• No categories

Without Reservations

The fix

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com


For a longtime pastry chef, Emily Luchetti holds notably clear-eyed views about dessert. The sweet course, she writes in the introduction to her new cookbook, Classic Stars Desserts (Chronicle, $29.95), "is important for our emotional well-being and tastes better when we don’t feel guilty about eating it." To assuage this guilt, we must accept that "we cannot eat desserts all the time" (let alone start meals with them, and yes, you got the memo). We must also keep ourselves in some kind of shape and eat what she calls "healthful" foods — the usual suspects here: fruits, vegetables, low-fat protein, and so forth. With life in the proper balance, we can reward ourselves for our restraint and moderation with the occasional fix of blueberry pie, knowing that, as Luchetti says of herself, "I am more apt to stick to a healthful diet if I know I can have a treat now and then." (Blueberries, incidentally, are not without nutritional value; even in pies, they offer a rich palette of phytonutrients, including anthocyanins and anthocyanidins, which tend to protect human tissues.)

In Luchetti’s enlightened world, intensity, not scale, is the measure of all desserts, since when a dessert "is made with great ingredients and has maximum flavor, you don’t need a huge portion to feel satiated." It also helps to have first-rate recipes, and Luchetti (who has enjoyed long runs as a pastry chef at Stars and, for the past 10 years, Farallon) has a lot of these to offer. I was particularly pleased to find in this new volume the secrets of Stareos, the star-shaped cookies that were a favorite and icon at Stars. (One secret: the filling is made with mascarpone.)

Just as delightful is her cranberry twist on linzer torte, an old Austrian favorite typically made with raspberry jam. Although Thanksgiving is months off, it’s never too early to start worrying about cranberries, which despite their many virtues (including effectiveness as a home remedy for urinary-tract infections) always seem to end up being orphaned at the end of the big meal, valued for their reddish magenta color and not much else.

Luchetti’s greatest-hits book left me with a pang too for Stars, a sensational and imposing place built for the ages yet gone before the turn of the millennium. An ashen fate, yet memories of the restaurant remain surprisingly sweet.

Why a cherry?

-
0

Chili, most of us would probably agree, is beer food rather than wine food — if we are to make such odious distinctions — and that would make a winery an unlikely setting for a chili cook-off. Still, wineries can have their chili-friendly atmospherics on early-summer afternoons; the air is warm and fresh but not hot, and small planes drift through it on their way to and from the Petaluma airport, just a few flat miles away, across the vineyards. That, at any rate, is the view if one is standing on the grounds of Sutton Cellars, which did host such a cook-off recently and does bottle a Rhône-style red table wine sturdy enough to stand up to all the associated meat and spice.

Chili, it turns out, is surprisingly adaptable. None of the four restaurants from the city involved in the cook-off (Nopa, the Slow Club, the Alembic, and Maverick) used a recipe, nor, for that matter, do they offer chili on their regular menus. Yet each entry was strikingly different — one quite spicy, another perfumed with smoke and fruit from a combination of (pre)grilled skirt steak and lime juice, the third friendly in a rather ordinary way, and the fourth devoid of meat.

I liked this last one, from Nopa, the best. Ground calamari was used in place of meat, and with long braising, the cook told me, the flesh acquired the texture of cooked hamburger. More interesting was the deployment of rice beans, which indeed looked like fat grains of rice and are a close relation of azuki beans. Nopa’s chili struck me as being, in its overall effect, a close relation of gumbo, while the lone non–San Francisco restaurant’s effort (from L Wine Lounge in Sacramento) was so thick with pork, duck, and duck fat as to resemble a cowboy cassoulet. That chili was also served with a cumin-and-coriander cherry on top — pitted, of course — for a touch of tasty weirdness, or maybe a nod toward dessert?

There were no desserts, of course, unless you count a block of cheddar cheese that quickly disappeared, leaving behind plenty of forlorn sliced bread. A loaf of bread, a jug — or goblet — of wine, and thou, thou being chili in many guises, scarfed happily at picnic tables while little planes buzzed in the distance.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

A stitch in time

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com


Today’s lesson — do as I say, not as I do — pertains to knives. What I say is what all sensible people say: keep your knives sharp; keep the tips of your fingers bent under the knuckles when chopping, mincing, dicing, and so forth; and, most important, do not rush. I rushed, and I paid, by slashing my ring finger with the 10-inch chef’s knife I had perhaps neglected ever so slightly. The result was a scene of carnage and gore the likes of which I hadn’t seen since the long-ago TV footage of Rockingham and Bundy, plus four stitches. All this, as Sir Thomas More might sadly have said to me — if A Man for All Seasons had concerned cutlery and Indian food — for vindaloo. And the vindaloo was too vinegary, I was advised from across the table. Must tweak the recipe.

It is one of life’s glum facts that collateral damage occurs in kitchens. Virtually every everyday cook I know has a scarred finger or two or (in one case) is even missing a fingertip. Then there are the lesser insults: the spattered shoes and shirts, the spattered cookbooks. I have a large wardrobe of aprons, and I always try to keep open cookbooks away from spatter zones — not to mention open flame — but cooking, like war, is organized chaos, and one’s best intentions can easily go awry when the pot comes to a boil or the minced garlic gently sizzling in the pan starts to smell acrid and you must act in haste.

The injured finger was the bird-flipping one, and while this procedure wasn’t compromised by either wound or stitches (not that I had any public occasion to try, and not, of course, that I would have if I’d had), I did feel curiously diminished. I had trouble signing my name and putting in my contact lenses — even sleeping, that first night, since the installation of the stitches was followed by an extravagant wrapping with gauze and a metal pinch cap that made me feel as if I had been given the finger equivalent of a club foot, an unwieldy mass I could find no comfortable place for and that only stopped throbbing once I’d popped a Tylenol or two. Tylenol doesn’t cure vinegar breath, alas.

