Gangster of Food

Last night we ate at Spints, a new German restaurant on NE 28th in that trendy little area near Burnside. You may not know about it but the Gangster is a Germanophile. It’s hard to be a Germanophile in an increasingly Franco-Italophillic world. Everybody loves the Italians and the French. They love their food, their wines, the funny way that they talk like zis. Even I love the French and the Italians. My people hail from Alsace and so I get to have two cultures at once, which does not create an internal conflict. What does create a conflict is that, outside of the sausage places, there is really no where to get decent

This is what Over-the-Rhine looks like.

German food in Portland.  Neither is there any good German food in Cincinnati, which is strange because in Cincinnati they like to say Zinzinnati and they have an old neighborhood called Over-the-Rhine that is now a big, decaying ghetto, despite repeated attempts at gentrification.

As a matter of fact, I’ve never actually visited Germany. I’ve been to Alsace and it was awesome and the food was great and Germanic, but not wholly German. The closest I’ve been is the train station in Munich and I tell you, that train station had some of the best goddamn food in the entirety  of Western Europe. They had pretzels and roasted chicken and potato salad with bacon and sausages and all types of hardy braises and beer, large glasses of German beer. Truly the best layover that a weary traveler could hope for. I can’t wait to go back. But until I do, I’ll have Spints.

My Alsatian family.

Spints may be the first restaurant in this city, maybe the whole west coast, to take German food seriously. Everyone gets to do a “take” on French or Italian or Japanese or Thai, but bloggers and “professional” reviewers alike get real confused when they go to a restaurant where the cooking is rooted in the German aesthetic but serves items outside the predictable pretzel, fondue, saurbraten formula. I’m not confused, these are my people.

We started with a friseé salad that had a creamy garlic dressing and smoked salsify. The garlic dressing was plenty assertive; served with anything but a bitter endive it would have been aggressive. The smoked salsify was cut into little batonnetes and provided the perfect punctuation. I will say that, when I tried a piece of salsify without salad, the smokiness took on that acerbic quality that a vegetable can take on when it is aggressively smoked. I might have noticed in the context of the salad too, but I was starving and drinking fast.

Then als Hauptgerich, I ordered the pork shnitzel which came with a little cabbage gratin and a sherry butter sauce which I will not here refer to as a beurre blanc. She ordered the brisket Pelmeni which turns out to be a sort of ravioli. Imagine wrapping a spaetzle around a beef forcemeat. That’s a Pelmeni. They are delicious, although these were a little over-salted. Nothing a gangster like me couldn’t handle though.

The schnitzel was tasty, not as tasty as the cabbage gratin but tasty nonetheless. It could have benefited from a little more pounding; slice it thicker and pound more. The butter sauce was well executed but the sherry was a little assertive for this guy.

For desert we shared a ricotta/ chocolate layer cake. delicious. It could have been at room temperature to be more delicious.

The beer selection really shines here. I had an Upright Rye and a Heater Allen Dunkel. I then had some Cynar with dessert.

What else really shines is the atmosphere. The owner seems to have done her own interior design, blasphemy in the age of hyper-specialization and questionable “services”. The lighting is the same throughout. Believe it: at the bar we ate under the same frosted white globes as any of the roughly seventy five or so other patrons at the restaurant. I despise the trend that requires a restaurant to have at least ten different types of lighting; it is the height of pretension. The furnishings are simple and sturdy.

What’s great about Spints is that they take an underappreciated cuisine seriously enough to play with it. It’s so commonplace to do a “take” on any other cuisine in southwestern Europe. For fuck’s sake, there isn’t anything but “takes” on Spanish cuisine (which should be a post in the very near future). German food is treated largely like the bucktoothed, knock-kneed orphan of anything worthwhile, which perhaps explains more about why I identify with it than my provenance does. I could as easily call myself French, but that would be too conventional.

I read this article the other day by a real nice sounding lady named Charlotte Allen. She wrote a piece in the LA Times called: “Keep Your Self Righteous Fingers Off My Processed Food”, which is a real mouthful of a title. Maybe she could have said something like: “Please Refrain From Your Gastronomic Sanctimony”. That mightn’t have meant anything to her readership.

Anyway, the article was basically about how all the social critics are a bunch of assholes who should really stop saying bad things about our society. Specifically, she feels that when people say, “cheap mass produced goods are bad for people and the environment and the world in general”, what they are really saying is, “pony up, poor people, for yours is a life of sloth and greed.” She then goes on to liken Alice Waters to Marie Antoinette, which makes Michael Pollan, I don’t know, Mao Tse-tung maybe.

People like this thrive on a bad economic climate because then they get to start screaming from the podium “You SEE! You see what all these high-fallutin, college- educated, liberal elites want from you. They want to take away what littles you still got!”. They never put two and two together to come to the understanding that the consumer economy, the economy obsessed with collecting more stuff at the lowest possible price, is hastening the annihilation of the domestic manufacturing sector. The result being a downward spiral in the quality and compensation of jobs available for regular people and massive consumer and the government debts which helped cause the economic downfall in the first place.

If you love this country then you should be willing to put more of your money into it. Every dollar you send to southeast Asia for an unnecessary gadget, every penny that you send to South America for out- of- season fruit, says to the American producer of quality goods: “Why don’t you take a fucking job at Walmart?”.

What you pay is directly correlated not only to what you get but also to what the people who make the stuff get paid. If you pay more for food, the farmer makes more. If you pay next to nothing for huge gobfuls of garbage to shove in your face, then the producer is making very little on the pound and must produce many more pounds in order to stay afloat. When what you pay for is heavily processed, the primary producer gets even less, the processor takes the lion’s share.

