Monophagia

One of the difficulties that I have had to face in deciding to write a food blog is a compulsion of mine not usually associated with foodies. The foodie eats a compulsively diverse diet, celebrating her omnivorousness by having Swedish pancakes for breakfast, Thai noodles for lunch, a snack of Japanese seaweed-covered rice crackers with fancy French tea, and a dinner of tapas under the moonlight. Tomorrow she'll eat through Ethiopia, Morocco, and Italy. Her gut is global and her attention is wandering.

I, on the other hand, am a serial monophage. I eat one thing for days. I will order the same takeout broccoli and chicken thing at the same Chinese place over and over. I will crave a cheeseburger although I had one yesterday. I will go again to the same Vietnamese restaurant that I visited Tuesday and order the same room temperature noodle and herb salad, the exact dish I have been ordering in Vietnamese restaurants ever since I left home. I have a habitual sandwich, which I only get at one particular deli just off the subway, and I will visit that counter from Wednesday through Friday. I subsisted through much of college on macaroni and cheese plus green salad with carrot and tomato, hold the cucumber. Speaking of salad, the kind with beets, goat cheese, and walnuts, a damnable cliche of a salad on every menu of every cafe and bistro in New York, whether on arugula or frisée, I sometimes make it at home for near a week, working on it.

For the past month, I've been in a fish mood. So when I cook, it's been fish at home, constantly. Flounder yesterday. Perch today. Perch tomorrow, too, since there's more perch left. What is there to write about? I'm lazy with fish. I like fish fried. So I flour it and fry it. What's to tell? I've already given you my tartar sauce recipe. Aside from writing some gushing description, verging on pornography, of tender flaking meat and the bright sparkle of freshly squeezed lemon awakening the old palate, I got nothing for you.

Oh, occasionally I dash out with something that shocks the roommate. Like the time she came in to find me sauteeing chicken livers and shallots. Or the time, on what must have been the hottest day of the summer so far, I simmered a bolognese ragu for five hours. Or when she found me carefully pinching shut little pillows of ravioli.

But for every daring excursion, I have an endurance marathon of curried tofu salad with cilantro, or that peanut thing that Will knows well, with the fried triangles of tofu in the sauce. Days of dumplings. Or I'll live off a bowl of homemade tofu chorizo, damn the digestive consequences. Then there are the toast eras. Toast, glorious toast.

Being thoughtful, it occurred to me to ask why, in the realm of eating, I had this precise compulsion: three days of sameness, and generally, on the fourth day, a violent desire never to let that particular thing touch my lips again. A three-day food phase. On day one, I think, gee, I'd like to have a panini. On day two, the desire to have a panini is so powerful I don't even know where I am before I find myself walking toward the cash register with a hot foil-wrapped panini in hand. On day three, I peer in four different doors at lunch before drifting toward the panini guy one more time. On day four I am in revolt. I run for sanctuary in eel sushi or quiche.

This is now my theory: a three day hunger for the fresh kill is what drives me. Yes, the kill! Some ancient pre-refrigeration understanding, in the gut, of how long a felled bison is good for! For three days I stuff myself with the bounty, and on the fourth day, I get as far away from it as possible. You live off the master meal for three days and by day three you need a new stew. Peas porridge should not be in the pot nine days old. Three days, tops.

As cockamamie explanations for inexplicable behaviors go, I think this is not bad. It is not good either, but you come up with something better. In the meantime, what do I do with this perch?

Photo of perch fillets nicked from luckystarenterprise.com

Mayophobia

There is one in every group of friends: the one who fears mayonnaise. You know her. I know her. She shuns it on a sandwich, even the thinnest suspicion of it between a tomato and a slice of bread. A jar of it makes her lurch in fear. When she encounters a vast bowl of some mayonnaise-dressed salad — potato, macaroni, pasta, coleslaw — her lips press together as if to prevent the salad from suddenly leaping between them, her nostrils flare, her pupils dilate, she involuntarily curls her shoulders away. She would rather eat crickets in mustard than bear the mixture, frequently seen between bread, known as tuna salad. She is a woman with a phobia.

