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Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network, but still I'm in my house in the Lower East Side. John uh John from Booker and Dax is uh up there in the uh Murray Hill. We got Nastasia. Where are you right now, Anastasia the Hammer Lopez?
Hell's Kitchen. Hell's Oh, you're back is still in New York, huh? You haven't gone back to Stanford. No, I was there, but I was I've been trying to work with Macy, so I have to be here. What do you mean?
You still have to like socially distance. You just feel better when you're like, No, no, I no. We don't have to. Well, we're talking about it. We can talk offline about it.
It's the work with Jose Andreas I told you about yesterday. Okay. All right. And uh Matt in the booth and the booth is in Rhode Island still, Matt. I am in my own personal hell.
What? I said I'm in my own personal hell. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Your personal recording hell? Yes. Nice. That's I love that. Coming at you live.
Yeah, nice. Uh, so uh we have I'll I'll bring him in now just so he doesn't have to sit there and not talk for a while uh while we talk about you know our week in review. Uh we have uh I've known him for quite a while. Uh it's first time on the show. Uh Matt Sartwell from Kitchen Arts and Letters.
How are you doing? I'm well, thank you. Thank you for having me. Oh, hey, listen. So for those of you, I don't know, if you've never been to New York City before, uh, then you've never been to Kitchen Arts and Letters.
But uh, right up on you take the the number six train up to the uh what is it 96th Street stop, right? 96th Street, yeah. Yeah, and then you're like right on that hill next to the model shop. It's in a weird little block you're on, right? We uh we aren't met like many other blocks in the city now.
Uh lots of small quirky individual businesses. Yeah, so it's like so you like you you go into this store, and you you know, you wouldn't necessarily know if you didn't know about it, but you go into the store, and as soon as you're there, you're like, oh my god, this is the best cookbook store I've ever been in. And this is actually what happened to me. So like uh sometime, Matt, you remember that book, uh, what was it? It was by a guy named Um Wing Wing, somebody Wing Scott and or and Dove, the The Bread Builders Book.
Who wrote that? The Bread Builders, yeah. Absolutely. So this was, I don't know, this was like 2000 and when did that come out? Like 2000, 2001, something like that.
Uh I might have even thought it was a little earlier than that. But uh maybe well, it was before it was before 911 anyway. I um I was trying to research baking bread. I was beginning to bread. This is maybe it was late 90s, I don't even remember.
And I, you know, the online buying, you know, already existed. Uh, you know, it's relatively new, and I had found out on you know, one of the user groups about this book that this book existed, but I didn't want to, I needed to see it because you know, I'm one of those people that I need to see a book to see whether or not I'm gonna agree with it. And the subject of this book, by the way, and it it is a classic in the field, I think, in its own right. It was kind of a game-changing book, at least for me, was about building your own retained heat masonry ovens, uh, and kind of a style of bread baking that wasn't well known among you know average idiots at the time. This is when bread in the United States was really, really, really, really bad in general.
Um, anyway, so I was like, well, I want to go see this book in person before I buy it online. I hear there's a cookbook store, so I took the trip up to Kits and Ar Kitchen Arts and Letters, and then I bought it immediately from them because I realized what a gem this bookstore was. And um, because not just the books, when you show up, the team at Kitchen Arts and Letters knows more about cookbooks than anybody else. So chefs go there, writers go there, and they don't just say, you know, they don't just look for a book they already know. They're like, what are all the books on this subject?
What you know, how do they fit in with each other? What would you recommend? Plus they can find old books. So it's like it's it's it's like having a store with research librarians available to you kind of at all times. It's an amazing place.
You need to go. Would you say it's accurate reflection? Yeah, I mean, that's that's a big part of the excitement for us is being challenged by the questions our customers ask us. Because I mean, we don't have it all like right at our fingertips, but we love going on the hunt. And sometimes we can answer the questions in a couple of minutes, and sometimes it takes a little longer.
But uh yeah, I mean to go to sort of go down a different rabbit hole every day, that's what keeps the the job interesting. Yeah. I mean, uh, I mean, we've I know that everyone I know has thrown you uh uh curve balls over the over the years. My brother-in-law, Wiley Dufresne was always a a big customer, and he would always give you crazy tasks to to find, right? Yes, and uh Wiley is is good for keeping us on our toes.
Um and when he has a lot of time on his hands, we uh we feel so uh and you you know you got you guys are shut down, right? Like everyone else, or no? Well, we're um we're filling website orders, so going in three days a week to pack and and fill orders and so forth. Um, but no browsing. But we're still answering lots of questions, uh helping people choose books, uh sometimes for you know obscure questions and sometimes very general ones, like you know, I want to start baking bread.
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, don't you you're gonna trigger nostasia? Nastasia hates all of the COVID-based uh bread baking. No, no, no. Again, it's not about bread baking, it's about the couples that are like showing off their bread baking skills together.
That's all that's why I don't resent Dax. I told you this, Dave. Yeah, but it's it's kind of the same hatred you have of ramps, though, no? But you like ramps now, don't you? No, no, it's way different.
Yeah, I do like ramps. It's the over excitement about something that's been around for a really long time. Like it's it's it just seems you mean like their significant other. They're over excitement for their significant other? Yeah, who's been around for a long time and now they have to pay attention to that.