Grapes of steel

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com


If the wine gods should decree that I must no longer be permitted any whites, I would weep — but survive too. While it may be true, as Deuteronomy instructs, that "man does not live by bread alone," he — or we or I — surely could make do with red wine only. The charms of red wine are considerable and inescapable, from the gracious lean strength of a good pinot noir to the cherry-and-pepper bouquet of a côtes du Rhône or zinfandel in its prime. Red wine is, somehow, gravid with life itself.

And yet … I am one of those people for whom white wine is not a second choice or second-rate. A well-chilled white for me can have some of the same limpid elegance as a martini — at least if it is a well-balanced white, crisp with acid and properly founded on minerality. The French make this sort of wine better than anyone else in the world, with excellent examples from Sancerre, Vouvray, and Chablis, to name just a few appellations, and if California-made wines in this style are much harder to find, that just makes looking for them more fun.

At a recent tasting of forthcoming Burgundian and Alsatian bottlings, I was reminded of the gold standard, which in this setting (at Masa’s) took the form of a Chablis: Domaine Faiveley’s Grand Cru Les Clos, a beautiful straw-colored wine made as if from grapes of steel. The fruit used is in fact chardonnay, and some of its appley character could be detected amid the sweeping sense of earth and sky — terroir is the French word — that make Chablis and Sancerre whites more alike than not. Although white Sancerres are made from sauvignon blanc grapes, the two districts are quite near each other and produce remarkably similar wines. (Chablis is one of France’s greatest appellations, incidentally, and how the name came to be slapped on supermarket jug wine in this country is a mystery.)

A few days later, I found myself at a sun-spattered winery open house, breathing in the tropical fumes of various California chardonnays — each quite good in its way, if you like that way, the Barry Bonds, unnaturally big, toast-with-butter-and-vanilla way. I found myself wondering: is there a red in the house, even a simple house red?

It’s the environment, stupid

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com


You must be a pretty good orator if you can bewitch a roomful of people who can’t understand a word you’re saying — except for, perhaps, your incantatory "stupido!"s while discussing America’s many foolish agricultural policies — and by this standard Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, is a pretty good orator. He held a media crowd rapt at a lunch recently at Greens, the point of which gathering was to proclaim the advent of Slow Food Nation a year hence at Fort Mason. Dutifully I cheer and huzzah the news, though I continue to think the word "slow" is all wrong for this country. In America, "slow" means "stupid" — or, as Petrini and his fellow Italians would say, "stupido."

"Stupido" — operatic accent on the first syllable — is great fun to say, much more fun than "biodiesel," which seemed to be Mayor Gavin Newsom’s mantra as he addressed the same crowd in its native English. Why, you ask, would the mayor be discussing biodiesel at a food-related gathering? Was he planning to haul away some of the restaurant’s used cooking oil for use in Muni buses? Or was he reminding us of the deeper political tectonics at work beneath Slow Food? Food is politics, and a rising theme in politics these days is the fate of the earth itself.

Newsom, despite the travails of the past few months, looked like one of the youngest people in the room — the man with the most tomorrows in the bank. The likelihood is that most of his political career is still ahead of him, and what does a politician of his age see when scanning the prospect? Crisis, of course, since that is the nature of politics and indeed of human beings, but crisis of a new sort, one in which the livability of this globe and the survival of its inhabitants can no longer be assumed. The younger you are, the more acutely you sense that the consequences of our poor planetary stewardship will make your stay here less pleasant — and maybe to suppose that biomass fuels and sustainable agriculture are important pieces of the same big puzzle.

I love slow food by any name, and I am older than the mayor by more years than please me, but on the matter of ecopolitics: faster is better.

Nuts about wine!

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com


What sort of birthday present do you get for the wine fancier who already has everything: a cellar full of rare and prized bottles, a kitchen drawer with a full complement of cork pulls, a special refrigerator for chilling wine? You might tell yourself that not every wine fancier has everything — yet — but because oenophilia has become such a conspicuous component of lifestyle pornography, of status-consumption culture, the gap between aspiration and acquisition narrows a little every day. If wine in these parts is now a sort of wampum, constantly traded in an informal barter economy, it is still one thing to show up for dinner at somebody else’s house with a bottle of midrange chardonnay or pinot noir and quite another to present the same wine as a gift that’s supposed to signify in its own right.

The situation isn’t hopeless, however, at least for the moment, because at the Ross Valley Winery in San Anselmo, owner and winemaker Paul Kreider has begun turning out half bottles of vin de noix ("wine of nuts," specifically walnuts), a Provencal-style digestif little known in this country. The walnut-infused wine has a portlike presence, with a low center of gravity and some restrained though deep sweetness, but it is a different color and has an extra dimension in the mouth. The color is the easier of the two differences to describe; whereas port is typically a deep ruby hue, the vin de noix looks like a blend of well-aged balsamic vinegar and some kind of winter ale. As for the additional flavor: it is nutty. If there were a dessert version of Kürbiskernöl (the Austrian pumpkinseed oil), it would be something like the vin de noix.

Best of all, for the gift-minded shopper, is the price — $20. That’s not nothing, but it’s a pretty good deal for what you get. The smallness of the bottle, incidentally, adds to the aura by suggesting that the elixir within is potent and concentrated, a drink to be not quaffed but sipped, thought about, discussed, sipped some more.

And in other news, a reader wrote to remind me (apropos of my recent piece on Portuguese wine) that there is indeed a Portuguese restaurant in the Bay Area other than the Grubstake (if the latter even fully counts). That would be La Salette, on Sonoma’s town square. Obrigado.

