Breakfast in Britain

I love to travel, but I confess, that I'm not in love with "continental breakfasts" since they tend to be light and simple. One thing I liked about England is that their ideas on breakfast is on the same continuum as ours, maybe even more so. I recall the morning meals served in a small hotel outside of Bath, that consisted not only of bacon and eggs, but sausages and fried tomatoes. My German friend, being raised on the "continental" concept of breakfast, was not pleased, but I loved it. I also enjoyed the breakfasts in the Netherlands, because they would serve peanut butter. In fact, the Dutch seem to be the only Europeans who eat peanut butter, except they would look on with horror when we added jelly to ours. But there's nothing better than peanut butter and hagelslag (chocolate sprinkles) on toast. The Dutch also have the best chocolate sprinkles, made with real chocolate, not wax or plastic, like ours.

German cuisine and its discontents

I love pork, and thus I adore sausages, and no cuisine has more sausages than German. I don't know what's going on with German food in Germany, but the few German restaurants I've eaten in NY and the midwest are bastions of a very old food aesthetic, untouched by nouvelle experimentation. Take Rolf's on 3rd Ave., where I had a splendid repast of weinershnitzel in paprika sauce a few months ago. First, all German places seem to have been designed to look like Rudolf Hess' living room, so you have to overcome the urge to sing the "Horst Wessel Song" and Sieg Heil, or that you're going to be asked for your papers. That out of the way, you're usually served vast platters of food, pre-any health conscious ideas at all. I admire that moxie. This is a heavy cuisine, so it's best eaten in winter, when you need the carbs for warmth. A friend was horrified when I said I had weinershnitzel. "You ate veal?" she gasped, as if I admitted to some deep horror. Let me explain that my attitude to veal is sort of like my feeling about lobster. Yeah, it's a shame to boil a critter alive, but the fucking things taste so good with butter sauce, so between my feeling for a sentient being and my desite for a tasty bit of food, my desire for food wins. So, I know veal is often raised in inhumane conditions, but the meat is just so delicious! I see that England has actually banned inhumane conditions for veal, but I doubt such laws exist in the US, where you can feed people anything, until someone dies.
By the way, the best Bratwurst I ever had can be gotten from the midwest, where many Germans settled. Usinger's makes great brats, and so does Nueske's. Highly recommended.

Immigration and Food

In all the blather about immigration (They're lepers! Drug addicts! Rapists!), no one has talked about the real reason we need immigrants: Food! Maybe this is too bourgeois for the mainstream, but where would NY be without fucking immigrants? For years, two things were true about NY food: No good barbecue, and no good Mexican. Recently, a slew of bbq places have opened, and suddenly, we see Mexican restaurants actually staffed with Mexicans! The bbq complaint should be amended: no good American bbq, sinde Asian bbq has been on offer here for years, some quite good. I was reminded of this when a delightful development happened on one of my commuting routes: the appearance of an authentic taco truck on 14h and 8th Avenue, and some taco stands appearing in Coney Island, one right by the sideshow that makes the best chorizo I've ever eaten, and I've eaten a lot of chorizo. On 14th Street, the truck disappeared for a few weeks, but it was back the other night, and I had a lengua (tongue) taco, that caused a fellow subway rider to look up from his book (Buford's book about being Batali's sous-chef) and ask me where I got that deliciously smelling item. And it was excellent, the tongue soft and tasty. A good taco is a thing of beauty. My taste for tongue of course formed in delis, where a good tongue sandwich is hard to come by. This tongue was not prepared like deli tongue, I suspect a long stewing process, but it was delicious! If you're ever on 14th & 8th, and need a late night food fix, I strongly recommend this truck.
Chinatown too benefits from immigraton. For years, Chinatown was in decline. I remember discussing with a friend how awful most Chinatown places had become, and then new immigrants arrived, bringing soup dumplings and revitalizing stale cuisines: Good Sezchuan! Tasty Cantonese! Anyway, without immigrants, none of this would be possible. And let's not forget my fave Viet fast food: the banh mi sandwich, a noble collision of East & West, yielding one tasty treat. My fave banh mi place is on Broome, but I haven't tried them all by any means.
Viva La immigracion, I say. Let the stampede of exotic food continue!!!!!

PS to Eastern Desserts

As much as I don't like Asian desserts, the Japanese are clever at making some Western treats. Currently, in NY, the best creampuffs to be had are at the oddly named Beard Papa chain, imported from Japan. These are delicious, with a nice light pasrty, and fresh cream, injected when you buy them. They are the best creampuffs I've eaten in a long time, especially since a good bakery is heard to find.