No, I'm saying the practice of bread. Yeah, maybe that maybe it extends into that too, man. I haven't I haven't gone to therapy in six weeks, so okay. So the so I brought you on, obviously, for classics in the field, uh, Matt. But one other thing I want to mention, have you noticed this fact?
So I was researching a um, I was researching a book, and I realized that a book that should not be rare is right now, like as of this week, $150. Whereas prior to the COVID outbreak online, the book was like $30. Have you noticed that there's been on stuff that's not exactly rare, but people aren't resupplying their their used stuff, so certain prices on crazy books are just shot through the roof? Well, online book prices are um are a baffling jungle, and there's all kinds of crazy uh stuff all the time uh that I see in terms of prices. You know, people uh put us crazy price on and just sort of you know wait for the greater fool to come along and and and buy it.
And I also think that people are like sitting around and going through their cabinets and saying, Well, I don't use this anymore. I wonder if I could get some money for it. And they're throwing it out there with some absurd price. And then somebody else comes along and says, Well, I was gonna sell this for 20 bucks, but look, this guy's asking $55. Why don't I ask $65?
And and then there are these bizarre price climbs on books that actually nobody's buying. I mean, the weird, the dangerous thing about looking at uh Amazon, for instance, is you don't really know that anybody's paying those prices. Uh I watch prices on books sometimes, and you see the same seller with the same book for hundreds of dollars for months at a time. So, and then you know, for us, somebody comes in and says, Oh, I want to sell you a copy of this book because it's you know $500 on Amazon, and maybe it's not really getting $500. So it's always good to be patient about hard-to-find books because you just don't know what to believe.
eBay is a better place to see what the real action is because you can see what's sold and what people have actually paid. Well, like, how much is there still an opportunity to just like go find good books in like boxes of books, or is that is that gone the way of the dodo? Does that not exist anymore? Oh, it still happens. Uh, but it was never like you know, you were gonna buy a house in the Hamptons because you you went to a garage sale in uh uh upstate and and came back with three rare books.
I mean, that kind of thing, you know, it's not you're not gonna find the declaration of independence in a thrift store. Um but people dream about that stuff. Uh, you know, we do a lot with selling older books. Um we we try very hard when we're putting out a list of of older books to tell people about them to give the story and the background. Uh we're going out later this week with an offer of a book that was from the personal collection of a guy who was uh exiled from Naples because he pissed off the king of Naples and he fled to England and decided the food was so horrible that he was going to improve the uh uh the British dining habits.
Uh so he wrote books, he collected books, and we ended up with a couple of things out of his collection. So you tell a story like that about books, and people become caught up, they become engaged and you give them context. And that's hard to do that uh online sometimes if you've got somebody who's just going through a box and slapping prices on it. How much extra value is there on someone having owned a book? It depends a lot on who that someone is, uh and and also how much you can tell they sort of uh you know cared and engaged about it, but it can, you know, if the stories right.
If you have, I'm just gonna make something up off the top of my head. I don't know that this is out there, but if you have a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking that Julia Child inscribed and gave to James Beard, that's gonna really amplify the price. And that's already a book that's carries a high price. Um so, you know, if she inscribed it to Beard, you know, I would say double the price of a of uh otherwise inscribed first edition. So so you're saying I should go out and forge that right now.
Well, I'm not giving any uh anybody any instructions. I mean, I'm hesitant to even tell you about the book that I was interested in just because I don't want the price to get pushed up. Because it's one of those things where if even five more people want it, then it's gonna be a problem for me to get it when the time comes. You know what I'm saying? Because the book that I want to get is online scanned, but the A, the scanned copy is horrible, and I just can't stand reading scanned books online as opposed to having a real copy.
You know what I mean? Yeah, it's it's the whole experience of reading online is is uh is different. In some things it works really well, but it tends to be with something that was written and formatted for that purpose, whereas a scan of an older book is it can be a real uh makes my eyes bleed. Well, maybe I'll talk to you about it offline. Yeah, and then because it it needs to be a classic in the field.
This book that I'm thinking of, which I'm teasing everyone with now, is amazing. It's an amazing book, it's fantastic. I'll give this hint, which is not gonna give it away. It was rediscovered by Shirley Corrihir, and uh she came up because I had Harold McGee call her to find out information on the author of that uh French cake book that I talked about last week. His name name escapes me.
He's uh what was his name? It was a two uh Bruce Healy and Paul. That's it. So, like someone on you know, a listener was like, There's no information on the internet about Bruce Healy. He's kind of dropped off the map.
So I was like, Well, I saw that Shirley Corri here had written the introduction or the foreword to like one of his books, and so I was like, Well, Harold knows Shirley, and she's still going strong, apparently is still writing a book now, and someday we'll put would you say if I had to choose one of her books, would you do bake wise as a classics in the field or cook wise? I Harold says bake wise. I I I agree with Harold. That's that's where Shirley's heart is. Um we actually had we had a listener write in yesterday in the chat.
Classics in the field recommendation. Uh they also noted your podcast was recommended to me by Matthew Voss of Marvell Bar in Minneapolis. He said it was his favorite podcast. He's listened to every episode since then. The book that they were recommending was Cookwise by Shirley Garer.
Well, we're doing we're gonna we're we're thinking bakewise. I've looked I've only met her once or twice, but she's an amazing person. But anyway, so she rediscovered when she was or I should say she wrote about and allowed other people to discover. I'm sure she had it in her collection a long time, this book. So it's only readers of Bakewise who by the way, which right now is currently at a relatively high price and is it is scarce as a used book, which is kind of interesting for a book that's so recent, but I think that's just a COVID-related phenomenon.