The pyramid

-
0

While fretting a few days ago about the menace of the $40 main dish, I spoke to my neighbor, who on a recent trip to San Diego had a close encounter with a $63 main course, some kind of veal with truffles. San Diego — not Las Vegas, not New York. She ended up with a $40-something main dish (veal, no truffles), and I went to New York to forage on the lower reaches of the city’s restaurant pyramid.

High-end restaurant food, whether veal or something else, doesn’t just happen: it is built, or cooked, or created, on an infrastructure of more modest restaurants. In these places, far from the lurid glow of the world’s Columbus Circles, cooks and eaters alike educate themselves; expectations are formed and preferences established. While I am not a partisan of the inventive, technique-driven school of cooking that seems to prevail in New York City, I have always found the standard of execution in Manhattan restaurants to be of the highest order. Had, I must now say, for after spending several days grazing in restaurants up and down the West Side, I became filled both with surprisingly mediocre food and with disappointment.

Let us begin by granting conditional pardon to busy-body New York chefs, who after all must spend months working their way around an inconvenience called a real winter. Still, is this any excuse for serving plate after plate of perfectly unseasoned food? At a place called Fairway Café (above the fabulous Fairway Market on B’way at 74th St.), I nearly wore out my salt-shaking hand in the struggle to revive a succession of dishes, beginning with grilled asparagus and a mushroom pizza and continuing to creamed spinach and some linguine with scallops and pesto. At Swagat, a fragrant, crowded Indian restaurant on Amsterdam, it was the same, with the chicken tikka masala sweet rather than tangy. And again at Louie’s, a handsome café with extensive outdoor seating, a big Sunday brunch–with–the–Times service, and a DOA huevos rancheros–style egg preparation.

We were warned beforehand, by an Upper West Side–dwelling friend, that the neighborhood was a dead zone for food. The better places, he said, are all downtown. I came to see his point, but I couldn’t help wondering how good the food downtown would have to be to impress people immiserated by bad food uptown. That is the $63 question.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Eyes on the prize

-
0

The recent news that a food writer from Los Angeles won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism puts us on notice that food writing at its best is an art form – also that LA is a serious food town, loath though we may be to admit it. The southland has access to all sorts of local agricultural bounty, a nearby wine country (in Santa Barbara County), and a polyglot population that represents much of the world. It also has something we don’t have – an international border just miles away, with a genuinely different culture on the other side. This must be massively stimuutf8g.

Criticism is a minor art, secondary and derivative – there must be some larger, primary subject at hand to examine and consider – but its subordinate position doesn’t make it less worthy. Authentic food criticism tends to overcome this limitation anyway, since, handled in a certain way, it becomes a species of social or cultural criticism, a meditation on how people live their lives. As anyone who’s traveled abroad will know, one’s first and indelible experiences of other cultures often have to do with food: what it is, how it is grown or gathered, how it is prepared and presented. If it is true that one feels most American when outside of America, then perhaps it is also true that our industrial-food folly becomes most apparent to us when we are sitting in some cafe in a faraway land, awash in local food habits and practices that are hundreds or thousands of years old, and no one has heard of Velveeta.

The difference between criticism and reviewing is a segment of the border between art and craft, with the former more keenly attentive to wider and deeper meanings. Many of our food-involved locals abide by a credo of living to eat, but because this is true to some extent of every animal on the planet, its meaning seems a little watery to me and appears to involve mainly the hunt for the "best" version of this or that. I have no particular complaint with this, just as I have no quarrel with gearheads or fanciers of pedigreed dogs. But, as with other forms of monomania, it does have a flattening effect, reducing the world to a single dimension. LA is flat, but it isn’t just flat.

Paul Reidinger

> paulr@sfbg.com

The importance of being imported

-
0

If you think of Mateus or Lancer’s when you think of Portuguese wine, then you may soon be thinking anew. Portugal’s food and wines have been overshadowed by those of Spain, its larger Iberian neighbor, over the last generation or so, but the Portuguese viticultural tradition has its roots in Roman times and produces wines that compare favorably with any in the world. The issue at the moment is distributing them to that world – in particular, to us – and that means finding importers.

To judge by the offerings of a recent trade show, Portuguese winemakers aren’t going to have much trouble convincing the public about the quality of their wines nor about their value. I found myself, after rapturous sips of this and that, asking what a particular bottling might sell for at retail in Europe and repeatedly hearing, "2 euros 50" or "3 euros" – in other words, $3 or $4. I would have bought several cases on the spot if I’d been able to, the whites being especially appealing.

At least one wrinkle for Portuguese winemakers who want to sell their stuff here is that there is no restaurant infrastructure to serve as a wedge into public consciousness. Our Iberian restaurants are almost all Spanish, and there aren’t even that many of them; I am aware of only the Grubstake, a Polk Gulch hamburger salon, as an offerer of a full-scale Portuguese menu in the city, and even there you have to know what you’re looking for, lest you end up with a BLT from the regular menu. Some years ago, Stars, in one of its post-Jeremiah Tower configurations, made a point of featuring Portuguese wines, but that program went down with the restaurant.

Perhaps there will be a breakthrough wine, a Portuguese answer to gruner veltliner and albarino. (The Portuguese grow the latter, incidentally, as alvarinho.) I might place a small bet on white wines produced from antao vez, a grape indigenous to Portugal and grown in the Alentejo region southeast of Lisbon. The name looks a bit forbidding to the Anglophone eye – an unhelpful detail in a brand-name culture like ours – but the wines are bright and fresh, with a green fruitiness gently crisped by acid. Wines like these at $3 to $4 a bottle would be too good to be true – but maybe $5 or $6 is feasible?

Paul Reidinger

> paulr@sfbg.com

El pollo greco

-
0

Herbs tell stories, and the association of certain herbs with certain experiences can be specific and powerful. Basil, for instance, is summer and tomatoes, while sage is Thanksgiving and bread stuffing. Oregano? Its strong perfume is the smell of pizza — but it’s also Greek. It is, in particular, the herb that gives Athenian or Greek chicken its bewitching character.

