Archives for posts with tag: Edward Espe Brown

Pork Neck Bones

July 5, 2012 //
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Doing foodie research lately into the influence of Edward Espe Brown and the San Francisco Zen Center (Tassajara cookbooks, Green Gulch Farm, Greens restaurant) on Alice Waters and the food revolution. Right now tracing the ancestry of recipes, to see the bloodlines, has me confecting one myself.

Offal is one of the great healthful and inexpensive meats. On today’s march, I am going to be cooking me a potful of tripe a la Paul Bertolli, Alice Waters’ second influential chef (the first being Jeremiah Tower).

Bertolli’s recipe in Chez Panisse Cooking is the best ever tripe recipe, after Jane Grigson’s in Good Things, Bertolli’s in a long-simmered minimalist tomato sauce, to offset what tripe does to a sauce, and Grigson’s French dish, Tripe de Gourin aux pruneaux, baked for hours with a bucket of shallots, carrots, prunes, thyme and butter, one of God’s gifts to the world. Yum. O.

Good Things, for its adventurous but unpretentious palate, its arrangement by chapters of Grigson’s favorite ingredients — Prunes, Carrots, Celery — is, I think I am now after 30 years prepared to assert, the best cook book of all time. A protege of Elizabeth David, who revolutionized British cooking in the early 1950s, when food was still rationed, Grigson was also a translator and the wife of the poet Geoffrey Grigson.

Jane Grigson, with the publication of English Food in 1974 set off the heirloom growers, locavore movement in Britain. In one of my favorite blogs, Neil Cooks Grigson, a young PhD. postgrad is doughtily cooking his way through English Food.

Jane Grigson, food hero.

But there are few sustained contemplations of pork neck bones. Not precisely offal but deeply inspiring and very cheap. Googling, I find mostly Kentucky mountain folks longing for home with their recipes for pork neck bones and poke sallit. Delicious, I have no doubt. In her early and authoritative The Art of Charcuterie, Grigson has a whole chapter called “Extremities”, with at least three recipes apiece for ears, tails, brains, tongues, heads, and feets of pork. But no neck bones.

But me, I am thinking, come fall and cooler weather, of browning them in the oven. Then making a Shanghai beef noodle flavor broth, with wine, soy sauce, star anise, fresh  ginger, scallions, orange peel. Then strain, defatten, pick off the meat, and serving boiling hot over cooked noodles, sliced kielbasa, cilantro, scallions, sizzled brown garlic slices, garnished with those outrageous pickled mustard greens. Bones to the dog nieces next door, Olivia and Maisie.

http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Pickled-Mustard-Greens

Mmmm hmmm. Mmmm hmmm.

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Categories food

Plant Freedom

July 3, 2012 //
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I am all about a new profit model and  System D. My father was a big Green, and I grew up composting and recycling and worrying about the archipelagoes of pellets floating on the surface of the Atlantic, which he started talking about  in the 1950s, composed of shit and petroleum emulsified with detergent.

Me, my father, and the ocean. Puerto Rico, ca. 1950.

I am still researching the piece on Edward Espe Brown as the most influential cook of the 20th century. I am encouraged by my research into the source of his recipes — forensic evidence noone else has — that research into the ripoff use of his recipes by Waters, Tower, Katzen and Batali will reveal similar unarguable lines of descent, Waters being the alleged most influential chef of the 20th century, Tower being her main early influence and employee, Katzen being the east coast hippie chef who now serves on Harvard nutrition panels, and Batali the current rage of Manhattan chefs. Like Brown’s,  Katzen’s hippie chef/vegetarian books were and are massive best-sellers. Unlike Brown, she did not sign all her profits over to the Moosewood collective. (Maybe she did. I have to check that out. I bet she didn’t.)

Always been a foodie, worked in a restaurant for a couple of years, avid reader of a wide range of cookbooks. With EEB, I’m getting to the place where it’s all porn and what I eat is simpler. Last night I had cantalope, smoked local Tucumcari Gouda, artisanal sourdough and Costco butter for dinner. (Got to check that out and go for the humane butter.)

