by Cathy Erway
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 - The Start of My Restaurant Fast
CHAPTER 2 - Breaking into Bread
CHAPTER 3 - Mise en Place
CHAPTER 4 - Chilaquiles and Meringues
CHAPTER 5 - Getting Dirty TRASH DIVING, FREEGANS, AND FRUGALISTAS
CHAPTER 6 - From the Land URBAN FORAGING 101
CHAPTER 7 - Not Ordering In LESS HASTE, LESS WASTE
CHAPTER 8 - Giving Thanks
CHAPTER 9 - Going Solo
CHAPTER 10 - New Lows
CHAPTER 11 - Underground Eateries
CHAPTER 12 - Hanging Over in New York
CHAPTER 13 - Cooking Up a Storm
CHAPTER 14 - The End of an Era
CHAPTER 15 - The Opposite-Week Experiment
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
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Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, Feburary 2010
Copyright © 2010 by Cathy Erway
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint: Page ix. An Alphabet for Gourmets by M.F.K. Fisher, reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Page 43. Reprinted from The Elements of Cooking by Michael Ruhlman, Scribner © 2007. Page 135. The Way to Cook by Julia Child, Alfred A. Knopf © 1989.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Erway, Cathy.
The art of eating in : how I learned to stop spending and love the stove / Cathy Erway. p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-18529-2
1. Cookery, American. 2. Food habits—New York (State)—New York. 3. Erway, Cathy. I. Title
TX715.E7155 2010
641.5973—dc22 2009040836
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To my parents, for teaching me to cook.
And to my brother, Chris, for helping me do
literally everything else.
A great deal has been written about the amenities of dining, but few writers have seen fit to comment on the very important modern problem of eating in a public place.
-M.F.K. Fisher, “D is for Dining Out,” An Alphabet for Gourmets
Foreword
I first became aware of Cathy Erway two years ago. As I sat eating in a fancy midtown restaurant, a dining companion leaned over his foie gras torchon and asked confidentially, “Have you ever heard of Cathy Erway? She’s decided to not eat out in restaurants for two whole years, and she’s blogging about it.”
I suppose he expected me to express contempt or outright derision, since my livelihood as a restaurant critic depends on everyone eating out as often as possible. I harrumphed something noncommittal but felt a rush of excitement. What a cool idea, I thought. As a fan of performance art—which this project surely was—I was instantly intrigued. As a blogger and gung-ho home cook, I couldn’t wait to visit the site and see how she’d translated action into words.
Her blog—“Not Eating Out in New York”—became a favorite of mine, and over the next year I checked it often to see what she was up to. The site offered a fascinating potpourri of culinary punditry, practical cooking advice, social observation, and recipes that often featured a running commentary. Moreover, much of her cooking incorporated novel elements that owed nothing to any hidebound culinary school. She was an improvisatory cook, par excellence, and seemed to prefer freestyling with stumbled-on ingredients to simply reading and executing predictable recipes. She also backed up her recipes with details about how much ingredients cost, making her website consumer friendly.
A year later, Erway’s two-year experiment was up, and I wondered whether I’d run into her at one of the culinary events that kept herds of foodies wandering across the city like nomadic tribesmen. I didn’t have to wonder long—soon after her experiment ended, I met her for the first time at the loft of Winnie Yang, a mutual friend from the Slow Food Movement, who frequently hosted events in her Fort Greene loft.
Cathy was as skinny as a rail, and half Chinese, two things I hadn’t expected from her blog and her name, respectively. She proved a keen conversationalist, and when she told me she was working on a book about her experiences, I wanted to get my hands on a copy. I convinced her that once the thing was finished, she should send me the manuscript.
When it finally arrived in my e-mail inbox with a resounding ping, I sat for several hours reading it. While I’d feared it would be merely a collection of material cadged from the website, the book turned out to be quite a different kettle of fish entirely, a narrative for which the website was only a starting point. Not only had she not eaten out, but she’d explored all avenues of not eating out, including forays into freeganism, urban foraging, bread baking, competitive cook-offs, agricultural sustainability, and amateur chefing at the dining clubs that were currently popular all over Brooklyn. And who but a virtuoso writer could make the act of cooking itself seem as interesting as a car race or a shipwreck?