You know what I mean? But whatever. Um, but this book is just amazing. I can't believe it, but I can't. I'm not gonna pay $150 for it.
You know what I'm saying? You should uh you should send me an email. Let's see what we can do. I don't even know what this book is. Yeah, don't worry, people.
You all this will become clear if you continue to be you uh listeners of our podcast, as soon as I get my hands on a copy, then I'll do classics in the in the field. Because uh as of now, I haven't done any classics that I don't personally own uh a copy of. Although again, that could that could change. Like I've never done the gastronomic regenerator because I don't own a copy. I have scans, and that's in fact um early on, you won't remember this, uh Matt, but I I went to the New York Public Library in kind of like maybe 2001, 2002, pretty soon after I discovered your store, and with a really like you know, rudimentary at the time digital camera, got their copy of the gastronomical generator.
And the gastronomical generator, for those of you that don't know, is a book by Alexis Sawyer, who is kind of one of that fairly early generation of there, maybe two generations after the uh French Revolution, French chef moved to England when you know France was exporting its culinary prowess like nobody's business. You wanted a French chef. Anyway, he was the French chef who had moved to England, had a place called the Reform Club, and wrote a giant book called The Gastronomic Regenerator, which was I learned about that because that was one of MFK Fisher's favorite books. And so when I was reading MFK Fisher, is how I got turned on the gastronomic regenerator. I went to the New York Public Library, which at the time had all of their cookbooks in the public library.
They've since been shipped to Jersey, so it takes a day to see them if you want to see one of them, and sat down there for like four or five hours with a camera taking a picture of every page like an idiot, and then I printed it out and I brought a printed out copy to Kitchen Arts and Letters. That was many, that was decades ago. But um, how'd I get on this? What was I talking about? Gastronomical generator.
Yeah, who knows? Um, so like I won't do a copy of that, but at the time the gastronomical generator was like a 400 book. Is it still like a 400 book? If you can find an original, you I think $400 would be a good prize. There are uh, you know, some scans out there and so forth, but they're uh the quality on a lot of those scans is uneven.
Uh so you take the chances. Yeah, yeah. All right. So what do you guys think we should do? Should we do the classics in the field now?
And then afterwards, if we have time, answer some questions. Should we answer some questions first and then do classics in the field? What do you guys think? What should we do? The the same person who wrote in with the classics recommendation of Shirley Corriher did have a question for you.
I don't know if you want to group the two. All right. Is it a cookbook related question? Because while we have Matt on the phone, we should do some, we should. If we have cookbook related questions, we should do them.
If anyone's going into the chat room with questions about cookbooks, as they say now is the time. Not a cookbook related question. So we could all right. I'll give me the question. Give me the question.
I'll go. So this was from Mark K. Uh, he asks if you can make a reasonable argument as to why I would believe the calories my body absorbs from a given food are the same as the energy released by that food in a bomb calorimeter. Sure is not they're not. There's no way they are.
Yeah, okay. There's absolutely no way that they are. That's like it's a bogus argument. That's why, in general, in general, the whole argument is banana llama. You know what I mean?
Uh like the like the whole way that these things are measured is is is nut baggy. You know what I mean? I mean, that's basically what he was asserting, so okay. Cool. All right.
All right, good. All right. So do you guys think we should do like a couple questions and then classics? You think we should do classic? What do you what?
What? What? All right, so the first ever guest edition of Classics in the field, yeah. All right. Matt, take it away.
What do you got for us? I hear you brought two classics in the field. I did. And they don't seem to be that similar, though I think they are linked by a very common thread, which is context. The first one is a book by Jane Grigson called Charcuterie and French pork cookery.
It was originally published in the mid-1960s. For people out there who are looking around, there was a US edition with a slightly different title called The Art of Making Sausages, Patees and Other Charcuterie. And this is a book that has been continuously in print for 50 years. But it is passionate, it is careful, it is sometimes very offhand about what you might be willing to do and what you might be able to obtain. But it's also incredibly informative about the way French people handle pork.
And it's the result of years that she and her husband spent living in a little town in the Loire called Trot, which was a village that's still notable for the fact that it has a lot of troglodite homes, houses that are built into cave walls in the stone of the book, Grigson is talking about what you would find, how you would find these different dishes in uh charcuterie shops in France. Uh she's telling you about how a home version might differ from what you get on the shop. And she's just taking your interest incredibly seriously when it comes to handling handling cork and preserving it. So interesting thing about this book, and I remember um many years ago, this was oh no, 2004, maybe 2005. Um I was working for food arts uh at the time, and uh the the book Charcuterie, the kind of uh Rulman Poulson uh book was not yet out.
It was it was in galleys, and I had gotten a galley and I was asked to write about uh books on charcuterie, and at the time, before the that book came out, uh my copy says is called The Art of Charcuterie. I have the 1991 Echo Press paperback edition. Um it uh it was the only book available, right? And I think I even asked you, like except for the extremely professional um, you know, that that French that French professional set that was translated in it was like $150 a book or whatever. It was the only available book.
Yeah, the cotton soap. Yeah. Um so it was kind of amazing that this was the only book available. I remember at the time I was really young when I I read it, and it made me a little bit nervous because like all of the recipes, and I'm I wanted to, you know, now that I have you, I'll ask you, the recipes for nitrates and nitrites, they all recommend, uh at least the ones that I remember recommend saltpeter as an ingredient. And is that just a bad translation out of the French?
