“Shit? What shit?”
“Yours,” he says, laughing. “Mine.”
On the wide streets near the city center, there are student demonstrations; my cousin says they’re a response to a massacre of citizens by the military down south in Kwangju. After the riot troops clear the avenues, the air is laden with tear gas—“spicy,” in the idiom. Whenever we’re in a taxi moving through there, I open the window and stick out my tongue, trying to taste the poison, the human repellent. My mother wonders what’s wrong with me.
I don’t know what’s wrong. Or maybe I do. I’m bored. Maybe I’m craving a girl. I can’t help staring at them, the ones clearing dishes in their parents’ eateries, the uniformed schoolgirls walking hand in hand, the slim young women who work in the Lotte department store, smelling of fried kimchi and L’Air du Temps. They’re all stunning to me, even with their bad teeth. I let myself drift near them, hoping for the scantest touch.
But there’s nothing. I’m too obviously desperate, utterly hopeless. Instead, it seems, I can eat. I’ve always liked food, but now I’m bent on trying everything. As it is, the days are made up of meals, formal and impromptu, meals between meals and within meals; the streets are a continuous outdoor buffet of braised crabs, cold buckwheat noodles, shaved ice with sweet red beans on top. In Itaewon, the district near the United States Army base, where you can get anything you want, culinary or otherwise, we stop at a seafood stand for dinner. Basically, it’s a tent diner, a long bar with stools, a camp stove and fish tank behind the proprietor, an elderly woman with a low, hoarse voice. The roof is a stretch of blue poly-tarp. My father is excited; it’s like the old days. He wants raw fish, but my mother shakes her head. I can see why: in plastic bins of speckled, bloody ice sit semi-alive cockles, abalones, eels, conches, sea cucumbers, porgies, shrimps. “Get something fried,” she tells him, not caring what the woman might think. “Get something cooked.”
A young couple sitting at the end of the bar order live octopus. The old woman nods and hooks one in the tank. It’s fairly small, the size of a hand. She lays it on a board and quickly slices off the head with her cleaver. She chops the tentacles and gathers them up onto a plate, dressing them with sesame oil and a spicy bean sauce. “You have to be careful,” my father whispers, “or one of the suction cups can stick inside your throat. You could die.” The lovers blithely feed each other the sectioned tentacles, taking sips of soju in between. My mother immediately orders a scallion-and-seafood pancake for us, then a spicy cod-head stew; my father murmurs that he still wants something live, fresh. I point to a bin and say that’s what I want—those split spiny spheres, like cracked-open meteorites, their rusty centers layered with shiny crenellations. I bend down and smell them, and my eyes almost water from the intense ocean tang. “They’re sea urchins,” the woman says to my father. “He won’t like them.” My mother is telling my father he’s crazy, that I’ll get sick from food poisoning, but he nods to the woman, and she picks up a half and cuts out the soft flesh.
What does it taste like? I’m not sure, because I’ve never had anything like it. All I know is that it tastes alive, something alive at the undragged bottom of the sea; it tastes the way flesh would taste if flesh were a mineral. And I’m half gagging, though still chewing; it’s as if I had another tongue in my mouth, this blind, self-satisfied creature. That night I throw up, my mother scolding us, my father chuckling through his concern. The next day, my uncles joke that they’ll take me out for some more, and the suggestion is enough to make me retch again.
But a week later I’m better, and I go back by myself. The woman is there, and so are the sea urchins, glistening in the hot sun. “I know what you want,” she says. I sit, my mouth slick with anticipation and revulsion, not yet knowing why.
2002
“If you could eat only one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?”
AS THE FRENCH DO
JANET MALCOLM
With the left hand, hold an asparagus upright in the heart of an artichoke while a wall of the sauce is built around it with the right hand.
—The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
How can a sauce be a wall? Why does Toklas swerve from the hortatory to the passive in midsentence? To answer these questions, it is necessary to cook the dish called Hearts of Artichokes à la Isman Bavaldy, which Toklas offers as an example of French haute cuisine on pages 11 to 12 of her cookbook. It was, she tells us, one of the courses in a nine-course lunch for sixteen at a fashionable French home to which she and Gertrude Stein had been invited, and which included Aspic de Foie Gras, Salmon Sauce Hollandaise, Hare à la Royale, Pheasants Roasted with Truffles, Lobster à la Française, Singapore Ice Cream, cheese, and fruit.
