The Elegant Sufficiency

Kitchen Stories and More

I’m a list person. Lists for everything. Books I want to read. Albums I want to buy. Perfumes I’ve read about that I want to sniff. Things I have to do for the blog. Blog entries that need to be written. Things I have to do for work. Daily lists. Weekly lists. Lists of films I want to see.
I was excited when I read that the ITunes store had started a movie rental download system — until I discovered it would be some time before it was rolled out in Australia. I don’t have a video-rental store terribly close to me now and, in any case, I’ve always found something a bit ghastly about them; they make me feel like donning dark glasses in case I’m spotted. So I went looking for alternatives so I could start to excise that list of films to see.
Bigpond Movies, I discovered, offers a download rental service and a DVD delivery service, but the download service is not available to Mac users. Its DVD service — free postal delivery and return, no late fees — seemed very expensive. Then I stumbled onto Quickflix. (I’m going to start to sound like an ad here…)
I’m now a convert. For $9.95 a month (more if you want to watch more) I get three movies sent to me. When I’ve watched them, I slip them back in the envelope provided and drop it in a mailbox. Quickflix then sends me the next available DVD on my list, which I now maintain on my Quickflix account page. That list is long, and getting longer, but finally I’m starting to see films that I’ve long wanted to see and which aren’t available in your garden-variety video store.
Kitchen Stories, for example. I knew it was Norwegian, and that it was about two bachelors. I had it in my head that it was some ironic contemporary thing, replete with Scandinavian design — blond wood, chic furniture, avant-garde architecture — ruggedly handsome Nordic men, and plenty of food.
Not quite. I must have read the review that spurred me to put it on my list after a few glasses of wine. The Kitchen Stories that Quickflix sent me was something altogether different. Norwegian bachelors yes, contemporary no.

Set in the mid-’40s, it’s an initially slow-burning, ultimately engaging film about an upright Swedish researcher for the presumably fictional HRI — the Home Research Institute — and the Norwegian bachelor he is sent to observe as part of a study into the “kitchen habits of single men in Norway”.
The researcher, Folke, spends his days perched high on a wooden stand drawing diagrams, as his craggy subject, Isak, moves around below in his kitchen, and his nights in a little bubble of a lichen-green caravan parked outside Isak’s house. The men are forbidden to communicate, lest the study’s integrity be jeopardised. But, of course, eventually these two lonely men do. And it’s in their gentle, musing dialogues in which what is unsaid is more significant than what is said, that this poignant, whimsical film’s true treasures emerge.
There’s not much food but still, I love this exchange, coming after Folke has been fired:

Isak: “Maybe you could stay for Christmas.”
Folke: “That would be nice.”
I: “Since you don’t have a job anyway.”
F: “Thank you, but I don’t think that would be possible.”
I: “You probably have family to spend Christmas with.”
F: “Not exactly … except for my old aunt. The one that sends all the food. … what the hell… why not? Everything’s gone to hell anyway.”
I: What do your normally eat?
F: “Herring, of course. And Jansson’s Temptation. Pig’s feet, Christmas ham, and lutefisk. And bread and grease.”
I: “Bread and grease?”
F: “Actually, they mostly eat that up north. Not where I come from.”

I had to look up Janssons Temptation, and it’s not tempting me to rush off and eat it, but I did find myself looking at a bottle of herrings yesterday in a deli …
Meanwhile, I’ve added another film to my Quickflix list this week — The Secret of the Grain, a film about North African immigrants in the south of France. The grain of the title is couscous; the opening of a restaurant is a plank of the plot.

A Million Stories in the City

It's a long time since I've known my neighbours ... living in big apartment buildings tends to do that. But thanks to a brief conversation with my next-door neighbour in the lift this week, I think I know an alarming amount about her. Had noticed her before: an unnervingly skinny woman with a hard face, always in gym gear. I suspect too, that her apartment is the source of the regular doof-doof bass beat that drives me nuts. In the lift this week she was again in tight-fitting lycra and I smiled and asked her if she'd been out exercising. She volunteered more than I expected: "Yes, but I can only walk ... otherwise the baby jiggles too much," she said, patting her stomach. She hadn't put on any weight that I could see — there was no bulge at all — and I asked her how many months pregnant she was. Five-and-a-half months, she told me, then clutched at her non-existent chest and, grimacing in horror, said "and I've got boobs!" I think I shook my head sympathetically but my head was full of images of this malnourished woman pounding the streets, trying to throw off her imagined new breasts. I hope there's someone watching over her, and her unborn child. As a result of the encounter, I read this piece in The Age about eating disorders with more interest than I might normally.

