Sarasota Soundings

We continue our eclectic roundup of books that have crossed our desk over the past year.

The Art of Simple Food
Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution
Alice Waters

Clarkson Potter (October 2, 2007); 416 pages; $35.00

Perhaps because Ms. Waters herself has been more visible than usual,* a lot of reviewers were expecting this book to be a louder manifesto. There seems to have been anticipation that the founder of Chez Panisse would present us with a declaration more reminiscent of a 1960’s UC Berkeley anti-establishment rally than this quiet, but no less insistent or impassioned, call for responsible food production, preparation, and consumption.

What we have is an iconic book for the new cook or for someone who already cooks but wants to capture the essence of food through Alice Waters’ lens. Given the number of books replete with sensuous photographs and recently published by other celebrity chef-restaurateurs, those who eat with their eyes and collect cookbooks are bound to be disappointed by The Art of Simple Food. It’s not a flashy book. No macro shots of micro-greens; in fact, no photography at all—just painstakingly delicate line-drawings by another member of la famille Panisse, Patricia Curtan.

Will this book accomplish the author’s goal—to help her readers learn how to shop, cook, share, and love food? Absolutely—but book-sellers are going to have to work a little harder until enough people literally get Alice Water’s message

Ms. Waters lays out the reasons to plant gardens, shop locally, and support local farmers. She exhorts her readers to join her

As Monty Python used to say, “And now, for something completely different!”

Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill Cookbook
Explosive Flavors from the Southwestern Kitchen
Bobby Flay

Clarkson Potter (October 16, 2007); 288 pages; $35.00

We could not ask for a better example to contrast with Alice Waters and her Chez Panisse than to juxtapose her with the flamboyant Bobby Flay (photography by Ben Fink) and his Mesa Grill.

Everything about the book and food is intense. From the larger-than-life photos with gorgeous props to the elaborate mis-en-place and multi-step recipes, you know this is food as theater. You can almost smell the mesquite, hear the sizzle of the grill, and feel the heat (there’s a Scoville scale for rating chiles). Or is that glow and warmth coming from the foot-lights? Local food? Fuhgeddaboudit—this is New York, so you might guess that the ingredients for a Southwest fusion-menu were not gathered by Native Americans foraging in Central Park.

But like many who finally got great seats to Phantom of the Opera or Cats, the diners who got their table in the exuberant Mesa Grill want something more than an Amex receipt by which to recall the experience. A splashy book like this fills the bill. The ambitious may actually cook from it—for the recipes are well-organized. While Alice Waters is writing for the home cook, Bobby Flay is scaling-down genuine restaurant food, whose execution at Mesa Grill depends on a legion of prep artists. Not many home cooks are going to do Cornmeal-Crusted Oysters with Mango Vinaigrette and Red Chile Horseradish or Sixteen-Spice Chicken with Cilantro-Pumpkin Seed Sauce when they want to whip up dinner after a day at the office. But if they love the process, they’ll love this book, and their friends and families will love them for preparing this food.

Does this sound like a refrain? Maybe Bobby and Alice should share some space after all—on both the stove and the shelf.

Disclosure: Clarkson Potter sent us both of these books for review

An eclectic roundup of books that have crossed our desk this year.

The Last Chinese Chef: A Novel
Nicole Mones

Houghton Mifflin (May 4, 2007); 288 pages; $24.00

The procuring, preparation, presentation, and enjoyment of food provide an excellent introduction to cuisine as a mirror of modern China. Tension between reverence for past traditions and the brashness of an expanding consumer class can play out on a Beijing menu as much as on a city street clogged with bicycles and SUVs. Amidst the improbable mid-life situations of the protagonists and the novel’s strained plot, the strongest character, China’s complex cuisine, stands out. From crisp yet spongy jelly-fish to lotus root with sausage and pungent celery, nuanced textures and flavors carry on the real dialogue.

The House of Mondavi
The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty
Julia Flynn Siler

Gotham (June 21, 2007); 464 pages; $28.00

Take the classic immigrant saga: hard work, strife, success…and more success. Set this drama in California, the ultimate American dreamscape. Give the plot and subplots, like the very vineyards that provided Cesare Mondavi and his descendants with their livelihoods, decades to develop.