Was she actually, or was she actually specifying saltpeter, which is what everyone prior to the 90s used to recommend for curing? Like what do you think the deal is with with that? I think she was actually specifying it. I mean, she gives instructions on going to the chemist to get it. Uh that was that was in common usage.
Yeah. Huh. Because I mean, I remember that would be that was one of the reasons why I was kind of loath to do a lot of the like kind of longer cured things was because of the specification of again. I was also young and cocky at the time. I didn't, I couldn't like look past my own generation.
You know what I mean? Uh, because you know, when I first got this book, which it was sometime in the 90s, you know, I was still in my 20s. I was like, what does anybody else know? You know what I mean? Uh I and I probably haven't reread it since 2000, since since about 2003, 2004.
So I think I should go back and and reread it. I think one of the interesting things about America is we tend to focus on the cultures that we learn things from. And especially after the charcuterie book that you know Poulson and those guys put out, and the wave of Italian stuff that happened and kind of the Salumi craze, a lot of people's focus on cured meats in general is very Italian now in the in the US. And I think maybe that's another reason why a lot of people don't know this work, which was much more focused on kind of French. You would think that French would be the charcuterie to be just because of the huge range of charcuterie, but really in the US, we tend to focus more on Italian products.
What do you think? I think that's very true. I mean, it's been a sexiness to um uh Italian foods that was coming starting to come on strong in the 90s, and I mean it's continued uh to be with us. There was a point in the 90s where I think publishers were just slapping the word Italian on anything and putting it out there, and that's that's fallen back now, but uh people overlook the fact that you know we're in English, we're using a French word to describe to describe these products. Um there is a uh a comfort level in this book with with curing meat that uh that speaks of a really long acquaintance.
She talks about uh, and my French pronunciation is not strong, so forgive me, uh a salar, which is basically a brine crock uh that she kept uh on the counter, into which she would she would add things and just leave them there mixing together. So she sort of recommends starting out with a five-pound loin of pork, uh, a boned leg of pork, a hawk, a two-pound piece of pork belly, and then what she calls a shifting population of trotters, eaters, tails, pieces of pork skin, and anything else the butcher throws in for a copper or two. And this was the thing she would reach into and pull pieces out and use as needed. We don't approach uh meat curing that way these days. We've been uh made afraid of it, uh, and possibly for good reason, but it's uh it's a kind of uh intimacy with the food that uh that has been lost as we've become more regimented, more uh more disciplined in our uh in our approach, and the the very specific temperature of the very specific uh salinity of the water.
That's not what she was doing, and that's not what the women she was learning from. Right. And she well, the other good thing is she's a good writer, you know what I mean? Like you want to read the book. And this is the only like, how come she don't think she's maintained her fame among the general public?
Is because she was writing such specific books like her other books, The Mushroom Feast, any good? Beautiful. Well, I mean, that this is I think one of the things that's uh if you were to if you have a listener from the UK, everybody there knows Jane Griggson. Uh her work has stayed in print there, it's commonly available, it's highly revered. Um, you know, she died uh fairly early in 1990.
She had cancer. Um, but she was uh a writer for The Observer, she was a weekly columnist. Uh so it's a it's uh to a degree the way Elizabeth David is a particularly well known here versus the UK. Uh she never quite broke out of here. So uh the famous French ham.
I'm gonna look at this one section of the book. This uh the famous French ham, uh Jambon de Bayonne. Uh, I've always been interested, I've only had it a couple of times, but she has the first English recipe I've ever seen for it. So, for those of you that don't know, in the I became kind of obsessed with cured hams long many decades. Anyway, this is it.
Uh so this is her simplified version. Here's a simplified version to be attempted after after the hay harvest in a dry summer. Alright, so this to give you an idea of the way she writes. One leg of pork, two, and then she has dry salting. Notice she doesn't say dry brining because that doesn't exist.
There is salting and then there is brining. I don't understand why there has to be a word dry brine. Do any of you guys understand that? No. There's salting and there's brining.
Whatever. Uh two pounds salt, two tablespoons of saltpeter, half pound granulated sugar. She then has a brine with red wine, and then specifies six cups soft or rain water, uh, another three tablespoons of saltpeter, block salt, sea salt, rosemary and olive oil, and then I'll just read a little bit. She goes, if you have a ham from a newly killed pig, you will have to beat it with a piece of clean wood. One of those old-fashioned butter pats are excellent for this.
This brings out a certain amount of blood and also smooths out the wrinkles in the skin. So this is the kind of writing that she does. Thread a piece of strong string through the knuckles so that you can suspend the ham over a dish in a dry, airy place for three to five days according to temperature. You will find that a pinkish liquid runs out. Mop it off twice a day at least.
If you were buying the leg straight from a butcher, tell them what you want it for. You will probably not have to go through the above performance. The next step is to remove the bone, which is not too difficult provided you have a small, very sharp knife and plenty of elbow room. So she just has a very nice kind of tone and lyrical writing and you know tells you to beat things with bats and then hang them over plates until a pinkish liquid comes out, which is all enjoyable. You should read it, right?
Yeah, she has this infectious confidence. And it's it it's inspiring. Yeah, yeah. Enjoyable. I'm also going to is mushroom feast cheap?
