in season. I will cook what is here. It recognizes the incomparable joys of eating wild strawberries or white asparagus in France, fresh baby eels in Portugal, tomatoes in Italy. The Bloods, in my experience, rooted as they are to place and time, are more likely than not to cook with real, heartfelt soulfulness and integrity, seeking to nurture, sooth, comfort, and evoke, rather than dazzle.
I always liked to think of myself as a Blood. Having recently traveled the world, often to very poor countries where being a Crip is not an option, I was enchanted again and again by cooks making fresh, vibrant, hearty, and soulful meals, often with very little in the way of resources. Like with the early culinary pioneers of France and Italy, the engine driving great cooking in Vietnam and Mexico, for instance, seems to be the grim necessity of dealing with what's available when it's available— and making the most of it. I've yammered endlessly, tiresomely, on the desirability of food coming from somewhere, that the sort of regional, seasonal fare that so many French and Italians grew up with is what is missing from much of American and British culinary culture.
But now I don't know.
There is more than a whiff of dogma in the Blood argument. The French "Group of Eight" chefs who decried the introduction of "foreign" spices and ingredients into haute cuisine strike me as the same crowd who want every movie to be a bloated, government-funded costume drama starring the inevitable Gerard Depardieu. I once heard a Parisian chef, while watching a comrade from Alsace make choucroute garnis, comment, "Thees is not French." An element of jingoism hangs in the air when some chefs decry "outside" and "foreign" influences on cooking—a scary overlap between those decrying foreign-influenced food and those decrying foreigners. And the organics mob, so fervent in their recitations of the dangers of pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and genetic manipulation, often sound as if their agendas are driven by concerns far from taste or pleasure. The "slow food" lobby, arguing for sustainable sources of food, organic and free-range products, cruelty-free meat, and a return to a photogenic but never-to-be-realized agrarian wonderland, seem to overlook the fact that the stuff is expensive, and that much of the world goes to bed hungry at night—that most of us can't hop in the SUV with Sting and drive down to the organic greenmarket to pay twice the going rate.
Don't get me wrong. I like free-range; it's almost always better tasting. Wild salmon is better than farmed salmon, and yes, the farmed stuff is a threat to overall quality. Free-range chickens taste better, and are less likely to contain E. coli bacteria. Free-range is no doubt nicer as well; whenever possible we should, by all means, let Bambi run free (before slitting his throat and yanking out his entrails). Since I serve mostly neurotic rich people in my restaurant, I can often afford to buy free-range and organic. I can respond to the seasons to a great extent. But at the end of the day, if I can find a genetically manipulated, irradiated tomato from the other side of the country that tastes better than an Italian vine-ripened one from Granny's backyard (not likely, but just suppose), even if it causes the occasional tumor in lab rats, I'll probably serve it. It's how it tastes that counts.
For instance: I like grain-fed beef. When talking about beef, I don't want some muscular, over-exercised animal with delusions of liberty providing the steaks. I want a docile, corn- and grain-fed jailhouse fatboy who has spent the latter part of his life standing in a lot doing nothing but eating, all that nice fat marbling rippling through the lean. If, as in the case of Kobe beef, some nice cattleman wants to give my steer regular rub-downs with sake (and the occasional hand job), all the better. The grass-fed Argentine stuff, shipped in a cryovac bag full of water and blood, tastes like monkey meat
I always liked to think of myself as a Blood. Having recently traveled the world, often to very poor countries where being a Crip is not an option, I was enchanted again and again by cooks making fresh, vibrant, hearty, and soulful meals, often with very little in the way of resources. Like with the early culinary pioneers of France and Italy, the engine driving great cooking in Vietnam and Mexico, for instance, seems to be the grim necessity of dealing with what's available when it's available— and making the most of it. I've yammered endlessly, tiresomely, on the desirability of food coming from somewhere, that the sort of regional, seasonal fare that so many French and Italians grew up with is what is missing from much of American and British culinary culture.
But now I don't know.
There is more than a whiff of dogma in the Blood argument. The French "Group of Eight" chefs who decried the introduction of "foreign" spices and ingredients into haute cuisine strike me as the same crowd who want every movie to be a bloated, government-funded costume drama starring the inevitable Gerard Depardieu. I once heard a Parisian chef, while watching a comrade from Alsace make choucroute garnis, comment, "Thees is not French." An element of jingoism hangs in the air when some chefs decry "outside" and "foreign" influences on cooking—a scary overlap between those decrying foreign-influenced food and those decrying foreigners. And the organics mob, so fervent in their recitations of the dangers of pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and genetic manipulation, often sound as if their agendas are driven by concerns far from taste or pleasure. The "slow food" lobby, arguing for sustainable sources of food, organic and free-range products, cruelty-free meat, and a return to a photogenic but never-to-be-realized agrarian wonderland, seem to overlook the fact that the stuff is expensive, and that much of the world goes to bed hungry at night—that most of us can't hop in the SUV with Sting and drive down to the organic greenmarket to pay twice the going rate.
Don't get me wrong. I like free-range; it's almost always better tasting. Wild salmon is better than farmed salmon, and yes, the farmed stuff is a threat to overall quality. Free-range chickens taste better, and are less likely to contain E. coli bacteria. Free-range is no doubt nicer as well; whenever possible we should, by all means, let Bambi run free (before slitting his throat and yanking out his entrails). Since I serve mostly neurotic rich people in my restaurant, I can often afford to buy free-range and organic. I can respond to the seasons to a great extent. But at the end of the day, if I can find a genetically manipulated, irradiated tomato from the other side of the country that tastes better than an Italian vine-ripened one from Granny's backyard (not likely, but just suppose), even if it causes the occasional tumor in lab rats, I'll probably serve it. It's how it tastes that counts.
For instance: I like grain-fed beef. When talking about beef, I don't want some muscular, over-exercised animal with delusions of liberty providing the steaks. I want a docile, corn- and grain-fed jailhouse fatboy who has spent the latter part of his life standing in a lot doing nothing but eating, all that nice fat marbling rippling through the lean. If, as in the case of Kobe beef, some nice cattleman wants to give my steer regular rub-downs with sake (and the occasional hand job), all the better. The grass-fed Argentine stuff, shipped in a cryovac bag full of water and blood, tastes like monkey meat
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