Gangster of Food

If the gangster were rich, he would buy billboard space throughout the city of Portland that would give all current and would-be restaurateurs solid culinary advice about things that they often fuck up. First and foremost would be french fries.

French fries or pommes frittes if you want to get fancy are, as you may know, fried sticks of potato. Usually seasoned with salt and dipped in a variety of condiments, commonly a tomato preserve known as ketchup, they are generally regarded as the epitome of simple. So why is it necessary to pay upwards of $5 for a serving of them that are both edible and not from a freezer truck? Is it because people who own restaurants are idiots? Yes.

So, listen up Mcmenamin’s brothers, Mr. Stanich, and the rest of you good- for- nothing, french fry slaughtering slobs, I’m going to let you in on a little secret: the secret is to fry twice.

Here’s what to do:

First, select nice, fresh russet potatoes, old potatoes won’t work as won’t red potatoes or yukon gold or anything else. Only Burbank russets make really good fries.

Second, cut your potatoes into even french fry shapes, battonet in french, and don’t try to make them too big. Smaller is better.

Third, rinse the potatoes several times with cold water and then put them in the refrigerator covered in water and let them sit overnight. This is very important.

Fourth, drain off the water and dry the potatoes as you wish to fry them.

Fifth and most crucially, fry the potatoes in peanut oil, lard, duck fat or even rice oil that has been preheated to 250 degrees farenheit for several minutes until they are quite limp, almost falling apart, and the corners are begininning to brown. Hydrogenated fat may be used as well, especially if you wish to perpetuate the notion that you really don’t care about your customer and they should respond in kind. Spread the potatoes on a screen or on towels and allow them to rest and drain off some of that excess fat.

Sixth, fry the potatoes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit until they are crisp and brown and season with salt that has been crushed in a spice grinder or mortar and pestle into a fine powder which will allow it to stick to the potatoes better. Now they are ready to serve to a customer who isn’t on death’s door or whose standards haven’t been mercilessly crushed by a lifetime of unfulfilled expectations.

You see, standards matter. If you’re going to serve something you should make it right even if it is just french fries. In The Gangster’s career as  a preparer of quality foodstuffs, it broke his heart and kept him up at night to think of that one plate that he sent out that could have been, should have been, better. I’m suprised that some of you haven’t killed yourselves from shame.

What pisses people off in my social circle is fusion cuisine. Little jerk-off nerds who claim to be  “transcending cultural barriers” and that “flavors exist without contextual association… flavors are just flavors, man” are infuriating people worthy of acknowledgement only in terms of bullying and hating. To be perfectly honest, the gangster doesn’t even know any proponents of fusion cuisine (and for that the hypothetical recipient of my enduring wrath should be most thankful) but he commits crimes of culturally perverse flavor building on an increasingly frequent basis. I first learned the horrific wrongfulness of interbreeding flavors or ingredients of the cuisines of two or more distinct cultures at the Higgins, which restaurant, paradoxically, taught me that flavors are just flavors. Sambal Oleck was a staple of the house, now it’s a staple in mine. Sambal does what cayenne does, only better. It’s fruitier, less abrasive, and disburses more easily. So, secretly I’m a fusion chef too. The case in point is cauliflower mushroom and potato soup. By which I mean Sparassis crispa the mushroom that vaguely resembles cauliflower not Brassica oleracea var. botrytis, the genetic mutant of broccoli, mixed up with Agaricus bisporous, the supermarket mushroom, as most internet sources seem to understand.

We found this particular sparassis after a long wet slog through the thick underbrush of Larch Mountain. It was, like all encounters with this bizarre mushroom, a little surreal. It grows from the base of fir trees, right out of the area where the roots meet the ground, and it can be massive. This particular one was about twice the size of my head.

I left it in the refrigerator for a week, I have my excuses. I didn’t know that it hosted maggots. I pulled it out to make soup and some pickles and found that the base was home to not quite a swarm, but definitely a family of writhing grubs. So I did what any conscientous fungivore would do and sliced it up and started picking them out with a paring knife. If you think that’s disgusting you should take a close look at the next piece of predatory fish that you buy at the supermarket, especially tuna. I’m just saying, at least I dig out my parasites before I eat.

Potato cauliflower soup is sort of a classic of mycological cuisine, if that “cuisine” could be said to have “classics”. So normally I would start with some salty cured pork product and render the fat out of that, then sauteé the onions, celery and a little bit of garlic in that, then add wine, then milk and potatoes. The mushrooms, previously blanched, come about 15 minute before the end. Finish with pepper, parsley, a touch of vinegar or a little lemon and serve it up with bread. But this time I forgot about the pork. I started with butter which especially sucked because I had some Armandino Guanciale that I brought back from Seattle.

The soup was lacking. Savoryness. What it lacked was something that I always thought could only be gotten from cured pork or, occasionally, from anchovies. But it was too late now and I was determined to not make a fucking mess out of it after all that. Serendipitously I happened to have a little shot glass on the counter half full of toasted, powdered dried shrimp that I needed for some Malaysian crab nonsense. So, in desperation, I added a little and simmered.  When it had had time to blossom, it tasted more better. So I added a little more. The same as with the cayenne trick, the shrimp didn’t assert itself. There was nothing fishy about it, it was simply more savory, more satisfying. So you see that I am a fusion chef too. Just like all the fusion chefs from the 1990’s who made up pan- asian and Franco- Japanese and Russo- North African and….

So here you go interweb, here is something that you really need, recipes for “cauliflower mushroom” not cauliflower with mushrooms.

