gastropoda

If you read only the Human Scratch N Match in the Daily News, you might think her employer has no copy editors. Having done that work for so many years, I suspect they’re just the all-too-common passive-aggressive kind. If she wants to say ricotta is exhilarated, they are going to give her that and all those extra commas she likes so much. If she wants to drop a little fancy French and confuse a mouth with a log, the idiocy is all hers. Grapes permeate, dessert proffers, a journey is storied — they’ll slap a headline on it and move on to something more important, maybe the toilet habits of ready-for-rehab celebrities. But I hope whoever handled this latest assault on the language at least had a pang at letting porchetta into print with the description “light on its feet.” Sounds like the walking dead in Babeland.

Sometimes the horseshit you read actually makes perfect sense. For a developer contemplating a Ferry Plaza-esque market in a city that has Greenmarkets, Grand Central, Chelsea Market, Fairway, Zabar’s, even Dean & Deluca, not to mention Chinatown and Curry Hill and E.B. White’s reality of myriad small towns all connected on one island, of course the right consultant would be a guy who thinks that what this city needs is a biscuit purveyor in the most remote location imaginable. Batali on a tripe truck has a certain appeal, but really. The whole project reeks of Bridgemarket. Which means it will end up as a Food Emporium at best. And next they’ll be telling us little plates have supplanted big-ass steaks. . . .

For 27 years I’ve driven my consort crazy by distilling the semantics class I took in high school with a “textbook” by S.I. Hayakawa. Anyone today who even remembers him probably recalls only the senator* who seemed to suffer from narcolepsy, but he deserves to be quoted into infinity for one observation: The word is not the thing. Or, to put it another way: Words have no power until your brain charges them. (You disagree? Try saying “asshole” to Ferran Adria and see what reaction you get.) All of which is a roundabout way of marveling, yet again, at how a restaurant critic for a once-respected newspaper could confuse a television persona with the food on his plate. I don’t remember who said this, but one of my favorite quotes ever is: Sometimes the news is in the noise. And sometimes it’s in the silence. Bluster makes good teevee. What the fuck does it have to do with cooking?

Oh. Right. This is the guy who informed us the Chimp would be the best candidate with whom to sit down and sock back a few brewskis. Foreign correspondence school should include a class in how “the image is not the person.” And how it’s a slippery slope from Panchito to Kristol-Cloudy.

At the expense of a feeble laugh, I also have to add that I remain amazed at how many people these days will pile on and criticize without reading anything more than a headline. I hate to point out the obvious, but that’s the first warning sign of cretinism. Then again, I force myself to slog through the shallow Bruni waters before dissing, and you can see where that gets me. . .

*Oops — I said he was from Hawaii, but an alert reader notes that the sleepy one was actually from the great state of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronald Reagan.

Before Pakistan, my consort had been starting every day for the last two weeks railing that there was no news on the front page of the NYTimes — it was all puff pieces and thumbsuckers; one morning the “lead” was actually a picture story that could have run in July, or next February. Given how craven the paper has gotten in pandering to advertisers, maybe it was all a ploy to get readers to turn to the back page of every section. That’s where I learned about a “100 percent juice blend” being marketed to “help nourish your brain.” And if you think flavored sugar water is going to keep Alzheimer’s at bay, you might enjoy Sunday Styles. Whose back page carried a full-page ad informing the gullible that Diet Crap has been pumped up with vitamins and minerals. To paraphrase a British tab’s headline after the Chimp was selected a second time: How can 300 million Americans be so stupid?

Thanks to Chow’s Grinder, the one clog with bite, I see Chicago is not stopping with banning a food only a minuscule fraction of its population even eats. Now that the village idiots have come for the duck livers, they are turning their evil eyes on chickens raised in backyards. The justification is that chickenshit attracts rats. And if that’s the case, the City Council chambers must be overrun.

My writeme box is always overflowing with gaffe riots from the flack circus, whether straight from the source or passed along by my e-pals who are equally amazed at what people paid to promote actually churn out. Most recently a new variation on the most abused term in the restaurant business turned up (“pre-fixed” menu), but the funniest had to be the release touting a new place and its chef, who hails from TOWN, Italy. Someone must have been too busy writing an invoice and checking it twice to go back and proofread. Then again, she did promise “a menage a trois never tasted this good.” Is the human Scratch N Match moonlighting?

The same day I noticed my bottle of Heinz white vinegar carried a sell-by date (preservatives go bad?), I opened a jar of popcorn and a big bug flew out. It got away before I could see what it was, but it left plenty of company: one teeny red crawly critter and a swarm of slightly bigger black creepy things. Almost every kernel had gone all “Alien” in the couple of weeks since I had filled that clean jar with stuff bought in bulk at the health food store around the corner. I’m used to strange creatures hatching wildly in my flour and pasta and dried chilies. I just never knew the national snack was also alive with unadvertised protein, and from a vegetarian oasis at that. Of course the whole experience was not as unsettling as the rumor I recently heard that the most overexposed, least interesting voice in food is being considered for radio. If you think Bonnie Wolf is vapid, smarmy and annoying, you haven’t heard the half of it. The wonder is that NPR isn’t chasing after onefatass.com. But then she’s back, and sequels do happen.