For years I tried without much success to create at home a plausible version of the Athenian chicken that we found so irresistible in Greek restaurants. The restaurant chickens often seemed to have been roasted on rotisseries, and while I couldn’t match that, I did have my trusty vertical roasters, which produced (with day-before rubbing of kosher salt and Herbes de Provence) wonderful Zuni-style roast chickens. My basic theory was to substitute oregano for the Herbes; this worked, but the results were underwhelming, certainly no match for their Zuniesque brethren. Smashed garlic and lemon slices under the skin? These helped a little, but the birds still seemed to lack the sought-after verve.

Of course, there is more than one way to roast a chicken. Roasting says oven the way oregano says pizza, but it need not be so. Let us not forget pan roasting, a near relation to braising, in which the item in question is cooked on the stove top in a small amount of fat or other liquid. I had a time-tested recipe for pan-roasted lemon-rosemary chicken; what if I dropped the rosemary in favor of (dried) oregano? I did: eureka!

Start with an oregano-and-salt-rubbed chicken, cut into pieces. Put the pieces in a large nonstick skillet over lively heat for a minute or two, turning occasionally until they’re lightly seared. Add a couple of tablespoons each of sweet butter and olive oil to the pan, along with a good pinch of salt, a heaping tablespoon of dried oregano, and three cloves of smashed, peeled garlic. Cook for a few minutes more, shaking the pan and turning the pieces. Add a cup of dry white wine, and bring to a boil; reduce the heat and simmer, partly covered, for 30 to 40 minutes, turning the pieces now and then. When the chicken is golden brown, remove from the pan and deglaze with the juice of one lemon. I use a gravy separator for the pan juices, but you don’t have to. Serve the jus on the side and say oompah!

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Assault on batteries

-
0

The urban forager is generally looking for something to eat, but this does not have to be the case. While there is an undeniable pleasure in bringing edibles (blackberries, nasturtiums) home to the table from the metropolitan wild, there is also satisfaction in gathering up rubbish and disposing of it properly. And just as the city is a remarkably fertile place, so too is it rich in articles it would be better off not being rich in.

We have all seen the plastic water bottles rustling in the gutters like autumn leaves — husks emptied of their pricey elixirs and tossed away. They are easy enough to pick up and put in the nearest blue recycling bin, and that was how I started. But once I began to see the gutters as traps for stray Evian bottles, I began to notice that they hold other sorts of trash, less conspicuous but more worrisome. They hold an awful lot of batteries, in particular, with a decided tilt toward the AA size. I would like to think that even blithe people do not make a practice of throwing objects as thick with toxic chemicals and heavy metals as batteries on the sidewalk or into the street, but I seldom travel more than three blocks by foot or bike without finding at least one, often smashed or mangled by traffic.

My little foraging project for the past six months or so (since winter is a bleak time for urban food hunting; the weekday chef’s menus have heavily featured cabbage and broccoli) has been to collect all the discarded batteries I come across and put them in an old measuring cup on the pantry counter. When the cup fills, every few weeks or so, I take it to Walgreens and empty its contents into the recycling pail. Batteries do not belong in landfills almost as much as they don’t belong in the gutters, and by accepting them and sluicing them into the recycling stream, Walgreens is performing a large, if undersung, public service.

My hope is that once people start to notice that yes, there are AA batteries all over the gutters and yes, they can be picked up and recycled, people will pick them up and recycle them. Walgreens stores are easy to find in these parts, and a city whose streets are cleansed of old batteries will be a better city.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

The big town

-
0

From the air, Chicago in late winter looks like a giant crepe sprinkled with crushed peppercorns and minced scallions: a brown flatness textured with bits of black and white and wan hints of green. It’s a cold crepe, of course; you land and you can see your breath, though within a day or so the temperature will have risen into the malarial mid-70s, and the sky will be filled with purplish green, swelling clouds right out of The Wizard of Oz. Summerish heat in March suggests (apart from global warming) the imminence of tornadoes, to be followed by a blizzard, though not mosquitoes.

One evening we wandered west through River North to Scoozi, the Rich Melman–Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises restaurant that turned 20 last year. The place was something of a pioneer when it opened; the neighborhood was still slightly sketchy, and the setting — a remade temple of heavy industry, with an enormous barrel ceiling supported by wooden cantilevers so as to leave the dining room clear of pillars — gave some sense of what imagination could do with grand old spaces that hadn’t been built with food and restaurants in mind. I thought Scoozi was spectacular when I first visited it, soon after it opened, and it seems to me none the worse for more than two decades of wear; in San Francisco, only LuLu begins to compare in the category of warm spaciousness. Even Scoozi’s big, red, and curiously flattened tomato still hovers, cigar volante–style, above the front door.

The metro-rustic food too was — or is — as good as I remembered it. We particularly liked the grilled artichoke hearts, which seemed not merely to have been marinated in lemon juice and garlic but to have been braised or parboiled in that combination before hitting the barbie. Clue: the potent pair was present throughout the vegetables, making the flesh tender, moist, and fragrant, rather than being just a surface phenomenon. And I am not particularly an apostle of artichokes.

Chicago is underrated as a food city, as in so many other ways. Its reputation is one of rust, Al Capone, Vienna beef sausages, and the clattering El — but that is the old city. The new one is, like our own, a forest of cranes and high-rise apartment buildings whose residents want something interesting for dinner. Excuse me, did someone say crepe?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Still Waters

-
0

If you come away from Thomas McNamee’s riveting new book, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution (Penguin Press, $27.95), not sure whether you’ve just read the story of a woman or a restaurant, do not panic. You have read both, the twist being that the two tales are so embraided as to become one. The book makes quite clear that Chez Panisse as we know it would not exist without Waters, and it makes equally clear that Waters as we know her would not exist without the restaurant she helped launch in 1971.