Cauliflower mushroom soup:

Maybe 1 big onion, diced

Maybe 2 ribs of celery, also diced

about a clove of garlic, thin sliced

butter

2,3 or 4 bay leaves, as you wish

a little bundle of thyme sprigs

pinch of cayenne or 1/4 t sambal

1/4 t toasted powdered dried shrimp

white wine (whatever you have, provide it’s not white zinfandel, is, I’m sure, just fine) or white vermouth

a quart of chicken stock

a half pint of cream

4 yellow potatoes, peeled and cubed (not red, they won’t thicken the soup properly)

a goodly chunk, maybe a pound, of dewormed, blanched, bite sized chunks of cauliflower mushrooms

parsley, chives

It’s fairly straightforward: melt the butter in your best pot, sauteé your onion, celery and garlic along with the bay leaf, but do not brown. Add the white wine, the cayenne and the shrimp powder and simmer briefly. Add the stock and the potatoes  and season the soup well with salt (it should taste close to how the finished product will tase) and simmer, add the thyme in about 15 minutes. Add the mushrooms a little before the potatoes are done and when the potatoes are done fish out about a half cup, mash them well, mix them with a little stock and cream and stir them back into the soup. Then add the cream, cook until the soup thickens up nice then add the finely chopped parsley and chives and whatever else the soup needs including, perhaps, a squeeze of lemon or a little vinegar.

Leona with cauliflower mushroom

So I finally saw that movie “Food Inc.” and I really wasn’t expecting much. So Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan and Joel Salatin get interviewed by some foodie neophyte and then they all sit around and talk about local food and organics and how bad The Man is and stuff. Like the food movement for people who are too lazy to read popular nonfiction. But you know what, It was actually pretty good. I learned a few little factoids about The Man, like well I really can’t remember right now, but Wal Mart has organics stuffs ya’al so get on in there and get you some organic Totino’s Pizza rolls. Also I learned about some more Monsanto intellectual property rights cases that I hadn’t heard of. See I had only heard of this Percy Schleimer fellow who was a canola farmer in Canadia and who had his crop of canola invaded by the Monsanto roundup- ready canola pollen which fearsomely injected its little frankenetic information into Percie’s crops naturale little ovule’s and then they had these little crazy baby canola plants that were also “Roundup Ready!”. That is true. Well, this movie talks about another guy named Maurice Parr.

This guy apparently crossed Monsanto by not only helping, but encouraging farmers to save seeds from Monsanto’s patented “Roundup Ready!” (that sounds a Ronald Reagan movie title) with his little seed cleaning machine. Well, this little seed cleaning machine was a patent infringing criminal and the guy had to settle out of court with Monsanto and he went broke in the process. But you see according to Monsanto, this Maurice is a lying sack of spit- stained cow shit as a matter of fact, all these dirty farmers are liars.

So what does this mean to the gangster? That white shirt corporate nice guys are the side of truth and right? That commodity farmers are not just a bunch of painfully innocent, slack- jawed yokels spraying agricultural chemicals at each other through fire hoses, naught a care in the world? No. My world view has not changed. If Monsanto developed a cow that shit gold turds, I might try to get my hands on some of that gold, but they would still fundamentally be a bunch of sub- organismal jerk- off geeks with a real flair for marketing.

What defies my logic is why these people continue to work with this company, the economics must be brutal. Either that or they’re just lazy.

North American food is at a dead end. There are of course those fancy restaurants that proclaim to be serving some qualified version of American food, and Yankees can’t get enough “Southern Food”, the type that doesn’t include giblets, brains or chitlins, but mostly it cannot be found.

A trimmed down, fatted up institutionalized version of it can be found in fast food restaurants and greasy spoon diners, roadside cafés, “family restaurants” ( the definition of which, to my knowledge, means no beer and crayons) and the often times sorrily misnomered roadhouse. In these sorts of establishments the food served, well you know what they serve, It all comes from a can, a box or a frozen bag. It leans heavily on the “deep fried” group of foods and it consists primarily of white bread, potatoes, meat, cheese and laboratory- formulated sugars and fats. The food is manufactured in truly stupendous quantities in factories that, to the untrained eye, look as if they could just as easily be manufacturing formaldehyde.
Nothing is actually prepared on site in these types of places, no one knows how to cook. Even hash browns and french fries are beyond their scope. Burger patties are generally made by a Patty-O-Matic (yes, there really is such a machine) in a slaughterhouse in Des Moines, frozen in stacks of ten, packed 10 to a box, 4 boxes to case, 12 cases to a palate and shipped to warehousers and distributors like Sysco and Food Services of America to be distributed among the quaint- looking and humble roadside diners of this country, big signs proclaim Home Cooking. Why bitch about this? This is old news. Everyone knows, many take for granted that any restaurant that exists in a rural area that does not have a daily menu, printed on linen paper, hanging in a well-lit wooden box topped with glass hanging outside of the door is crap. It helps if the menu proclaims European food, by which I most heartily mean Western European:Salade Nicoise, Rissoto con Funghi and cetera, because everyone also knows that, if North America could be said to have a cuisine, that cuisine is crap. I protest because I know that this is not the case.
How long has European- dominated America been around?, goes the familiar argument, not long enough to have developed a cuisine. We know, however, that although the myth that Catherine de Medici single-handedly brought cuisine to the French with her entourage of Italian cooks when she moved to the French court in the sixteenth century has been largely debunked, it is also true that the French still lived like barbarians before the sixteenth century. They didn’t even have knives and forks. What was European food anyway, before the discovery of the Americas? Italian food with no tomatoes, no peppers, no polenta, no winter squash? French food without turkey, without pomme frites, without vanilla, Spain without chocolate and cheap abundant sugar without alubias, chorizo or Tortilla de Patatas? These are not the European cuisines we know. Clearly, new cuisines have evolved in Europe since the discovery of the Americas.
It is, I admit, easier to admire the rural cuisine of say, Alsace than that of say, Clackamas county. In Alsace we went for a hike, arrived after the first leg of a long and brutally hot trek in a town called Hellert and went into the first restaurant we saw. We ordered Assiette de Charcuterie and Omelette Forrestiere as well as wine and Amer Biere. The Charcuterie was delicious, as well prepared as that in any of the fancy restaurants in Portland, The omelette was jaw dropping. Wild forest mushrooms and Gruyere folded inside of a perfectly cooked sheet of egg, seasoned perfectly. Mind you, we had bad food in Europe, but rarely in the countryside.
In contrast, we’re still trying to find a good meal near Estacada, We’ve tried the Carver Cafe, Fearless Brewing, The Trails and, when it was still open, The Safari Club. The Trails approached edibility, but only by virtue of not making a mess of the fruit of the factory. Carver Cafe was so bad, and so cute, it inspired this little rant. The situation is the same no matter where you go.
Was this, I wondered staring deeply into my “chicken fried steak” with “white gravy”, what the owners of this little cafe envisioned when they opened or bought the place? That the chicken fried steak would be a frozen, deep fried patty topped with a milk gravy that tasted for all the world like dehydrated milk powder and xanthan gum. That the undercooked hashbrowns would come frozen and shredded in a bag, color preserved with ascorbic acid. Or did they slip into this slovenly lifestyle, little by little, like an oxycotin addiction? Did they come to believe, as I have heard the worst sorts of “chefs” proclaim, that their skills could never be any match for the wonders of the laboratory, filled with it’s highly educated scientists applying the principles of chemistry, the principles of laundry detergent and Zyklon B, to the gastronomic realm? Consistency is ensured by the clever machinations of the similarly credentialed engineers, lots of fuel ensures freshness.
You only have to beat your competition and if the competition serves the same thing then you only need a better brand, lower prices or nicer window- dressing. My inclination is that there is no competition. Nobody knows, or cares, how to really cook. The guy running the cafe may as well be running the gas station, or the mini mart because in his mind, he’s little more than a retailer. What happened to all the people who might be inclined to do a little better? Who might create something with the aim of making people happy, delighted or contented? They moved to the city and got jobs as “chefs”. You see it in restaurants all the time, small town kids who ache to throw off the chains of conventionalism and provincialism. Also, kids from places like Cincinnati, places whose very name smacks of insular conservatism. Becoming a “chef” in our society largely means forsaking your roots, assuming your roots are embedded in some decidedly non- sexy backwards terrain like the American plains, the Midwest or non- French Canada. You have to learn to embrace wine over beer (at least in your professional capacity ), Scotch over Bourbon and Foie Gras over Hot Dish or kraft dinner or whatever sort of embarrasingly pedestrian dinner you grew up eating. Isn’t all this changing? Sure, just not fast, deep or widespread enough to suit the likes of me.
Because to serve a great burger isn’t enough. Fried Catfish? You’re getting there. Barbeque spare ribs? Enough with those already. You have to go back pretty far to find American cuisine that is untainted by the grease of industry. Crisco, first used as food during world war I as a lard substitute because of food rationing. Velveeta, invented in the 1920’s. Artificial flavors, mid ninteenth century. In fact, one of my personal favorite books about mid century American cooking, American Regional Cookery by Sheila Hibben was copyrighted in 1932, published in 1946 and begins thusly:

I say to people I am writing a cook book and they ask if it will tell how to make a cake with the new better-than-butter shortening and how to use all the latest dehydrated wonders and if there will be a set of rules showing the vitamin superiority of parsnips over nectarines… and when I am asked further if I think that this is right time to bring out a work unconcerned with the marvels which science has placed with such a flourish on our postwar plastic kitchen tables, I can speak up with a bold and certain yes.
When, a decade ago, I brought out the collection of traditional American recipes which forms the nucleus of this book, the regional cooking of the USA had been exploited neither by metropolitan gastronomes nor by harried writers in search of the picturesque.

Even with the advantage of 20/20 hindsight, I couldn’t have said it any better myself.
The concern is not that American cuisine will disappear, it has long been buried under a pile of individually quick frozen chicken wings, the concern is that it will be completely forgotten and that Americans will have to continue living like Hale’s “Man Without a Country” aimlessly drifting from port to culinary port with no food to call their own, nor anything to add to the international landscape.
American food is not, from a white person’s perspective, some exclusive, totally indigenous and unique cuisine. Risotto would not, by most standards, qualify as American but it has history in this country. Yet Hibbens gives a recipe for risotto “as prepared by the Italian housewives of rural California”. It’s prepared with saffron and mushrooms and is smothered in giblet stew, which is essentially gravy. And what’s more American than gravy?

Portland suffers from culinary hubris. Everyone is an expert on such diverse topics as “How to properly share dishes when they are served in a small plates format” to “Which northwest beer is the bitterest, in terms of ibu’s”. In contrast, in my hometown of Cincinnati, it seems that people are content sticking to just exactly what they know. Primarily, chili with spaghetti, double decker sandwiches and Hot Metts. These they wash down with a variety of non- bitter beers: Bud, Coors, Keystone (hi dad), Hudepohl and Christian Moerlein. Christian Moerlein is for fancy people like me.

But what is the difference between one and the next? How can one tell the difference between Coors and Hudy or one chili parlor and the next. What qualifications does a double decker with deli ham and hard boiled eggs have that set it above the next? And what the fuck is a “Hot Mett” anyway?

If you can’t tell the difference between Bud and Hudy or Coors or …. the list goes on, then how can we begin to respect your opinions on the difference between a good vin de pays Provençal rosé and some tripe from  central california that’s been long forgotten in the dankest, dusty corner of a Trader Joe’s sale bin? There is a difference between one major brew and the next, If your palate is so jaded and desensitized from a daily battering of alpha acids, then you should take a break, or quit drinking beer for god’s sake, liquor is quicker, not to mention cheaper.

If you are one of those unfortunately enlightened and sensitive individuals who can appreciate the crisp, palate- cleansing tang and fine effervescence of an ice cold Budweiser and can differentiate that experience from the more coarsely textured bubbles and faint malty earthiness of a Coors Banquet beer (I am not here to defend, differentiate or comprehend the subtleties of “light” beer) then perhaps a trip to Ohio is something that you could appreciate.

I don’t think an outsider would, at first blush, notice the glaring differences between the Queen City’s various chili recipes. The heretofore woefully ignorant diner would still be reeling from the shock of the presentation: on an oval plate, over a mound of spaghetti, topped with a medium dice of yellow onions, canned red kidney beans and covered with a generous blanket, nay, a comforter, of feather- shredded mild cheddar cheese. The familiar diner however, is keenly aware of their preference. A little more cinnamon, less cayenne, more cocoa, less grease. Skyline is really spice- forward, a little too much so for my taste. Camp Washington is too fatty, they must use 40% and not skim it. So many of the Greek diners (late arrivals) make it real bland, perhaps they’re still afraid to assert themselves. For my money, I’ll take Pleasant Ridge or Blue Ash over any of the more popular joints. Not only is the Chili in these fluorescent throwbacks well balanced, they make good double-deckers besides.

