. Prime cuts such as filet mignon went for $25 per pound; porterhouse was $18; and T-bones were $13. But tongue was $4 per pound, oxtail was $3 and heart was $1. We got a beautiful six-pound sack of marrow bones for $6: it produced a rich, satisfying soup that fed us for days.

A few days ago a friend sent me Fergus Henderson's newest cookbook, "Beyond Nose to Tail". Like his first book, "Nose to Tail Cooking" this one is not for the faint-hearted. It contains recipes for pressed pig's ear, confit of pig's cheek, and dandelion and chicken and ox tongue pie. (It also has wonderful recipes for vanilla ice-cream and treacle tart. This is like a Ferrari having excellent brakes: essential, but hardly the point.)

The book's first recipe centres on salted pork fat left in the refrigerator for a month; as a romantic dinner à deux, Mr Henderson suggests a halved pig's head, roasted whole with foil over the ear "so it does not frazzle".

Mr Henderson's restaurant, the St John, in Clerkenwell, is widely if informally credited with returning offal to the high-end table. I have eaten three memorable meals there, and I hope to return again. I am especially fond of their signature appetiser, a roast bone-marrow and parsley salad. It comprises three roasted bones that I would guess weigh about half a pound, a tangle of parsley, a small mound of coarse salt and a few little triangles of white toast. It costs £6.60 ($13.42). A half-pound of bones from the high-end farm I visited in Loudoun cost me $.50; presumably a restaurateur, buying in quantity from a larger farm would pay less.

If this doesn't explain offal's fashion, it at least helps explain why restaurateurs love it so dearly. Sure, it's new and interesting; it lets high-end diners fancy themselves macho, adventurous, far too sophisticated for something as plebian as a steak. But restaurants do not exist to expand diners' palates; they exist to make money. Most of it may still be made on booze and bottled water, but compared to other meat offerings on any menu, offal offers huge profits. At least for now, that is. Offal-proselytising chefs should beware their success. After all, the average cow offers about 50 pounds of sirloin and a few hundred pounds of ground beef. Unless genetic modification takes a frightening turn, though, it has only one tongue and only one heart.

 

October 15th | The Dosa Man of Washington Square

One street-food post leads to another. Late last month, the Dosa Man (Thiru Kumar) won the Vendy Awards, which recognise the best street-food vendor in New York. Mr Kumar sells Sri Lankan-style dosas in Washington Square Park (take that, Henry James, you vast, sallow old bigot!). Mr Kumar's food is the only one of the five finalists for which I can personally vouch, and I rate it quite highly. The range of foods on offer among the five (do check out the short video of all five finalists) is inspiring. New York is not quite Singapore, but it's come a long way from hot dogs and pretzels.

 

October 8th | Half a smoke, half a smoke, half a smoke onward

Great and manifold are the ways in which my home city of Washington, DC is misunderstood: let us restrict ourselves here to the slander that the city lacks an indigenous food. Chicago has Italian beef and hot dogs; New York has pizza; Philadelphia has cheesesteaks; Washington has chain restaurants and pleated-front khakis. Washington's signature food is in fact the half-smoke, a sausage whose name and origin are shrouded in mystery that this excellent article plumbs. The article is worth reading even if you have no interest in sausage (and what an unimaginably tragic condition that would be): it is a shining example of how popularity can destroy and stubborn pride can sustain and revive the same product. For my money, to get a good one skip the lunch carts and head for The Shrine.

October 3rd | A tale of two nasis

An old friend of mine, when asked where he wanted to go for dinner, used to reply, "I know this lovely little Irish restaurant just down the street." The establishment in question, of course, is neither lovely, little, nor Irish (and it is only just barely a restaurant). It is predictable and convenient: a known quantity.

I happen to live in the vicinity of an actual lovely little Irish restaurant; nobody would ever confuse the two. But what if the relationship between a chain restaurant and an individual one were closer? I thought of this last night over dinner at Malaysia Kopitiam, a Mom-and-Pop restaurant that has been churning out first-rate Malaysian fare for a good decade or so, and now finds itself just around the corner from an outpost of a growing chain of Malaysian restaurants.

The relationship between Penang and MK is a good deal more intimate than one between, say, a neighbourhood Italian restaurant and Olive Garden (or, needless to say, between the two LLIRs above), both because Malaysian food is less familiar to Americans than Italian, and because, iconographically, a "neighbourhood Malaysian" does not exist in the same way as a "neighbourhood Italian."That having been said, though, the differences between the two restaurants is vast.

Walking past Penang, I saw a gaggle of suit-wearing westerners on cell phones outside, and I imagine the crowd inside was much the same, if only because it has been at the Soho branch, where I have eaten twice. Penang presents itself as a "fun" restaurant with "fun" drinks and a "lively" atmosphere. Outside MK, by contrast, were a pair of east Asian men smoking furiously. A burnished wood, faux-rustic archway tops Penang's door; a tattered red awning hangs over MK's. At Penang a broad staircase leads up to the restaurant; MK's stairs lead down, into a rather dreary, linoleum-floored basement space with Formica tabletop and red naugahyde banquettes. Penang's bar offers (or at least it did offer, when I was last there) an array of flavoured martinis. At MK I was brought a glass of gin on the rocks.

The real difference, though, was in the eating. All four of the dishes my companion and I ordered had the messiness and savour of homemade food. Filling spilled out of the lobak, but it was the single best example of this dish I have ever had. The stuffed lotus root did not quite hold together, but it was none the worse for it.

Admittedly, it is hard to go wrong with nasi lemak, but it is equally hard to go noticeably right, and MK did: the chicken for the curry was obviously cut by hand rather than a machine (and it was made from dark meat, rather than the cheaper and less flavourful white meat), the pickles had the soft fizz of home fermentation, and the fried shallots on top had real spark.

