gastropoda

My mom had a million maxims, one of which was that you only entrap yourself in a tangled web of deceit. (She always quoted the original, of course.) And I’m hoping that will be the case with the butter-golden girl of the most tarnished hog business. And with those who just promoted the book in the pages of what presents itself as an august publication, of the highest integrity. I’m so old I remember when you wouldn’t review a cookbook without actually cooking from it. Let alone shill a promotional brochure without pulling back the chicharron to acknowledge what lies beneath.

Figures that it would be Molto Ego who would induce second thoughts on my crazy idea of posting daily. By Sunday I’m sure I’ll have a whole other negative reaction to the bankster brouhaha over his loose lips; right now I love the idea of those guys writing checks for credit default swaps their guts can’t cash. And in the meantime I’m focusing on the rather astonishingly lame coverage of the linkbait. At first I was impressed the formerly arboreal media even jumped on the story. But then I started to count bylines — four for Rupert’s crew, three for Pinch’s — and neither mega-team answered the obvious question: Can you get into the “boycotted” restaurants? Saturday at Del Posto, for the record, is as open as it always was to peons: 4:30 or 10:30. Babbo’s line is nonstop busy. But if you want to know what the commenters are texting, including on whose cash keeps the crudo afloat, just head on over to your hometown paper. For the insights, you know, you can’t get on your own.

I’m a little behind, but did we really need a Brit advising Americans on how to cook on a camping trip? As Paul Theroux must have wondered, shouldn’t she be sitting in her underwear staring out to sea in Cornwall? I would ask if they’ve lost their fucking minds, but the answer is too obvious. I could deal with bangers on the barbie before fava beans in the field. It’s been 40 years since my family would pack up the bedrolls and the old Coleman stove, and I still remember what a hassle cooking anything but freshly caught trout was. And we had a wood stove to practice on at home. What’s most amazing is not just that a recycled book is being passed off as fresh. It’s that I was the most recalcitrant Girl Scout ever and still know you do not approach a campfire barefoot. You may start thinking s’mores with those marshmallows. But watch out for napalm. . .

And this new Nigella. Sacre merde. Is there anything better than a cliché? Why would anyone presume we need lecturing on not shopping in supermarkets? For a home cook, the great glory of living here (or in Paris or San Francisco) is the variety of ways to part with food dollars. But I guess it’s all a clear indication that the target audience is officially “out here” (no matter that one of my old friends could never get home delivery of the birdcage liner in Louisville). The thing shoulda been conceived as Kountry Kitchen. Slickers might learn something.

Apparently only outsiders read the hometown paper’s public editor’s lament about trash-tracking, which noted that three different sections had run silliness about a non-story. This week readers were subjected to back-to-back gluten-free BS. Of course, this is the pinnacle of journalism that sold the world the connection between yellowcake and WMD. But still. Would a better story not focus on whether this trend should even be a trend? Humans have been eating wheat/wheat products for millennia. Why the pushback now? Has everyone gotten lactose-intolerant to oat bran with pomegranate juice? A few years ago I met a woman in Tuscany whose brother’s guts were being corroded by celiac disease, and I have taken it seriously ever since. Still, I somehow doubt half of America could be similarly afflicted. But I am looking forward to Nivea in Thursday Styles . . .

Over at my Dr. Jekyll outlet, I’ve already commented on the idiocy of a cake mix company trying to re-target its crap to Food Network followers it thinks might be willing to put in two and a half hours on a dessert from a box. But in retrospect Ms. Hyde started dwelling more on the apparent naiveté of the reporter who brought the marketing campaign into the Timeslight. His last graf noted that Duncan Hines “began attaching his name to food products.” Licensing/franchising, you mean? I believe that’s called selling out.

I’m not speaking ill of the dead here, but I did wonder why the hometown paper would run a substantial obit of a guy whose role in the popularization of Mexican TV dinners sounded so peripheral — dad and bro appeared to have done the big enchilada lifting. The other hometowner is always printing megatype-heds over mystifyingly long homages to women who appeared to have done nothing more than give birth, which I assume is payback to some longtime pressman (do they still exist?) But given the popularity of all things food-related these days, this just reeked of link bait.

On the other hand, if you missed the rare laudable NYTimes take, on the no-win salt study, check it out for sure. So much “journalism” seems to be “some say the sun comes up in the east” even-handed nonsense, with total disregard for facts. But this laid it bare: The study was flawed, and no study ever done will be anything but flawed. If only food science reporters had been covering the run-up to the Iraq war . . .

This was a disturbing weekend for readers of newspaper supplements. In one I actually read this phrase about peeling asparagus: “it will look, taste and bite more nicely if you take the time.” Diagram that sucker. Unless you mean “good dog!” And then there was the bizarre correction on a featurette on the most pretentious dinner party hostess ever featured by T for Twaddle, one so dumb it had to be run twice. Seems to me, if a blogger changes her domain name after a piece goes to press but installs a redirect, that’s not an error. It’s a glitch. The real correction should have been on the site itself, which I looked at only to see if there was any there there. “Desperately seeking saffron,” indeed. That’s one way to do a 404.

