Best friends coming over?
Bring home an imported Spanish chorizo, cut it into half-inch pieces, heat them up in a pan over high heat, put the pan on a trivet, and spear them with toothpicks one-by-one right from the pan.
Best friends coming over?
Saute a couple of handfuls of oyster and shiitake mushrooms in a pan, sprinkle them with salt, coarsely ground black peppercorns and grated parmesan, and serve them hot from the pan on a trivet, with toothpicks.
Best friends coming over?
Take the three sides of rind off a wedge of aged sheep’s cheese like Manchego or Pecorino Toscano, cut it into wafers a quarter-inch thick, serve it with a dish of honey to dip them in.
Best friends coming over?
With cocktails or wine, serve Catalan ‘pan con tomat’: toast four-inch, halved pieces of a baguette, stack them on a plate with a halved tomato, peeled cloves of garlic, and a cruet of really good olive oil; make each person rub the toast with the garlic and then with the tomato, and finally, drizzle it with the olive oil.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
France - Nov 2, 2006
Just back from a week in Paris.
Yes, I was at a different restaurant seven nights in a row, three of which were memorable. One of which was Chateaubriand in the 11th arrondisement, despite the hi-falutin’ name, a simple neighborhood joint, though obviously a dearly beloved one. Sweetbreads, and then shrimp and snails. It is profiled in the Oct./Nov. Saveurs magazine. Not Saveur. Saveurs. Saveurs is an extraordinarily beautiful and useful food magazine. French.
Yes, I had a beautiful and cushy hotel, Pavillon de la Reine, in the 4th, le Marais, my favorite Paris neighborhood. Very Jewish, very gay. Feels just like home. Orthodox Jewish men on the street helping each other wrap tefillin, as decidedly effeminate Gentile men edge past on the narrow sidewalks. Great shopping, terrific Jewish delicatessens, innumerable thing to see, places to eat, blah, blah, blah. I know what I’m doing.
Bistrot Paul Bert (rue Paul Bert, also in the 11th) was a perfect joint for me, too. Foie gras and a cassoulet. Funky, timeless. Gaya is a new, slick fish joint on the rue du Bac that I highly recommend. Oysters are a passion for many of us, I believe. Main course of splendid barbue in a sauce of Pernod and dill. Barbue are often referred to as turbot, which they are not. They are brill, less flavorful than turbot. Restaurant l’Ascot in the 8th was imminently forgettable. Dopey, hideous neighborhood, smug, oblivious clientele, stupid wine list, boring menu. Profiled in Saveurs. Go figure.
Yes, I worked myself to exhaustion. Each was an early morning leading to a peripatetic fifteen-mile hike, up one aisle and down the other at the Parc d’Exposition, two stops on the RER before Charles de Gaulle 2. It was the bi-annual international food show called SIAL which stands for something I don’t care what. I despise acronyms. I have two plates and fourteen screws down where my original tib-fib used to reside in my lower left leg. After about five miles my leg is shot. I can then bolt a half a dozen Alleve/Motrin/Advil and gain a modicum of relief. But it was the blisters on top of the blisters that made it so unpleasant.
And yes, at least eight grand-slam homeruns will be on their way shortly to Port Elizabeth, NJ en route to the Fairway warehouse up at our Harlem store.
Some kosher pasta, bird’s tongues and a couple of other diminutive cuts, and kosher harissa, the thick, chunky, North African chile paste that is married to couscous, but that is drop-dead good with everything. This harissa is better than any I tasted in Tunisia.
Three thick mushroom sauces from Hong Kong. You’ll just have to taste it to believe it.
Toasted pasta called “croes” in four different shapes, tiny shells and tiny squiggles, a tradition of Savoie, as well as Savoyard buckwheat “crozets”, little quarter-inch squares of pasta, and ruffley “taillerins” and chanterelle-shape “trompettes”.
Some spice mixtures from a little company in Provence. A line of Swedish cookies. South African vinegars. Alsatian vinegars. Lemonade from Franche-Comte.
French soups, 100% natural, no preservatives in little three-cup packages – white asparagus and morels, green asparagus and vermouth, a red gazpacho, tomato and mint, carrot and orange, cucumber and mint, zucchini and parmesan. Beet sugar candy rods from Holland. Balsamic dressings, garnishing oils and dipping sauces from a brilliant new company in England. And South Africa continues to amaze me. I can’t wait to show you some of this South African stuff.
