Cooking With Ideas

Eataly Chicago

No, the titular terms are not misspelled. Eataly is a deliberate allusion to . . .Italy. (I know, not exactly surprising.) And, it is also (again not surprising) emphasizing the notion of eating. Modified by Chicago -- aka the Windy City -- this is all about a food emporium at 43 East Ohio Street in the city. 

Eataly is, kind of, a grocery store, if by grocery store you mean department store of food and food-related stuff circling around restaurants or eateries of various sorts. In the case of Eataly Chicago, you can buy produce and charcuterie (the best dry proscuitto I have ever had), cheese, fish, meat, pasta, olive oil (too many kinds for me to even consider listing), cooking utensils, chocolate, gelato, drinks (alcohol related and not), and. . . well, loads of things from Italy. And, the dining establishments range from a fish place (complete with oysters), a meat venue (where I have eaten twice -- see below), a pizza place, and more. Plus, and very importantly, 50% or so of their desserts are gluten free. Goes to show you -- the term gluten free does not mean "Serve me roughly chopped fruit on a plate." 

Eataly veers between wonderfulness and overwhelmingness. It is right there at the intersection of way too indulgent and. . . just perfect. (With two minor exceptions. First: I actively dislike their women's room. It is too small, kind of grungy and unpleasant. And, for some reason I am cold all the time when I am at Eataly. And, this was before the outside temperature plummeted.). 

On eating in: well, it is kind of noisy, but nowhere near the Purple Pig level of chaos or waiting (a place with perfect food, to be honest and a nice bathroom, so they are clearly not mutually exclusive.) In both cases that I have eaten at Eataly, I have dined at the meat restaurant. Here's what I shared each time and a few comments:

*Slow braised short rib -- I think braised in barrolo. Ok: this was (to quote the person I dined with) "to die for." It was dark, melting-ly chewable, and tasted exactly like I imagined. I have a vague feeling we ordered a kale salad-y thing with it, which as you can tell, left little impression, especially sicne I can still imagine every mouthful of the kale salad at . . . Purple Pig. We drank lovely brunello with it, and that, too, was perfect. 

On our second visit, we had two dishes: (a) polenta with tomato sauce and a poached egg (which was absolutely splendid, even though I am still just a little squeamish about poached eggs); and (b) a daily special that involved sausage, lentils and roasted grapes. (The sausage was pork and porcini; the roasted grapes were really odd and wonderful.) I had a very inexpensive (for Eataly) wine which went perfectly and the brunello was there at the counter too -- being drunk by my partner.

The brunello is worth the $24 a pop, though my $10 glass of wine was really really good. The overall cost feels high if you think you are eating in a grocery store, not so bad at all if it is a restaurant. 

A few other things: I bought two very cute little cans of olive oil on the first trip. Worth every penny to have two that taste so dissimilar. The cheese and meats we bought were . . . the best ever. I bought a few hard candies and fruit jellies on my second visit. They lasted very little time -- and tasted very good. 

All in all, I like Eataly. It might wear off. But not soon. Not, at least, 'til I go to a class or . . . try some of Lidia's favorites. (She tempts me more than Mario. . . ) No clue what I am sayikng? Check out the Eataly website in general or here.

 

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The Culinary Imagination

The book reviewed here was not obtained for free. I bought it. And, I am glad I did. Why? At least two reasons: I like Sandra Gilbert's work -- as feminist, as a thinker about and with death and elegy, and more. So, I was intrigued enough to buy this in . . . gasp . . . hardback . . . at my favorite (our favorite) stress reliever in Chicago, the Seminary Coop Bookstore. If you do not know her, you should. (Check out her website here.) 

I have read some of her prior work -- knowing her as feminst critic and as I worked myself on death and moring finding her struggles with that as an intellectual matter and a lived experience both moving and helpful. And, as readers here know, I love to read about food. So, a book that explores that very thing -- how we read abotu food, and how we have read and written about food, seemed just right. Sometimes, these turn out to be turgid, and not fun or not thought provoking. Gilbert is fun, thought provoking, has read a lot of things I have read in terms of recent foodie lit of various sorts (I had never heard the term "foodoir" til I read this book -- a term for foodie memoir), and knows an enormous amount of literature I have never encountered, some quite dandy recent poetry, much philosophy both ancient and more recent, and lots of stories and novels. I learned from this book. Perhaps it is not surprising that in her retirement Sandra Gilbert lives in Berkeley -- a foodie delight and an intellectuals delight (with loads of wonderful bookstores). And, like many of her peers, retirement seems to mean little, as she goes on producing works that are meaningful and important. 