But I got more annoyed on skimming Useless Weekend and the profoundly stupid Mother’s Day food feature. Note to the daughters attaching themselves to mom’s apron strings: Eggs without hollandaise cannot be Benedict. Substituting salsa went out in about 1995,  when fat was being scorned as the high-fructose corn syrup of its time. What you “created” is just huevos rancheros on an English muffin. And I kinda doubt any mom who was presented that for breakfast on her big day would be flattered to think you were worried about her getting fat. Better to buy some lo-cal chocolates.

Okay, sap’s stopped rising. Back to bile. Is there anything sillier in a 140-character world than 30 gazillion words about a single recipe? Even without slogging through, I was reminded of the coulibiac in the marvelous “Decline of the American Empire” — all that yapping about fish in a blanket.

I’m very glad the FCC is making sure bloggers disclose all freebies they take. Keeps the agency distracted from wine writers who persuade restaurants in the top 1 percent of prix fixes to cook eight-course dinners for their wives who drink only the finest. Even if the antichrist employer picked up the tab, you still wanted to pick up a pitchfork. Not least because the chosen wines ran with no prices given. Message: Let ’em drink “Yquem.”

Woke up yesterday morning and something gruesome unfolded in my hometown paper. Something that almost took me back to a certain younger inconvenience. Clots is clots, is all I’ll say. That was it for me with that section, especially given how I did ribs-in-the-oven spin four years ago (parboil/sauce/bake/no beer can required). But then a Twitter nudge made me check out the alleged Brie Syndrome just to the left of it, and I suddenly found myself shoveling Barbero droppings out of my cranial sieve. Having actually lived through the “cold wheel of Brie” era, I wondered where the editors were. Certainly not reading the business press, which has been industriously pointing out that other people’s money is the same as it ever was — selling off assets and digging in deep with debt until the golden goose is damn near hollow. What killed the biggest scam in underripe fruit was not changing tastes, or even a world of Fast Company-anointed chocolatiers. Assholes bought a solid company and bled it dry. Just consider that Pat LaFrieda and a million “Farmer Clarks” have stepped right up to the FedEx scale lately, but it’s a rare week when I walk into the elevator in my building and don’t encounter an Omaha Steaks delivery. Maybe those organ-transplant boxes, though, contain the fixings for another food cliché — as I have written many times, fondue is the Scandinavian furniture of food: always on the verge of a comeback but never really out of style. The real news was in the third paragraph from the bottom.

As I contemplate, for the 40gazillionth time, upgrading to more frequent posting rather than Twittering my life away, I do want to say my jaw nearly hit the 6 train floor last Saturday as I skimmed the WSJ: It actually had a great take on how exactly the calories in any given food are calculated. In all these decades of obsessing on food, I have never seen any MSM outlet act as explainer. Too bad there’s no way to link unless you subscribe. So much for Father of Smidge’s pipe dream.

Not to pick on the WSJ, because its Off Duty really is best in show these days, almost enough to compensate for the slovenly copy-editing in other sections of the paper and the batshit insanity in its opinion pages. But, really, how could such a savvy section fall for the Chatty Cathy string-pulled salad spinner? Sure, it seems like a good idea in a quick test on a weekly deadline. Use the sucker for a few months, though, and you’ll see why old fucks prefer the OXO with its pump. What’s saddest is that I feel as if I’ve been watching this argument get lost for easily a decade (I was overruled at the NYT when I pointed out the obvious — that string goes flaccid faster than Newt’s patriotic organ). A seltzer maker is a wondrous thing on its first shot, too. Not so much when you try it without a fresh cartridge.

And I also made this point over on the Twitter, with a nice acknowledgment from the guilty party, but a feature attacking restaurant websites for what I always attack them for could at least have noted that the pot was calling the Creuset black — to read the assault, you had to register and click 65 times. I’d almost prefer a PDF menu after annoying music.

I should ignore the great redesign of the Sunday magazine just the way advertisers did (11 non-house ads over 56 pages on debut weekend?) But I was pretty awed at the miscalculation of the premier food column. Weekends are when home cooks want to kick back and think about cassoulet and other Everests they can take the time to climb. Not “git ‘er done” soup formulas from Dinings past. (Don’t even get me started on the Lives column on the “tamale” I read months ago on the infinite internets.) I’m no admirer of the Wicked of Oz, but the WSJ’s Saturday food coverage shows how it’s done: mini recipes that are almost haikus in their lyricism and precision but come from a plethora of different palates. Not from one “boil an onion in plain water, then add spinach” recycler.