“It does not take as long as it sounds to prepare this dish,” Toklas writes of Hearts of Artichokes à la Isman Bavaldy, and she is right. The recipe is actually harder to read than the dish is to prepare. There are so many steps that one cannot take them in; one’s eyes glaze over, one’s thoughts wander. However, shopping for the ingredients (which Toklas doesn’t list—you just bump into them as you read) refocuses the mind. The ingredients are: artichokes, asparagus, lemons, cardamom seeds, sweetbreads, shallots, coriander seeds, butter, flour, dry champagne, and bread crumbs.
You cook the artichokes in water to which lemon juice, cardamom seeds, and salt have been added, and then remove the leaves and put them aside. They are not part of the dish. (“The leaves can be scraped with a silver spoon and mixed with a little cream to be used in an omelette or under mirrored eggs,” Toklas writes, trying to be helpful, but only adding to the forbidding length of the recipe.) Then you boil the asparagus until it is just tender, and cut each spear “within 2 inches of the tip.”
Earlier, you have started to deal with the sweetbreads. Toklas says to soak them in cold water for an hour; boil them for twenty minutes with salt, shallots, coriander seeds; plunge them into cold water; “remove tubes and skin” (very messy); and, finally, put them through a strainer with a potato masher. I found that unworkable and made a mush of them in the Cuisinart. Next, you sauté the sweetbread mush in butter, and add flour and then champagne. “Cook gently until this sauce becomes stiff.”
And now comes the improbable (and, as it proved, impossible) building of the wall of sauce. Toklas’s wobbly sentence clearly expresses the anxiety of the moment and subtly enacts the disparity between what the two hands are doing: the left hand confidently clutching the asparagus spear, the right hand helplessly plastering its base with the sauce, which no amount of cooking can make into the cementlike substance needed to hold the spear upright when the left hand releases it. The recipe called for twelve artichoke hearts. I cooked six, and six times failed to keep the asparagus from drooping miserably into the pool of sauce gathering in and messily spilling out of the artichoke heart. There was no way to make the dish presentable.
Well, was it good? No. The champagne (two cups of it), and a final browning with buttered bread crumbs, muddied the delicate taste of the sweetbread, and the asparagus and artichoke hearts similarly had no reason for being together—they canceled out each other’s virtue. Nor could you taste the cardamom and coriander seeds. The dish took about two hours to prepare, three minutes to serve to game friends, who politely pushed it around on their plates, and ten seconds to throw out.
But the first time I cooked from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, in 1954, the year of its publication, when it was given to me for my birthday by an arty friend, was to quite different effect. Seven years had yet to pass before the appearance of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and, like most people living in pre-Julia America, I had never eaten real French food. Thus, when I took my first bite of the coq au vin I had made from Toklas’s recipe, on page 149, I could hardly credit my senses. I was stunned by the suave deliciousness of what I had produced. In all my life, I had never eaten anything of such complex and rich, and yet clear and pure, flavor. It was a moment of astonished rapture, one that I will never forget.
When I decided to cook the dish again recently, I doubted that the moment would be repeated. In 2002, Americans no longer need to be told, as Toklas told us with great condescension in 1954, that “the French never add Tabasco, ketchup or Worcestershire sauce, nor do they eat any of innumerable kinds of pickles, nor do they accompany a meat course with radishes, olives or salted nuts…. To cook as the French do one must respect the quality and flavor of the ingredients.” (When I first read these words, I was properly awed by them. I had not yet made Hearts of Artichokes à la Isman Bavaldy.)
But Toklas’s coq au vin—or Cock in Wine, as she called it for the sake of her radish-eating American readers—remains wonderful. The combination of fowl, pork lardoons, butter, carrots, shallots, onions, wine, brandy, and mushrooms is as felicitous as the combination of artichokes, asparagus, and sweetbread mush is ridiculous. It differs in one respect from the usual coq-au-vin recipe: Toklas uses white wine instead of red for the sauce, and I, for one, think this is a good idea. But in either manifestation coq au vin remains one of the glories of French bourgeois cuisine. The butter and pork fat aren’t good for the heart, but the dish is good for the soul.