A few specific tidbots to ensourage you to go out and purchase your own copy: 

1. For upstate NY types: she does mention Wegmans. You will only notice this if you already love wegmans, but it does remind you that Gilbert was educated at Cornell and continues to have ties to the region. 

2. She uses the word feminism. Shocking, I know And, she does not seem to think that all feminists think the same things. I like that. I also like, on a related note, her reflections, across the book but especially when she discusses food and death and again, toward the end, when she looks at her own earlier work anew. This, to me, is hte sign of a thoughtful intellectual modeling growth across a career. Well, perhaps not growth, as that presumes a sort of teleology -- just movement, dynamism, thoughtfulness. Some of the texts she writes about -- including, e.g., Atwood's The Edible Woman, are themselves from the period at the cusp of second wave feminism -- so her reflections on them are in part reflections on change -- and stasis. 

SHe does, of course, though in a bit less integrated way than one might have liked, address the anorexia/bulemia matter, but she resists seeing that as all that feminism has to say about food or, indeed, that somewhat more mysterious (or perhaps equally mysterious) thing -- the culinary imagination. 

3. The subtitle, of course, is "From myth to modernity." Here I would quibble, though who knows who chose the title. Really: this arc is a cliche that has been critiqued regularly. So: enough already. And, it comes with a kind of limp ending, to be honest, where the book kinds of just stops. Hmmm.

And yet, this is a book sprinkled with ideas I like, that felt welcoming and like dining with a thoughtful friend with similar but not identical tastes. It mingles the personal reflection of a hyphenated American with a somewhat tart evaluation of the myth of a uniform american culinary past that fast food tore us away from. It mingles a sardonic look at casseroles made with mushrrom soup with nostalgia for her own particularities. It mingles the literary critic with the amateur consumer of food. I enjoyed the meal. 

 Here is the Washington Post review and here is the Guardian review, just in case you think I am not enough! 

Black Cats and Food

So, I bought a mystery (surprises you, I know). This one focused on a bookshop (again, surprising). And yet, I am writing about it here, on Cooking with Ideas. Why? Because Literally Murder by Ali Brandon mentions food. Ok, maybe all mysteries "mention" food -- but this one deserved a few lines, I thought, even though the "hook" is a black cat and a bookshop and a trip to Florida where the featured cat is being honored -- because of a video of him imitating the bookstore owner doing karate went. . . viral. Hence the cat is known as Karate Kitty (though this is not his "real" name)> 

So: the scene is a cat show in Florida. The characters include a female ex-cop (and her mother who lives in Florida), the bookshop owner and her cat (named Hamlet and called, on occasion, Hammie). The mysteries abound: the cat is catnapped. There are some PETA like events. And, there is, eventually, a murder. Given the Florida locale, condominiums are involved, pools, mini cooper convertibles, and New York accents. Given the cat show, there are tidbits of cat lore sprinkled into the plot along the way. 

Meanwhile, off stage, back in New York, where the bookshop is -- there is construction going on that bodes well for the future of the series (and the bookshop): they are putting in a coffee bar. Not much on this, but if you have lived through construction you know why our hero is repressing any knowledge of what is happening and hoping that the stuffy (though lovable) bookshop assistant, James, is on top of everything. 

What did I think? It is actually a novel, not a peanut book -- which was delightful. So: I recommend it. And, Ali Brandon is the pen name of Diane A. S. Stuckart who authors the Leonardo da Vinci mysteries as well as other htings under other names. So, we have a writer who has not lost every thing in the pursuit of writing a lot. She can actually write. And she does have cats, named, delightfully, Butch and Sundance. Hmmm. I am not a cat person really, but great names. And nice to see someone who knows that black cats are not unlucky. 

The Telling Room

From Zingerman's and University of MIchigan in Ann Arbor to a tiny poor village in Spain, this book is a real trip -- in several ways. The author, Michael Paterniti, a writer by trade, meets a cheese -- yes, that sounds oddly like a romance -- as he exits his MFA program and discovers the so-called "real world." Where does he meet the cheese? In ZIngerman's, before the Ann Arbor institution became a place that we all know even if we have never been there (and indeed even if we have never been to Ann Arbor).  And, what was the cheese? Apparently the world's most expensive cheese, at the time (1990s or so). 

Never able to afford to try it, years later the author goes off in search of the cheese. Or, perhaps, something else, disguised as a search for the cheese. Over years, he spends time in the village where the cheese originated, ostensibly with the cheese's maker, listening to stories (and along the way gaining some Spanish), taking along friends as translators, and eventually a wife and child (and children) who come along for the ride twice. 