A double decker, maybe you know what it is, I don’t know, they don’t make ‘em in Portland. It involves neither Ciabatta nor aioli, nor even a shred of mesclun mix. It is simply a sandwich, usually on white bread, that involves two layers of sandwich in one, like some of the more popular club sandwiches. Only in Cincinnati, the sandwich might have ham and hard- boiled egg, Or roast beef and ham, or ham and tomato, or any of maybe five or ten other truly esoteric and obscure combinations of only the finest and most elegant products that money can buy.

This is not to say that all double decker sandwiches are created equal, far from it. I was reminded this past trip of the broad range of possibilities that can be explored with this simple palate. First, the bad (sorry dad). We went to a place called the J&J on the West Side of Cincinnati. Horrible. A sandwich can be large without being grotesque. How much meat do you want in a bite? The answer should be, “less than a quarter pound”. Also, just because it’s cheap deli meat doesn’t mean you need to buy the cheapest.

I ordered a five- way (spaghetti, chili, onions, beans and cheese), I advised Leona to order the Ham and Egg double- decker, add tomatoes. I regret misleading her so. Imagine, if you will, three slices of toasted white bread. Between the top and middle slice are a mess of overboiled eggs (all green around the edge and stinky) and some commodity tomatoes (not that that is necesarily a bad thing). Between the middle and bottom layer is two full inches of salty salty thin sliced cheap deli ham. Like a mountain of processed pork, trying to push up through the top layers of bread and sulfurous egg. Oh, and slathered with maybe four tablespoons of mayonaise. I’m not against any of these things per se (when I’m trying to have a cultural experience), but for fuck’s sake, put it together right.

The chili was that bland sort, the type with no cocoa, cinnamon or  chili powder to speak of, not to mention salt. It wasn’t a matter of some recent emigré family, afraid to offend the atrophied American palate, these were your garden- variety Cincinnati trashers. There is little on a plate that is less palatable than overcooked spaghetti topped with what is essentially boiled ground beef with onions and canned beans and cheese. Disgusting. This last trip I got to have no good chili, so you’ll just have to go yourself.

We went to Columbus to see a friend, a jaded ex- cook turned tattoo virtuoso. Now he makes money putting ink on people’s bodies, which is artistic and pays better than putting food in their bellies. Suffice it to say, he knows food. I got a tat of some delicious looking wild mushrooms, growing on the forest floor, in a ridiculously large caliber … this is not a tattoo blog (hi John). Anyway, we went a couple of places around this capital of Ohio, and we ate well.

We went to a Nuevo Latino restaurant called Barrio. Pleasantly surprised. I didn’t even know they had Latinos in Ohio. More important however, was breakfast the next day. We had already eaten breakfast once at our bed and breakfast. which was, coincidentally, an incredible place to stay and I was curious as to how I was going to fit more food on top of the bread pudding slab of “french toast” and three strips of bacon I had already consumed. Turned out to be not so hard.

The German Village Cafe looked like a slice of real old Ohio, but kind of cleaner. We ordered with trepidation, I had to have a double decker, they had a double decker club. The right ratio of bread to meat to sauce to vegetables, that’s what makes a double decker worth eating. In light of my having just feasted, I shied away from the special, country fried steak, a decision that I regret to this day. It came with The Ohio Triumvirate: mashed potatoes, gravy and green beans. The steak was thickly breaded and fried crisp and perfectly browned. Remarkably tender and thick for a cube steak, maybe it was pounded, not cubed.  My companions couldn’t finish theirs, I helped.

Which brings us to the Hot Mett. It’s not Mettwurst in the traditional sense, which is a cured raw pork sausage that you spread on toast, this is something you cook. I hadn’t had one in years but this trip I ate enough for maybe the next 10 years.

The Hot Mett is a sausage, sometimes a very large sausage, made of pork and beef and some organs and smoked. They come in two varieties “hot” and well… then there’s just plain Metts but who cares about those, the hot is where it’s at. I don’t know what all the seasnonings are, I tried to make some for my wedding feast, to no avail, but it definitely includes garlic powder and chilli flake and paprika, maybe some cayenne too. Hot Metts are available, to my knowledge, nowhere else in the world outside of  a radius of undetermined  length around the Queen City.  Queen City Sausage’s Metts seem to be the most popular and those are what we ate this trip. They aren’t ridiculous, growing up we would sometimes get these “five alarm Metts” that would hurt the nethers for days afterward, never eager to learn, we sought them out at every opportunity, whining, “Mom, I want the five alarm Metts! Why can’t we get the five alarm Metts?!”. But these were good, perfectly spiced, plump, moist without being greasy and just enough burn to keep you pounding those ice cold Budweisers. I hear there’s a family butchery left that still keeps some hogs and makes good Metts. Next trip I’ll hit them up, assuming they haven’t been assasinated by Krogers, maybe bring some back to Portland, show them around to the local meatheads, maybe they’ll learn a thing or two.

If you’re new to Portland (or have the misfortune of living elsewhere in the US), vote democratic, are under 55 years of age and 250 pounds of weight or are, most unfortunately, a vegetarian, you may have never been to Tad’s Chicken and Dumplings. A situation that you will soon need to rectify.

When you enter Tad’s, the nostalgia envelopes your senses like your own mother’s breath on your infant face. The brass, the wood grain, the canvas- shaded table lamps and, most importantly, the red gingham checked curtains. Forget the Sandy River view, those dirty hick children can frolic out of my sight, I want to be immersed in the setting that Tad so thoughtfully envisioned. Okay, so Tad is long dead and the location of Tad’s now was opened by subsequent owners in the 1940’s.