But my favorite thing is from Calanquet, an olive oil producer in St.-Remy in Provence. They have invented an olive leaf-shaped crisp they call “petales de tapenade verte” made from tapenade – olives, capers, herbs, garlic, basil, olive oil, Cognac, flour, yeast and egg white. I brought in “scourtins” from nearby a few years ago, pretty much the same thing, named for the Provencal beret which is in turn named for the rope-woven circular mats used in olive presses. I thought they were spectacular, but I couldn’t give the damn things away. They were too expensive, and most of them were broken by the time they made it through the roller derby gantlet of the Fairway shelf-stocking system, a product beating of the first water. Let’s see how we do with “petales”. Quite special. Elegant. If something as peasanty as tapenade might be referred to as elegant.
So there I sat waiting for take-off at the Newark airport. On my way to Paris. Talk about smug. Working on my second stiff Bloody Mary. A dish of warm cashews by my right hand. Holding my hearing aid in my left hand, between my index finger and my thumb. Remember the great Dr. Oliver Sacks book, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”? What a book.
You can call me “The Man Who Mistook His Hearing Aid for a Cashew”.
Molar-crunched my state-of-the-art, twenty-one hundred-dollar, digital hearing aid into about sixteen pieces. Hadn’t even left the ground and I was stone deaf. Had two back-ups, though, each of exponentially decreasing technology, and had I had a third, it would have been one of those grampa’s ear trumpet things.
Fruits - Aug 23, 2006
I haven’t even been swimming yet. Haven’t gotten out of town. Haven’t had a single mosquito bite. No lobster. No local tomatoes. Had some pretty terrific corn, though. Our corn from Long Island has been better than green market corn, swear to god. My partner Peter Romano has done gorgeous work this summer. His stone fruit has been superlative, particularly his white peaches and all those plums and pluots. Some drop-dead ribs from Rack ‘n Soul at 108th and Broadway, and I’m not a rib freak. I go for brisket and pulled pork way before ribs. But those ribs were perfect; falling off the bone. Daisy Mae’s are wonderful, too, and so are Virgil’s and Blue Smoke’s, but Rack ‘n Soul’s – oh, baby.
The best tomatoes have been those Campari tomatoes in the rectangular clear plastic containers, and they don’t really qualify as summer stuff because they’re so agri-business. I mean, there’s nothing grower-holy or local-phile about them. They’re trucked here from bloody California, for chrissake. But, DAMN, they’re good – with one of those burrata cheeses we fly in every week from Campania. It’s a rarefied fior di latte, which is the proper name for Italian-origin mozzarella. “Mozzarella” is made from the milk of water buffalo (bufala). “Fior di latte” (the “flower of milk”) is the mozz made from cow’s milk. Whatever. Let the Italians differentiate. A burrata is a handmade mozz from Campania, the region of Naples, from the hills behind Salerno. But it’s rarefied in that this mozz is wrapped around shreds of fior di latte, plus thick, sweet cream, plus whey. It’s sort of this wondrous, amorphous gland that’s then wrapped in asphodel leaves, which are (logically) indigenous, and the leaves perfume the burrata with an indescribable fragrance. You simply plop the burrata onto a plate, lop the thing into bite-size pieces, pepper the heck out of it, and the quartered Campari tomatoes, drizzle one of my marvelous barrel oils over the whole thing, and I guarantee you you’ll feel like this is the best summer of your life whether you’ve been swimming or not.
Thanks god our best friends Robert and Margo (two lawyers, no children) and Tim and Dagny (whose lives are so full we refer to them as “The Virtuals”) invite us over a lot. Both locations are grill-friendly. Those prime, 21-day, dry-aged, grass-fed beefsteaks have that mineral-y, lingering flavor that make life worth living. I’m here to tell you. I love to roast whole poblanos with those steaks, right along side of them. And those red, sweet Tropea onions I bring in from Calabria. They’re torpedo-shaped, so we halve them lengthwise and grill them cut side-down. We usually roast a few dozen cherrystone clams first. Those we precede with a couple of cheeses. A Le Chevrot, a St.-Marcellin (or the bigger St.-Felicien), a Le Chatelain Camembert, a sheep’s milk Perail. Those are five of my go-to cheeses. I confess to being a creature of habit to a fault.
