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NOTES
1Long-grain rice is “plain” rice to most non-Asian Americans; short-grain rice requires a very different kind of cooking and so is outside the reach of this discussion.
2Quoted, with slight adaptation, from Elizabeth Andoh’sAt Home with Japanese Cooking.
3W. S. Merwin draws an intimately detailed and quietly affecting picture of the daily life of one such small-townnégociant in “Blackbird,” one of the three narratives that make upThe Lost Upland: Stories of Southwest France. Each is a richly textured portrait of an anarchically independent inhabitant of the area—Blackbird himself, a stubborn shepherd, and a companionably seedy aristocrat—and through them, an unsentimental exploration of French small-town and rural life.
4Conversely, when general-subject magazines publish wine ratings, quality is almost always given a backseat to guaranteed availability. This
is why the October 1997 issue ofConsumer Reports bestowed their only “best buy” recommendation upon Napa Ridge’s 1994 Central Coast Cabernet Sauvignon, certainly a good buy for the money, but not a wine that deserves to be placed at the top of any budget-minded aficionado’s list.
5At the time this book was published, subscriptions were $25.95 a year from Grapevine Associates; P.O. Box 6003; Oxford, OH 45056; (800) 524-1005; www.winepocketlist.com.
6Not surprisingly, Robert Parker, the wine writer who has done the most to popularize the numerical rating system, has also generated an enormous amount of hostile criticism for doing so. The real problem is that so many wine drinkers subscribe to his publication that a high recommendation of a reasonably priced wine (a rare event—most of the ones that interest him cost a lot more than ten or fifteen dollars) means that every bottle of it will be bought up in the next several days. (At the time this book went to press,The Wine Advocate was $50 a year from P.O. Box 311; Monkton, MD 21111; www.wineadvocate.com.)
7Vietnamese is an inflected language; a word’s meaning often depends on how it is “sung.” To show this in print, a complex system of diacritical marks has been adopted—marks that I have not attempted to replicate here.Banh mi is pronounced “bagne mee,” with “bagne” more or less rhyming with the French pronunciation ofchampagne .
8Maggi Seasoning looks and tastes like a sort of Western soy sauce. To the Vietnamese, the label and bottle shape were French and exotic, but the taste of its contents was comfortingly familiar.
9According to Arrigo Cipriani, for instance, inThe Harry’s Bar Cookbook, “If you’re a cold person, you are not going to make a perfect risotto.” Now, I don’t consider myself a cold person, but neither do I see any reason to put myself in a position to find out differently.
10We currently use a thirteen-inch wok made by Farberware as part of their “Millennium” series. It is made of a very lightweight metal, but the nonstick surface seems all but indestructible—whereas the rice grains annealed to the more attractive and substantial Joyce Chen nonstick Peking Pan, leaving behind an indelible pattern of pockmarks.
11I except a brief addiction to the bear claws made at a certain Down East bakery and a lifelong fondness for old-fashioned Maine buttermilk doughnuts. But that’s another story for another.
12Here for the record is her keep-’em-crunchy Grape-Nuts breakfast: Take a flat soup plate and spoon in a thick layer of plain yogurt. Scribble honey over its surface. Shower this with Grape-Nuts until the yogurt disappears from view. Lightly drizzle on more honey. Do not stir. Eat immediately.
13Those living in areas of the country where fresh pierogi are not a supermarket staple will find that frozen varieties serve as a passable substitute in the recipe that is to follow.
14Elizabeth David, writing in 1979 inEnglish Bread and Yeast Cookery, rejects the average British loaf of sliced white bread as all but untoastable: “There is too much water to get rid of before the toasting process starts, and steamy bread sticks to the toaster.”
15Taint of gas, indeed. You don’t have to immerse yourself all that far in the literature to become aware that the difficulty of making crisp toast with British bread created a new breed of English eccentric: the toast bore. Col. Kenney-Herbert is as robust an example as any collector could hope for, but I also treasure my encounter with Sir Henry Thompson, who instructs us—as quotedin Florence White’sGood Things in England (1932)—to take each piece of toast as soon as it is done and carefully slice it vertically to produce two half-toasted slices, the untoasted surfaces of which are to be returned to the fire. Such toast, he assures us (and who would doubt him?), will be genuinely crisp, and not “scorched outside and flabby inside, as is toast [made] according to the general custom.”
16All quotations that have to do with Lundy’s, unless otherwise attributed, come from Robert Cornfield’s book, which contains a whole section of reminiscences from Lundy patrons. I should disclose here that Bob is our friend and literary agent. However, while this may be why I opened the book, it isn’t the reason I’ve read it through, spellbound, twice—Bob takes a great story (only part of which is recapitulated here) and runs with it.
17A waiter’s lot at Lundy’s was not an enviable one, especially on weekends, when shifts ran for twelve hours with no breaks, starting at eleven in the morning and ending, with luck, at midnight. Like the patrons they served, former waiters also recall the size of both the dining room and the portions at Lundy’s, but from a very different perspective. As one waiter told Cornfield, “Let’s say you had a party of six, and they were all having the Shore Dinner. You’d be carrying from almost a block away six orders of steamers covered with heavy bowls and the butter and broth. During the summer sixty percent of the customers would order watermelon for dessert, and they’d each get one-fourth of a melon. With six people you’d have close to two watermelons on a tray.”
