Two of my favorite things are now together

Mind you, they don't include bacon.

Eat me daily (which, surprise, I read daily) reports that food-inspired typefaces are now available to the public. For those of you who hang out with me, you know that I spend most of my classes practicing the alphabet, as a sort of D-list handwriting designer/greeting card person. (This causes problems when I've written the Schumpterian model in swirly cursive.)

Not so much a fan of the "square doughnut" font depicted in the post, but I think the garlic-clove inspired font is clever if not particularly usable for my papers. After checking out the VetteLetters site, I've decided I'm a fan of the Irish Stew. The top-heavy letters are simple and just enough quirky (HUDS should make an investment in these. After all, Yale has their own typeface!)
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As someone who punctuates her real-life conversation with "ZOMGs" and "I can haz?" this sort of thing will not be curbing my web-speak anytime soon. (Although the discovery of Megan Joy Corkrey as a font designer only raised my opinion of her by about .4%.)

Two unrelated links

1. A sponsored ad above my inbox: Black bean brownies (and not the chocolate kind). This reminds me of the balsamic vinegar recipe above my bed, courtesy of my cupcake calendar.

2. I couldn't wait another eleven months (that is, Valentine's Day) to post this hilarious 2002 piece from the New Yorker.

Enjoy.

Fortune Cookies and Good Reads

I recently found Jennifer 8. Lee's blog, the Fortune Cookie Chronicles, and am loving it. She happens to be releasing her book (of the same name) in March, and it's about the history and role of Chinese food in America. Obviously, it's about food, but it's also about culture (example from the summary: "unique bond between Chinese food and American Jewry" - yes).

In any case, she recently wrote a piece for the New York Times about the fortune cookie's backstory, which my sister forwarded to me. Check it out - surprisingly, a historian argues the fortune cookie could have stemmed from Japan. And if I've told you about my return to Boston last week (where the annoying know-it-all across from me claimed fortune cookies were from China - more on him later) then this article seems to be in good timing.

For me and for him.

Food Writing: the Holiday Gift Edition

I'm excited for this: although I found his United States of Arugula to be amusing but a little overhyped, David Kamp is back.

According to Sara Dickerman in the Slate piece (linked above), it looks like it may be a food version of the Preppy Handbook, whose droll text was a hit of the 80s. Consequently, it might also run in a similar vein to The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and An Incomplete Education - as it were, staples on my bookshelf. The only concern with this is that the number of food snobs might actually increase - after all, some people ended up taking the tongue-in-cheek Preppy Handbook as gospel.

The article also comments on the Food Lover's Companion and its references to Asian food, which makes me glad that something besides consomme is acknowledged...which somehow leads me to my next point: the Harvard Book Store has a lot of great food writing - and not just cookbooks. The staff does a great job of picking books to display, and the food section - towards the front of the store - is prominently featured in the front of the store. If you're in the Cambridge area, check it out.

the obligatory Thanksgiving post

Not unsurprisingly, my Thanksgiving involved quite a bit of food from the get-go, and then some. My original intention was to grab a quick meal at Quincy House (since the freshman dining hall, Annenberg, was closed today) and then catch my flight. Although my alarm clock caused me to forgo that plan, I found a well-hidden (though extensively bruised) in a corner of my backpack and consequently escaped short-term starvation.

Upon arriving at the airport, I headed towards Au Bon Pain, colloquially known as ABP. ABP
is my East Coast-fairly-cheap-and-fast-culinary-friend. Though PETA activists have protested the Harvard Square's use of "innocent eggs," I take a sympathetic stance towards the company. Especially since their ubiquity ensures almond croissants on every corner. I bought a piece of Southwestern cornbread ("it's spicy," the cashier warned me), and chewed it fast.

Maybe this rush - or the anticipation of real Thanksgiving food, whatever that may mean - caused me to appreciate the cornbread less this time, but I found myself losing affection for the spicy Southwestern cornbread. First of all, it wasn't that spicy. The small green specks on the interior might have been jalapenos, but for the most part, the cornbread tasted like a hybrid of jalapeno kettle chips and red pepper flakes - not a terrible combination, but selective enough to be only fitting for a craving. In addition, the cornbread had a strange texture on the outside - crusty, but not entirely so to be crisp - which made it taste like an overcooked muffin.