I don’t think there’s a better dessert on earth than brownies or cookies with ice cream.
Cheese Event
So, on the 29th of January, a Sunday evening, I will be at the 92nd St. Y on Lexington Avenue. It’s a cheese event, the third year I have been asked to appear. This time I will not be delivering my usual more-cheese-and-accompaniments-and-wine-and-palaver-than-you-can-possibly-eat,-drink,-and-absorb routine. I will instead be seated with a moderator, the charming and extremely knowledgeable Alexandra Leaf, and with two other cheesemongers whose careers are apparently working out quite nicely for them. I have high regard for both Rob Kaufelt and for Max McCalman, and I am honored to be in cahoots with them.
God, am I high-road, or what. Everybody that knows me knows I must be livid to have to share an evening at The Y with these two.
I had to do a gig downtown several years ago where I had to appear with Eli Zabar and Andy Balducci. I wanted to jump out of my skin.
But the thing is way over-sold, so I don’t encourage you to call for tix. But this is not the point. The point is as follows.
The three of us will present two cheeses each. We are to have selected cheeses that have made a strong impression on us; cheeses we are particularly thrilled about or that have some certain significance in one way or another.
Out of the blue my dear friend Mary Falk sent me a cheese by parcel post. Mary is LoveTree Farm, ‘way up in the nostril of Wisconsin. She has won every award imaginable for her sheep’s milk cheeses, one of which is her glorious Trade Lake Cedar, a majestic, natural-rinded wheel festooned with aromatic cedar boughs. Mary and her husband Dave raise a sizable flock of sheep there, sheep that they not always successfully protect from predators by employing three Australian sheepdogs. Predators, you say? In Wisconsin? You better bloody believe it: Coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, eagles . . . Wild and wooly up there.
Anyway, this cheese arrives, always a welcome thing, particularly from Mary, because her cheeses are like drop-dead good. Well, this cheese was beyond drop dead. It was a raw (un-pasteurized) cow’s milk cheese, made from raw Jersey cow’s milk supplied to her by a neighbor. I have never tasted a cheese as delicious as this one in my thirty-one years in the business. Gooshy, yet chalky, with a natural rind, a recipe neither soft-ripened (like Brie and Camembert) nor washed-rind (like Munster d’Alsace and Epoisses); very smelly, very forceful, utterly staggeringly delicious. I could digress, but the goodness of this cheese is not really the point. Stay with me.
So I immediately contact Mary to tell her how knocked-out I am about this cheese, and can she send me eight pounds of it for the Y event. She says yeah. A day later it occurs to me that I don’t know what she’s calling it. So I e-mail her. The following is her reply. And I rush to deliver to you her reply because it stands for me as the most important document I have ever received in my life.
(Mary Falk’s reply)
Hi Steven
The “cheese” you will be tasting is currently called “Fishbait” since it is only 6 weeks old and made from raw Jersey cow’s milk.
I have never held onto it longer than 6 weeks since that is when it seems most ready. I suppose I really should give it a name especially in light of the fact that “Fishbait” seems to be evolving into a category on our sales board at the Farmers’ Market rather than just one cheese; for example we now sell the Fishbait Cedar, Fishbait Gabrielson Lake, Fishbait Fromage Blanc, etc.
Last week you asked that I explain why we are now adding Fishbait to our inventory of sales items. Here goes.
My customers have been routinely asking me for young, fresh, grassy raw milk cheeses. For the past 10 years I have dutifully told them that it is against the law in Wisconsin and Minnesota to sell raw milk cheese aged less than 60 days for human consumption. This has always been a sore spot for me since our farmstead milk is so darn clean.
In order to understand just how clean our milk is (and other typical farmstead dairy milk) it helps to be able to compare it to pasteurized milk standards. Pasteurized milk is allowed to have a bacteria plate count of up to 20,000 AFTER pasteurization and still be sold as pasteurized milk. The typical farmstead dairy averages a bacteria plate count of under 10,000. Our milk averages under 5,000 plate count. That means our milk exceeds the pasteurized milk standards FOUR TIMES OVER. Not only does it exceed pasteurized milk standards, but it still has the beneficial bacteria in it that pasteurized milk does not, and it still contains all the natural vitamins. Even knowing all of this, we still dutifully toed the line according to our state regs hoping that some day in the near future we will be able to prove that science is on our side, and that the fear of raw milk is worry from the 1940’s when these regs were first enforced, before bulk milk was even refrigerated and well before sanitation standards were even instituted.