I want to pick that up. I like any sort of feast of mushrooms. Mushroom feast is it should be around fairly easily. There is an edition currently distributed in the United States by a British publisher called Grub Street. Do you say called Grub Street?
Grub Street, yeah. But not Grub Street the website? No, no, this is this is older than you know than that. Grub Street the website is the new kid on the block. This is the um this is a publisher that's been around for for decades and decades and they're actually named for uh for the tradition in in Britain of doing work for hire.
Uh all right so that do you want to then talk about your second one and then how you think they tie in or sure or we also we do have a question for you in the chat about cookbooks. Okay. All right which is just can you recommend an Ethiopian cookbook the best Ethiopian cookbook you guys are aware of you know it has been um one of the great excuse me tragedies of American publishing that Ethiopian cookbooks have not existed in English, except when self-published by enterprising Ethiopian ingredients. There was a book that came out last year called Ethiopia, by a man whose last name I am going to pronounce wrong because I don't have it in front of me. And it's a uh it's actually a very serious, uh detailed book with a lot of regional material.
Prior to that, it was an enormous fight to find material in English on Ethiopian cooking. Um, and it's inexplicable to me in that something that is so specific and has such a strong uh cultural character was not well represented. Good question. This episode is brought to you by Bend to Table, a monthly food subscription service for avid home cooks, focused on delicious and sustainable pantry items. I recently received the essentials box, and one of my favorite items in that box was the uh Rancho Gordo Alubia Blanca beans.
So they're like a little white bean, almost kind of like a navy bean. And I did it, you know, fairly traditionally. Instead of water, I used chicken stock, which I guess isn't really traditional. Uh, threw it into my rice cooker with uh some rosemary and a bunch of bay leaves. Some people don't really believe that bay leaves have a flavor or help with flatulence, but I know they have a flavor, and even if there's a possibility that they help with flatulence, I'll add them.
Then you hit the rice cooker, you walk away from it, and you cut oh, I threw some garlic in too, a good amount of garlic. Uh came back in uh a couple of hours, rice cooker was done, beans were delicious, delicious. Go to Bent to Table.com to start your own monthly subscription. Use the discount code capital H, capital R, capital N, like Heritage Radio Network, to get $20 off a new subscription, and Bent to Table will donate $10 to support cooking issues and all of HRN's programming. Alright, so on to your second classic.
Okay, so my second recommendation is a book called Flatbreads and Flavors by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Doogood. The subtitle is A Baker's Atlas. And this is a tour around the world of the different flatbreads produced in different cultures and the foods that are eaten with them. And it goes through Central Asia, it goes through China and Malaysia, it goes through India and Sri Lanka, through the Middle East, through North Africa, through Europe, through North America, and it covers you know familiar things that you might think of immediately, like pita or uh chapatis, but it has, for instance, um uh anan that's made by the Uyghur people in Kashgar in western China. Uh it has a griddread called Murtabak from Malaysia that is um the dough is sort of flung and folded in this elaborate pizza-like preparation before it's being cooked on a griddle.
It has a cornbread from accordion wheat bread from India called tikkar. Um, it's it has all these amazing breads. Um flatbreads are basically the earliest type of bread that human beings prepared. Loaf pans came along a lot later, and they um they're integral to so many cultures. And the most appealing thing about the way these two people handled this book is that they give you a sense about why this bread in this place.
Is it the terrain? Does it you know require them to grow a certain grain here? Is fuel in short supply? Do they have to have highly efficient ovens? Do they have to be able to cook it over on a riddle over a fire as opposed to say a retained heat oven, which might take a lot of fuel to get up to speed and be useful only in a large community?
So they're they're plugging all these things together to show you where this food comes from and why it's eaten. Um I also happen to choose really enticing, exciting foods with lots of lots of flavors in here. But it's a uh, I think a beautiful tour of the world. Now, for those of you that don't know the these two authors, like that their whole McGill, right, was to they were a husband-wife team. They've got they got divorced sometime in the mid-2000s.
They were like a they were a husband-wife team, and they would they would choose a subject, right? The only one of theirs that I happen to own is Seductions of Rice, which I believe I bought from you. And um they would go like all over the world, but in generally in kind of Asia writ large, so at least of the book that that I have, I guess because it's rice, and um they would see how similar style of ingredient or ingredient, like rice or flatbread in this case, was translated to different areas, different cultures, different uses, and they would have a kind of a chapter on each locale, and they would have spent, you know, a decent chunk of time in each place, kind of learning and also taking, you know, great photos of what's going on. That's that's kind of part of it, right? Would you say that's an accurate?
It's kind of that was their MO, right? That was definitely the way with the later books. Flatbreads doesn't have the photography, unfortunately, that the later books do, uh, but it still has some pretty amazing storytelling. Uh there's an account of uh they're bicycling through uh I think it's in Turkmenistan and uh stop to watch a young woman uh who's firing up an outdoor oven and she's gonna be placing breads on the side of the inside of the oven. And as she's getting ready to do this, her mother-in-law comes out to watch her.
Um of the breads fall from the side of the oven into the fire, and the young woman is almost in tears as their mother-in-law stands there glowering, and they see all this without you know being able to speak a word of the local language. But it's a sense about how uh integral these foods are to these to these spices and these people. I have to say uh having a bread fall into the fire off the side. I mean, I've only done it with a tandoor, but having a bread fall off the fire, uh off the side into the fire, is an embarrassing and humiliating moment. It really is.