So I was very interested to see people I suspect of the punk, straighter edge, food distribution, Gen X Gordon Edgar  and Rainbow Grocery ilk, pace old hippies, featured in the NYT piece on small farmers. Some of them are now former migrant workers who have been taught organic microfarming by awesome organizations like Viva Farms. http://www.vivafarms.org/p/our-farmers.html

And some of them are Lena Dunham dead-end urban job Gen Z refugees, living in an RV without internets and television, doting upon the doggie their rural setting now permits them to keep. They’re 25 and they met in college.

Jenny and Alex Smith, Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times.

They remind me a lot of the permaculture hustlers blog of young Australians I read. They make a living by inviting people to come and learn permaculture on their farm — while paying to farm it.
http://milkwood.net/

Planting freedom is a burgeoning idea, and not just at Viva Farms, which seems to be specializing in training former migrant workers. Black Americans returning to the south and planting Juneteenth emancipation gardens is one thread. Another is the discovery, preservation, and promulgation of nearly waterless vegetable crops and techniques, like pre-Colombian water catchment structures, developed by Native Americans in the southwest and sold as Noah’s ark crops, standing tall and dry against genetically engineered, faraway, water rights war-inspiring, unsustainable agribusiness.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/garden/juneteenth-gardens-planting-the-seeds-of-survival.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.nativeseeds.org/

I keep wondering if I plant the Tohono O’odham garden, will they prosper? I did plant their melons this year and await them with pleasure.
https://nativeseeds.org/index.php/store/992/2/seeds/seed-buckets-and-collections/sc003/P-tohono-oodham-seed-collection
http://www.tonation-nsn.gov/

On the EEB research, one of the key pieces of the puzzle is Sibella Kraus, Alice Waters’ first forager, who was a line cook at Chez Panisse and went on to study agricultural economics and become a food activist.

This is one of the punk, System D, locavore jobs of the future. My father spent his life teaching sustainable fish farming in the Third World. Now it comes down to doing the same in the New World.

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Categories food, politics, the new economy

Best Served Cold

June 17, 2012 //
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I’ve been surveying a bunch of cookbooks lately, tracing the development of Edward Espe Brown’s recipes, his influence on California cuisine (he did not invent mesquite grilling, since meat is not on his Buddhist menu, but he may have invented California pizza, Spago, Wolfgang Puck and all his pineapple pizza spawn), and on what is now the commodity fetishization of farmer’s market vegetables and locavorism. New York City’s number one chef, Mario Batali, dropped out of the fast corporate chef track in the 1990s and went to cook in a 25-seat trattoria in a small village in Italy for three years. He never stops talking about pristine produce and married his farmer’s daughter. He calls it Italy, but it’s really Eddie.

Edward Espe Brown

Edward Espe Brown (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of Espe Brown’s cooking foremothers is Adelle Davis, who was the nutritionist rediscovered by hippie dippie cooks like me in the early 1970s. I have my original yellowed edition of Let’s Cook It Right, and have not salted boiling food from the first day I read Adelle over 40 years ago.

Adelle Davis

Adelle Davis (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I cracked her open recently, on my road trip, to do some of the tedious recipe comparison/origin work that is the backbone of the Espe Brown story. You never believe this of a nutritionist, and certainly not from the hippie-dippie ones, but what a good cook Adelle was!

Yesterday I made one of the aspics I pencilled a star alongside 40 years ago — slow and steady crosses the finish line, baby — and it is all I want to eat. Martha Stewart, having learned a lesson from Real Simple, a rival mag which pretends to be the anti-Martha but is weirdly anti-pleasure, has greatly simplified her recipes since the days I spent $100 on ingredients for minestrone and three days chopping that shit up, making stock, picking leaves off stems of herbs, and so on. This month she has a whole page of no cook soup, which almost qualify for the coveted Cuisine Dolce Far Niente tag I very seldom award.

So I made Adelle’s beet/smoked fish/apple aspic and Martha’s cantalope and chili soup. Cold fuds, mmmmmmm. Even with the enormous, perfectly tasteless cantalope I got from Smith’s, you bastards, and some doctoring with rice vinegar and honey, the soup is beautiful and mouth feely and almost tasty, and Adelle’s aspic is all I want to eat. She has one mother aspic recipe and about 50 changes to ring on it. I’m so psyched. Cold soup and aspic all summer long.

Mmmmmmmmmm.

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Categories food
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