She will pass quickly to the green salad and pour a bit of vinaigrette upon it, an honest mixture of red wine vinegar and olive oil, and munch upon that while those around her masticate heaping bowls of slick, opaque, off-white goo, in seeming pleasure, and she will never understand them.

But the difference between that vinaigrette and the mayonnaise she finds so repellent is slight. A mayonnaise is only a salad dressing, friends, with a secret.

First of all, there is a question every schoolchild asks at some point, looking with wonder and trepidation at the blue and yellow label on the Best Foods (Hellmann's east of the Rockies) jar before him. What is mayonnaise?

Mayonnaise is one of the basic French sauces, and unlike most of those sauces, you need never turn on the stove to make it. It's an emulsion. What is an emulsion? Thank you for asking, Jimmy. An emulsion is perversion and an abomination: it is the blending of two things that God made to not mix, specifically two liquid things, in this case, oil and water. If you pour oil on water, Jimmy, and please remember not to drink out of it later or you'll be completely grossed out, you will see the oil floats. If our mayonnaise-hating friend pours red wine vinegar and olive oil into the same dish, the olive oil will form a golden green translucent layer atop the garnet liquid. Vinegar is a water-based substance, of course. You can put the two in a bottle, shake them, see a pinkish brownish gray substance result, set the bottle down, and watch the mixture instantly begin to sort itself as always into red and golden green.

Frustrating, isn't it? Wouldn't it be nice to make them stay gloriously shaken up, so you could pour it atop your salad and have always the correct proportion of oil and vinegar on each leaf?

What you need, friend, is an emulsifier, a substance that brokers a truce between these two things that aren't speaking to each other. Being literate and curious, you have frequently looked on your food labels and seen listed a substance called lecithin. What the hell is lecithin, you wondered briefly, before forgetting it entirely as you went on to the more pressing problem of whether to cut your sandwich on the diagonal or the vertical. (The diagonal if you're going to eat it now, the vertical if you're tucking it away for later, so the acute corners don't get squashed.)

Lecithin is a thing found in egg yolks, and while I'm at it, soybeans too. It's called a phospholipid, and it is a tortured, divided thing: one end of it loves water, and the other doesn't. I'm sure you can identify. When whipped in with oil and vinegar or lemon juice, the lecithin coats each little oil droplet, the water-loving bits turned away from the oil much the way our friend the mayonnaise hater turns away from our beautiful potato salad, and the result is that the oil droplets cannot do what they would normally do, which is reach over to their neighboring oil droplets and become one in an orgy of boundary-dissolving togetherness. Good fences make good neighbors, in mayonnaise as in life.

So to make mayonnaise, what you need is two raw egg yolks, a cup of oil (I like a mixture of canola and olive), two tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar, a teaspoon of good Dijon mustard (and not the grainy kind, since there are additional emulsifiers in the pulverized hull of the mustard seed), and salt and pepper to taste. You put everything in a blender and turn it on. You have mayonnaise. If you want aioli, you add garlic pounded to a paste in a mortar with a little salt (and you refrigerate it right away and do not keep it for longer than a couple of days, because, dude, botulism). If you want herbed mayonnaise, add chopped herbs. If you want my famous tartar sauce, you add finely chopped shallots or onion, relish, lemon juice, salt, and a ton of lemon juice, then let it sit for half an hour in the fridge. If you like honey mustard dressing, add honey and mustard (this time grainy) to taste. Use all the above preparations and more to horrify your friend. And never be afraid of mayonnaise again.

A Crust of Bread

Because today is Bastille Day, I got to thinking about the French, pondering the transformation of a revolutionary republic into an imperial power, and then via my constant fixation on the strangenesses of my Chinese-Vietnamese mother, I got to thinking of French Indochina. A word now about the gastronomic consequences of empire.

It is known to every good college student that imperialism should be sorted into the column where go all the wrongs of the European peoples. That Europe, outfitted with firearms, the finest sea vessels in the world, hard tack and limes, and all their plaguey sneezes should have swarmed over the Asian continent looking for economic and political advantage, using racist condescension to overcome any hesitations they might have had in subduing the locals (perhaps only slightly more condescension than they used on each other, city by city, over this Alp or that river), is an abomination, is it not?