But when we found out that it is legal for my customers to order fresh raw milk cheeses aged less than 60 days, from anywhere in Europe, and have them shipped directly to their door (as long as they promised not to re-sell it), but they couldn’t buy it from us (and we are licensed and have an HACCP plan) we then said enough is enough. After further exploration of our state regs (and those of Minnesota) we realized that the regs are basically set in place to protect and regulate the large commodity cheese industry, and we have been placed under the same umbrella even though it has made no scientific sense.
We also found out that once all 50 states in the US allow for the sale of raw milk cheese less than 60 days old, then, according to import/export law, the US then has to allow that same age of raw milk cheese to be imported from Europe. And therein lies the rub. Large commodity cheese factories would be crazy to make raw milk cheese from commingled bulk milk, and they believe that they would not be able to compete with the flood of raw milk cheeses that Europe produces. For example, in California you can buy fresh fluid raw milk for human consumption (as long as it meets the pasteurized milk standards), but you can’t sell cheese aged less than 60 days that is made from that same milk. This is so totally insane since the cheese product is so much more biologically safe than the fluid product. So no one in California is worried about a flood of fluid raw milk being shipped in from Europe, but CHEESE! Ah-h-h-h. Cheese has the big guys worried.
So this brings us back to Fishbait. We first tried to sell “Catfood” at the Farmers’ Market, but when the state of Wisconsin found out we were doing so they threatened to yank my cheese plant license for making “illegal pet food without a license”. Evidently they had just instituted these new regs in order to “control” the “pet food milk” market, etc. The license costs $25. I wanted to be a law abiding citizen, so I requested a license application, but it was never sent to me. My husband (Dave) requested that I leave the Wisconsin Department of Food Safety alone and just make the cheese that we were licensed to make.
Being the dutiful wife that I am, I agreed to leave the Department of Food Safety alone. I instead phoned the Department of Natural Resources and asked them what, if any, license requirements were necessary to produce fishbait. The DNR said that it would be nice if the product was bio-degradable. I said that we could do that.
So now we bring Fishbait to the St. Paul Farmers’ Market and we sell it with a sign that states that it is not legal to sell raw milk cheese aged less than 60 days for human consumption in the great states of Wisconsin and Minnesota, so we bring it to the citizens of Minnesota, Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, as “Fishbait”.
We have been EXTENSIVELY inspected by the state of Wisconsin because of our Fishbait, and also by the USFDA, but it seems OK so far to sell the product in this manner as long as the public is properly notified that it is fishbait, and not legal cheese. I guess there’s no anti-Fishbait lobbying organization yet worrying about a flood of European Union imports! Laugh out loud! I did have a cheesemaker from Georgia ask me if I had a copyright on the term fishbait, and I replied to him, “Heavens, NO!”, and that it is a generic term, and I believe ALL cheesemakers should be able to sell “Fishbait”.
We just want science-based regulations. Since we CAN scientifically prove that our product is safe then we should be able to sell it. The best way to regulate the production and sale of dairy “fishbait” is to legalize it. In restaurants in the state of Minnesota it is illegal to serve a rare hamburger, but you can serve a rare steak. A similar distinction is all that we are asking for. We, of course, are the rare steak.
More about pasteurized milk in cheese:
Pasteurized milk only has synthetic vitamins added back to it if it is being sold as fluid, and then the vitamins are only added back if it is stated on the label. Pasteurized milk for cheese production has NO vitamins added back to it and also typically has fluid calcium chloride added to it so the cheese can be made since the pasteurization damages the calcium structure; this is one reason why so many folks tend to get constipated from commodity cheese.
Some pasteurized commodity Brie-type cheeses and cream-style cheeses that tend to have a ph factor around 7 have been the culprits of food borne illnesses in the most recent past, not raw milk cheeses. The only food illness that was truly triggered by raw milk cheese was 1988 in California where fresh raw milk cheese that was not licensed, nor working under state sanitation guidelines was sold out of someone’s kitchen using milk of very questionable quality. Every other so-called “raw milk cheese-poisoning” was actually, subsequently found to have been the result of pasteurized milk cheese that had been contaminated after pasteurization with raw milk, and then not processed accordingly.