I wanted something more, which is why - of all things - I found myself in front of McDonald's.

(To clarify my stance on Mickey D's: yes, I read Fast Food Nation. Yes, I realize the extent to which McDonald's branding has penetrated society, especially children: in fact, my junior high science project was on that topic. And yes, I enjoy their French fries and soft-serve (which I daresay, is their best-kept secret). I even occasionally delight in a discreetly hidden and textureless McChicken sandwich. So in short, I'm still confused.)

Airport menus are particularly limited, so I encountered some difficulty in finding a snack-sized item. Then I had my decision made for me: a poster on the side declared "Snack Wrap." Since the word "snack" was in the title, I ordered that.

In short, I finally got a Chicken Select (capitalization not mine) wrapped in a limp wrap, with a ranch dressing the consistency of tartar sauce and a few scattered cheese strips that looked as if they had been stolen from a Taco Bell...there went my $2.

My next stop on my food quasi-adventure was the plane. Don't get me wrong - I actually didn't consume any food on the plane - not even a flimsy aluminum bag of cocktail peanuts. Especially since they too, like my snack wrap, were $2. Instead, I read The United States of Arugula by David Kamp.

When my pundit friend lent me the book a few months ago, I originally thought it referred to the campaign speech where Obama complained about the rising price of arugula. Actually, the subtitle of the book is "How We Became a Gourmet Nation."

The book is quite cleverly written, and for its size it goes into a good amount of historical depth. Kamp does trace the evolution of the American gourmand through the twentieth century, but ultimately his book seems to imply that cults of personality are what really caused this change. It is interesting to see the culinary world as one big, dysfunctional family full of juicy affairs, occasional cocaine usage, and entirely different perspectives on who contributed what to the field, all of which Kamp covers eagerly and footnotes with asterisks. Having read other food history books and memoirs first, it was rather pleasant to read through the chapters and automatically recognize the "big critics" of that era by their first name, although Kamp does take a different perspective on culinary disputes than those memoirists themselves.

Ultimately, The United States of Arugula serves as a breezier, introductory book for the history of food writing and cooking. While it was nice to finally read through a sampler of interviews and to actually form a timeline of food in America, I wish less emphasis was given to the celebrity status of cooks. While I understand that the business and publicity aspects is often overlooked in the recent history of food, it would have been nice to see more of what the American consumer was becoming interested in, instead of how foodies were catching onto the biggest trends.

I finished the book just as the plane landed, and shortly after arriving home, I was treated to Thanksgiving dinner. A family friend brought handmade wraps that tasted like naan. We wrapped the turkey, along with Hoisin sauce and green onions, up in the wraps to make "Peking turkey." And of course, we had plenty of veggies - roasted, corn-on-the-cob, and my absolute favorite - green bean casserole. I have no qualms about green bean casserole, even if it looks spartan grey. Sure - when it's made badly, it can be rubbery. But when it's good, it's amazingly comforting - and for the most part, the french-fried onions will cover any mistake made during the preparation.

The sweet potatoes were quickly cooked to retain a crispy-carrot texture and tossed with cranberries for extra tanginess, and the mashed sweet potatoes with the mushroom gravy (Mom's somewhat-classified recipe, of course) topped it all off, with fruit tart and pumpkin pie for dessert.

Delicious. It was wonderful and fully satisfying (maybe too much - I definitely ate my share) to finally sit down to a home-cooked meal, and the company made it great. Happily enough, my day started from a mediocre banana-on-the-run and reached its climax to an amazing dinner. If there wasn't evidence already: there is something transcendent when food and family collide.

(I think we call it joy.)

NYT: Food press day!