Perhaps, perhaps. History is a history of abominations. But only by the swarming over of borders does anything interesting ever happen. As MFK Fisher points out, only when Catherine di Medici brought her fine Florentine chefs to tame the tongues of the French did they ever learn any table manners or cuisine. The horses that the Spanish conquistadores rode into grand cities of the Americas came first from the Central Asian steppe. Going in the other direction, the fiery chilies of Sichuan cooking come from the Americas, via the Portuguese traders who were doing brisk business along all the coasts of the world. And in Vietnam, long before the French showed up, the great patronizing civilizations were, of course, China to the north, and (to a lesser extent for Vietnam) India to the west.

The response to imperialism seems to be, dependably, a simmering, concentrated nationalism, but it would be far greater, in my opinion, if nations could take pride not in the purity of their national identity but in the amalgamated, mongrel patchwork that makes them what they are. I don't mean cheap diversity, this constant parading about of the hundred odd people living in some mountainous corner of a region and still weaving rainbow colored plaids out of horsehair after all this time while singing naive songs to their music of hammered brass bells, etc. I mean this:

Vietnamese Curry with Bread

Take the following:
yellow curry spice from India
chilies, dried, heralding from South America
onions first domesticated in Egypt, sliced into large half-circles
bay leaf from the Mediterranean
coconut milk from southeast Asia
chicken descended from Indian pheasants, cut into pieces
potatoes from the Americas, cut into large dice
salt from the nationless sea
black pepper from India
vegetable oil from anywhere you please

For garnishing and serving:
fresh cilantro from the Middle East
lemon or lime, cultivated so long ago that no one knows quite when or how
loaf of French bread, hot, with a crunchy crust and a soft white inside
or, alternately, lightly cooked rice vermicelli, such as you find in Chinatown


You brown the chicken and onion, then add the curry spice, pepper, and chili, stir, add the coconut milk, bay leaf, potato, and salt, simmer until the meat is falling off the bone.

Serve in big bowls, adding the rice noodles at the last minute if you are using them. Otherwise, serve with great big chunks of hot French bread, cut fresh lemons to squeeze over each bowl throughout the meal (you must never add lemon until the end, or all its loveliness dies), and fresh herbs, such as cilantro, for guests to tear over the whole.

Follow with that most Vietnamese of meal-enders, the coffee, which, along with bread, is the best thing they learned from the French. If you have not had a Vietnamese coffee, you are not really being fair to yourself. It is as strong as an espresso, but sweetened with the one milk product that has been an unqualified hit in famously lactose-intolerant Asia, condensed sweetened milk. A dollop of the syrupy, thick, creamy, buff colored substance is poured into the waiting glass. (Glass coffeecups are best, so you can watch the progress.) Then the coffee and boiling water are poured into the strainer, which is just big enough for one cup, over which it sits, trickling its brown-black product to collect over the milk below. The milk is so thick that it will sit, like sediment, at the bottom of the cup until you check the strainer, over and over because you are impatient, and see that it is done. You lift it off your cup and set it aside, then stir the coffee into the milk. Then you drink it, slowly and with great satisfaction, while watching the Japanese-make motorcycles of Saigon go by. Or you have it over ice and do the same.

The story of Noah's ark was the first story I learned to read aloud when I was about three or four, sitting on my father's knee. There is a voice recording of this on some decayed cassette; my tiny, chirping voice going on about the animals heading two by two into the ark. Decades later, while pondering that story, which everyone considers the tale of the beginning of the world, I realized what it is: it is the story of a god who would destroy the world as an excuse to make a rainbow. And so, now I see, he has also moved nations across sea and land as an excuse to make a curry and a coffee. These are the mysteries of creation, and who are we to say we understand?

Information about the origins of common foodstuffs from general reading and the glories of Google and Wikipedia.

The Fish

Americans, famously, prefer their meat delivered so transformed that its origins are masked, although not so transformed that they're forced to ask, "What is this? Is it beef?" What they like is muscle tissue, separated from bone and gristle, the fat trimmed, delivered in geometric slices or blocks, or ground and shaped into the familiar. Americans do not like to look their meals in the eye. Is it the shame, the guilt of eating a creature you'd never met before? Are we avoiding the cooked look of rebuke? And why the avoidance of bone — except for ribs, which are mostly bone and the only acceptable instance — and the dislike of feet?