Bacon, My True Love

Everyone has their own personal food hierarchy, or pyramid. Mine features Pork at the apex, then ice cream, fish, and chicken at the next level, and beef at the bottom. I love pork in all its manifestations: sausages, chops, roast, shoulder. belly. I also seem to be the only person who likes bacon rare. In fact, as a child I'd sneak raw bacon and eat it uncooked, choosing culinary pleasure over commonsense (raw pork can give you parasites, although I'm told this is happens much less nowadays with all the antibiotics and such pumpled into our meat supply). I also like to buy my bacon at the butcher's, since I like it thick cut and fresh. The best bacon I ever ate was on a trip to the Northern Kingdom in Vermont. The little stores often carried bacon hand delivered by local farmers, and it was delicious! I've never met anyone else who likes bacon as little cooked as I do, and I rarely order it in restaurants, because they always cook it too much for my taste, and it's the thin bacon usually, and I do prefer a nice thick strip. But as much as I like my bacon rare, I need my steak and hamburgers more well done. As a kid, any hint of red in my meat freaked me out. I've come down to medium well now, don't need every hint of red to be banished, and I can eat steak tartare well enough, just don't like my hamburgers rare (good thing too, a friend of mine got violently ill eating a rare hamburger, and almost lost his voice). Who knows how these things develop? The tongue wants what it wants.

Childhood Foods

I was thinking of stuff I ate as a kid that I haven't eaten in decades, things like bologna, frank and beans casserole, and hole in the bread fried egg sandwiches. Bologna seems obvious to forego, as it is definitely on the lower rungs of the cold cut ladder. Even as a kid, I used to fry slices to eat it, and not to be a snob, but once you eat the good stuff (prosciutto, soppresatta, etc) why would you eat bologna? Franks and beans I'd probably still eat, but for whatever reason, just never make for myself. The fried egg sandwich I've thought a lot about. Seems every mom served their family some variation of this, which was basically a slice of bread with a hole cut in the center and an egg fried in it. I loved these as a kid, and never attempted to make one on my own. I keep thinking there must've been more to the recipe, but when I ask my mom, she tells me no, it was just bread with an egg. Yet everyone I've asked seemed to have been served this as a child. Don't know if there is an official name for this dish, you never see it offered in diners and such, but there must be some source for its origin. It's just one of those childhood mysteries.
I confess that one cold cut I miss is the chicken roll. It didn't look like chicken, it didn't really taste like chicken, and I fear to think how it was actually made, but I was quite fond of it. It no longer exists, because the company that made it (Weaver) is gone, and I guess nobody else picked up the slack.
Although I was raised on homemade breads and cakes, I would eat junk, and I remember being fond of Twinkies that had been frozen. I stopped eating Twinkies when I heard the filling was essentially lard, and I've never gone back. Don't really know if this is true, but I'm sure whatever the filling is, it's not of this earth.