It really just it sucks. Because once it falls in there and it catches on fire, have you ever like a you know, if you have you guys watched The Simpsons where Homer is cooking a whole pig and Lisa, whose daughter is turned vegetarian, and so she somehow like ejects the pig, and the pig like goes on this like journey through the air and like all through all this terrible thing, and Homer's chasing it saying it's still good, it's still good, it's still good. Like that's what it feels like when the bread falls into the fire, and you try to think that you're gonna get it back. You're like, it's still good, it's still good, and it's not. It sucks.
It's burnt, it's got charcoal in it. It's ruined. You've ruined it. It's ruined. Anyway.
Um so one of the things I wanted uh kind of ask you, this is an interesting point, is that I wonder how this kind of in fact, uh, you know, five years ago, I mean, after they got divorced, I know they split, and uh he she's I think still in Toronto, right? And then he like moved off to Thailand and like kind of became a recluse and wrote a book that no one has read, as far as I know, called uh Chicken in a Mango Tree or something like this. Yes. About a Tai is that a good book, by the way? Um, it's a very idiosyncratic book.
There's really nothing else out there like it. Uh, but I think you have to already be pretty knowledgeable about Thai cuisine for it. I mean, he moved to a Khmer speaking village in Thailand and just like lived there for four years and kind of you know started living with a woman from that village, and then wrote a book about you know cooking up scorpions and whatnot, right? Is that basically the long and the short of it? Uh that's yeah, I think that's the short.
Yeah, that's the short, yeah. Um, but that book, like, no one, I guess because he he doesn't have a publishing regime behind him anymore, like that book didn't do any business, right? It was it was not particularly active. I mean, it was not well represented, I think, in the market. Um, and it was uh uh enough of a departure from what he'd done previously that uh people who knew his name didn't quite make the connection.
Right, right. So and uh so my question is is kind of in today's world, and by today I mean like the past five years, right? Where do you think this kind of project would fit in? Like the idea of uh I was I was thinking about it in terms of like w a lot of the problems when I'm looking at my own books going back and I'm for classics in the field and I'm rereading books that I you know I read twenty years ago, sometimes you know, twenty five years ago, and I picked them up again, or historic books that I've you know read recently is trying to kind of parse the meaning at the time. What do you how do you think a project like two white folk from Canada in this case, Toronto, like going around the world mining different cultures for their for their information?
I know that's not how this is actually working in the book, 'cause it's more just like they're trying to thread the whole world together by looking at the differences in different applications of similar ideas all over the world. But how do you think that that project would be viewed if it was coming out today versus when it did in the nineties? I think it would still be fairly receptive because their whole attitude towards what they're doing is um is it's it's not patronizing. Um and they're not trying to say, Here we've improved this for you. Uh right, they're not appropriating and yeah.
I mean that the they would admit, I mean both of them together would say, you know, they're not giving you the recipe exactly as they got it, wherever it was they ate it, because you can't get the same, you know, flour uh that somebody who's making bread in the mountains of uh Tajikistan is getting. So they you know they had to adapt to what they could get in their in their home kitchen in in Toronto and to what they thought their readers could reasonably adapt. But they're also really always intimately in putting interested in putting you in touch with the culture that the food comes from, um, which is different than like say my writing a cookbook on why don't we say Ethiopian food, and saying, well, you know, here's my uh here's my uh ketogenic Ethiopian cookbook. You know, here's my Ethiopian smoothie collection. Um I think that kind of appropriation.
Please write that book. Please write that book. Yeah, the keto, the uh the keto smoothie Ethiopian cookbook. I can I can turn that out too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh well, first of all, I don't I've heard it a million times. What exactly is keto? Is that just high protein? Uh keto is high fat. High fat, okay.
Uh now, are you familiar with the Midwestern? Of course you are, the the pie shake. Uh no, actually. I'm I'm intrigued, but I don't think I've encountered it. Yeah, and then there's a there's a Midwestern uh North Northern, I believe it's like Michigan, Minnesota, that kind of area where like there's a number of restaurants where when you order a milkshake, you're like, yeah, yeah, you want a slice of pie in that, and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then they like throw pie into the milkshake and you blend it in. It's a pie shake. All right. Okay. So that just that that exists.
That's a thing, right? Uh, you know, just take that for what take that for what it is. Then so I would assume that your Ethiopian shake book, you would be throwing injira in and doing like pie shake with injira in it, so that you would have the full injira as though you were eating an Ethiopian. By the way, for those of you that I don't know, never been to an Ethiopian restaurant, injira is the bread that you, you know, that the tip the in the old days was made exclusively with Teff, which is a grain from Ethiopia. Now in the US, you're lucky if there's any freaking Teff in your stuff at all.
But I but Peter Kim, show's favorite punching bag, and the emeritus uh director of uh or the you know former director of Museum of Food and Drink, he uh says that if that most Ethiopian restaurants, at least in New York, if you call them a day in advance and say you want a hundred percent Teft, that they'll do it for a for a fee, which is a good thing to know. Um, but anyway, so that's the it's the flatbread that they use, which I know I looked up at the table of contents of uh the flatbread book that you were talking about, classics in the field, there is an injira recipe in it. Is there not? There is, yeah, it's actually mentioned on the cover, right? Yeah, so yeah, so you would have to have injira blended into each one of your Ethiopian smoothies, I think.