"Helped" helps remind us that Chez Panisse is not and never has been a one-woman show. Waters has long been the restaurant’s public face and spiritual guide, but from the beginning Chez Panisse has been a family affair with a distinctly nomadic flavor. People — chefs, servers, investors, bakers, winemakers, managers, others — have pitched in as needed, sometimes wandering off for a time, only to wander back, usually to the mutual benefit of both wanderer and restaurant. Yes, Virginia, there are bedouins in Berkeley, and they look out for one another as well as for the worthy institution to whose vitality and fame so many of them have contributed.

McNamee’s factoid that Chez Panisse did not become profitable until it was nearly 30 years old would be more surprising if it were not widely known that the restaurant wasn’t started to make money. Its deepest impulse was and is to reconcile the aesthetic and moral — to square the joy of eating with the responsibility we all bear for minding the health of our small blue planet. This is as unradical a proposition today as it was radical 35 years ago. The indifference to money, on the other hand, while hardly remarkable in Berkeley at the end of the 1960s, seems almost otherworldly now, after more than a quarter century of supply-side evangelism and CNBC.

Waters, of course, is also an evangelist, a bringer of good news. She tells us it is possible to eat well in the company of loved ones and to know, at the end of the meal, that the circle of life on earth has been strengthened, not frayed. We might not have eaten that particular meal at Chez Panisse — but if we did, lucky us.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

It’s the chalk

-
0

When we think of white wine, we think of many things — Brie, student-faculty mixers, summer picnics sur l’herbe, grilled fish — but chalk is generally not among them. Chalk would not seem to have much to do with food and drink at all, except as a means to write the day’s specials on those little blackboards restaurants sometimes hang on the wall or prop up outside the front door. Yet chalky soil is intrinsic to a certain sort of white wine the French have long been masters of and we have struggled with, and I have often wondered why, until reading John McPhee’s riveting piece "Season on the Chalk: From Ditchling Beacon to Épernay," which ran in the New Yorker‘s March 12 issue.

McPhee is our greatest living poet of geology. His 1993 book, Assembling California, had much to say not only about the formation of our state but about that of the west of North America generally — in particular, how young everything is here relative to Europe. The expressions New World and Old World turn out not to be purely sociopolitical. Chalk is old, and it is really not found here; even Chalk Hill, in Sonoma County, consists not of calcium carbonate (like true chalk and its near relation limestone) but of volcanic ash. Northwestern Europe, on the other hand, is streaked by a huge band of chalk, which runs from the downlands south of London to the white cliffs of Dover, then under the English Channel into northern France and the Champagne towns of Reims and Épernay. From there the band curves around the Île-de-France and swoops into the Touraine region of the Loire Valley, where many wonderfully dry, minerally sauvignon blancs and chenin blancs are produced. There is even a tail-end bit around Cognac.

French champagne experts have often been heard to say over the years that méthode champenoise sparkling wines from California, while good and sometimes very good, simply do not compare to the best of their French counterparts. I have long suspected an element of snobbery here, but the McPhee story suggests that there might also be some empirical reality; "Vines like their feet dry," he quotes an (English) maker of sparkling wine as noting, and chalky soil drains quickly while providing high levels of nutrients. Advantage: France. And England!

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

On grappka

-
0

A small peeve of mine is grappa served at or near room temperature, as if it’s cough syrup. Perhaps I am churlish to complain about tepid grappa when having the chance to order grappa at all is a rare treat; even many Italian restaurants don’t offer it. On the other hand, ice-cold grappa is simply sublime — at least for those of us who find it so — and keeping the bottle stashed in the freezer under the bar doesn’t seem like a terrible burden. Can it be that grappa is widely, if dimly, assumed to be just another brandy, like cognac, and, like cognac, is best appreciated in a lukewarmish state?

I keep my own bottle of grappa (at the moment a moscato distillation, from Italy’s Antica Distilleria Negroni) in the freezer, where it was recently joined by a bottle of Swan’s Neck grape vodka. Grape vodka has been, until recently, a minor curiosity whose center of production was France. Most vodkas are produced from grains and potatoes; grape vodka, by contrast, is distilled from wine. (Swan’s Neck uses French wines made from undisclosed varietals and distills them in traditional copper alembics.) The unaged spirit is something of a cross, then, between cognac (distilled from wine but aged in oak) and grappa (distilled from fermented grape-crush remnants instead of wine but not aged), though its mountain-stream clearness seems to put it nearer grappa on the spectrum of spirits. I find myself thinking of it as grappka.

And how do the two cousins compare? I thought I would find little or no difference between them, but a brief taste test revealed that grappa and grappka can be pretty easily distinguished. The latter, despite its vinous origins, is still a vodka and, even when chilled overnight in the freezer, retains vodka’s distinctive edge, smooth and precise as a just-sharpened chef’s knife. And grappa is still grappa and still has a slightly unkempt bouquet of fruitiness, like that of a neglected bramble patch heavy with berries.

I could not say I prefer one over the other, especially when both are ice-cold. The grappka has a grander pedigree and, while potent, is silken in the throat. Grappa is fierier and maybe a little cruder, as befits its roots as a leftover; it must be one of the world’s most lovable overachievers. For digestif honors, I call it a dead heat.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Currant affairs

-
0

The backs and bin bottoms of refrigerators are known hazmat zones: difficult-to-reach, easy-to-ignore regions where spontaneous composting occurs. Most of us, I suspect, have at one time or another fished a plastic bag from these sepulchral depths and wondered what once fresh but long neglected foodstuff could have produced the black-green goo inside.