Why It's Okay to Hate Vegans

I"m 50 plus some years old, and in I came of age in the 60's and70's, which means I've seen a lot of crazy food fads come and go. Does anyone remember the word "Macrobiotic"? This diet, popular back then among the insane, promised to balance your yin and yang if only you did things like avoid eating food with any flavor. Children of macrobiotic parents would often scarf down hamburgers and ice cream as soon as they were away from home, their bodies desperate for nourishment and the forbidden. And of course, like all diets that promise to balance you out, the practitioners were all drug addicts or the most neurotic screwballs you could ever hope to meet. There was a well-known macrobiotic East Village restaurant, The Cauldron, and the staff were all outpatients. I wll say, they did make the best soba noodles I ever ate, if that counts for anything. You don't hear much about macrobiotic these days, but many macrobiotic ideas are still around. Another popular nut diet involved a long chart of what foods shouldn't be mixed together. I don't know what this was called, but many painfully thin women in the 70s would tack this long list on their refrigerators. Again, another way to remove pleasure from the culinary experience.
Of course, everyone knows a vegetarian or too, many of whom eat fish or chicken. I have no quarrel if you wish to avoid meat, but vegetarians aren't vegetarians because of animal empathy, most do it to feel superior to us lowly meat eaters. Walk into a steakhouse, and the overwhelming mood is of joy, comradery, and happiness. Walk into a vegetarian place, and it's a funeral parlor, the eaters solemnly bent over their plate of bean sprouts, tofu, and whatever else has no taste (if this isn't true, why do vegetarians try to create dishes that mimic meat?). "I don't enjoy this," they probably mumble, "but I it makes me superior to everybody else." I recall eating at Angelica's in the East Village years ago, a high temple of these beliefs, and asking the waitress for some lemon. "We don't do lemon here," she replied haughtily. I apologized for daring to ask for something that might add some taste to my food..
Vegetarianism is also a cheap way to be noticed. You're throwing a party, and you think, "Oh, I'll make a chicken salad for everyone," then you realize, "Oh wait, X is a vegetarian." Vegans are even more annoying, some going so far to not eat honey. "Bee slavery" they call bee farms. Go fuck yourself. If there's any field that doesn't hurt the animals being cultivated, it's harvesting honey. It's in the interest of the harvester to hope his bees flourish. Taking honey doesn't hurt the bees, doesn't kill them, so what is the problem? Vegan women often have problems dating, because let's face it, a guy who says, "Oh, does that have gluten? I'm allergic" is probably not a guy you want to date.
The most extreme food cult is of course the raw foodists. A friend of mine converted to this religion years ago, and a more hapless sorry bunch of morons it'd be harder to find. First, the idea of raw food is ridiculous. Many foods require heat to make them edible, and even signal desireability through cooking. Broccoli is a pale green, but when cooked, turns a beautiful vivacious green, and the chemical that's good for you in tomatoes is only released through cooking. Also, there's no culture that doesn't cook. I can't think of any society based on raw food at all. Even the most primitive tribes have fire, and a way to cook. Also, like all food cults, they make idiotic claims for themselves. It cures cancer, it cures athlete's foot, you won't age, etc. etc. If somebody wants to eat raw food, go ahead, but don't make pumped up bullshit unproveable claims, or invent theories. I love pork, but I don't claim any mystical properties for it, I just like it.
For years, vegetarians used to justify their diet with the animal kingdom. "Chimps don't eat meat," they'd say, but then it turned out not only do chimps eat meat, they wage war on each other and cannibalize their neighbors. Okay, not such a good example. Then they used dolphins, but it turns out dolphins eat each other too. Here's a word to the wise: animals are pretty diverse, you can find a species to shore up any argument. Monogamous animals, sexually perverse animals, celibate, whatever. It doesn't prove anything about humans. In the 60's there was a famous study of rats & overcrowding. Apparently, they became neutotic, masturbated, etc. This was supposed to show something about humans in cities, but even as a kid, I said, "Well, now scientists know a lot about how rats behave if rats lived in crowded apartments, but they don't. And notice, rat brain, size of a pea. Human brain, a bit bigger.'
Another religious aspect to being a raw foodie is the cleanse, an idea that's a hallmark of most food nuts. Either through fasting or some elaborately unpleasant diet, you're supposed to get the toxins out of your body. Obviously, none of these people took elementary biology. People who do these claim years of crap gets flushed out of their systems. But the stomach digests food by breaking it down with hydrochloric acid. In mad scientist movies, the vat of acid with the huge skull and crossbones, is either sulfuric or hydrochloric, and this acid is what attacks your food. Unless you've been eating metal or glass, nothing stays in your body for years. The intestines use bacteria to further break down food, take out what the body needs, and what's left is pushed out as waste. Getting colonics, anothr food nut belief, is actually harmful, because they flush out the necessary flora the intestines need to do their job. If you want things to flush normally, drink lots of water.
But raw foodists are always cleansing, and falling off the wagon, because I think the body rebels against so boring a diet. And then it really is like Christian Science: if you die, it's not because disease doesn't give a fuck how you pray, and Christian Science is dead wrong, it's because you didn't believe enough. So my friend has been cleansing for years, constantly backtracking, and constantly starting again. She thinks it'll cure her asthma. That fact that she's been eating raw food for years, and it hasn't changed her breathing isn't a fault in the diet, it's because she's not rigorous enough in following the true path.
Americans seem to enjoy any cult that removes pleasure from simple human activities. Eating, sex, walking, whatever, there's some doctor or theory to drain the pleasure out of it. I recall a study saying you shouldn't drink cold liquid, it shocks the system. Maybe if you're a neurasthenic, but I love cold liquid. I store a glass in my freezer, permanently filled with ice cubes. Cold water is a genuine pleasure to me. Now I'm supposed to give this up too? Anything that causes pleasure for it's own sake seems to make Americans nervous. Perhaps that's why so many glom on to these rigorous diets, founded not on good culinary principles, but vague wackjob theories.
Quite frankly, even if you could prove that eating uncooked food makes you immortal, I'm not giving up the pleasures of a well grilled steak, a juicy hamburger, a porkchop, or a nice broiled piece of fish. If you can, more power to you, and have a nice life.