I had thought myself immune to squeamishness in facing my food. For one thing, the Chinese always include the head of a bird as one of the pieces in the chopped roasted poultry jumble they deliver to table. You're stirring about with your chopstick looking for a delectable piece when you happen upon what looks like a section of neck with a dimple. As you quizzically spin it about, the dimple resolves into an ear, and you see the shuteye head of your victim, its mute beak, sorting themselves into significance. It never fails to take the breath out of guests.

I have watched my mother, in the tradition of all Chinese mothers, claim as her right the jellied eye of a cooked fish, seen her greedily sucking out its hard white round center.

But I met my match at a sushi restaurant in Beijing, one of the best I'd ever dined in, in a private room, treated to dinner by associates of a friend. As a harbinger of disaster, the woman across from me, a thickheaded, dumpy, colorless creature with stringy, tangled grayish-yellow hair, had arrived in a black stretch lace top over a hot pink camisole, drowned in my least favorite perfume, the bludgeoner Amarige. As we entered the dining room, waves of it rolled back from her body's every undulation and sent my head snapping back from the invisible blows.

Thus buffeted and weakened, I faced my saddest victim. The first course arrived, ordered by our Nipponophile host, a macho Chinese with blackened teeth who had spent the better part of his professional life in Japan: It was a fish with one fillet cut away and sliced into fresh, translucent sashimi, fanned out across a bed of ice in a deep froth of crisp shaved radish. The rest of the fish was mounted above the meat, with a chopstick stuck in one gill and another in the flesh of the tail, hanging in a U-curve, the mouth and tail arched toward heaven.

It was still alive. Its gills flared and constricted in the alien, stinging air. Its mouth sucked futilely at nothing. Its small fins weakly writhed. The long, lovely ribs of the tailfin flexed, and now and again, in a sudden passion, the body would give a huge shudder from top to bottom as it released more of the life it was clinging to.

How could anyone enjoy eating this thing? The flesh would be as fresh if the fish were dead. You could prove its recent departure, if that were your aim, merely by showing the table the live fish before dispatching it. There was nothing to be gained from this torture but to add the salt of cruelty. Such an idea isn't purely Japanese, of course. One could imagine Roman noblemen, in the richness of their decadence, ordering live creatures to watch them die in slow, beautiful throes in some steadily heating broth, or dining on a leg of a lamb with the amputated victim in bandaged attendance. But we who haven't yet retreated to vegetarianism have learned to accept the slaughter of our food as the way of nature; frequently, though, we insist upon a fiction of the relative painlessness and dignity of the proceedings, and we feel revulsion and horror on finding the true conditions of factory farms and butchery, and might pay a bit extra for cows allowed to graze in pasture and chickens given the run of the yard.

Even so, those of us who eat meat are usually not so rigorous. We'll buy a slice of ham in a breakfast sandwich and never think of the life and death of what's between our teeth. We'll chew on pepperoni pizza free of guilt.

But to enjoy the prolonged and painful death of your dinner? I tell you from experience that it makes the meat no more succulent. I slowly chewed one piece to be polite, tasting freshly of nothing, and the resilient cool flesh transmitted pure horror to every nerve in my mouth. One of our hosts, in Chinese fashion, hustled one last piece to my plate, which I prodded weakly, managing a wan half smile, then gulped it as you would a large pill, washing it down with too much sake, too fast.

In all fairness, fish suffer in fishmarkets. They suffer on the hook. They would, if questioned, confess to preferring to live, and thank you for asking.

But more horrible even than the suffering itself is the expectation that one is supposed to relish it as a seasoning. What kind of a woman do you think I am? I wanted to ask the blank-faced waitress, perhaps while clawing furiously at the hem of her dress. Who are you people?

Would they think me a coward? Is the meal a test of strength? Or is it a test of callousness? Or is it only a display of freshness after all?

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Further reading: Elizabeth Bishop