John Newton's 10 Totally Unrelated Terrific Books

Brilliant meal last week with old friend John Newton, one of Australia's finest and most thoughtful food writers and author of books including Beppi's: A LIfe in Three Courses. We ate at Pello in Stanley Street, East Sydney — about the best restaurant meal I’ve had since touching down last year, and some of the best company.
We talked books: I lamented how little time I get to read anything other than newspapers, magazines and stuff online. John, I'm sure wisely, largely avoids all that to keep his nose firmly buried in books. I demanded names, and today he obliged with his list of “Ten Totally Unrelated Terrific Books”, in no particular order:

1. Fortunata and Jacinta: Two Stories of Married Women, by Benito Pérez Galdós: “Sometimes called the Spanish Dickens, if you like sprawling 19th Century novels.”
2. What I Loved: A Novel, by Siri Hustvedt: “Siri Hustvedt has written a novel of ideas, in which she tackles questions of how much of what we perceive is personal, how much shared, how much is fixed for all time and how much is liable to shift. What I Loved is a ferociously clever book that, for the first third, I thought I disliked.”
3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon: “This is my 20-year-old daughter’s favourite writer; a wonderful tale of comics and their makers in early and mid 20th Century New York.”
4. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, by María Rosa Menocal: “The story of the intellectual, artistic and scientific achievements of the Arabs in Spain between 1711 and 1492 – if you don’t want to get on a plane and go immediately to Granada and Toledo and Seville and Córdoba after reading this, you’re an incurable Franco/Italophile.”
5. The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan: “If you've read it already you can move on to his others — Second Nature, The Botany of Desire and the new one that I have yet to read, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.”
6. Delizia! The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food, by John Dickie: “Interesting but polemical history of Italian food. Well worth the reading.”
7. A Late Dinner: Discovering the Food of Spain, by Paul Richardson: “One man wanders around Spain eating and talking about food with the Spaniards. As much about la cocina de siempre (the food of always) as la nueva cocina.”
8. Deep Economy, by Bill McKibben: “An absolute must; an exploration of why we can’t go on growing like this, and a way forward.”
9. Seeds of Deception, by Jeffrey M. Smith: “A history of the flawed science and political and corporate manipulations of  genetic engineering.”
10. Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, by Javier Marías: “If you like page turners, fuggedaboutit! This leisurely writer turns ideas over slowly and examines them for pages on end in this book with its famous beginning. In fact I’m going to read it again."

NB: Sad to read today in Scott Bolles' Short Black column in Good Living that Pello chef/owner Thomas Johns has put the restaurant on the market. I get a strong sense he wasn’t supported by Sydney’s fickle and fashion-conscious diners. Their loss.

Catching Up on the West Coast

I’ve written about the brilliance of Bloglines — one of several feed organisers that allows you to consolidate in one place all the online things you like to read. Sadly, for a while now I’ve been realising its downside: when you have 163 feeds in your Bloglines, there’s simply no way you can keep up with them all. I have some catching up to do… perhaps over Easter, which I’ll spend with my folks in Queensland…
For now, I’m wading through one blog at a time, inhaling the backlog. One of the blogs I subscribe to is Between Meals, the blog of The San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic Michael Bauer. The benefit of going through a long list of his older posts this weekend has been that it has given me an overview of a number of months on the West Coast.

On trends:

• Bauer writes that eggs are being given starring roles in appetisers (entrees) in restaurants across California and the US — poached egg with pork belly at Dovetail in New York; poached egg on mushroom ragout with parsnips and smoked salt at the locavorian-inclined Fish & Farm ("new American seafood and artisan meats"); “creamy farro crowned with a slow-poached egg, accompanied by honey roasted garlic and grilled baby leeks” at Cortez. It is, says Bauer, a trend that’s yet to peak. (Bistrode's Jeremy Strode, a noted egg lover, could well ask why it has taken them so long.)
• Seriously market-driven menus in New York City to, perhaps, the point of gimmickry — at Park Avenue Winter, for example, “the restaurant changes names and decor with the seasons. Now when you enter the expansive space, it feels like a blast of winter with strategically placed bare trees, white walls, upholstery and crystal chandeliers and lights. There's also a 'white' menu, and a regular menu that also changes by the season. Waiters and staff are dressed in winter white jackets -- in summer it was white and yellow, and in fall burnt orange, according to our waiter. The upholstery and walls also reflect the change, as does the wine and drink list.”
• Trends that he's over. These, says Bauer, include truffle oil, “the blatant misuse of the term tapas”, crudo and fish tartare when done poorly, Kobe-style beef — “it's everywhere, and often times not very good” (Australians can substitute “wagyu” here) — and flourless or molten chocolate cake.