Below, I reprint Toklas’s appealingly short recipe—its brevity and the ordinariness of the ingredients were what attracted me to it in 1954—followed by a sort of hovering Jewish mother’s version for use in 2002.
COCK IN WINE NO. 1
Cut a young cock or a young chicken in serving pieces. In an enamel-lined pot melt 3 tablespoons butter, add 3/4 cup diced side fat of pork, 6 small onions, 4 shallots and 1 medium-sized carrot cut in thin slices. Brown these in butter. Remove and place pieces of chicken in pot and brown over high heat. Add salt, pepper and 2 cloves of crushed garlic. Remove the browned pork fat, onions, shallots and carrot. Heat 3 tablespoons brandy, light and pour into pot. Sprinkle 3/4 tablespoon flour into the pot. Stir with a wooden spoon for 2 or 3 minutes, then add 1 cup fresh mushrooms and 1 cup hot good dry white wine. Increase heat, add pork fat and vegetables. Cook uncovered for 1/4 hour. Serve very hot.
COCK IN WINE NO. 2
Buy four pieces of chicken and as small a slab of pork fat or bacon as you can find. Fill a cup to the 3/4 mark with pork fat you have diced into small pieces. Heat 1 tablespoon butter in a heavy enameled or stainless casserole, and sauté the pork pieces until brown. Remove to a side dish. Add another tablespoon of butter to the pot (if needed) and sauté 12 small white onions, 8 large quartered shallots, and 4 sliced carrots until lightly browned. Remove and add to the side dish with two cloves of crushed garlic. Rub chicken pieces with salt and pepper, and brown over medium-high flame in the fat left in pot; then remove. Pour 3 tablespoons brandy into pot and light. When flames subside, add 3/4 tablespoon of flour and stir with a wooden spoon for about a minute over very low heat. Add one and a half to two cups dry white wine, then return chicken and vegetables and pork pieces to the pot. Cook covered over low heat for half an hour or until the chicken is properly done. While the chicken is cooking, sauté 4 or 5 sliced mushrooms in 1 tablespoon butter over high heat. Add them to the pot in the last five minutes of cooking. Taste the sauce—it will probably need salt. Serve with boiled new potatoes.
2002
“I’ll have the barbecued half-pounder, with all the ramifications.”
BLOCKING AND CHOWING
BEN MCGRATH
If you are an offensive lineman, the Netherlands cafeteria, at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, where the New York Jets hold their training camp, has a couple of things going for it: the portions are unlimited, and the food doesn’t cost anything. “Shit, if it’s free it’s for me, you know what I’m saying?” Randy Thomas said recently, dipping a piece of fried chicken into a puddle of blue-cheese dressing during his lunch break, between practices. Thomas, the Jets’ starting right guard, has a fast metabolism, and he weighs three hundred pounds; his appetite can be expensive. “I’m known to eat, like, seventeen pieces of chicken,” he says. “By the way I eat, you would think I’m a big fat slob. But I just keep myself lean.”
“Lean” is a relative term in the Brobdingnagian world of an NFL cafeteria. Thomas is not quite the largest of the men who, for the past month, have lumbered into the Netherlands four times a day, like trucks rolling up to a gas station, dressed in sleeveless T-shirts, green shorts, and sandals, with their ankles, knees, and elbows wrapped in tape. Jumbo Elliott—“still the biggest guy on earth,” according to the Jets’ head coach, Herman Edwards—is three inches taller; Kareem McKenzie is twenty-five pounds heavier. But Thomas is the undisputed king of consumption, and when he pushes back his chair, raising his arms above his head after polishing off a plate of pecan pie, he reveals an ample midsection.