Hugs,
Mary at LoveTree
There you have it. The importance and significance of Mary’s documented experience is evidence that so many foodstuffs (not just cheese) in this country are regulated not for health and nutrition concerns, but for economic ones. And the result is that so much food grown or produced here is just not very good, or good at all, and certainly less nutritious than it could be. And the logical step past that statement is that our federal, state and local government bureaucracies are actually becoming more intrusive, more obfuscating, more impossible, more blind to the real need for food to be NOT refined, and even blinder to the fact that their job SHOULD be to be absolutely supportive of farmers, cheesemakers, local and seasonal produce and other artisanal foodstuffs and their makers.
So dream on. It’s only going to get worse. I see in The New York Times that raw milk cheeselovers can order on-line direct from France any number of superb examples of illegal raw milk cheeses and have them delivered right to their door here in the US. They’ll cost you around $50, $60 per pound, plus a walloping shipping cost, but what the heck, right? How ridiculous. The cheeses they are offering are NOT illegal (each is aged at least 60 days) and not one of them is a French cheese that I haven’t stocked day-in, day-out here at Fairway since 1980.
Olive Oil
So, about that olive oil Florence Fabricant put in her NYT Food Notes column a few weeks ago, you remember? You know Florrie – the only woman besides my wife for whom I would take a bullet. The oil, the Israeli one that was selling at Dean & DeLuca for some exorbitant price? Comes in two olive varieties, barnea and manzanilla. Perfect for Passover. Well, as you might imagine, it irritated the heck out of me, first of all because it was an OLIVE OIL, attributed to bleeding DEAN & DELUCA (as we used to say, make-uh-me-pyookah, just to be silly; no offense intended); and second, because the price was so off-the-wall, as we would expect for anything found there. Which is not the point. The POINT is -- WHY and HOW would anybody, any importer, choose to premier their product, particularly an olive oil or a cheese, someplace other than Fairway? It baffles me. The importer would sell fifty times as much, would get paid much faster, and would get re-orders of increasingly enormous quantities like clockwork.
So I come across the importer’s who- and whereabouts on-line. E-mail him a sanitized version of the query above, receive a prompt and very courteous reply and offer to send samples, which of course I accept.
So a few days later I receive a bottle of each. Not even HALF-liter bottles. God forbid a liter. 375-milliliters which is 12.7 fluid ounces. The oil is decent, nothing I’d write home about, nothing I’d go out of my way to stock for our customers except for the virtue of it being Israeli. I go out of my way to support Israel. The barnea olive provides some finishing pepper, resulting in an oil only slightly more than not-completely-unexceptional; this manzanilla is completely unexceptional. Let us olive oil freaks not mistake “gentle and fragrant” with “bland and forgettable”. This Israeli manzanilla is decidedly the latter. All that’s well and good and usual and typical, and I often find myself railing at Florence for some of the choices she makes, and then I catch a gander at the importer’s price list that came with the dwarf samples. I almost choke on my tongue. This genteel and gentile-sounding, Massachusetts-based importer apparently shamelessly asks for more than twelve dollars for a less-than thirteen-ounce bottle, albeit a “cobalt-blue” bottle, which, when light shines through the yellow oil, results in very pretty green up until the oil level stops and the “cobalt-blue” neck takes over. So, for more than thirty-three dollars per liter WHOLESALE you too can support Israel AND this fine, yet supercilious-sounding (The Harrington Trace Corp. – sounds vaguely goy-horse-y, no?), obviously new-to-the-game importer. Me? I believe I’ll pass. Thirty-three dollars wholesale for a bottle of not-even-very-good olive oil. Plus shipping. Add 5%. Patently absurd. Look, you’re going to shop at stores that insult my intelligence, you get what you deserve. These stores know who they are.
Fairway Redhook (Brooklyn) is a juggernaut. The store’s a mind-blower. You will flip out. I have never been so excited about anything in my life, and my partners feel the same way. Nothing cooler than Fairway; nothing.