On interesting meals:

• Bauer talks of a meal at Chez Panisse, cooked by guest chef Atlanta’s Scott Peacock, “...the keeper of the flame in Southern cooking, and last night's meal stoked those fires and made me want to head south. ... he created an oyster stew with salsify and half-dollar-size biscuits with country ham; in one bite, I knew why this product is so beloved in the South.”
• The Hominy Grill, a Charleston restaurant he visits with 18 different vegetables on the blackboard menu: “We're talking vegetables that include squash casserole, mustard greens and, of course, lima beans. Chef-owner Robert Stehling … keeps true to the Southern traditions with such things as pimiento cheese spread, fried green tomatoes on a pool of ranch dressing, she-crab soup fortified with sherry.”

On the offbeat:

• The influence of Google, which has 17 restaurants offering free food on its Mountain View campus, may yet be felt in the food world. Says Bauer: “Of course, Google's restaurants and cafes are open only to employees, but the Google effect on Bay Area dining struck me yesterday when I read a Los Angeles Times story about Thunder Parley, a 27-year-old computer programmer turned critic, who according to the story ‘is becoming as influential to the company's hundreds of chefs and culinary staffers as the Michelin and Zagat reviewers are to restauranteurs (sic).’ ”
• “I don't think I've ever been in a room where dozen of people unabashedly proclaimed their love of okra, or rejoiced in artisanal boudin, that loose sausage made with the guts of the pig,” says Bauer, who attended the 10th annual Southern Foodways Alliance symposium at the University of Mississippi last October.

On the business of restaurants:

• Bauer writes about the universal problem of “no-shows”, something that has been on my mind since trying to come up with an affordable Sydney restaurant to take two different lots of interstate and overseas visitors in the past week. I’m realizing how many of the places I like here, or want to try — Bodega, Vini, Moncur Terrace and Pizza e Birra spring to mind — don’t take bookings. (A no-bookings policy is usually a restaurant's decisive way of dealing with the problem of no-shows.) Frustrating when you want some certainty about a dining time and when you’re not interested in hanging around on Surry Hills street corners waiting for a table. Surely there must be some middle path here: to get a table, I’d be prepared to give my credit-card details and take a hit if I didn’t show up.
• In light of Australia’s own multi-restaurant celebrity chefs — Neil Perry and Bill Granger (who has just opened a restaurant in Tokyo and has eyes on London) spring immediately to mind … Frank Camorra may not be so far behind — was interested to read Bauer's thoughts on celebrity chefs such as Craft's Tom Colicchio opening “bicoastal branches”. Says Bauer: “Luring chefs from other cities doesn’t feel like a coming of age.”
• Restaurant chefs who are growing their own vegetables: “Spruce, the splashy new restaurant in Presidio Heights, grows most of its ingredients at its 5-acre organic farm in Woodside. In addition, the oil used in the restaurant is made into fuel for the truck that delivers the produce. Ubuntu, a very stylish and upscale vegetable restaurant in Napa (it doesn't use the term vegetarian) also gets most of its gorgeous produce from their biodynamic farm.” With Sean Moran spending a few days a week tilling his soil in the Blue Mountains, and Dan Hunter, the young chef at regional Victoria’s Royal Mail Hotel drawing on “a kitchen garden full of wondrous things from within his employer’s 20-hectare stone-walled estate”, according to Age restaurant critic John Lethlean, this may well emerge as a trend here too.
• Coked-up waiters: “The giveaways are the glassy deer-in-the-headlight eyes and a kind of frenetic movement and speech patterns that could be mistaken for someone with boundless energy.”

On the recently thorny subject of blogging:

• My own view is that it won’t be long before every professional food writer and reviewer will have to have a blog presence to remain relevant. Says Bauer: “Like many colleagues, I wonder what the growth of the Internet means to restaurants, food and reviewing. There are many ways to get information, and who will end up on top is obviously still in play. Certainly the Internet is a much more interactive medium than print, and things such as blogs bring us closer to readers.”
• The issue of bloggers who take photographs in restaurants: “This is a growing problem, and it largely boils down to good manners,” writes Bauer. “Some people have the notion that if they pay for a meal, they have a right to take pictures (or talk on the phone), even if it annoys others.” I do it about twice a year and even then with great embarrassment, figuring I look like an idiot. Very curious that so many, here and abroad, seem to do it without a second thought.