There is a bar, which is fabulous, but is unfortunately manned by youngsters. Some of these youngsters have proven capable, but there is no substitution for experience, or at least the appearance of such. I really wish they would get rid of all those kids and hire some stiff old men who wear bow ties and who know many cocktails but only dispense a half dozen or so. But I cavil.

What’s good about the place is its seamlessness. One is seated courteously, then brought a “relish tray”, which is a silver serving dish filled with raw vegetables and a little paper cup of creamy dill dressing which could use a little acidity and salt. Whenever I see the term “relish tray” on a menu I envision watermelon rind pickles, chow chow and green tomato jam. Alas, I am almost always disappointed. The service is prompt.

I have ordered many things, my favorite is razor clam cakes. Well seasoned, tender and well executed (that is to say, fried), they are the signature appetizer. The fried chicken livers are routinely terrible (what a fucking crime it is). The onion rings are fairly good and the bay shrimp cocktail is (inexplicably) hit and miss.

So skip the appetizers and head straight for the mains. Who needs ‘em when you’ve got a rocks manhattan in your hand anyway? The green beans are standard, you can have as many as you like, and you will like many. They’re not, um, how do you say in your language? al dente. Which I must assume means bland and crunchy. They are, as we say in my language, stewed. With ham.

The chicken and dumplings is very large. It is rich and fatty. It is almost seasoned well enough. Unlike many restaurants in the metro area, salt is on the table. Is this what is meant by the colloquialism, the salt of the earth? I remember sitting down to my first meal where a salt dispenser was not in evidence, it was at a restaurant called “Mint” (capital M, lower case m? the website makes it unclear. This sounds like a job for my wife). What was certain was that the food required salt.

The dumplings are dumplings. They are steamed, they are heavy, they are white. They make an excellent accompaniment to gravy. The fried chicken is also good. It lacks the colonel’s secret blend, but who can compete with the Colonel of the Food Scientists? Certainly not I.

In summary, if you ever find yourself out on the Old Columbia Highway near Troutdale, hightail it to your nearest KFC. They have a seven piece meal deal going on right now for ten bucks or something like that. They don’t have drinks, or ambience, and the clientelle and staff are largely ignorant and/or addicted to drugs. But they have managed to, through the genius of food science, transform chicken feces into an incredibly crispy, deliciously spicy, fried nugget that, when dipped in honey mustard sauce, resembles fowl in flavor.

I remember a certain variety show from the early 80’s on PBS called “On TV”. Nobody else, except my own family, seems to know what I’m talking about. On this show, there was a chef guy who in retrospect probably wasn’t very good, but he was my hero. His name was Chef Tell and he made all sorts of (to my young eyes and palate) exotic and fancy foods. I remember Shish kabob was a favorite. I begged my mother to make the food that Chef Tell made. I wanted sirloin tips skewered with cherry tomatoes and peppers so badly I could taste them. Chef Tell probably served them with rice pilaf, as cous cous was probably not yet available in this country.
I don’t remember liking Julia Child, but apparently she was a childhood favorite as well. I do remember buying my mother a copy of “The Silver Palate Cookbook” in probably 1987. I don’t remember ever once having “Chilled Shrimp and Cucumber Soup” nor even “caviar dip” (which includes cream cheese). This book now sits on my shelf, and I’ve never prepared any of these dishes either. My closest brushes with the “fancy foods” of the eighties were lobster (from Red Lobster), chicken liver paté, and medium- rare T-bone steaks with my grandfather. Come to think of it, he ate more like the sixties.
I thought that my chances of regularly enjoying the Yuppie foods that graced the tables of the cognoscenti, the Seavers, the Keatons, The Strattons of my childhood had passed into obscurity. I mean I’m not gonna cook that shit, I had the ideas beaten out of my conscious will through years of working in more “contemporary” restaurants (a thoughtless position that I’m strongly reconsidering).
It didn’t really occur to me when I saw it that it would dredge up so much nostalgia, but I knew what type of restaurant it was at first site. I knew from the font, from the first time I gazed upon the metallic geo-scrawl of a nameplate that graced the walls rising above the heavily foliaged veranda. This restaurant is a relic. The type of place that might unabashedly serve cultivated mushroom caps stuffed with seafood and bechamel, or a fancy stuffed baked potato, or a molten chocolate filled cake. I always knew that I would someday eat at Perry’s on Fremont.
And what awaited us on that patio was exactly what we might have expected. Families, the men in rugbys and polo shirts, the women in conservative floral print dresses, kids in their easter egg colored gear, laughing under a giant Japanese maple (these people knew it was cool before it was really cool). The bar looked like a pickup lounge for Tom Selleck or Jack Lord, funky and Modern (note the capital M). I had a Manhattan, Leona had the “Champagne Perry” both truly wonderful, the Manhattan large and strong, the Champagne Cocktail bracing and refreshing. The menu informed us that the owners had previously owned a burger joint further up the road and that they had opened Perry’s in 1984, the same year The Police released Synchronicity.
I had the burger of course. It seemed to be their speciality.  Only one burger was offered, with blue cheese and bacon, it seemed unproductive to squabble, and weren’t fancy burgers invented in the eighties? It was delicious. The meat was hardly pattied, formed would be a better verb, the result was tender beyond my realm of understanding. The bun was… 80’s, soft, toasted, large, yeasty. What more could I want, toasted onions?
Leona, at my urging, had a salad that included asparagus, chicken, hard boiled egg and lemon vinaigrette. It was the quintessence of simple and modern. Needed salt and acid, yet perfectly acceptable.
I was passing out by dessert, on account of the five shots or so of whisky I had consumed. But Leona insisted. So I chose, the molten chocolate spice cake. What a revelation. So, this is what the college professors, the marketing exec’s, the TV advertising account representatives of the 1980’s were missing at their dinner parties. And probably still are. Asparagus, chicken and eggs found what they were looking for, were completed by: warm, runny chocolate and spice.
Think what you like, the ground work for “cuisine” in this country was laid in the nineteen eighties. Yuppies have become (to me anyway) the butt of every joke concerning nouveau riche pretension, but a friend of Leona’s put it best, “the yuppies were seeking authenticity”. Authentic to what, I honestly don’t fucking know, but my nostalgic yearning has been fulfilled.