The far reaches of kitchen cabinetry don’t generally host this sort of putrefaction, but they are venues for the forgotten bottle of this and overlooked box of that all the same. A few weeks ago, while urgently trolling my clutter of bottles for some mild vinegar — a key ingredient in Mark Bittman’s excellent recipe for vindaloo (see his indispensable volume The Best Recipes in the World for details) — I came across a dusty bottle of Vilux vinaigre de cassis, which I’d bought on sale years ago because … it was on sale.

"Cassis" means "black currant" in French — ergo, we are dealing with black currant vinegar, which is a lovely pale purple color (like that of weak pinot noir) and has a rich, fruity flavor. I’d occasionally made vinaigrettes with the Vilux, but over time the fullish bottle drifted toward the back of the shelf, supplanted by flashier or easier-to-reach newcomers, including a series of bottles of rice wine vinegar. Usually I use rice wine vinegar when making Bittman’s vindaloo (I also use chicken instead of pork; please don’t tell him), but I had managed to run out of it and further managed not to get more in time for dinner. So: a wing, a prayer, and vindaloo with black currant vinegar.

The result was surprisingly satisfying — even better, I thought, than the usual version. Emboldened (and still without rice wine vinegar), I used the Vilux to make a sweet chile sauce for the dunking of lumpia. (A good recipe for this simple condiment can be found in Taste of Laos by Daovone Xayavong.) Again, the result was notably better, with the vinegar’s fruit adding some richness and helping to take the harsh, hot edge from the cayenne.

Naturally this small success set me to searching the nether reaches of the pantry for unsung treasures. Among the archaeological finds: A jar of Harry and David’s muffaletta, doubtless a gift from someone years ago. Strange little cans filled with herb and spice blends, with directions in Italian or perhaps Armenian. No vindaloo mix; that’s still a DIY.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Up on the roof

-
0

During these past six lovely years of Bush and Cheney, one has become almost nostalgic about duels — the calling out of adversaries to settle matters of honor with pistols — even if one or both adversaries should hold high office. But the duel isn’t dead, of course; it’s just the pistols that are gone, replaced in many instances by fanged memoirs.

Walter Scheib and Roland Mesnier aren’t exactly Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, but they are Washington, D.C., figures of recent vintage, they worked together, they plainly did not get along, and now each has published a book of reminiscences that does not flatter the other. Scheib was the White House chef from 1994 to 2005, and his book (with Andrew Friedman) is called White House Chef: Eleven Years, Two Presidents, One Kitchen (Wiley, $24.95); Mesnier was White House pastry chef from 1979 to 2004, and his memoir (with Christian Malard) is titled All the President’s Pastries: Twenty-five Years in the White House (Flammarion, $24.95).

Mesnier’s is the more unintentionally comic performance. He recounts history as a series of elaborate desserts served to the high and mighty. Scheib’s story, while briefer, carries greater significance, for he was hired by Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1994 to make the White House a setting for the best in American food and wine. He stayed on through the first term of George W. Bush, even as Hillary’s culinary revolution was chucked in favor of what Scheib calls "country club" cuisine: hot dogs, fish cooked to death, and lots of beef tenderloin.

Hillary turns out to be an unexpected point of convergence for this pair of kitchen antagonists. Both men respected and liked her, and Scheib, in particular, gives us a picture of a woman who, despite a rather icy public image, understood the broad and deep meanings of food, for human sociability and health as well as for the fate of the earth. Ronald Reagan might have made it his first order of presidential business to remove Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the White House roof, but Scheib, with Hillary’s support, started growing organic vegetables up there. (Interesting factoid: far fewer insects are to be found several stories above ground, so the need for pest control in a rooftop garden is dramatically reduced.)

Memo to Hillary: if you make it, how about an organic rooftop garden and solar panels?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Death drove a cliche

-
0

With the mayor’s race opening up rather unexpectedly, the power-involved now have a little something extra to think about: should I or shouldn’t I, come autumn? I shouldn’t and won’t — though I love autumn — but if I did, my platform would include some provision to the effect that writers who use clichés should be put in prison. Well, not really. As a society, our fetish for putting people in prison is matched (and perhaps exceeded) only by our fetish for objects and acts military. Also, we would not have remotely enough prison capacity.

But reprieve or no from the next mayor, writers should shun cliché — even go to war against it, as the British writer Martin Amis suggested a few years ago. Clichés are cheap plastic doodads from seedy dime stores about to go out of business, and to write in cliché means to think in cliché, and that means shoddily. The cliché is prima facie evidence that the writer has failed to meet the basic obligations of all writing: to have valuable thoughts to impart and to impart them in language that is fresh, original, and alive.

Food writers might or might not be under a special obligation here, but I know that when I, as a reader of a food or restaurant piece, happen upon such phrases as "earned his chops," "finger on the pulse," "came on board," and "cutting-edge" — these are all real and recent examples, by the way, published locally — it’s as if I’ve struck a pothole and a wheel flies off and I hit the guardrail and flip over: the journey is over. One cannot keep one’s attention focused against a fusillade of prefabricated language and autopilot writing any more than one can take seriously a Hollywood set that consists of propped-up facades with a void behind them: a one-dimensional world whose only dimension is obviousness.

Deadlines impose their pressures and deformations, certainly, and it’s possible to defend some triteness as a kind of shorthand. We do all know what these threadbare expressions mean. Clichés also have real value to ironists; strings of tired words can acquire a comic sheen, like bits of kitsch, if placed in the proper surroundings. But there is an art to this, and it is the antithesis of the unthinkingness that propagates the clichés in the first place.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

A gourmet ghetto

-
0

Although Noe Valley has become quite tony in the past decade, the neighborhood’s commercial district seems to be developing a slight case of schizophrenia, at least in the matter of comestibles. On one hand, chic little food shops abound, selling fancy cheeses, coffee, gelato, baked goods, and wine — but on the other, there is an area of darkness at the center of things, on the main drag between Noe and Sanchez streets.