While there is no direct meal-by-meal oversight of Jets players’ dining habits, the strength-and-conditioning coach, John Lott, has a few basic recommendations for some of his bigger, hungrier charges: avoid fried foods and sweets; drink water instead of soda. To this end, the cafeteria menu, prepared by the team trainer and a certified nutritionist, is color-coded by fat content: green for lentil soup; yellow for a mesquite-turkey club; red for meatloaf with gravy or fish-and-chips. Thomas was unaware of these traffic signals, but would probably not have heeded them anyway. “I don’t worry about my fat,” he says. “I just fuckin’ eat. It makes me happy and comfortable and relaxed, you know? ’Cause if I’m hungry on the field I don’t perform—I’m thinking about fuckin’ eatin’.”
Once the season begins, this week, the players are on their own for dinner—and for the all-important late-night “snack,” which for Thomas means a dozen wings and eight fried jumbo chicken fingers. (The team continues to provide a buffet breakfast and lunch every day.) And while Thomas and his teammates savor the cafeteria grub—“These goddam chicken tenders are good, boy. They’re addictive. They’re so goddam crunchy”—they spend a certain amount of time at the training table trading restaurant tips for steak houses and all-you-can-eat buffets. Major’s Steak House, on Long Island, is one favorite, and East-West, an all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant in New Jersey, is another; Thomas ran afoul of the management at East-West two years ago when he put away sixteen lobster tails. (“I’ve fucked up some buffets, man,” Thomas says.)
Coach Lott was a player himself, so he understands the urge to eat after a hard-fought game. (In his playing days, he weighed as much as 307 pounds.) “I really strongly advise the guys to go to town one night a week,” he says. “If you hamstring them and say ‘Don’t eat this’ or ‘Don’t eat that,’ you will find a guy at three o’clock in the morning with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken eating all he can because he’s just going stir crazy.” Still, Lott tries to set guidelines: “Instead of getting a Big Mac, get the grilled-chicken sandwich. And, hey, if you want a milk shake, get your milk shake.”
In past years, the team has scheduled a series of educational seminars with the nutritionist, to recommend healthier alternatives to fast food. This season, the Jets are testing a new, more proactive approach: house calls. “Not everyone’s married, and they don’t live with their moms, so they’re by themselves,” Coach Lott said. “I’m going to have a couple of ladies cook prepared meals and bring them to their house. It’s not going to be a lady preparing them sundaes; it’s going to be a balanced meal.” So far, four players have signed up (Randy Thomas, who is married, is not among them), but Lott expects more players to request lady service once the word spreads. “They won’t have to think about it,” he said. “They just go home and eat.”
2002
“Let me see if I have it correctly, sir. To hell with the appetizer. A chopped sirloin that damn well better be rare. No goddam relish tray. Who cares which salad dressing, since they all taste like sludge?”
WHEN EDIBLES ATTACK
REBECCA MEAD
The guests at the Food Allergy Ball, a black-tie gala that took place at the Plaza Hotel last week, were drawn from that class of New York society which includes Fortune 500 CEOs and senior partners
at corporate law firms and exclusive interior decorators: the fortunate few who are largely sheltered from many of life’s afflictions. But food allergies—the symptoms of which can range from mild nausea at a bite of shrimp to convulsions brought on by the mere inhalation of a cashew fragment—can strike even the most pampered New Yorkers, and, more significantly, the children of the most pampered New Yorkers, for whom a rogue peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in the lunchroom can present a deadly threat. This fact helps explain why the Food Allergy Initiative, a nonprofit organization that was founded six years ago, has already raised a total of nine million dollars for research and education.
“If you’re not going to do it for your kids, who are you going to do it for?” said Todd Slotkin, the Food Allergy Initiative’s chairman and a senior executive at MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings. Slotkin’s food-allergy activism was activated by the diagnosis of allergies in his twin sons as toddlers, after he unwittingly fed one of them a nut-laced cookie while on vacation in Nantucket. Slotkin suffers from the usual anxieties of parenthood—what are your kids doing, and who are they doing it with?—amplified to an excruciating degree. “My sons are eleven, and in a few years, I hear, they will start to kiss other people,” he said as he tucked into a feast that began with a grilled-eggplant terrine (comprising twenty-one ingredients, all carefully enumerated on the menu), and explained that for his boys a make-out partner who had recently eaten a nut-studded brownie could prove fatal.
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