Penang's food, in my experience, emphasises sweetness, and this is hardly surprising: it is an easy taste to like, and can cover up a multitude of sins. MK's exhibited the breadth and balance that makes Malaysian food endlessly interesting. Leslie and Penny Phoon, MK's owners, do great work: I was glad to see them doing great business (on a Tuesday, no less) as well.

 

September 27th | A night at the Yemen Café

I HAVE heard people express doubts about the Yemen Café. It looks unwelcoming, they say, dark and a little dingy. Yemeni men huddle over bone-littered tables, chattering at full volume, their faces just inches apart. I can, in fact, confirm that this is among the most dangerous restaurants in Brooklyn. Not because of the voluble and friendly clientele, nor the food-the bathrooms are clean, a sure sign of a clean kitchen-but because of a more serious danger well known to anyone who has ever travelled in Muslim or Arab countries: extreme, almost antic, hospitality.

The first time I ate here was with five other diners. It was a Friday, the restaurant was packed, and we were the only non-Yemeni table. We ordered enough food for a small army, but they kept bringing more, unordered and uncharged. We said we liked the roast lamb, and the owner-a jolly, balding, moustachioed man who looks like he has caused the demise of many a flock himself-brought out another plate and watched us eat it. We heaped praise on the oven-fresh, crackling pita: out came a small tower. After the meal, he followed us out into the street to shake hands and pointed us toward the subway, two blocks away (as it happens, two of us, including me, were local and two others had just moved out of the area). I fasted for the next day and a half.

The Yemen Café is one of three Yemeni restaurants among a good dozen or so Arab restaurants, bakeries and groceries towards the western end of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. The neighbourhood has long been Arab, though traditionally the Arabs have been mostly Syrian and Lebanese Christian, with Muslims and Yemenis more recent arrivals. A grocery store called Sahadi's has anchored the block since 1948. The Damascus Bakery next door celebrated its 70th birthday last year.

We make our latest visit to the Yemen Café more or less on the spur of the moment. It's one of those soupy, miasmic New York summer nights when you can feel the microbial rot ooze down your throat with each breath. The restaurant looks about as wilted as I feel. Only three of the dozen tables are occupied, though I can tell from the litter of grease, soda cans and chicken bones that somebody has just left another one. A group of men stands around the tea urn at the back, laughing and trading jokes: they all work here, I think, though at a family-run place like this you can never quite tell employees from cousins from friends. One of them breaks away from the group and shows us to a (clean) table, bearing Styrofoam cups of steaming tea.

I know people believe hot tea is good in hot weather because it promotes sweating and therefore cooling. But alas, to my dry-cleaner's delight, my sweating has never needed promotion. Still, the tea tastes good-sweet and bitter, with hints of mints, cardamom and cinnamon-and I'm across the table from my wife, who is well enough acquainted with me to know I'm not having a heart attack, nor have I been sitting under a running sprinkler: it's just July.

The waiter takes our order on the back of an envelope holding a bill, and we choose judiciously, uncertain of just how much extra food will be thrust upon us. Our first choice for dinner, the aseed, is unavailable. I suspect someone's grandmother didn't make it into the kitchen, because this is a comforting granny-type dish somewhere between a dumpling and a polenta-like porridge topped with a meat gravy. It evokes African dishes such as fufu or ugali; at times like these you look from map to menu and see how and why Yemeni cuisine has such hidden delights. Chicken curry also appears on any authentically Yemeni menu: a gift from the spice traders who sailed across the Arabian Sea to and from India.

We choose a different gift from the spice traders: ghallabah, a sauté of lamb, tomatoes and okra served over rice, and salta, a thick meat and vegetable stew that comes to the table bubbling in a cast-iron pot. The base of salta is fenugreek seeds left in water until they thicken and become gelatinous; more sodden fenugreek is whipped into the consistency and appearance of egg white and drizzled over the top right before serving.

Before the main courses arrive, though, there are the extras-bowls of lamb consommé and salad. I have the same reaction to the soup as to the tea: "I don't want it...I don't want it...this is so good I can't stop eating it!" It tastes of lemon, lamb, onion and a ship's worth of spices. It tastes like it will make you healthy, and I could drink it by the gallon. As for the salad, well, what can you say about chopped iceberg lettuce and tomato, however full of garlic and coriander the dressing? It tasted virtuous, and like the 1950s.

Our main courses arrive shortly. We eat the salta by tearing chunks from the hubcap-sized, blistered, hot pita and dipping them in the stew. I forgot I had ordered not just the salta, but the salta with roast lamb, and my resolve flags a bit as the waiter brings a plate with a few fist-sized hunks of lamb shank. It comes off the bone in fibrous strings, as it should, but it is a bit bland. Better to use it as the filling for an impromptu sandwich: a chunk of pita dipped in the stew and wrapped around a string of shank.

Despite (or thanks to) our best efforts, we eat ourselves into a stupor, but only a mild one. As we get up and walk to the front, through the window we see a group of Yemeni teenage boys-wispy moustaches, gawky posturing, Yankees caps-on the stoop leading from the restaurant to the street. They're huddled close together, their backs to both the restaurant and the street, speaking intently. I can't catch what they're saying, or even what language they're speaking, until we pass them, and one of them points at a stocky guy about their age, also presumably Yemeni, across the street. "Look at that fat-ass knucklehead," he says in Brooklynese as thick as an Italian grandpa's. "Can't hold a f----- job for s---."

(This post first appeared as an entry in a Correspondent's Diary written for Economist.com)

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