18The comedian Alan King, in his culinary autobiography,Is Salami and Eggs Better Than Sex? (answer: no), advises his readers to “wait at least six weeks before going to a restaurant that has had a favorable review. It’s got to be a madhouse, the way Rao’s was when Mimi Sheraton gave it three stars. They went so crazy trying to handle everyone they finally tore the phone off the wall.”
19“The Hangout,” by Thomas McNamee. It appears in the July/August 1998 issue, pages 62 through 72. McNamee buys the restaurant’s version hook, line, and sinker, but he recounts it with gusto, and the photographs by Maura McEvoy are astonishingly effective in capturing Rao’s peculiar self-congratulatory charm.
20The Italian wordfiasco means both “a straw-encased flask”—such as a Chianti bottle—and “an utter failure,” “a ridiculous breakdown”—in other words, a fiasco.The Random House Dictionary of the English Language finds the connection between the two meanings obscure, but the phrase “to make a bottle” (as the complete Italian expression goes) implicitly suggests an inexorable Humpty-Dumpty trajectory, especially if one thinks of the hand-blown, infinitely delicate things these flasks once were.
21Giuliano Bugialli, inThe Fine Art of Italian Cooking, is so enraptured with the idea of bringing this dish to table in abagno maria (bain-marie)—preferably “a beautiful one of antique copper”—that he manages to persuade himself that the beans can be served from the flask with aspoon. Unless you also have a marrow spoon the length of a bath brush—and very patient dinner guests—it might be best to think of another way to show off your antiquebagno maria.
22Hence the legendary savor of Mexico’s primal peasant dish,frijoles de olla, or “beans from the clay pot.” In modern times, the pot has universally become the pressure cooker and the dish has suffered accordingly. However, more recently still, Mexican cooks have taken to cooking their beans in a clay potput into the pressure cooker—about as nice a definition of postmodernism as anyone could want.
23In fact, they both made the mistake of ordering something else: Sartre, a bottle of mineral water—“One does not drink mineral water in Naples, sir,” their indignant waiter expostulated. “One drinkswater” —de Beauvoir, a plate of pasta. Although this was on the menu, her request caused some consternation—and a long wait. “They obviously had to get it from some old box in the cellar,” and it tasted like it.
24The fact that an oven heat of 750—F isillegal in restaurants in this country makes the contrast all the more telling.
25The culinary essayist Edward Behr traced published recipes for crab cakes as far back as the 1897 revised edition of a Baltimore cookbook, Marietta Hollyday’sDomestic Economy. The recipe—“Crab Cakes for Breakfast. (Very nice.)”—calls for the crabmeat to be seasoned “high with red pepper and salt.” The cakes are bound with flour and butter, then dipped in egg and cracker crumbs and fried in butter or lard.
26That birthday having since come and gone, Davidson may now regret putting this pledge in print.
27Other transliterations includegoonmondu, goon mandoo, koon man too, et cetera. None seems any more authoritative than another
. As to the meaning,mandu is the Korean word for “dumpling,” and presumablygoon means “fried.” I consulted a Korean-English dictionary in an attempt to confirm this but managed only to discover that the colloquial Korean expression for pot sticker is “fried dog.”
28Calledgenmai cha by the Japanese, this is a blend of green tea and kernels of roasted and popped brown rice. I found it both tasty and disconcertingly reminiscent of Quaker puffed rice.
29 Also spelledchaotse, jao-tze, jow-tse, jiaoz, jiaoze, andjiao ji. For the sake of consistency, I have used thechiao-tzu spelling throughout, including in quotations. My favorite of various explanations of the phrase’s meaning is the Zen-koan-like one offered by Fu Pei Mei inChinese Snacks & Desserts: “In the Szechwan province, Won-ton is calledChiao-Tzu in that the way the Won-ton is wrapped looks like two hands that are folded in opposite sleeves.
30Thus living up to its name, sincehun t’un means, literally, “swallowing clouds.” As A. Zee, in his book of that title—a delightful meditation on Chinese ideograms—writes: “To Joni Mitchell, clouds are ‘ice-cream castles in the air.’ To me, they are wonton in the sky.”
31Compare them—in this regard—to the White Castle chain’s hamburgers. Eaters order them by the sackful because they’re so cheap and so tiny that it makes no sense to buy. just one—but then they have to decide how many itdoes make sense to buy.
32Another prized quality in Chinese gastronomy isyu-er-pu-ni, which means “to taste of fat without being greasy.” Ken Hom writes that his mother, when she made dumplings, especially sought out pork fatty enough to keep “the filling moist and flavorful. Lean fillings meant a dry and tasteless dish—a grave error in my mother’s eye. An often heard criticism was that a dish did not have enough pork fat—the equivalent of an Italian’s saying there is not enough olive oil, or a Frenchman’s saying there is not enough butter or goose fat.” Bear this in mind when choosing your pork.
33Currently out of print in the United States but available in Britain under the titleThe Roald Dahl Cookbook (not to be confused, by the way, withRoald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes, which is directed at children).
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