So let’s say you live in a city with a lot of bars, and you want to open another one. What would you do? Open another smoky dive in which 20 somethings could acclimate themselves to adult society? A fancy beer haven with the ambience of an office depot? A hipster den, replete with hummus and Bulleit bourbon (the milk and honey of the edgy crowd)? Oh, how about a third floor dance complex for out-of- town “white hats” and the slutty little things that love them? Any of these ventures would provide a steady stream of low- investment, easily- managed income to just about any sleazeball in the country who’s willing to show his sallow, sagging, dirty little face around the place once a month or so. They have two class of prey:  the old and stupid, and the young and ignorant (and probably stupid) .

Why pay $4.75 American for a pint of the same beer that’s available in every convenience store and supermarket in the city? “To meet members of the opposite sex, gangster, to impress them with our sophistication and prowess”. This is not enough, especially for the married among us. I expect something special from a bar.

I want atmosphere. “Lived in” is nice, as is “bizarre”. But the seating needs to be comfortable, and preferably leave me with a similar point of view to that which I had while standing. Simply fancy is not good enough, unless it’s really fancy and has character. Like the Maria Cristina in San Sebastian. If your going to be fancy, I want to feel a little mentally uncomfortable. The fancy bars here are a bit of a joke in that, if your fleece is expensive enough, you’ll fit right in. Now I’m just wearing a flannel amongst the nouveau riche which is only mildly amusing.

But mostly what I want is a truly knowledgeable selection of drinks. By which I definitively do not mean a collection of cocktails made with major brand liquors. A bottle of Grey Goose and some Lillet Blanc doth not a cocktelier make. I don’t care if you have the hoppiest IPA from Vancouver BC to Salinas nor that you make your own “bitters”. Here’s a hint: bitters should actually be bitter, if you infuse vanilla pods into grain alcohol, that’s just a liqueur.

A competent, thoughtful selection of esoteric liqueuers from the farthest flung corners of Europe is a reason to go out. Especially when they come at a reasonable price. If you refuse to pollute or cheapen them by mixing them into clever little “creations” and referring to yourself as a “mixologist”, then we’re speaking the same language. Unfortunately, that sassy little hussy that Mr. nine to five just picked up from behind the counter at the tea shop is not in accordance with my views, hence the demise of Apotheke. Really the best bar in the city for a time. Zwack Unicum, Chartreuse (several varieties), Rip Van Winkle 15 year; they had it all. Not to mention a selection of esoteric, yet delicious draft beers not to be found elsewhere in the city. I like to think that the Pearl District location was their downfall, but I know better. That place wouldn’t have fit in anywhere in Portland.

And now it’s gone. So where to drink? Where to take the friends? Higgins has a nice selection of bottles, but it’s a little pricey for just any old night. Pix, well chosen beers, wines and liquors, they even got the Rip Van Winkle. But it is always so incredibly crowded, totally understaffed and just hipster, hipster, hipster. Enter Saraveza.

My new favorite bar is smartly located in an underserved neighborhood and right next to Portland Community College (these people are savvy) and has just the right mix of up and downscale. Best of all, its never busy when I go in. Even at night one can find a seat. The selection is thoughtful, the service is friendly and the food is good and best of all, it’s  American.

Saraveza serves about eight beers on tap and countless more in bottles. the selection rotates often and usually features a couple of European brews in addition to the obligatory Northwestern IPA and pales. Resin covered bottle cap mosaics in the tabletops, dark wood and lots of really truly vintage midwestern beer paraphenalia make up the decor. The tables sit at bar height, which is what I like, but they got a handful of chairs that are ridiculously uncomfortable (hope you all see this) like they’re just broken. The food though.

The speciality of the house is the pasty. An Upper -Midwest staple, it is essentially a savory turnover. Think mom’s potroast, only wrapped in shortcrust. This they serve with a doctored up bottle of Heinz chili sauce and some house-made pickles, and some ambitious pickles at that (maybe balance the acid little more please?). They also got deviled eggs, the whites being pickled, chex mix, summer sausage with cheese and crackers (just like home) and a trio of Old Country Meats sausages with mustard. Not my favorite sausages in town, but better than most.

So what’s so special? Nothing, except it’s thoughful and that’s rare. And by thoughtful I don’t mean really ambitious or super- creative or niche- driven. I mean details are almost effortlessly orchestrated to give an overall  impression of ease and abundance. No need for homemade “bitters” when you got beer and atmosphere.

Another thing that’s real hip is offal. Well, hip in the, “I had some at Babbo” sense. Not hip in the, “come on over, I got some kidneys on the Brinkman and some Valpolicella in the cellar” sort of sense. That is to say that, for the very, very intrepid foodie, offal is okay if it’s been given a good going over by a professional kitchen, sanctified by the hand of a culinary deity, served in the minutest of portions and cloaked with some other, more benign foodstuff. This is a crying shame.

Not that I’m a great offal cook myself, I do a few things right and I’m a little scared of say, chicken intestines. But that’s just cultural conditioning and that’s just what needs to be undone. Especially if we want to call ourselves cooks, or conscientious omnivores, or logically consistent people.

As far as cooking is concerned, offal is the only group of ingredients that consistently and inherently requires thought and consideration in it’s preparation. As Thomas Keller proclaims in The French Laundry Cookbook:

It’s easy to cook a fillet mignon, or to sauté a piece of trout, serve it with browned butter à la meunière,  and call yourself a chef. But that’s not really cooking. That’s heating. Preparing tripe however, is a transcendental act: to take what is normally thrown away and, with skill and knowledge, turn it into something exquisite.

In his customarily prosaic fashion.

But only in recent times, in this country, has offal had the distinction of being an amuse bouche for the jaded palate. In nearly every other meat- eating society on earth, offal is on the table. Even Jews and Muslims with their squeamishness’ about blood and bottom feeding, eat offal. So what is the fucking hang up?