New crop Nyons AOC is in; this oil is buttah. Crazy about Nyons oil. Extremely rare; hardly anybody growing olives up there anymore. France’s northernmost olive oil, like Italy’s Lago di Garda. It’s not Provence here. Well, that’s not really true. Provence, a state of mind more than a finite geographical locale, starts at about Montelimar, or at least that’s what Roy Andries de Groot would have me believe. If you’re driving, and driving south, heading for the paradise that is Provence, Roy once wrote that at Montelimar, about twenty miles north and a bit west of Nyons, you’ll begin to smell rosemary and thyme and sarriette, which is wild summer savory. These fragrances mean you’ve entered Provence despite the fact that you’re still heading south through Dauphine, the classical region above Provence.
Mr. De Groot , dead about a decade now, is one of the few food-world journalist superstars. MFK Fisher, Elizabeth David, Patience Gray, Madeleine Kamman, Mimi Sheraton, Waverly Root, George Lang, to name a few. Roy lived in a sprawling loft in the Westbeth building. I used to bring him stuff I was excited about back in the late ‘70’s – olive oils and cheeses; sit around with him and taste stuff and talk about it. Don’t remember how I met him; he was completely blind. Probably one of his comely assistants came to my counter. In any case, having known him makes me, marks me as having participated in real history, sort of like having been near the Bastille in July of 1799 or something.
I digress about Mr. De Groot because of the power and memory of one of the books he wrote, one that re-read forever will re-infuse me with the passion for food and location that should have half-lived, that is, diminished by half – years ago. The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth, about two old maids who ran a b&b in Dauphine, way high up a road from The Valley of Chartreuse.
So I come across the importer’s who- and whereabouts on-line. E-mail him a sanitized version of the query above, receive a prompt and very courteous reply and offer to send samples, which of course I accept.
So a few days later I receive a bottle of each. Not even HALF-liter bottles. God forbid a liter. 375-milliliters which is 12.7 fluid ounces. The oil is decent, nothing I’d write home about, nothing I’d go out of my way to stock for our customers except for the virtue of it being Israeli. I go out of my way to support Israel. The barnea olive provides some finishing pepper, resulting in an oil only slightly more than not-completely-unexceptional; this manzanilla is completely unexceptional. Let us olive oil freaks not mistake “gentle and fragrant” with “bland and forgettable”. This Israeli manzanilla is decidedly the latter. All that’s well and good and usual and typical, and I often find myself railing at Florence for some of the choices she makes, and then I catch a gander at the importer’s price list that came with the dwarf samples. I almost choke on my tongue. This genteel and gentile-sounding, Massachusetts-based importer apparently shamelessly asks for more than twelve dollars for a less-than thirteen-ounce bottle, albeit a “cobalt-blue” bottle, which, when light shines through the yellow oil, results in very pretty green up until the oil level stops and the “cobalt-blue” neck takes over. So, for more than thirty-three dollars per liter WHOLESALE you too can support Israel AND this fine, yet supercilious-sounding (The Harrington Trace Corp. – sounds vaguely goy-horse-y, no?), obviously new-to-the-game importer. Me? I believe I’ll pass. Thirty-three dollars wholesale for a bottle of not-even-very-good olive oil. Plus shipping. Add 5%. Patently absurd. Look, you’re going to shop at stores that insult my intelligence, you get what you deserve. These stores know who they are.
Fairway Redhook (Brooklyn) is a juggernaut. The store’s a mind-blower. You will flip out. I have never been so excited about anything in my life, and my partners feel the same way. Nothing cooler than Fairway; nothing.
New crop Nyons AOC is in; this oil is buttah. Crazy about Nyons oil. Extremely rare; hardly anybody growing olives up there anymore. France’s northernmost olive oil, like Italy’s Lago di Garda. It’s not Provence here. Well, that’s not really true. Provence, a state of mind more than a finite geographical locale, starts at about Montelimar, or at least that’s what Roy Andries de Groot would have me believe. If you’re driving, and driving south, heading for the paradise that is Provence, Roy once wrote that at Montelimar, about twenty miles north and a bit west of Nyons, you’ll begin to smell rosemary and thyme and sarriette, which is wild summer savory. These fragrances mean you’ve entered Provence despite the fact that you’re still heading south through Dauphine, the classical region above Provence.