Almost everything I cook I have shopped for myself, so maybe I’m more than normally sensitive to how prices are edging up scarily fast these days. I can never have exact change ready when a lemon poppy seed muffin at the corner shop is suddenly a dime more, or stay calm when anything from Eutopia is 30 percent higher, let alone be prepared when the potholders I have always bought for $4.25 are now tagged $4.99 in the same store. But even I was surprised, on buying four movie tickets at Lincoln Square the other day, to be asked for $47 cash (of course the credit card machine was not working). Last time I looked, I don’t think a ticket was $11.75, yet I have not read a peep about it anywhere. I couldn’t even imagine what would account for the increase in this strong economy, but it did put me off my popcorn. Which turned out to be a good thing, because the same theater determinedly gouging at the box office had exactly three attendants at the concession stand while a good 40 people were lined up with money in hand. All I have ever read since the hysterical days of nutrition nuttiness and movie-popcorn-is-a-heart-attack-in-a-box has been that theaters make all their profit on food and soda. And here was one staffed like FEMA.

Anyone worried that Hillary might be pushing American women too far ahead too fast has only to flip open the Dean & DeLuca catalog to rest easier knowing girls will be idjits. For $150, it is selling a pink cake in the shape of a particularly ugly purse. How “Sex and the City” vacuous would you have to be to want a hunk of that? The copy says it’s a “must” for “those who simply can’t have enough purses.” Should you have your bag and eat it, too? Which seems to be the thinking behind another trend, reported in the NYT by way of Reader’s Digest. Women (I can’t imagine a guy would be so devious) are apparently buying fake wedding cakes to cut costs, hiding a “first piece” in foam replicas and serving any old cake from the kitchen. Considering wedding food is inevitably so abysmal to begin with, maybe this is a slice in the right direction. The guests should send replicas of themselves as well. Or of their checks.

Heading out to a promotional event a friend with a cookbook on the line enticed me to attend, I rode the elevator down with my next-door neighbor who was regaling her friend with the tale of how the two of us had each broken ourselves right around the same time in freaky falls in Eutopia, she in Paris, I in Piedmont. I don’t know about her, but I remember mine every morning when the pain wakes me before the alarm can. Talking about how instantly your life can change put me in a strange frame of mind, so maybe I made too much of what the unexpected flack at the door said as he handed me my name tag: “Just don’t get drunk and get hit by a car.” I laughed it off by responding, “Don’t trust me not to do either.” But the longer I thought about it the more I wondered why a guy with social Tourette’s would choose to make a career of ass-kissing. And I really wondered whether T’dum advised another invitee, one of his pals: “Just don’t get greedy and fuck over your partner.” Except that is how that ugliness actually unfolded.

If there is even a tiny shred of doubt left that everything the Chimp touches turns to guano, this official travesty will dispel it. Poor Bill Yosses appears to have been reduced, as my consort put it, to “sculpting cow turds.” Given that chocolate is lethal to dogs, what were they thinking serving it to a French poodle?

Guess the bosomy one must not be working out so well as the human Scratch N Match. Her new employer has taken a turn toward testosterone with its “sexiest chefs” contest, and whatever the candidates got for their souls, it cannot be enough to compensate for being labeled “culinary cuties” or “diamond in the roughage” (did one of them shit a gem?) Even Careme, who did everything but jump naked out of a vol-au-vent in his time, must be cringing in his marzipan grave over the hoops chefs have to backflip through for celebrity anymore. Judging by the stud-wannabe photos, next the paper will be making them whip out their salumi to see which one inches circulation up. Maybe Molto can blog it.

If I had a peso for every restaurant critic’s lament that New York has no good Mexican, I would be able to afford three or four casas down in San Miguel de Allende, where my consort is off teaching workshops and where I decided the cuisine has to be Ex/Mex (for expatriate Americans). This is a city where most paid evaluators still have trouble telling a taco from a tortilla (let me count the mixups), but they consider themselves qualified to micturate all over most any place that opens. If good Mexican landed in a UFO, would they even be able to describe it? I was weaned on tamales and empanadas in Arizona and would have trouble. And I’m no expert on Thai, but at least that is a cuisine originating halfway around the world. Enchiladas are right next door. For chorizo’s sake, you natterers: Get your bosses to underwrite you a standard of comparison before you write the whole cuisine off.

Until I needed health insurance that would not strangle me like NYTimes Cobra, I never joined a union in my life. I always paid the dues and abstained, never more adamantly than after learning on my first stint on 43d Street exactly why my salary was depressed: the Guildsters were not about to allow equal pay to a youngish college dropout in a building full of gray sheepskins. Even so, I find myself decidedly on the side of the striking television writers (and Broadway stagehands) right now. Down the line every creative type is going to be working for the Pharaoh unless someone makes it stop, as I just realized on getting an offer from Fine Cooking that seemed hard to refuse. I did a single feature for the magazine, nearly a decade and a half ago, and because I had insisted the contract gave me the copyright and the editors one-time use, I got a nice little check every couple of years, whenever recipes were being rebundled. Then the publisher decided a buyout would be more economical, and a smallish chunk of change was dangled in my direction. I declined, figuring it was not enough to cover rebundling into perpetuity. And then I stupidly agreed to an online buyout only, assuming the recipes would just be out there like everything else in the free beyond. So of course the magazine is now charging for access to its web site and database. And guess who will never get a cut? Don’t be surprised if this strike converts even comedy writers into scripters of “Saw XIII: The Kitchen Story.”

Not for the first time, I’m thinking the leading cause of obesity etc. in America is sloppy reporting. The new health columnist at the WSJournal just blithely informed her myriad readers that trans fats are what make croissants flaky. Sorry, that would be the beurre, a nice healthful fat since time immemorial. And don’t get me started on the coverage of the single study linking a little unneeded avoirdupois to longevity. Since my femoral calamity, I stop and think every day that every five extra pounds will put 25 pounds of stress on a joint like a hip or knee, not to mention the fact that the additional exertion involved is comparable to hoisting a sack of flour up a staircase. To spin the old joke: Even if you don’t live a little longer with your flesh spilling blithely over into the next airline seat, it will feel like forever. Then again, maybe putting your newspaper/magazine down will make the journey lighter.