In my short career as a meat- cutter/ manager, I got an unrestrained, firsthand and unwelcome view of American’s relationship with meat. “Can you pull the skin off that and cut it into 67 one quarter by five eighth inch cubes? that’s what it says in my recipe”; “Um, I’ll have one boneless, skinless chicken breast. Can you put that in a plastic bag and wrap it?”. Or one of my very favorites:

“Hi, do you sell rabbit?”

“Well yes we do mam, it’s right over here.”

“Oh my god, it’s true, you do sell rabbit.”

Me smiling, oblivious, “yep, we sure do. How many would you like?”

“I don’t want any, rabbits aren’t food, they’re pets and that is inhumane and disgusting. I can’t believe you people sell this. You need to take those off the shelf. I belong to an organization….”

“I’ll go get the manager.”

This conversation took place before I was the manager, thank the good lord for something. I could go on and on but that isn’t the point. The point is, oh wait, I have one more that needs telling.

When my brother and I were catering, we scored a demonstration at the local farmers’ market. We had been making pies for the local wine bar and I had rendered out a 25 pound case of leaf lard and canned it for the purpose of making real, traditional pie crust. So we decided to make a strawberry/ rhubarb pie. We made two: one all butter, one butter and lard. I suppose you would have had to be there to imagine all the “ewe!”’s and “no way!”’s (it seriously sounded like a classroom of kindergartners being asked to eat a pile of dead rats) when my brother bravely solicited the crowd, “so who likes lard?”. Apparently not the denizens of the farmers market. Only in America, as Eddie Murphy would say.

So we have established that modern (or are they post-modern? or “after-modern”) Americans, especially in Portland, really hate every part of the animal except the loins and breasts (avian dark meat and mammalian shoulders are quickly being relegated to the category of “variety cuts” as well). And even these lilly white extravagances are regarded with suspicion, like an envelope, lacking a return mailing address, full of a mysterious white powder. And Portlanders think of themselves as environmentalists.

The energy inefficiency of raising animals for food is well documented. And although there are arguments to be made for an alternative system of animal husbandry as an ethical, aesthetically pleasing and efficient way to feed the burgeoning population of increasingly affluent top tier heterotrophs, waste is inexcusable. And waste is precisely what we do when we disregard about 20% of every pig we slaughter and maybe %10 of every cow (those figures are approximate educated guesses, it’s unreal how many greyhounds one must consume before any useful information can be pried from the internet). A pig apparently yields, on average, about 73% muscle meat. Maybe 5% of the rest is digestive contents, and the rest is edible. Seriously, most of this food is thrown away, fed to animals (like livestock) or shipped to China.

It’s especially repulsive when one considers that as recently as the 1960’s offal was considered perfectly acceptable family fare, but by the 1980’s that had all changed. Can you imagine the Seavers sitting down to a nice platter of boiled tongue with horseradish sauce? Yet, as recently as 1972 James Beard was rhapsodizing the glories of skewered lamb kidneys. Which are delicious by the way.

What you do is cut the kidneys (which must be fresh) through the middle lengthwise. That is to say, along the inside split of the kidney bean (you’ll know what I mean when you have them in hand). Remove the white stringy stuff that’s in there with a sharp knife (yes offals do take a little skill) and then cut the halves into half or thirds if they’re large. Soak these pieces in water for a few hours (or milk if your loaded), then drain and pat dry. Cut some mushrooms (Crimini or, if you got ‘em, Porcini, Chanterelles, Morels or any other firm, large, flavorful fungi) into quarters or halves depending on size. Some good bacon will be threaded onto a skewer, intertwined with alternating layers of mushroom and kidney chunks. The bacon should wrap half way around each skewered piece of kidney or mushroom. Season this well and grill carefully (so as not to set fire to the bacon) for 10 minutes or so, while basting alternately with a mixture of white wine and mustard, and melted butter,  until the mushrooms are soft and the kidneys are crispy outside, just pink inside. Serve forth with a salad of endives and radishes, and some good bread.  This is how we eat.

If you don’t do it first, restaurants will beat you to the punch. You’re probably okay with that, but you shouldn’t be. When I began my career as a white trash line cook, flank steak was about $3 a pound. Then London Broil got trendy, no wait, it was already totally trendy, then every two bit hack of a cookbook author in the country published a recipe for flank steak, the Great American Marketing Machine went to work, now you’d be lucky to get a pound of stringy, fussy meat for under $12. So don’t wait for others to tell you, just forge ahead. You’ll already be competing with the dogs.

Marrow is people food. Have you ever eaten Osso Bucco? It literally means “bone hole” (don’t you laugh) and refers to the fact that the real treat, the raison d’être of this dish is the little spot of marrow in the middle of the bone, and it should be served with a little tiny fork so you can get it out of there. But how often does that happen? Just ask for a little fork and one gets a reaction ranging from bemusement to utter confusion. Fortunately marrow bones are still relatively cheap, easy to prepare, and can be enjoyed on their own.

The french classic of bone marrow with snails is pretty good, but a little fussy and rich. I like the suggestion of Fergus Henderson, to serve them with toast, salt and a simple salad of parsley, shallot and capers dressed in olive oil and lemon. Cooking them is simple. Have the butcher cut them into 2 to 3 inch lengths (and make sure he’s only giving you bones with a lot of marrow, he thinks it doesn’t matter because you’re going to feed it to the dogs) rinse them off, and roast them in a 450 oven for 15-20 minutes or until the marrow is just soft all the way through, use a skewer. Don’t overcook, as the marrow will just turn to liquid and run out the ends. If you want to get really fancy, the New Professional Chef would have you soak them in a bowl of cold salted water for a few hours to draw out the blood and any “impurities”, then you can apparently push the marrow right out of the bone. Good stuff to garnish a steak with.

Chicken and turkey offals are about the only offals commonly available. Increasingly, these are seen on the menus at trendy izakayas skewered and broiled. I even at some skewered chicken butts at Ping, they were disappointing. As a red blooded Midwesterner, I’m partial to fried livers. As a fussy contemporary epicure, I got a certain method.