Mr. De Groot , dead about a decade now, is one of the few food-world journalist superstars. MFK Fisher, Elizabeth David, Patience Gray, Madeleine Kamman, Mimi Sheraton, Waverly Root, George Lang, to name a few. Roy lived in a sprawling loft in the Westbeth building. I used to bring him stuff I was excited about back in the late ‘70’s – olive oils and cheeses; sit around with him and taste stuff and talk about it. Don’t remember how I met him; he was completely blind. Probably one of his comely assistants came to my counter. In any case, having known him makes me, marks me as having participated in real history, sort of like having been near the Bastille in July of 1799 or something.
I digress about Mr. De Groot because of the power and memory of one of the books he wrote, one that re-read forever will re-infuse me with the passion for food and location that should have half-lived, that is, diminished by half – years ago. The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth, about two old maids who ran a b&b in Dauphine, way high up a road from The Valley of Chartreuse.
Cheese
There really is no other foodstuff as perfect as cheese, neither fruits nor vegetables, meat nor seafood, beans nor grains, breads nor pastries. Not one of these food groups comes close to cheese’s perfection in terms of its intensity and nuance of flavor and fragrance, its remarkable gamut of textures, its ambassadorial regional specificity. I love the way cheese gives such a happy, welcoming halloo to these other foods, as if a cheese is on a mission, a stalwart fellow traveler perfectly content to ride alone but evermore ebullient with company. I also love the way cheese always acts as the mediator between often quarrelsome tablemates, the whiny wine too young to be out this late, the sulkingly bitter olive or almond, the tarted-up and shameless piece of fruit that seems to know everything about everybody and is not shy about pointing the finger.
Cheese is low-maintenance. I value that it requires little more than one’s knife and a sturdy surface. Nor is it so balefully evanescent like fruit and flesh. It will be there when you need it.
No foodstuff is so beckoningly sensuous. The texture of Vacherin Mont d’Or is voluptuous. In dominatrix-fashion each is belted, bandoliered by a strip of highly aromatic Norwegian spruce bark lest she spill out of her costume. The feminine fromage de chevre Sainte-Maure de Touraine is hermaphroditically phallic, and even pierced – a piece of rye straw from end-to-end, to keep it from falling completely to pieces. A true Camembert smells of sex. Numerous cheeses have been named for and made to resemble the female breast. The arousal of every cheese via brief exposure to room temperature is evidenced by the cheese becoming moist and slippery.
Cheese as an elegant and traditional coda to haute-cuisine? As you wish. For me, I prefer it down-and-dirty.
My philosophy of selecting cheese is a simple matter, whether the cheese this philosophy is to be applied is for my own personal enjoyment or that of customers here at Fairway. The simplicity of this matter is borne out by the questions I ask. Is the cheese made more by a person, or more by a machine? Cheese tools are one thing. Even the most hands-on cheese recipe requires vats, hoses, rakes, colanders and thermometers. But if the cheese is a product of mass-production, a Henry Ford-like assembly line where very soon the few humans involved will be replaced by incorporeal robotic arms, then the cheese has been made by a machine, in which case I say, “No thanks!” Mass-production factory cheese is anathema to a memorable cheese experience. There is no character, no rusticity, no individuality to a factory cheese.
Has the cheese been made from raw milk? To use pasteurized milk in the creation of a cheese is unthinkable, illogical, if in fact the goal is to make a cheese that is as good as it can possibly be. And there can be no other goal than that, for me, for all of us.
Does the cheese taste good, look good, and does it give itself up nobly to the knife? I will forever be in awe of the fact that cheese is one of the few things in this life that runs roughshod over the old saw, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.”, because with cheese, I don’t even need to taste it to know whether it’s good or not, because with cheese, you can. If I behold a cheese that looks like it just stepped out of a limousine, rather than a truck, a cheese wearing a three-piece suit, rather than flannel and corduroy, a cheese sporting a label that is in some garish primary color within a logo crafted by committee, a cheese whose exterior is as flawless and glossy as the promise that its interior will be flabby and slabby, I say I will not select this cheese. It is not worthy of me.