Yeah, that would probably destroy the whole ketogenic thing, but you'd have to do one or the other. Two different projects. Two different projects. But uh we yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the like what's the uh what's the name of the it just popped out of my mind the Ethiopian Mead?
Oh my god, what the heck? What's the name of it? Just went out of my head. Anyway, yeah, because that's also not ketogenic. I don't I don't feel like maybe it's the most ketogenic.
Although maybe I think they're two separate books. I think your Ethiopian Shake Book and then your Ethiopian keto diet book are maybe two different. Right, so it'll take me two weeks to write. Two different books. Don't yeah, you don't want to you don't want to sell this series short.
You want to milk it for all it's worth. Um we don't have a ton of time. We have five minutes left, but another question from the chat, quick one. Uh Devin is asking Matt, what is the most humorous cookbook he knows of? Oh god.
Okay. So um this is a wide topic, but look for a book called Bull Cook by George Herter, which was originally the animal? B-U-L-L, yep. C C O O K. Published in the early 60s.
Um it's around there was an Echo Crest that a reprints in the mid-90s for that as well. Um it is the most hilariously confident assertive book you've ever met. Uh it contains Chateaubriand's recipe for Chateaubriand. It is um uh page after page after page. This guy who ran a sporting goods company in Minnesota, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, herders. Yeah, is just laying it down. And there's absolutely no reason to believe that he's right, but he is so so self-assured uh about everything he says that um it's yeah, he is uh wrong about I didn't see one of his one of the bull uh one of the bold cookbook, we did one of the three volumes as a classic in the field early early on, like a year ago, and everything he says is pretty much wrong, except for I have cooked some of the recipes and they've worked, but like, yeah, yeah, all of his assertions are incorrect. He also really, really has a lot of kind of like uh he hates Hollywood, he hates magazine writers, he has some kind of unfortunate things to say about women. I mean, he is an unhe is he is he is a weird was a weird dude.
You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, this is this was a guy who 60 years ago couldn't get a mainstream publisher to release his book. Um, so he's self-published. Um, so he he was definitely a fringe character to begin with. You are maybe the only person to ever admit that they've cooked from the book.
Yeah, I have cooked from the book. I have cooked from the book. And uh I mean, I thankfully have not had to follow it's the only cookbook I own with advice on how to survive a hydrogen bombing. And it's just it's so weird. Like it's also like the one thing I've never tested is he's the one that told me how to uh how to how to kill a snapping turtle.
He's like, there's two ways. Are you familiar with the two ways to kill a snapping turtle, Matt? I don't think I I read that part. So you can hold a stick out, and if you're lucky, the turtle will bite the stick and you can chop its head off. The alternate way is to is to stick your finger in its nether region, and then that will surprise it, its head will pop off and you can chop the head off.
I I bet it would surprise you. Yeah. Surprise. You know what I mean? Woohoo!
Oh god. Boom, snap. Yeah. This is an amazing delayed prank on the part of the author. Yeah.
Yeah, right. I mean, uh, yeah, he calls, he says that every he's like uh he I don't know whether I mentioned this on air, but like uh one of the things that sticks out in my head is he describes Palm Springs, and he loves Palm Springs, except for he wishes that every person in it would be dead. You know what I mean? He calls and he says really terrible stuff, like really terrible stuff about the people in Palm Springs, but he loves it. And he's been to all of these crazy restaurants, they are worth looking at.
Um, I actually have another classics in the field question from Instagram. Neil Hersell wrote in and said that his classics in the field suggestion is imbibed by Dave Wendrich. He said, even though this book is not very old, it's a must-read for all bartenders. He says a few years ago, I feel like reading it was a given, but he feels it is somewhat fallen by the wayside with younger bar staff. I think this is the problem in general, is that as you get older, uh Neil, as we all get older, we realize how short the memory is of the generations that come after you, and how much they kind of want to make their own way and ignore in certain ways, like kind of like the kind of the people that we think are giants.
I mean, Dave Wonders is still revered in the bar world as far as I can tell, and I and people are still reading it. But what what do you think, Matt? Have you seen? I mean, that book still sells really well, right? It does sell really well.
It's I mean, it's I don't think we have a rival to it, but I I understand the process you're talking about by which new things come along and they sort of you know shoulder aside things that have been around, and they may not be of the same quality, but they still they're new when you have an author who's you know out there beating the drum and waving the flag and saying, Hey, look at my knee, look at my book. Um, but if somebody comes to me with a question about you know American cocktail history, that's gonna be the first thing I call off the show. Of course. Um I mean it was it was the book. First of all, it was the only book that had done that.
It was the first book of its kind like that. I'm sure other people have done things like that now. You had um, you know, Ted Hayes Lost Ingredients and Vintage. What was this book called? Lost, what was it called?
Forgotten cocktails or something. But anyway, but that was it. I can picture it, but I don't have it at the end of the day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
That's a great it's a great it's a great book, but it's a different that's a a different thing. It wasn't kind of a serious history, you know what I mean? Um yeah, it was it was a a recipe collection with with with strong uh supporting notes, as opposed to Dave's, which was a history with recipe. Correct. Um we gotta uh we we gotta bounce pretty soon here.