It continues to be a good day for reading New York Times...with my stomach. These two articles, relating to food, were on its online front page today:

American Food Writing

Sushi for Two

I particularly liked the latter article; I remember sixth grade when a girl ridiculed the kids in our class that dared to enjoy tofu. It's - in sixth-grade-terms - cool that we're approaching an era of more adventurous eating. Even if it's one that began long ago.

Female Food Writing (part two)

This week, it was back to food reading...as well as the trip to the library. In searching for "food writing" in the catalog, Through the Kitchen Window: Women Writers Explore the Intimate Meaning of Food and Cooking (ed. Arlene Voski Avakian) was on top of the list.

Unfortunately, that was kind of a misnomer, because this book related more to gender studies than food. (The editor is a associate professor of women's studies.) Don't get me wrong - I love how food intertwines with everything, including gender, and as a female, I think it's incredibly important to observe how such a basic function like eating relates to identity. But in my opinion, the majority of this anthology was overly ambitious by attempting to tie the relationship between food and gender into one neat bow. Ultimately, the food writing portion suffered. Pieces that focused exclusively on narrative or on an academic perspective tended to be better reading - standouts included "Laying on Hands through Cooking: Black Women's Majesty and Mystery in Their Own Kitchens" by Gloria Wade-Gayles, and "Follow the Food" by Barbara Haber. But for the most part, no piece was particularly memorable. I was also uncomfortable with the explicit material in some essays.

On the other hand, I'm in the first half of Cornbread Nation 1 (ed. John Egerton), an annual anthology of Southern food writing. While its Southern nostalgia overwhelms me at times as I read, each cook's profile draws me in. The writing doesn't have as much "sparkly metaphor" as Through the Kitchen Window, but the storytelling paints a vivid picture nonetheless. The food is not necessarily the main character here - sometimes dedication is - but it plays a meaningful role. Interestingly enough, it's easier for me - a teenage girl who has never been to the South - to identify with this compilation.

This is Foodivia: #3

#2 and #1 (the actual definition of foodivia) are here and here, respectively.

Not to paraphrase Johnny Gilbert with my post title, but besides the “Did you knows?” I’ve also been searching examples of foodivia. And there are so many of them, it’s absolutely wonderful. Here is one that absolutely nailed my arbitrary definition on the head, from Floyd Skloot’s “Jambon Dreams”:

Halfway through lunch, [my brother] began the ritual quiz: “Okay, what’s a hero sandwich called in Philadelphia?”
“A hoagie.”
“In Boston?”
“Grinder.”
“What about Chicago?”
“A sub.”
“And why do they call it a sub?”
“Because it’s shaped like a submarine.”

Female Food Writing

(Unrelated Did You Know?: right now, I'm watching a special on a chocolatier in Taiwan that makes chocolate shaped to look like Hermes purses. Just thought that was interesting.)

"From the nameless fifteen-year-old bride given book-length instructions on how to run her husband's home, to M.F.K. Fisher [one of the first modern food writers] who dared to write about men the way Brillat-Savarin [a 18th century male writer who related female sexuality to food] wrote about women, the history of food writing became the story of the long, slow struggle toward women's emancipation."
- Mark Kurlansky in Choice Cuts

Currently on chapter seven (of thirty), I've managed to go through chapters in Choice Cuts entitled "Not Eating" and "Food And Sex." (For your information, the latter's contents are much, much more discreet than say, Sir Mix-A-Lot's Baby Got Back video featuring fruit. As I learned on a VH1 retrospective.)

The above excerpt (I believe it was in that same chapter) caught my interest,as it somewhat related to my History Day essay (quick thesis: While advertising for appliances and pre-prepared food in the 1920s and 1930s championed emancipation from housework for women, it simultaneously and intentionally pressured them into the image of the "perfect housewife" that shied away from suffrage).

The paragraph also seemed to mesh perfectly with the confident voices of female food writers I have read. Aside from the anthologies I have been reading, I read Mimi Sheraton's memoir Eating My Words as well as Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires. It was difficult to not compare the books to one another - while Sheraton and Reichl were both restaurant critics at the New York Times, their tenures were about two decades apart, but even with that, as very "strong" women, their personalities were similar (great, since critics are supposed to have opinions on food).

