Chefs of State

In a culinary G-20 summit of sorts, the personal chefs of presidents, prime ministers, and royalty gathered last week in Hong Kong, Macau and Beijing for a reunion of the Club des Chefs des Chefs. The group meets in a different city every year to explore the culinary traditions of the host country, to represent their respective countries, and to promote a strong international network. A luncheon welcoming the chefs was held at Amber restaurant at The Landmark Mandarin Oriental, hosted by its Culinary Director and former Chef of State Richard Ekkebus.

Among the 80 guests in attendance, the chefs were easily identifiable from chef’s coats each bearing an embroidery of their respective country’s flag on the collar. “It is one time in the year when the chefs are treated like heads of state,” said Gilles Bragard, founder and executive secretary of the club.

Theobroma (food of gods)

I used to pretend that I loved hot chocolate even though secretly, I was puzzled why everyone seemed so wild for it. This is not to say that I dislike chocolate. As far as I’m concerned, the person first responsible for envisioning the great potential of the cacao bean–fermenting and roasting it, separating the resulting nib into solids & butter and then recombining them in various proportions with sugar (and sometimes milk)–is a freaking genius. (Obviously this process cannot be attributed to one person but has developed collectively through Mesoamerican and European traditions over centuries. Still, it doesn’t diminish my amazement at the sheer human ingenuity of transforming cacao into chocolate, grapes into wine, milk into cheese, soybeans into tofu. Ah, happy potential: what great things haven’t we invented to eat yet?)

But back to hot chocolate. The Mesoamericans used to consume xocolātl as a beverage; the etymology of the word actually means ‘bitter water’. Hence, one might assume that hot chocolate should be a close cousin. I can’t exactly say with full authority, not having had xocolātl, but all accounts lead me to believe that the foamy bitter waters of the Mayans bear little resemblance to, say, that stuff produced by a certain Swiss miss or the Nesquick bunny. The cocoa flavor in hot chocolate is so thinly dispersed in sugar and milk that–while agreeable enough–makes it a tertiary incarnation of its theobromine self. Cocoa is not a subtle flavor; it has a pleasing and distinctive mouth-drying bitterness that requires a certain concentration of flavor to be satisfying.

Sour (Trebbiano) grapes

It is easy to dress grown-up salad greens. Crush two cloves of garlic and a few anchovies into a paste. Add white wine vinegar, olive oil, pepper and salt. Squeeze a bit of lemon and you’re good to go. I do this at home when I want to feel like a sophisticated lady because iceberg lettuce is for babies.

I learned this dressing from Maureen, an American food anthropologist who has been living in Italy for over 30 years. She is of the school that regards technique as a secondary consideration to fresh ingredients—not that it is a unified “school of thought”, but a single idea that she repeats so frequently that we can rightly describe it as strict philosophy in her books (anyway, who would argue that high-quality materials are unimportant? Except this guy.)

So make no shortcuts:
✓  anchovies, never anchovy paste.
✓  Make a little cloth dress for your bottle of olive oil to prevent oxidation from light.
✓  Always mince your own fresh garlic right before use.
✓  Always use good wine vinegar.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kentwang/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Then I made a mistake: Balsamic vinegar. The mere mention of the term sent Maureen into a tirade: Balsamic is NOT a vinegar; it’s just a condiment. Never, never, NEVER use balsamic for salads. Not ever. Red wine or white wine vinegar only, please.

But I like balsamic vinegar whatever-you-call-it.

I did a bit of research after this encounter, feeling vaguely like I’ve been conned by marketing. Maureen was right; balsamic is technically not a vinegar. The process is hundreds of years old. It is made from the juice of Trebbiano grapes, reduced to a ‘must’, fermented by yeast, and then aged in successively smaller casks for 12 or more years.

So why isn’t it a vinegar?

Alert the authenticity police

I am not ashamed to admit that I like chicken tikka masala.

Does it matter that no one actually eats this dish at home in India? We’re all well aware that it bears the great shame of having a bastardized conception in Britain. As the story goes, it was the brainchild of an Indian chef who, in response to a customer’s complaint, drowned pieces of chicken tikka in a gravy mixture of Campbell’s tomato soup, cream, and spices. The chicken was too dry, the British customer said. And la!—the birth of “a mongrel dish of which, to their shame, Britons now eat at least 18 tons a week.” (Lizzie Collingham)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuart_spivack/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Every now and then I get a taste for mongrel cuisine, which I suppose is cause for some nose wrinkling among the foodie set. I once made the mistake of dragging one such friend to “Curry Row,” the two-block stretch in the East Village lined one-after-another with Indian restaurants. (This was some time ago. The Indian restaurants on Curry row has thinned out in recent years). As it turns out, my friend is an unbearable snob and the Oriental chintz was just too much for him to endure. A barefoot sitar player beckoned to us from the open window of one restaurant: Buffet special! I peeked over at my friend who paused from his nonstop grousing in order to grimace and, just out of spite, I considered eating at the sitar man’s restaurant. Instead, we settled on a well-lit restaurant—the least ornate on the entire block. No fun.

I really underestimated just how distressed he was over this whole “Indian” food proposition. The restaurant had a fairly good reputation, with some glowing reviews. He pointed out that these reviews were probably written by white people. I pointed out that he was white. This did not go over well. He hissed: Oh you think this is authentic? The restaurants here are not even run by Indians, but Bangladeshis!

Bangladeshis? Heaven forfend.

I know this friend is an extreme case. And it is probably disingenuous to make an argument by setting up such an easy target. Most people— foodies, even—have a more reasonable response to this issue. However extreme, he and most foodies still share this mystifying superiority complex. And frankly, I’m fed up with their fixation on authenticity.

Noblesse Oblige

On a recent trip to Rome, I had spent a morning at the stalls of Testaccio market admiring the quality and variety of produce, some that I have never or rarely seen: the famous ribbed Roman zucchini; its delicate orange blossoms (fiori de zucca) both male and female; the oddly fractal broccolo romanesco; the wild Italian mint mentuccia whose flavor seems an offspring cross between mint and parsley; Italian chicory shoots called puntarelle which are so ‘bitey’ they can assert themselves against both garlic and anchovies. It is clear the the vendors take great pride in preparing their produce for market.

The best was the Tomato Genius of Testaccio. He offers what must be at least 30 or 40 varieties of tomatoes. Locals would consult with him over the evening’s menu and then, he would put together a blend—a flavor profile of sweetness, acidity, desiccation—customized just for their pomodoro needs.

I asked myself why I don’t have a specialized guru to custom blend my tomatoes and I felt very envious indeed.  It’s not that my tomato use is so elaborate that I would need him, by the way. What cooking I do at home is better described as “assembling food.”  But he does appeal to a certain nostalgia, an idealized vision of food shopping before the arrival of the Supermarket when the experience was personal and specialized; when the milkman and the baker delivered milk and bread via wagons; when people went to the grocer for dried goods, the greengrocer for vegetables, the fish monger for fish, and the butcher for meat. (Somewhat related: Chris Smith’s fascinating story on the evolution of supermarkets in New York.) This is great, I thought. This is how it should be back at home: all local and seasonal vegetables, interaction with grocers and butchers, and real people accountable for the quality of their produce. It’s so simple.

Sick of the rat race

TK