Add the seemingly inevitable elements of sibling rivalry and hubris; bring in the lawyers and accountants. It’s the tale of another family businesss whose growth and influence surpassed the visions of its founders… But if that’s not enough, change the names and repeat the cycle of superlative achievements and suspicion with the next generation.

Speed-dial the attorneys and the TV news crews. Finally, allow Julia Flynn Siler from the Wall St. Journal to put the whole show together as a business thriller.

The Year of Eating Dangerously
A Global Adventure in Search of Culinary Extremes
Tom Parker Bowles

St. Martin’s Press (September 4, 2007); 400 pages; $24.95

You know that Tom Parker-Bowles wants to be Anthony Bourdain rather than a gentleman who knows better. Being the thirty-something son of the Duchess of Cornwall and, thus, the step-son of Prince Charles can hardly be considered an occupational handicap unless one wants to be taken seriously as one more enfant terrible de cuisine.

If we thought that we might be pushing the author over the brink and into inconsolable depression, we wouldn’t say that we were disappointed in his book. But we think he’s probably quite well-balanced, so we’ll take him to task for wasting his talents; he is an adroit writer. Maybe you can take the boy out of Eton, but you can’t take Eton out of the boy… Like many schoolboys, he’s willing to try almost anything to get attention. Whether it’s incendiary, illegal, endangered, smelly, treacherously hard to harvest, or still wriggling, our boy wants to eat it.

And we quickly realize, he’s simply testing the limits of tolerance—of both himself and his readers. Tom Parker-Bowles ingests hot chillies, insect eggs, dog soup, and things both live or seriously decomposing. Although he’s capable of some trenchant reflection (on the cultures he experiences or how meat animals are raised and slaughtered) most of the book confirms that he’s opening his mouth at the table so he can boast of his exploits later. His vagabond year was one of extreme sport (and, in some instances, extreme expense). We hope he’s gotten this out of his system.

Disclosure: The publishers of these books have sent them to us for review.

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We’re in the midst of reviewing a new book on the history of the spice trade, The Taste of Conquest. Author Michael Krondl’s entertaining scholarship highlights pepper—once such a precious commodity that it was used as actual currency. This brings to mind the history of a Tuscan stew, Peposo. Numerous sources attribute its origins to the 1430’s, when the architect Filipo Brunelleschi was supervising construction of his dome on La Chiesa Santa Maria della Fiore, the famous Duomo in Florence.

The recipe is unremarkable. Then and now, it epitomizes Tuscan cuisine—local ingredients simply prepared: beef, garlic, red wine, and salt. However, one ingredient was anything but local. Giving the dish its name and distinctive bite is an unusually generous quantity of black pepper. Even more than the quantity of meat (Tuscany is famous for its Chianina beef-cattle), it was the pepper that would have made this dish deluxe in the 15^th century. It is quite likely that Cosimo de Medici, art patron and the Duomo’s financier, was paying a portion of Brunelleschi’s (and perhaps even the workers’) wages in spice. The fact that medieval medicine deemed black pepper to be a “hot” and invigorating element would have been yet another reason to include it in the workers’ meals.

At the end of the work day on the Duomo, the ingredients for Peposo were sealed in a clay vessel and placed in the kiln which, during the day, had fired the terra cotta tiles for the dome. Overnight, the residual heat cooked the stew, hence its colloquial name, Peposo Notturno, Nocturnal Peposo. The following day, runners would shuttle bowls of stew up to the tile-workers on the dome. The roofers seemed to like the stew well enough, but the notion of spending their lunch hour on the dome—depriving them of the chance to play a few friendly hands of Scopa and quaff some vino on the ground—didn’t go over well at all, causing a small rebellion that may have amounted to Italy’s first labor strike.

Credit for the original Peposo recipe is claimed by nearly every town near Florence that had tile-making operations. Among those are Pistoia, Impruneta, and even La Spezia, in the province of Liguria. All these towns also insist that Dottore Brunelleschi visited each of them to select his tiles.

Over time, cooks have embellished the dish with tomatoes, mushrooms, and onions. One thing is certain: Brunelleschi’s stew could not have included tomatoes. That New World oddity didn’t appear in Italy until the mid-16^th century.