If, on the other hand, the exterior of the cheese I behold is in some shade of an earth-tone, from bone-white, to beige, to khaki, to straw-colored, through the russet-reds, rawhides and chocolatey browns, and sports a toadskin or a pebbly surface, or a deer antler’s velvet, a surface that begs to be stroked, or is cloaked in gray gingham, or is stippled or tattooed over every square inch with its name and provenance, or is dusted or rouged or cobwebbed with some beneficent mold, or whose exterior, like that of fermier Saint-Nectaire, like some expressionist painting or Hubble telescopic photo of a distant galaxy, reflects the colors white, yellow, red, green and black, of five distinct and identifiable strains of wild yeasts, each a healthy, flavor-producing substance, I then know the cheese is going to taste good. Heaven knows it looks good. As for that business about the knife, don’t worry about it. It will cut just fine.
With regard to my favorite cheese, I remain noncommittal. I’ve always found myself baffled by the question, exactly as I am when asked my favorite color, or which of my children I love the most. I’d have to say my favorite cheese is often the one presently before me.
Cheese is low-maintenance. I value that it requires little more than one’s knife and a sturdy surface. Nor is it so balefully evanescent like fruit and flesh. It will be there when you need it.
No foodstuff is so beckoningly sensuous. The texture of Vacherin Mont d’Or is voluptuous. In dominatrix-fashion each is belted, bandoliered by a strip of highly aromatic Norwegian spruce bark lest she spill out of her costume. The feminine fromage de chevre Sainte-Maure de Touraine is hermaphroditically phallic, and even pierced – a piece of rye straw from end-to-end, to keep it from falling completely to pieces. A true Camembert smells of sex. Numerous cheeses have been named for and made to resemble the female breast. The arousal of every cheese via brief exposure to room temperature is evidenced by the cheese becoming moist and slippery.
Cheese as an elegant and traditional coda to haute-cuisine? As you wish. For me, I prefer it down-and-dirty.
My philosophy of selecting cheese is a simple matter, whether the cheese this philosophy is to be applied is for my own personal enjoyment or that of customers here at Fairway. The simplicity of this matter is borne out by the questions I ask. Is the cheese made more by a person, or more by a machine? Cheese tools are one thing. Even the most hands-on cheese recipe requires vats, hoses, rakes, colanders and thermometers. But if the cheese is a product of mass-production, a Henry Ford-like assembly line where very soon the few humans involved will be replaced by incorporeal robotic arms, then the cheese has been made by a machine, in which case I say, “No thanks!” Mass-production factory cheese is anathema to a memorable cheese experience. There is no character, no rusticity, no individuality to a factory cheese.
Has the cheese been made from raw milk? To use pasteurized milk in the creation of a cheese is unthinkable, illogical, if in fact the goal is to make a cheese that is as good as it can possibly be. And there can be no other goal than that, for me, for all of us.
Does the cheese taste good, look good, and does it give itself up nobly to the knife? I will forever be in awe of the fact that cheese is one of the few things in this life that runs roughshod over the old saw, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.”, because with cheese, I don’t even need to taste it to know whether it’s good or not, because with cheese, you can. If I behold a cheese that looks like it just stepped out of a limousine, rather than a truck, a cheese wearing a three-piece suit, rather than flannel and corduroy, a cheese sporting a label that is in some garish primary color within a logo crafted by committee, a cheese whose exterior is as flawless and glossy as the promise that its interior will be flabby and slabby, I say I will not select this cheese. It is not worthy of me.
If, on the other hand, the exterior of the cheese I behold is in some shade of an earth-tone, from bone-white, to beige, to khaki, to straw-colored, through the russet-reds, rawhides and chocolatey browns, and sports a toadskin or a pebbly surface, or a deer antler’s velvet, a surface that begs to be stroked, or is cloaked in gray gingham, or is stippled or tattooed over every square inch with its name and provenance, or is dusted or rouged or cobwebbed with some beneficent mold, or whose exterior, like that of fermier Saint-Nectaire, like some expressionist painting or Hubble telescopic photo of a distant galaxy, reflects the colors white, yellow, red, green and black, of five distinct and identifiable strains of wild yeasts, each a healthy, flavor-producing substance, I then know the cheese is going to taste good. Heaven knows it looks good. As for that business about the knife, don’t worry about it. It will cut just fine.
With regard to my favorite cheese, I remain noncommittal. I’ve always found myself baffled by the question, exactly as I am when asked my favorite color, or which of my children I love the most. I’d have to say my favorite cheese is often the one presently before me.
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