The book is a travelogue. Or it is? It is the biography of a cheese or cheesemaker. Or is it? It is what some have called a fooroir (foodie memoir). Or is it? It is a kind of reflection on why it takes  him so long to write (or at least gather notes on) this cheese and cheese maker. It is the pursuit of a mystery -- what really happened to whom when and for what reasons? Whose story matters? The cheese makers? Someone else? The author? No one?

Even at the end of the book, as the author muses about why it took him many many (too many he indicates) years to write, he muses, as well, on what it is all about. I think, he seems to be saying, that the book is about all that it is about. And what is it? (No, I am not mimicking Bill Clinton.) It seems to be life itself. 

As he writes about all of this, we can see his training as a travel writer for I imagined I could see where he was, and smell what he was smelling. I imagined seeing the various oddities he experienced -- drinking wine and seeing a landscape that sounds as much like Mars as Spain. I imagined what it felt like when he finally tasted the cheese, some of the very last of it ever to be available. And, I imagined the smoke and more. 

I think this book is actually about other things as well, most particularly masculinity. The cheese maker, the author, and many of hte other figures one encounters in the telling room are men -- trying, I think, to figure out what it meant -- or means -- to be a man in late twentieth century American and Spain. Perhaps, even the globe, given the globetrotting author. Among the struggles we encounter are: what is our place in history when everyone can remember the damage of the past, but no one wants to discuss it? (Here, Franco's Spain and a Civil War that divided even tiny villages stands in for much more -- history and memory and the impact of past actions). What does it mean to consume -- food, life? What is a story for? Whose stories get told? Why? 

Perhaps obvious, the telling room is more than the room where certain aspects of cheese making occurs. It is where the stories are crafted, told, remembered, and aged. Telling, isn't it? 

The Telling Room, for Paterniti, though is about more, for with his wife, Sara Corbett, he has founded something called this. Here is some information on it. And, its own website. What is it? A nonprofit writing center. How amazing. How utterly amazing. 

Here's the NY Times Review of The Telling Room. And, for the lower brow, the USA Today view, here. No wonder I found it in an airport!  The book is dandy. And, more importantly, the nonprofit is worth your attention. It got mine. 

A Serving of Scandal

Ages ago, a book arrived via surface mail (when did that phrase originate? Hmmm). The book -- A Serving of Scandal by Prue Leith. Not surprising, given the title, the book is somewhere between a romance and a romance, with some resonance with Julie Hyzy's white house chef books. (Yes, I repeated the word romance twice; I simply could not find another term.) Leith's book features a chef turned caterer who has a young son of about 5, named Toby, who serves as the reason for her choice to cater. What makes this somewhat like the Hyzy books is that the caterer works for the Department of Foreign Service. And yes, there are men -- the fascination with a politician, the [SPOILER ALERT] resurfacing of Toby's father, and much much more. One figure -- the somewhat stuck up (if that is an appropriate term) person who serves as head butler in some of hte contexts that our chef is employed seems to have stolen his attitude from Hyzy's characters as well, though here what is often an annoying person is, perhaps, completely lacking in ethics.

Leith's plot pivots on the ways public lives and private passions (to sound just a tad like a soap opera) intersect. Most crucially, the distinction between "gutter press" and press per se becomes worthy of some reflection as events build, as do the unintended (and intended) consequenes in the lives of the not-so-public figures whose lives intersect with politicians and celebrities of all sorts. One does, though, wonder as one reads about whether Leith fully intended to say what I heard: when trapped by a media circus, especially when famous, you are powerless? Strikes me as unlikely. PAssivity on the part of one of the main characters is 

What about the food, you ask? Kate (the chef/caterer) is known for good ingredients and simple fare. This gets repeated throughout the book in various iterations. A part of this is a political implication that some high flying food and high flying politicians are about self indulgence rather than a more poulist approach, regardless of party. Thus the [SPOILER ALERT] good guy prefers simpler fare, well presented and with great ingredients. 

Born in South Africa, Leith is also an author and a television type. She has written her memoirs (as discussed here) and a variety of other books. And, she is a CBE -- if you know or care what that means. What perhaps is most relevant to making some sense of this book -- which, I have to admit, I enjoyed, expeting not to given its somewhat Halrequin-like exterior -- is her own "late in life" adventures. (For details, see this link.) 

Here is a UK review, since it is a UK book! and below, because something is messed up are multiple routes to the same piece on veal. Hmmm. Repetition -- is it a good thing? 

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Put veal back on the menu, says Prue Leith

Put veal back on the menu, says Prue Leith

Put veal back on the menu, says Prue Leith

Put veal back on the menu, says Prue Leith