On the south side of 24th Street, we find the corpse of the Real Food Company, which unceremoniously shut down in August 2003. The empty building has lain there ever since, dark and silent, windows papered over. The occasional bit of buzz suggests fresh permits have been taken out or workers have been seen inside, but these are like Elvis sightings. People are becoming inured to them, while the building sinks slowly into slumdom. There are rumors that the building’s new corporate owners plan to tear it down and replace it with something more up-to-date, with housing on the upper levels, but if that is the plan, the powers-that-be should note that it’s already been tried a few doors to the west, with a (so far) conspicuous lack of success: unoccupied apartments above blank storefronts.

Across the way, meantime, Bell Market continues to twist in the wind. Last August it was announced that Kroger, the store’s parent company, had agreed to sell the store (and most of its Cala-Bell siblings) to its former owner. The deal was to close in December. In mid-December, an employee told me that the closing would occur in January or maybe February. My neighbor said she’d heard it would be in March. Now the Noe Valley Voice is reporting (in its February issue) that the sale of the 24th Street store (though not of the others) has fallen through altogether. Details are vague but seem to have to do with the lease term — Kroger’s control of the property lapses in 2009. That’s a pretty tight window for a new owner trying to rejuvenate a business.

It’s possible that someone has plans for the site that don’t include an aging supermarket building and a homely, if useful, parking lot out front. But there is much to be said for neighborhood grocery stores, which, if nothing else, don’t have to be driven to — driving being, in the city, a drag.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

When the lights go down

-
0

Now that our winter festivals have ended, taking their candle-lighting rituals with them, we are left with winter’s deep and early darkness. We are left with it even in restaurants, many of which seem to be increasingly dim and shadowy, and how are you supposed to read a menu in such brown-out conditions? If you’re lucky, your table is set with a votive candle, which you can pass back and forth, like boys in a tree house sharing a flashlight to ogle purloined porn. If you’re luckier, someone in your party might have one of those little Sharper Image squeeze lights that attach to key chains.

If you’re not lucky at all, you just squint and struggle in the gloom and wonder why a restaurant with a mood-lighting fetish would also choose to print its menu in black ink on crimson paper or in gold ink on taupe paper. These sorts of combinations might look very handsome and arty in daylight or under ordinary room lighting, but for some of us they become unreadable when the lights go down. Are restaurant staff testing these objects in battle conditions? If so, the testers must be people in their 20s, people whose rods and cones are still working at peak efficiency. We higher-mileage models can tell you, though, that at some point well before dementia and having your driver’s license revoked, you will find that seeing in dim light has become a challenge undreamed of in your barfly days.

How about menu cards printed in big letters in black ink on plain white paper? If it matters, the paper can have a nice texture or maybe some beautiful border design. The font can even be striking and fancy (though not too much, please!) Such a menu card might turn out to look like an overachiever’s résumé, but at least it will be readable — a key consideration for the people who hope to order from it.

Erratum: a reader wrote to point out that my recent piece about the Portuguese soup caldo verde ("Hot Green," 1/24/07) bungled the translation. "Caldo" means "soup" or "broth" — ergo, "caldo verde" means "green soup." The Latin root "cal" does mean "heat," though, and from it we take our words "cauldron" (for the making of green and other soups) and "calorie," counters of which will find much to appreciate in caldo verde.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Behold, a pale port

-
0

While sipping my way through a barrel tasting last week, I came across something of a novelty: a California chardonnay port. White port isn’t that unusual, of course; the Portuguese have been making fortified wines from white grapes and from red fermented off-skin for a long time. Still, when most of us think of port, we think of a ruby-colored, almost syrupy elixir, a few sips of which makes a lovely after-dinner drink and, with its sweetness, a good substitute for dessert.

The maker of the chardonnay port is VJB Vineyards, in Kenwood. The winery belongs to that class of ultra-chic, ultra-small-production enterprises that sell most of their wine through their tasting rooms and, in some cases, through subscription lists or Web sites (www.vjbcellars.com). VJB’s chardonnay port, Baci de Famiglia, is produced in rather minute quantities; just 200 cases of the 2005 vintage are available. Given this scarcity, the price — $28 for an elegantly slim 375-milliliter bottle — is surprisingly nonstratospheric.

The port is a pale honey-straw color, like a richer pinot grigio. It is lighter and less syrupy than its red cousins (you are supposed to serve it well-chilled) and perhaps slightly less sweet; most red California ports are distinguishable by their pronounced fruitiness and sweetness. I have never tasted Portuguese white port, but I have tasted ice wines from both Austria and Canada — wines made from very-late-harvest white grapes that are allowed to freeze on the vine before being crushed — and I would say they are the nearest relations of VJB’s chardonnay port, both in color and in restrained sweetness. Certainly, many of the great white dessert wines, even those from France, such as Sauternes, tend to be noticeably sweeter and weightier on the tongue. For a chardonnay wine produced in California, the port is noticeably nonoaky, and the bouquet does carry a hint of apples — a natural and attractive characteristic of chardonnay, though one too often muted or lost altogether in the making of the heavier white wines we cannot seem to wean ourselves from.

The port, I was told, would make a beautiful match with a blue cheese from the Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Co. (www.pointreyescheese.com), samples of which were just steps away. A novelty pairing? No, a natural one.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Hot Green

-
0

Kale: what is to be done? Yes, kale has its virtues: it’s good for us (as indicated by its dark green color), it presents a variety of interesting textures, it isn’t too expensive, and it turns up in winter, when our farmers markets are desolate. Still, kale is among the trickier leafy greens to handle. Its flavor — much stronger than that of chard — can put people off, and its texture — much tougher than that of spinach — can result in chewiness if the cook is in a hurry or hasn’t added enough liquid to soften it.