Chicken livers, to my mind, need soaking. Salted water works, salted milk is even better. I rinse the livers first, then I soak them for about 12 hours or overnight. Drain, pat them dry and season generously with salt and especially pepper, and roll them in a 50/50 mixture of rice flour and AP flour (rice flour helps make everything fried, crispier). Immediately upon dusting them, shallow fry them in a cast iron skillet, preferably in lard. They cook pretty quick, so you can cook them at a fairly high temperature, just don’t let the oil burn. the livers should be brown and exceptionally crisp on the outside, just a hint of rosiness on the inside. No, I cannot explain why it’s okay to eat chicken livers less than totally gray all the way through. I just know that I can, to cook them any more results in a dry, crumbly mess that is best served to the cat. These I serve forth with a spicy cocktail sauce. In the Midwest, and even out here, chicken livers are generally, flabby and limp and served with ketchup, appealing only to the die- hard who is probably more interested in proving their authenticity, or their virility, than in enjoying their food.

The overarching theme here, as you may have noticed, is soaking. Not all offal needs a soaking, mainly just the internal organs, especially those that process waste. This tames the often strong flavors. and removes much of the bloodiness. On the other hand, aficionados like Fergus Henderson and rustics like Angelo Pellegrini waste little time or flavor with such niceties. I leave it to you. If, however, you choose to bring home a nice boneless, skinless chicken breast for dinner tonight, I want you to think about all that flavorful, delicious skin and bone that, thanks to your squeamish contemporary sensibilities, is being rendered into soap, machine lubricant, pet food, candles, cosmetics and livestock feed right now. Turns out that, on some level, even the industrial complex abhors waste.

Preparing lamb’s kidneys. In reading order: a fresh pile of kidneys, where to cut into them from, the opened kidney showing the white stuff to be removed (there’s a little more under the pale flesh), soaking in a milk brine.

I just got my first negative feedback and I am so excited. Yuppiedouche@Gmail.com suggests that, “You’re an idiot”. I want my fans and detractors alike to know that I am open to criticism and suggestions. But speaking of ground-hugging detritivores, I finally found some Verpa bohemica!

Apparently, the metabolism of this fungus is still not well understood but, according to mushroomexpert.com it is suspected that it is both saprophytic and mycorrhizal at different stages of its life. Saprophytic means detritivore. The meaning of mycorrhizal is fully discussed elswhere on this website. It belongs to the family Morchellaceae  (morel family) and subdivision Ascomycotina  (spores born in sacs called asci, for our purposes however these are all the “weird” looking mushrooms) . So despite the claims to the contrary, the Verpa is closely related to the morel.

For the longest time I, along with everyone I know, labored along under the illusion that this was a poisonous mushroom. All “false morels” are supposed to be poisonous. According to David Arora’s “Mushrooms Demystified” the Verpa bohemica should be consumed rarely, in small quantities, with caution, if at all. And I would certainly recommend that you treat it as if it were of “unknown edibility” the first time you try it, as prudence would dictate. Not all people are able to consume all mushrooms. I would, however, never have thought to gather this one for the table if it weren’t for the fact that last year, a bad year for morels here in the Willamette Valley, it started popping up in farmer’s markets and restaurants started buying it. At first, I was shocked. Then one day I asked one of the more well-known commercial mushroom harvesting outfits at the farmer’s market about it as I didn’t see any at his table; morels were becoming more ubiquitous at this point. His response, “more people get sick from Morels than from Verpa”, and he seemed none to happy that I had questioned the integrity of commercial mushroom harvesters. So this year, cooks started putting up pictures on my facebook club “Pacific Northwest Mycological Club” of their Verpa harvests and saying, “the flavor is like a morel” and I thought, “I’m gonna go get me some of them”. And so I did.

We (Leona and I) found them growing under some cottonwood trees near the Columbia River, amongst a tangle of Himalayan Blackberry. As so often happens with these things, all the easy- to- get- to ones trailside had already been gone over by a very thorough individual with a sharp knife. Of course it was pouring and I was in flip- flops, my boots having previously gotten thoroughly soaked.

Prudence advises us to try new mushrooms with caution, whether or not they have a reputation. David Arora advises us to always cook all members of Morchellaceae. So I did. I split it down the middle lengthwise and cooked it in a cast iron skillet over a high flame. A little oil to prevent sticking and a little salt to move things along. This is true of most cookery and most mushroom cookery, salt at the beginning of the process, this draws out the water which is necessary for the vegetable to really begin cooking. The mushroom first turns flaccid, this is not a sign to stop cooking, one must be brave and forge ahead. When the mushroom has released moist of it’s excess water, which takes a while as it is between 80 and 90% water, then it will begin to brown. Many people tell me about how they don’t like this or that mushroom because it “tastes like slugs” or is “too slimy”, as if they alone do not enjoy the consistency of raw gastropod. The rest of us just relish it. The problem is in the cookery. It is not a young snap pea, nor a stalk of asparagus. The fungi are more closely related to meat, both in flavor and tissue makeup, than they are to tender spring vegetables. Sure, a Porcini may be consumed raw, as may a meadow mushroom, Agaricus campestris but Cantherellus, Hydnum (hedgehog), Pleurotus (oyster), Verpa are best hammered as they say in the professional kitchen.

The next evening I roasted them with garlic (garlic added at the end of the process) and served them forth with our usual salad: curly endives tossed in garlic/anchovy/red wine vinaigrette and dusted with a generous blizzard of parmigiano. This was good. The next evening however, grilled next to a simply seasoned fryer, was not so good. Robin was over too and no one finished their mushrooms, they tasted… spoiled. Like decay. So, my recommendation is to eat your Verpas fresh.

This concludes my tirade on mushroom cookery. If you would like to know more I suugest reading Angelo Pellegrini’s epilogue to the 1970’s edition of The Savory Wild Mushroom. Especially the part where he rages that “the mushroom hunter rises at dawn and wears his shirt inside out. To ask why is to ask why fire burns.” That part always cracks me up.

And if you have some constructive criticism, I’d love to hear it. If you want to talk shit on the internet under an assumed name, tell me where we can meet, it’ll be like an online date. And you can talk shit to my face.