They also both dealt with comparisons to male reviewers, which I thought was interesting - those incidents played on the idea that there is "male food," and then there is "female food" (invariably more delicate), and that for example, a woman couldn't adequately review steaks.

Fortunately, these women rose above these misguided ideas, and fortunately for my reading, each book's main theme was different. Sheraton focused on how her food career spanned her entire life, while Reichl examined her career at the NYT (dividing each section of her book as a different disguise that she would use at restaurants); I enjoyed the specificity of the latter more and probably would recommend that first.

That said, time to read about bread - excellent.

Thursday's here, which means...

the arrival of the Star Tribune's Taste section on my doorstep. I love the Taste section, for several reasons:

1. It provides a rationale for me to eat at new restaurants. "But...it was reviewed by the Strib!" And sometimes, to buy new products (read: pomegranate chip ice cream).
2. I can cook vicariously by marveling over the pictures that accompany the recipes. (This is actually a reason why I've started to begin reading Martha Stewart Living.)
3. If Foodivia was a word (in the same vein as truthiness), then the Eat Your Words game is definitely foodivia (remember, food + trivia?). Tucked into the corner of one of the pages, it's a word game that tests your knowledge of food/cooking terms.

Today's Taste featured the "Taste 50," subtitled "Fifty people, products, places and ideas that make Minnesota the place for food fans." This time, nothing related to the State Fair was on the list, which makes me relieved that I hadn't missed out on deep-fried Snickers bars last year. (But...did you know that deep-fried Snickers bars are not unique to the Minnesota State Fair?)

The Taste 50 is an listing I annually pore over, and as usual, there were plenty of things I didn't know about. I'm hoping to try them soon (perhaps another quest for this blog?) -- but I was particularly excited at the second entry: Dong Yang. I would yell "Scoop," but judging from the fact that Dong Yang's always packed on weekend lunches, I don't think I was the first one to find out...

The Three Rs

You might be wondering what I do aside from eating on this senior program, or what I'm doing in between blog posts. Like traditional learning, it can be summarized from the above acronym.

1. Reading
I love to read, and I read almost everything. If I'm particularly bored at the dentist's office, I will actually read a copy of Bikers Today or something like that if it's there. Granted, if Gourmet is on that same coffee table, I will pick that up first.

Reading about food was what got me interested in writing about food. Furthermore, I'm hoping to improve as a food writer/blogger through examples.

I'm currently reading three books:
- Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History (Mark Kurlanser, ed.)
- Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life (Mimi Sheraton, former NYT food critic)
- Best Food Writing 2006 (Holly Hughes, ed.)

If you'd like to read with me, I suggest beginning with the latter. The Best Food Writing annual anthologies is a sampler of a diverse array of topics, from barbeque to candy bars to childhood. It was the 2004 edition given to me as a Christmas present that culminated in this senior program proposal. I may write reviews upon finishing this reading.

2. Writing
What you see in this blog post. Something I've learned is that reviews take longer than I thought, even with a subject in mind. I've also learned to take detailed (though discreet) notes at the dinner table.

3. Arithmetic
Okay, so recipes have numbers in them. And you can use proportions (from pre-algebra) to make them for greater or fewer servings.

But my project title is "Food = Life, Food = Art" (whenever I don't feel like saying the "equals" sign, I say "as" instead). And although I can't draw a still life of fruit, aside from a lopsided banana, eating and writing are things that I hope to refine - discovering the complex layers (insert cake metaphor here) within each. With that said, one larger theme I am working on within this blog is what food means to me and to people in general. I wonder if I can sum it up in one large statement - "Food = Life" is deep, but a little broad. Aside from that "equation," my next guess would be "Food = Emotion." Couples save the top layer for their wedding cakes for sentiment. For a crude example, after a person throws up a certain food, they often are not willing to eat it at a later time in their life. I have a feeling this is a question that will take longer than three weeks to answer, but for now, that's my conjecture.