P.S.
I gotta write one more about gadgets before all my gadget- happy friends disown me. Then I promise we’ll get back to eats and pictures of good eats. I just gotta get this craziness outta me first.

Dear Delusional Right Wing Zealot,

In your righteous zeal to condemn anyone, no matter how poor, how desperate or hopelessly victimized as a serious threat to the security and wealth of our great nation, you have overlooked one obvious fact: your children are lazy, fantastically lazy. Not just your children, all American children raised on the supple breast of lady liberty are junk food munching, gadget collecting, TV zombies. Not only are your children lazy but you are probably lazy as well, not just physically, which is a great enough crime on its own, but also intellectually.

A lot of you feel like laziness is your right given by god and country and perhaps it is, but the fact remains if we are to consume, someone must produce. From i-phones to cheeseburgers the actual stuff must be there if we are to consume it. For the i-phone, the computer, the flat screen, the navigational system we can look abroad. To Africa, the middle east and Latin America for the raw materials and to the Far East for the labor. Behind every retailer, ad executive, public policy coordinator and computer programmer there are thousands of miners, sailors, oil rig operators, chemical plant workers, and manufacturing plant laborers providing the stuff that keeps them doing their thing. These people are generally located in areas where local economic and political factors conspire to keep their wages low, which is good because, who would pay even more for an i-phone?

The other thing that all these busy professionals need is food and this brings us to the cheeseburger, the actual food of which I am a gangster. Food is more complicated because it requires land to produce and land does not transport as easily as a Brooks Brothers clad VP does. Food is also bulky, relatively cheap and perishable. So the fact remains that we still need to produce at least some of our food here in the United States, because we have a lot of land. And a good climate and soil and so forth. The only thing we don’t have a lot of is people who are willing to work at wages that are low enough to restrict their access  to spacious and comfortable accommodations as well as good food and i-phones. Also, you can’t afford an i-phone if you spend all your money on food, so it has to stay really cheap. Artificially cheap. And seeing as your sons and daughters aren’t lining up to pick tomatoes in the summer in a swamp in the middle of Florida in order to earn little spending money. And seeing as the urban homeless aren’t hitchhiking down to Greeley, Colorado for the opportunity to wade around in a pool of beef blood and feces while hacking pieces of limbs off of dead beasts moving by at a speed so breathless that limbs of the living beasts are sometimes inadvertently severed. Shit, we can’t even get enough idealistic college students to head on down to Napa for the fall grape harvest for the kind of money they pay. We need to find someone else to do this dirty work because we still need to eat, and we need to eat cheap.

It wasn’t even the Latinos who came up with the idea, American meat and poultry producers came up with it way back in the nineteen eighties. You see, chicken farming is far from the idyllic, All American, pastoral mythos so winsomely evoked by the Perdue chicken farms label. As it turns out it is one of the most vile and contemptible jobs in this country. Anyway, I’m not Eric Schlosser so I’ll leave it at that. It will suffice to say, your kids ain’t gonna do that shit for too long. So the chicken producers came up with a great idea: seeing as the brown people to the south of us were living in increasing abject poverty due in part, to American economic policies (see: farm bill), why not advertise in the local papers down there for some labor? After all, after your generations- old corn farm goes belly up because the price of corn on the world market is such that you need 5000 heavily fertilized, intensively irrigated acres and a government subsidy just to pay the mortgage, what better next step in life than to move far away from your family and friends to a country where you don’t even speak the language and the locals refer to you alternatively as spic, greaser or frijole to earn peanuts for inhaling toxic quantities of ammonia gas?

I just think maybe, at the very least, we shouldn’t give these people such a hard time. Maybe we shouldn’t blame our pretty princess problems on the most put upon and vulnerable people in our land. You think rounding up all the spics and sending them back down south is going to solve even the most marginal unemployment rates? Do you really believe that, if we were to somehow rid ourselves entirely of the “brown menace”, that IBP and Tyson and Smith foods would just up and go to the cities and start offering all- comers decent wage jobs in safe and respectable facilities and your kid would go on down to the local slaughterhouse and get himself a job so he could learn the value of hard work in that year before college or on summer break?

The attitude became unbearable as I was listening to an account on the BBC the other day that described modern day slavery going on in this country right under our noses. Apparently, some “food producers” for lack of a better term, have been using threats of violence, intimidation and coercion in order to prevent their laborers from leaving the job. Not only that but they were extorting them by charging outrageous sums of money for ordinary, day to day necessities such as bathing under a garden hose. Many listeners wrote in to express their view that they had “no sympathy” for the victims of this modern day travesty of American Values because the victims were “probably illegal immigrants”. Like that’s the fucking issue. It’s not. The issue is that slavery, or anything like it, has been illegal in this country for almost 150 years. And freedom loving Americans should never tolerate this kind of activity by our citizens or on our soil. I thought, “my god the country is collectively stupider and more immoral than I ever would have believed possible”. So you don’t have a job, or your job sucks, your pissed yadda yadda yadda…. go on down to the local chicken factory and ask if you can shovel some shit. If they won’t let you it’s probably because the supervisor, shrewd man that he is, can look in those dull eyes of yours in that fat white face with that shit eatin’ grin and see the laziness written all over it.

Sincerely,

GOF

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:

1. 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.
2. Cut your potatoes into even french fry shapes, battonet in french, and don’t try to make them too big. Smaller is better.
3. 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.
4. Drain off the water and dry the potatoes as you wish to fry them.
5. 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.
6. 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 surprised that some of you haven’t killed yourselves from shame.

Fusion cuisine is ridiculous. I think it’s practitioners think that they’re “transcending cultural barriers” and that “flavors exist without contextual association” which are infuriating pseudo- intellectual sentiments. To be perfectly honest, the gangster doesn’t even know any proponents of fusion cuisine, 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; I 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.