She began by pondering, “How can you date if you can’t go out to dinner?” From the answer to that fundamental question flowed new friendships, and, eventually, romance. We see her moving from apartment to apartment, sometimes lucky in love, sometimes not so lucky. One boyfriend continues eating out, even as she cooks delicious food at home. One kitchen is large and commodiou
s, while another is so small she can barely turn around in it. Gadgets come her way; she keeps some and throws others out. We meet her parents and musician brother, along with a cavalcade of other memorable characters, some celebrities in the sphere of foodism, some just extras.
In total, the book is really one woman’s coming-of-age novel, with recipes, a sort of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cook. Cathy has a real eye for pictorial detail and knows how to tell a story, complete with dialogue and denouement. Moreover, the book is a bird’s-eye view of the youth culture—we might call it a “counter culture,” due to its kitchen orientation—during an era that will be gone in the blink of an eye. Cathy is a combination of Holden Caul-field and Henry David Thoreau, and if she gets her readers out of the restaurants and back into the kitchen—at least a few times a week—her experiment will have been a complete success.
Robert Sietsema, food critic,
The Village Voice
Introduction
EATING OUT IN NEW YORK
A few years ago when my friend Ari was apartment hunting, she was shown a two-bedroom in Brooklyn with plenty of sunlight, a patio, a nicely sized bathroom, and a tall industrial sink in one corner of the living room.
“Where’s the kitchen?” she asked her Realtor, looking around at the unfurnished space. A two-year-old was seated on her hip, and her belly bulged with another little-one-to-be.
The Realtor splayed his arms out wide as if to measure the preposterousness of her question.
“This is New York—everyone eats out!” he retorted.
She didn’t take the place. But you could hardly blame it on his argument. It’s not just in New York City; everyone does eat out—at roadside diners, upscale restaurants, drive-through fast-food pickup windows, and street-food carts. An estimated one-half of America’s meals are prepared away from home. We spend far more money in restaurants than we do in grocery stores each year. And eating food that’s prepared away from home is almost as prevalent among the impoverished as it is among the rich. We are halfway down the road to forgetting how to cook.
Across America we’ve experienced an eating-out revolution that’s changed the way we perceive food. From Big Macs to “small plates,” restaurant-prepared food is an everyday commodity and plays a part in popular culture more than ever. We talk (and often argue) with our peers at the office about the best places to eat. In restaurants, we conduct business, court one another, fill up on dinner alone. We go home to television shows such as Top Chef and Hell’s Kitchen that feature the business of gastronomy, and we have our favorite celebrity chefs. Eating out has also become a fiercely competitive sport, in which dining in the hottest restaurants in town is akin to owning the latest fashion accessory, and food blogs feature up-to-the-minute reports of the lines outside these restaurants.
But perhaps nowhere in the United States do restaurants play such an important role in daily life as they do in New York City. Eating out is so intrinsically New York, so vital to the city’s cosmopolitan and workaholic lifestyles, that it’s also an immense source of pride. Fine dining is to New York what the opera is to Vienna. The brown-bag lunch is a social taboo, frowned upon in the same way that not knowing how to use chopsticks is. Many New Yorkers would view choosing not to eat out as foolish at the least, disrespectful at the worst, and overall, perfectly nonsensical.
So how did our restaurant infatuation begin, and when did this service industry come to feed us night and day? What is a restaurant, really? When did they first appear, and what are they doing in our world?
The notion of eating food being prepared by another probably dates back to the earliest hominids, or to Eve handing Adam that fateful apple. But the idea of a restaurant where a paying customer could choose his or her meal from any number of predetermined courses prepared by a chef became common only in modern times. Throughout the many centuries and civilizations in between, class-divided societies appointed servants for day-to-day chores, while the upper classes for the most part relinquished any hand in food preparation. Skilled trades such as meat curing and bread baking developed, as did shops where one could purchase these goods. There were cafes, teahouses, and taverns where patrons could sip a drink, and there were inns, guesthouses, and monasteries where communal meals were served with little or no options of food choice for each diner. None of these instances exactly qualified as a restaurant, though.