Any final items? Huh. All right, let me answer this question real quick so that I can say I answered a cooking question, uh, other than how to chop the head off a snapping turtle, which I feel will help somebody out there in cooking issues land. Somebody is gonna get their finger dirty preemptively handled that one. Yeah, somewhere somewhere this week, someone's getting their finger dirty, but that turtle's gonna get the worst end of it.
Um Jeff Clark wrote in on the chat room. I recently moved into a home with a built-in wall microwave. It's nice, but much more powerful than the countertop units I've used in the past. And I keep burning my popcorn before I can pop most of the kernels. What is the ideal wattage for a good microwave popcorn?
This I don't know. Uh, but then you say this. My understanding is that the effective wattage is proportional to the power setting on most microwaves. Not true. Not true, Jeff.
Not true. Very, very, very, very, very, very, very few microwaves actually provide proportional power. Instead, for those of you that have microwaves, think about what happens when they're working. When you put them on high power, you turn it on, and you hear this, and then you hear the thing going, right? And then when you put it on lower power, you hear.
Because what happens is they're actually turning the magnetron on at full blast, but uh lower power cycles are only keeping it on for a shorter period of time. It's in fact not proportional at all. Microwaves are always, except for I think either Panasonic or Sharp made one that actually was proportional power, but they're on full blast. They're just using um a duty cycle, and because it takes a certain amount of time for magnetrons to fully come up to power and put out, you know, the energy that they need to put out, right? Uh, they don't switch them off and on very quickly.
So they don't work like like a like a like a pulse width modulation to get the to get the the power. So, like, you know, when I'm doing a uh uh a light emitting diode off of let's say an Arduino or something, right? I'm turning it on full power and I can flash it off and on real quick to make it look like it's dim, even though it's actually uh you know it's just flashing real fast. Microwaves can't do that. So uh a high power microwave is always putting out high power microwaves and just doing it in doses.
Now, that said, you could probably turn it down, and that's gonna be fine by your popcorn. But there's another way to do it. Microwaves try to dump all of their energy into the food that's inside the microwave cavity at the time. Now, some some effed up things happen. For instance, as soon as a certain part of the food gets brown, carbonized at all, brown or black, that that is a huge acceptor of microwave energy.
And so preponderance of the microwave energy will get absorbed in that. So once something does burn in a microwave, it tends to burn hard and then light on fire. That's why you could take grape halves, cut them in half, leave the skin connected, and get those fireballs because you dehydrate and brown that one little section, and then it can start to carbonize and stuff can fly off. Or why if you have like a little burning match and you get that little wooden tip with a little bit of charcoal on it, you can get those huge fireballs out of it because all of the microwave energy is gonna get focused on the place with the char. Okay, now that aside, also if you really think it's too high powered, you can stick what's called a moderator into it.
And it's real simple, just put a glass of water into the microwave along with the popcorn. Uh, figure out how much water you need to add, and that water will absorb a certain portion of the microwaves and make your microwave oven seem less powerful. And Jeff, I hope I've fixed your popcorn problem because first of all, you should be buying a whirly pop and making whirly pop popcorn during these times of COVID because clearly whirly pop popcorn is superior to microwave popcorn, no matter what my son Dax tells you. Uh, but uh it is terrible to be caught in this Netflix binge time without a source of popcorn. Am I right, guys?
Tragedy. Yeah. Right? I mean, can you imagine not having popcorn now? I can't even imagine it.
Yeah. So someone also wrote this in. This is uh Matt Clems. This is the day of many Matt's. Um and I'll just uh I'll just say this.
I'm not gonna answer Matt your question this week because I don't have time on your Gaggio espresso machine with an Olka pump. Uh we'll just tell you this. Uh yeah, it's a little more complicated, but I understand I'm gonna answer it next week because I don't want you to be without espresso during the times of COVID, okay? Uh just replace your Olka pump for now, and I'll talk to you more about pumps later. You can get Olka pumps relatively inexpensively.
Olka pump, by the way, guys, is the is the vibratory pump that's inside of most home espresso machines, including Gaggio, the Ranchillio, Sylvia, etc. etc. We'll talk more about that later. But wrote something very nice. He said, thanks for the show.
There's nothing quite like cooking issues, part how to cook, part soap opera, part frat party, and part repair manual. Hmm. Today he came for the repair manual, but unfortunately, Matt, I don't have time to give you your question. It's due worth. So I'll come back to that next uh next week.
And uh anything you want to say, Matt from uh Kitchen Arts and Letters on the on the way out. I'm super excited to have you on. Um for any of you, like go to their website, go to their store, support local bookshops. I mentioned last week that uh in my book, which you thankfully sell there, I gave a uh a recipe that is only given out in um the copies that you buy at Kitchen Arts and Letters. So, I mean, you really need to support um what they do.
Um, go check them out when they reopen. But you got any any uh stuff you want to say to the crew on the way out. Uh, you know, thank you guys so much for uh having me. I could talk about like this stuff forever, so it's good to have other people around. So I don't know Oh, wait, one last thing, one last thing.
Oh my god. You were gonna say how you were gonna tie together these two books. The the Oh, it's just it's it's the context. That that the that all this food fits into where it comes from. These are authors who tell you why this food is done this way and who makes it.
Uh and I think that gets left out of a lot of books these days. It's just a recipe collection with uh, you know, lots and lots of recipes, and nothing that really tells you why something gets made a certain way. All right. And I don't like that is a good way to tie them together. And this has been the classics in the field kitchen arts and letters cooking issues.
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