One decent treatment for kale begins with a diced onion and some diced bacon (I use turkey bacon), cooked in olive oil until soft and fragrant. In goes the chopped and still wet kale along with a pinch of salt, and the pot is then covered to promote a combination of steaming and braising. The finishing touch, to be added when the kale has achieved an acceptable degree of tenderness, is a splash or two of good red-wine vinegar, along with additional salt and pepper to taste.

This is a good dish, but I wouldn’t want it every night. A fine alternative is the Portuguese soup caldo verde ("hot green"), which is substantial enough to serve as a main course. Begin with some oil (or butter) heated in a soup pot; add a diced onion (with pinch of salt). When the onion has softened, throw in a clove or two of chopped garlic, stir, and let cook a minute or two. Add a link of spicy sausage (andouille, chorizo, linguica) in chunks; a couple of peeled, cubed potatoes; and four cups of water (or stock or a combination). Simmer, covered, until the potatoes are cooked, about 20 minutes. Puree. (You can do this in a blender or with an immersion wand.) Add a head of kale, cleaned and finely sliced, and another sausage link cut into rounds. Simmer about five minutes more, until the kale and sausage are cooked through. (If your sausage is precooked, you only care that it’s warmed through.) Balance the seasonings and serve. With some warm bread, a green salad, and a bottle of red wine, this makes a fortifying supper on a cold winter’s night. Also, you can warm your hands with the bowls — a nice extra if you happen to live in a badly insulated, freezing house. Anyone?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Silex Appeal

-
0

As the recycling truck hauls away the last of the year’s emptied wine bottles, we pause briefly to reflect. Winter is supposed to be the season of red wine, and this year’s red wines were good — from a fine St. Emilion with the New Year’s Eve rack of lamb to an excellent Groth cabernet with the New Year’s night cassoulet — but the whites, I thought, were at least as distinguished. A Hafner Reserve chardonnay held up to the cassoulet as well as the cab did and maybe, with its clarifying acid, was even a little better as a strong but cooperative accompanist. And a throaty Vouvray (Domaine d’Orfeuilles Silex, 2004) went beautifully with a plate of canapés (guacamole and blue cheese on crostini — but not at the same time) devoured en route to one last blowout at Harris’ Restaurant.

Vouvray wines are made from chenin blanc, and silex indicates flinty soil, and so we are talking here about a dry white wine whose composed intensity compares favorably with that of its Loire cousins (of sauvignon blanc extraction), the Sancerres and Quincys, and its nearest Burgundian relations (made from chardonnay), the Chablises. It might be that someday our own viticulturalists will figure out how to do right by an impressive grape that has been largely misused here, grown in bulk for jug wines. I like Husch’s chenin blanc, though it tends toward sweet and, lacking the French wine’s bass notes, the sense of feet planted firmly on the ground, can seem a little untethered. The Vouvray, incidentally, was far more impressive than another French chenin blanc wine I served at Thanksgiving, a savennières called La Jalousie. I brought it forth with considerable fanfare, but it tasted rather watery and got lost amid the other big guns at the table.

The unexpected ability of a white wine to cope with cassoulet struck me as notable. Of course, cassoulet is something of a hybrid in a wine pairer’s eyes, a light-but-heavy blend of white beans and various kinds of meat. Conventional wisdom says you should choose a robust red with good acid, maybe a tempranillo or pinot noir. Conventional wisdom also says that oaky California chardonnays are too much for many foods, at least the sorts of foods (such as fish) conventionally paired with white wines. Conventional wisdom says a lot of things, and sometimes we do better not to listen.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

In our cups

-
0

Although the holiday orgy of gift giving includes the giving of many pointless gifts, I was pleased to score yet more coffee-brewing equipment: a matched set of implements from Vietnam, like little tin cups with filter bottoms. I have a large and unwieldy collection of French presses, stove-top mokas, drip pots, pump-driven espresso machines, grinders manual and electric — but I didn’t have these things, had never heard of them, and did not think I was missing anything until I tasted the coffee they produced.

The cups are something of a cross between percolators, mokas, and drip devices: ground coffee is placed between a layer of filters at the bottom, the cup is placed over the destination vessel, and boiling water is poured in at the top. The water slowly drips through the layer of coffee to whatever you’ve set underneath, and while this can take several minutes, that interval gives a fairly long steep and produces an intense but smooth brew.

The charm factor is raised, at least in Vietnam, by the brewing of the coffee into a small pool of condensed milk, which is (as we bakers of cream pies know) sweetened. I no longer keep cans of the stuff around, but I did discover that a few ounces of scalded milk mixed with a teaspoon or two of sugar produces a pleasantly creamy sweetening.

More important is the use of Vietnamese coffee. We were given, with our cups, a packet of Nam Nguyen brand coffee, coarsely pre-ground and looking quite ordinary. Then we brewed it and found ourselves bewitched by a distinctly chocolately bouquet. The presence of chicory was suspected (as in New Orleans–style coffee), so I ground some Trader Joe’s decaf espresso roast and brewed it in a Vietnamese cup to make sure the brewing method wasn’t somehow producing a miracle. It wasn’t, though the coffee was quite good.

The resemblance of Vietnamese to New Orleans–style coffee isn’t surprising, given the long French tutelage in both places. Chicory root has been used for centuries to stretch coffee supplies and mask staleness, and because it contains no caffeine, its blending with coffee probably helps reduce the nerve-jangling effects of the latter. There is also some evidence that it has a tonic effect on the liver — an encouraging factoid to keep in mind if you seek a coffee to help lift any fog remaining from New Year’s Eve.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

12345Page 3 of 5

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org