According to some sources, the earliest known restaurants emerged in the Middle East during the late tenth century. At roughly the same time, in Kaifeng, China, then its northern capital, a thriving arts culture led the way to theaters that served food, and soon after, stand-alone restaurants became a common place to eat. According to Marco Polo, restaurants specializing in many different types of food were abundant in 1260 in Hangchow, China. “There are noodle shops ... fish houses, restaurants serving vegetarian ‘temple’ food prepared in the style of Buddhist temples, places specializing in iced foods,” wrote James Trager of Polo’s culinary discoveries in The Food Chronology. “The restaurants have menus, and waiters carry orders in their heads, repeating them when they get to the kitchen and remembering who ordered what with absolute precision (mistakes are severely punished).” As with the arts the popularity of restaurants may typically indicate a society’s prosperity. But in some cases, restaurants may have sprung from postdisaster situations. When fire swept through Edo, Japan, in 1657, market stands and prepared-food shops that previously sold food under takeout conditions were rebuilt as shops where patrons could sit down to eat.
The restaurant emerged in the Western world sometime around 1766, in Paris. At this time, a restaurant was not a place to eat, but a nourishing consomme or broth served to those in poor health, or to those who wanted to boost their well-being (hence the root word restore). French law stated that these broths or tonics could be served only by businesses that specialized in them, following similar laws at the time that restricted bakers from selling anything other than breads and pastries, butchers from selling anything but meats—essentially, to each artisan his own trade.
Most credit the development of the restaurant in Europe to a restaurateur in Paris at this time named Boulanger, who, according to legend, was sued by a guild of cook-caterers for serving mutton with white sauce to customers instead of a traditional restaurant. The case is said to have gone to the French high court; some say that he won it, others that he lost. Either way, history was made in its course. However, according to Rebecca L. Spang in her book The Invention of the Restaurant, historical evidence of such a case is unfounded. Rather, the first restaurant was the brainchild of an intellectual and sometimes banker named Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau.
The portrait of Roze de Chantoiseau that Spang paints is of a defiant, youthfully zealous, “lesser genius” of the eighteenth century. Driven by a desire shared by most intellectuals of his era to bolster Paris’s economy and reputation, he tried and failed at several schemes to improve the city’s banking infrastructure. But the two concepts that he did manage to establish were truly lasting. The first, in an effort to welcome and inform commercial travelers in Paris, was the earliest predecessor of what we might now call the Michelin Guide, which Roze de Chantoiseau published. His Almanac Royale listed the names and current addresses of all the most desirable wholesalers, merchants, bankers, courtiers, artists, and artisans in the country. (It was updated in numerous later editions.) The second was the restaurant as we know it.
When Roze de Chantoiseau opened his own salle du restaurant in 1766, he stretched the definition of the eponymous menu item by expanding his offerings to “exclusively those foods that either maintain or reestablish health.” At a time when science, particularly that concerning the health of the body, was in vogue, his enterprise straddled two elite concerns: the pursuit of optimum physical health and a burgeoning fascination with cuisine. The idea behind his salle du restaurant, according to Roze de Chantoiseau, was to “improve Paris life by freeing the fastidious traveler of the need to depend o
n an unknown, and potentially unreliable, innkeeper or cook-caterer.” In other words, the first restaurant served only medicinal foods to ward off sicknesses garnered from what we might refer to today as “sketchy” restaurants and hotels. (Now, why did we have to do away with this concept?)
Finally, to promote his ideas, Roze de Chantoiseau included the address and a short description of his own restaurant in Almanac Royale: “Fine and delicate meals for 3—6 livres per head, in addition to the items expected of a restaurateur.” The first restaurateur was a natural self-promoter.
After the French Revolution, the code of laws requiring artisans to keep to one trade dissolved. From that point on restaurants flourished. Since then, the concept of the restaurant has branched out in myriad ways, from the advent of fast food in the last several decades to the development of niche food-service styles such as tapas, dim sum, omakase, and the all-you-can-eat buffet. In addition to informing our culinary culture, eating meals in restaurants has also led to various social customs. The “power lunch” is taken in restaurants, where the food is second to the meeting’s purpose. The same can more or less be said for the restaurant date. Banquet-style dining, or “harmonious” meals in Chinese culture, is something of a learned art in regard to ordering courses for the table. And few public places are more favored for the modern sport of “people watching” than restaurants, especially among solo diners.
In the United States, restaurants evolved from family-style meals at innkeepers’ tables to a smorgasbord of fascinating eats and dining-out traditions. No historian, though, can argue against the birthplace of restaurant culture being New York. The island of Manhattan and its surrounding boroughs make up a dense nugget of multifaceted food lore and the seedling for our appreciation of so many ethnic cuisines, owing to its numerous ethnic communities.