The Sleepover

She's soundly asleep, teddy one side, dolly the other. I'm completely exhausted after play, park, catering and endless toileting. (Simply can't understand how anyone has the energy to do parenting permanently.) I gave her meatballs and spaghetti: onion, garlic, mushrooms and prosciutto fried 'til soft; that then mixed with grated carrot (insert vegetable wherever possible — isn't that what you do?), an egg, beef mince, pepper, grated nutmeg, a little chopped tomato left over from lunch, the last of some fontina and manchego, grated. All rolled into tidy little balls. Fried. Mini grissini sticks to keep her quite while I finished off — "needs hummus," she announced. All of two years and one month she is. Transfixed by the Wiggles. Batons of zucchini that she guzzled. Less enthusiastic about the beans and sugar-snap peas. She didn't seem to notice that there wasn't much of a sauce with her moist-as-anything meatballs and spaghetti ... that her aunt had neglected to stock up on canned tomatoes (how does that happen?) ... and that the homemade tomato relish really wasn't much of a substitute. The Sara Lee Absolutely Boysenberry a hit. There's still two-thirds of a tub of it left. Good thing my self-conceived, no-alcohol (19 days now) and now no-bread diet doesn't make mention of icecream.

Fit for a Princess

I may be responsible for preparing a two-year-old's dinner tomorrow night and my concerns about whether she'll sniff at what I serve her, as she did last time, have not been assuaged by stumbling on this absurd Guardian article about feeding fussy children. I want the little princess to want to come back, but I'm as likely to make her fresh pasta as I am to serve her truffles and foie gras and Krug. More on this Guardian blog on the subject, but I still don't have a clue what I'll cook her... ideas please!?

Changing the Subject Now

Moving right along now... two brief articles from The New York Times health pages that might interest. As I throw back a coffee and wonder why I'm feeling so exhausted, I'm reading that new research has confirmed the value of exercise over say, coffee or energy drinks, in combating fatigue. The other article — on a topic that's on my mind right now — is about binge-drinking. Touching on cultural differences, author Benedict Carey writes: "In a Japanese island village, Takashima, people knew a drinking occasion had gone completely off the dials if villagers began to sing or, wilder still, to dance." He adds that western cultures "are more likely to excuse binge drinking as a needed mental vacation" and quotes Brown University professor Dwight Heath: “An awful lot of cultures have institutionalized bingeing as a kind of time out like Mardi Gras or New Year’s Eve, a culturally recognized period where a certain amount of acting out is acceptable." In Australia, as our Prime Minister has identified, that culturally recognised period seems to have no limits. Just come walk the streets of Surry Hills with me any night of the week.

An Enemy or Two?

I may have made some enemies today. At the Out of the Frying Pan gabfest in Melbourne I was outspoken about my views that the quality of food blogs generally is very very poor.
The thing that alarms me about Web 2.0 (as the session for which I was a panellist was titled), is that it is removing a layer of quality control in the media that may never be restored. The proliferation of average or worse blogs (on any subject, not just food) will inevitably contribute to a dumbing-down and diminuition of content and writing quality across the board.
There is a reason that newspapers, magazines and publishing companies have commissioning editors and rewrite editors and copy/line/sub and check editors and not one of the exceptionally talented and published food writers that I know would argue that a good editor will take a piece of writing — be it a piece of investigative journalism, a profile, an essay, an opinion piece, a review, a recipe — and make it better. Nor would they argue that a good editor is almost always essential to their process.
I fear that the scattering of the ad-dollar will eventually mean that traditional media companies will no longer be able to afford to maintain the internal editing structures and processes that are the foundations of quality. The strongest voices will emerge, but they may be the loudest, not the best. The old empty vessels make the most noise thing ...
I'd encourage the people who seemed to disagree with my views today to spend a few months reading The New Yorker magazine, or feature articles from The Wall Street Journal, or Esquire, to start to get an understanding of good writing; of its tautness, its melody and its substance. (For that matter, I would also  encourage them to look at the photographs in Saveur, in Food Illustrated, in Gourmet Traveller.) It's not easy. It's not as simple as signing up with Blogger or Typepad.
Of course I have no issue with anyone, everyone, having a blog for any reason they choose. But, as someone who has been employed solidly for nearly two decades as a writer and editor on major publications in London, Hong Kong and in Australia, the presumption of some bloggers, the protestations of some bloggers, that their voice is as valid or as interesting or as high-quality as that of many of my colleagues in the print media is insufferable. Whatever happened to modesty and self-reflection for heaven's sake?
My flight is being called now... I'm flying to a mysterious location where I can't be tracked down and belted with a rolling pin ... but finally, I learnt one other extraordinary thing today: everyone seems to be giving up booze... my good friend David Thompson looks like a supermodel and is going to the gym, good grief; Necia Wilden was rueful as she told me that she's finally come to terms with the fact that women simply don't metabolise alcohol as well as men; John Lethlean has become a serious contender for the Tour de France... what, I ask, is the world coming to?
As for me. I'm on Day 14 of my new, alcohol-free existence. I don't even feel like a drink. Pass the mineral water please.