By tradition, Tuscans serve Peposo over polenta or crostini, toasted bread. Contemporary Tuscans also serve peposo over mashed potatoes—another post-Columbus ingredient.

Peposo alla Fornicina
Beef Stew, Kiln-Worker’s Style

Ingredients:

2 Lb. Beef stew meat, cut into bite-sized chunks
10 Cloves garlic, peeled, but left whole
1 – 2 Tbs. Crushed black peppercorns
3 – 4 Cups dry red wine
Salt
4 Slices rustic bread (at least 1″ thick)
1 Clove garlic, peeled and halved

Preparation:

Pre-heat the oven to 250° F.

Place the meat and garlic in an ovenproof casserole. Sprinkle the crushed peppercorns over all. Add enough red wine to cover the meat by approximately one inch.

Bring the casserole to a simmer on the stove, then cover, and place the casserole in the center of the pre-heated oven. Cook, adjusting the heat so the stew barely bubbles, for approximately 6 hours. If the liquid reduces too much while the stew cooks, add hot water to compensate.

At the end of cooking, the sauce should be thick enough to coat a spoon, and the meat should be falling apart. If necessary, simmer the stew, uncovered on the stovetop, to reduce the sauce further. Taste, adding salt, as necessary.

At serving time, toast the bread slices, and rub them with the garlic halves.

To Serve:

Place one slice of the toasted bread in each of four soup bowls, then divide the stew equally among them.

Serves four.

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When I got the e-mail reminder about an International Day of Action on Global Climate Change, I thought it was interesting. When I read, “Hundreds of people are needed, some to form the shape of an hourglass and the rest to move from the top of the hourglass, one by one, to the bottom of the hourglass,” on Siesta Key Beach, I thought it might be kind of fun–in an aging hippie sort of way. Probably not as much fun as the drum circle, but my Saturdays are mostly flexible anyway.

But when I read that “A helicopter will be overhead with a camera team to record the movement symbolizing that time is running out to stop global warming” I thought, “Are they serious?”

How do things go to such extremes? A well-intentioned someone has managed to charter a helicopter for at least an hour to hover above Siesta Key Beach in support of a “green” cause? Did this person not consider that aircraft are prodigious burners of fossil fuel? More specifically, a “TV-news” type helicopter, say, a Bell Longranger, or Jet Ranger, consumes approximately 40 gallons of fuel per hour. That’s nearly three tankfulls of gas for my car.

And if, indeed, hundreds of people show up to be part of the human hourglass—or the human sand—it doesn’t seem likely that many of them will get to Siesta Key Beach by public transportation. Even with a downturn in real estate values, the people who turn out for events like this probably don’t live within walking distance. So, even if they come by twos, the choreography of the hourglass will demand fifty or more cars that might otherwise have sat in the driveway on a Saturday.

But getting back to the issue of energy consumption, I wouldn’t expect the organizers of this event to know a lot about aviation fuel. But it’s not the unleaded stuff that Mom puts in the Camry at RaceTrac. Aircraft fuel, “avgas,” contains lead. While, on the surface this whole beach “happening” seems noble, I don’t think any cabbage-palm hugger wants to stand around on a public beach while a helicopter burning leaded aviation fuel hovers approximately 500 feet overhead.

Whoever is underwriting this event must have some deep pockets—or maybe a donor with a helicopter. I’ve just checked, and it costs approximately $1,300 per hour to charter a helicopter. I’m not even sure if that includes gas, but these days, if you want to fill up at Dolphin Aviation, it will run around $6.00 per gallon.

Now a day at the beach is always fun. But it seems more reasonable to me that with that kind of budget, it would be a no-brainer to hire a Computer Animation major at Ringling College of Art to do a stylized presentation of sand falling through an hourglass. There would certainly be enough money left to hire the local news anchor, or perhaps one of the understudy baritones from the Sarasota Opera Company to read the voice-over litany with the appropriate amount of gravitas. Furthermore, I feel confident that at least one of our local television stations would be only too happy to broadcast the piece as a public service, if they had not already covered the stunt as a news event. And, of course, someone could post it on YouTube.

I know Al Gore spends a fair amount of time traveling by aircraft. Nonetheless, I think he’d agree that while the time to avert the catastrophe of global warming is running out, we are already in the midst of a full-blown crisis of common sense.